How to Replace the Netflix Queue? - with slight tone of elegy for physical media

[Aunt Carol]

Does anyone here have experience using a website to keep track of movies already watched/movies you want to watch? It doesn't need to be a streaming service, but it'd be great if it told you where to find things, e.g. you look up "Movie X" and it tells you which services have that. I would appreciate the ability to upload my downloaded Netflix records. Recommending movies based on preferences would be nice. A notification system would be great, either for a new season of a show I watched or that a movie on my list that nobody is streaming has just come to streaming on Platform Y.

I'm an old lady. How can I possibly be expected to remember what movies and TV shows I thought sounded fun a year ago, much less keep track of when and where they come out? I resent having to give so much mental real estate to videos--this is the opposite of entertainment and convenience!

DVD Netflix had a deep, deep catalog, and you could add up to 500 disks to your queue. You could add a movie when someone told you about an interesting movie, when you saw a theatrical promo and realized that time moves faster when you're old, or when you read that X inspired Y. And it could be something you read about, because they had old movies. You know, those gross ones that aren't in color and in English, that nobody cares enough to upload.

After the shutdown, DVD Netflix is letting users download a data file of their thousands of watched/rated films and their queue, but now I have to find the best way to organize/store that. Or just give up; it's kind of a binary choice between autism/"fuck it."


Quoting my more in-depth complaints from an earlier thread. This may shed light on what I want, or I guess on what's wrong with me:

Spoiler: first world problems

Along with the chains and a few small ones, we had an amazing independent video rental place here. Every inch packed with tapes, and later DVDs. There were shelves up to the ceiling and the staff had modified reacher claws to get tapes out, extended poles and a toy basketball hoop added with the net tied together so it'd catch the VHS box. If you didn't want to browse, they had giant 3-ring binders at a side counter, and additional binders listing the movies that were across town in a storage unit. If you wanted one of those, the owner would drive over there twice a week to pick up any requested deep cuts.

They were open just late enough that I could get there after my swing shift then-job with 30 minutes to spare, which made it a more exciting errand and probably made me take a gamble on some movies I might not have rented otherwise. My goal was to get to the counter before they made last call, and I usually had an idea what I wanted from my spiral notebook of Movies To Watch. I filled so many punch cards there.

I made the conscious decision not to sign up with DVD Netflix until they closed, which I think is the only thing I've ever felt strongly enough about for a personal boycott.

 

[jertzog]

Letterboxd.
But the userbase deserves their own thread on here. I wouldn't recommend anyone use it except purely for sorting your own lists. No reviewing or anything.

 

[PFM]

Set up a Usenet client. Then install NZB360 and sonarr/radar. Come across something interesting? Add it to those and it'll auto download from a list of sources you provide. Have it place the downloaded file in their respective TV/Movie folder on your NAS, then have something like Jellyfin or Plex auto scan for changes.

 

[SIGSEGV]

Okay so for the movies you want to watch, you torrent them. Then after you've watched them, you delete them. It's pretty much the perfect system and the best part is that it doesn't cost a penny.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Okay so for the movies you want to watch, you torrent them. Then after you've watched them, you delete them. It's pretty much the perfect system and the best part is that it doesn't cost a penny.

I was unclear: it's not acquiring the movies that's difficult. It's more a scheduling issue.

Say you know that you want to get around to watching Gummo and also that you want to get around to watching Kung Fu Hustle. Those are movies for different kinds of nights.

Multiply that by the hundreds of other movies on the to-do list. The whole point of having computers is not having to remember 500 things, but to be able to put them down somewhere.

 

[Night Crawler]

Buy a Blu-Ray player. Then buy some movies on Blu-Ray. No more need for Netflix. You can watch them and resell them or keep them. You can see what you have watched or didn't watch. You can even go total OCD and form a watched and not watched stack. You can get Blu-Ray discs on Ebay and other places pretty cheap. Look around in thrift stores. Now you can finally have a reason to go thrifting. You can even get DVD's pretty cheap. Though they tend look like shit on modern high resolution TV's. I suggest sticking with Blu-Ray.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

Another victim left out in the cold by Netflix's cruel move to eliminate their DVD service, affecting society's most technologically vulnerable population: boomers.

The reddit consumers recommend something called Simkl, which from what I can see specifically advertises itself as a TV/movie tracking service.

They've got an import and sync feature, and specifically say it can import from Netflix. Maybe see about that.

Okay so for the movies you want to watch, you torrent them. Then after you've watched them, you delete them. It's pretty much the perfect system and the best part is that it doesn't cost a penny.

Old people are frightened of piracy, which I'm glad of because I really don't want to have to spend all my time trying to clean viruses and weird shit off older friends and relatives' computers.

 

[Catgirl Enthusiast]

The good news is that there is that there are several services that almost perfectly fit that description. The bad news is that you will have to become an anime avatar.

 

[Lokenstien]

Its probably time to start burning movies to DVD's with crude sharpie titles written on them and stored in a large leather disk folder once again.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Letterboxd.
But the userbase deserves their own thread on here. I wouldn't recommend anyone use it except purely for sorting your own lists. No reviewing or anything.

This looks like a good service, but it's only movies, not TV shows. TV shows are the worst to keep track of.

You are 100% right about the population on there; they're like an even more cancerous version of Goodreads users.

The reddit consumers recommend something called Simkl, which from what I can see specifically advertises itself as a TV/movie tracking service.

This looks more like it; I appreciate that you can make a one-time payment to them and have platinum for life. I'm not just old but also square enough to have paid for shareware that I found useful, but why is everything a subscription now? That's just terrible.

I went to a couple of movies at the art theater recently--part of a season pass-type thing, trying to be a better local citizen, but that's another story. It made me think of what I really appreciated about DVD Netflix.

It's not just that it was a viewing history/want list manager, but that rain or shine, I'd get those discs mailed to me, to sit around and get watched in a few days. See a promo for an interesting movie, put it in the queue, and then do zero thinking about that movie until it shows up later. Sure, sometimes I'd be on a kick of some kind, an actor or a director or an "inspired by," and I'd add things and bump them to the top. It was still just easy. Someone else was handling it.

I was thinking that yeah, I like the Cold War and nuclear history, probably would like to see Oppenheimer eventually, but not really in the mood for it right now. Definitely not in the mood, or with a space in my errands, to block out an evening to see it in a theater. But now that I won't have Netflix DVD in a couple of months, I can't just set it and forget it.

Isn't the whole point of the consoomer economy that they're supposed to spoonfeed me?

 

[Calandrino]

Mine are all in movies.txt

justwatch.com is a streaming metasearch engine that tells you where you can watch things without torrenting. Or else you can check filmboards.com (formerly imdb's forum and suck), they try to have every movie ever embedded. See here's Shadow of the Vampire, tough to find elsewhere, esp if you can't be bothered to spend interminable minutes torrenting things: https://filmboards.com/board/10189998/

 

[Your Starter for 10]

JustWatch allows you to have a consolidated watchlist, shows what's available on virtually every platform, and (this is all I use it for) shows what has been added on a daily basis to every platform. Which, for some asinine reason, services are fucking coy about. HBO used to actually be good about this, as the "Just Added" tab showed shit that was, you know, JUST FUCKING ADDED. But since they merged with Max, they do like all the other services, and it's literally whatever bullshit show they are pushing plus their shitty recommended list.

But anyway, try JustWatch, I guess. It's free, but I'm not sure how good the 'exploring/finding shit you want to watch' aspect is, since I've never used it for that.