10 Movies everyone should own.

[StephenHero]

I think Das Boot should be on somebody's list.

 

[binge]

Originally Posted by Fuuma

The last "samarai"??
Crash??
Billy Madison??

WTF is this ****?

It's a list of movies you should own, not watch. At the low cost of movie ownership these days, for the cost of a few ciggies, a cup of coffee, and the montly food intake of your average starving African child; well, you can easily dispense with this list.

 

[GQgeek]

^^ It's true. It's not even worth the cost to steal them anymore. Given the increased storage requirements of a BR movie, ripping them is not really worth the time/effort/cost to store.

Some posts made me think about the various costs of renting/ripping and outright buying them. Assuming you are careful with your purchasing and get good prices on discs, and don't pay full price for them the day after they release, you could very easily build a library for an average of $15/movie, and if you're willing to take more time and wait for particular movies to decrease in price, probably $12/movie.

Or, you can rent & rip (most people don't have internet connections that are cheap enough to download high quality rips on a regular basis):

A 2TB drive=$250.

You need a minimum of 2 drives for a raid 1 array, but you're better with 3 for a raid 5 array. If yuo don't do RAID, you run the risk of losing all your movies with a single disk crash.

3x2TB drives in RAID 5=3700GB usable space
2x2TB drive in RAID 1=2000GB usable space


@ 40GB/Movie=92movies fit on RAID 5 or 50 on RAID 1

Cost/movie=$750/92 and $500/50
Cost/movie=$8.15/movie on RAID 5 or $10/movie on RAID 1

But, we're not done yet because we haven't factored in the cost to rent them. Zip.ca (canadian netflix) charges $50 month for 22 movies with 8 out at a time. I'm assuming you can get a similar pricing plan from netflix. That works out to a cost of $2.27 per movie, so we're now up to $10.42/movie or $12.27/movie, respectively.

This all assumes you already have the hardware for RAID and running an HTPC to play them on your HDTV, otherwise the costs increase again. Then factor in the hassle of ripping discs (it takes 35-45 min to rip a blu-ray), and it's just not worth it. Burning isn't really an option either because the discs are still too expensive.

As a longtime user of HTPCs, it will be nice when they catch up because it's pretty awesome to have all your movies sorted automatically by genre, just a couple clicks away. Media centers need included blu-ray support and they need to be able to output the new codecs over HDMI, which they cannot do at present. They're limited to Dolby Digital/DTS via HDMI. They can output some of the newer formats over analog, if you have software to decode them. If you care about sound that means you need a high quality sound card, so factor in another $200-300. I was going to build an array for my blu-rays later next year, but instead i'm pumping that money into new speakers.

/nerd

 

[MyHeartIsMyProphet]

Well, its pretty impossible to restrain it to 10 movies, I'll try by not having more than one movie per director!

Robert Bresson - Au hazard Balthazar
Yasujiro Ozu - Tokyo Story
Federico Fellini - 8 1/2
Wong Kar Wai - In the mood for love
Ingmar Bergman - Persona
C.T. Dreyer - The passion of Joan of Arc
Stanley Kubrick - 2001 Space Odissey
Andrej Tarkosvkij - Mirror
Francois Truffaut - Jules and Jim
Ritwik Gathak - The cloud capped star
Mikhail Kalazotov - Soy Cuba!

It's 11, but I couldn't do more (and I left out Satyajiit Ray, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Tarr, Lynch,Renoir,...)

 

[Gradstudent78]

Cool Hand Luke
Seven samurai
Fight Club
The Hustler
Indian Jones Trilogy
Star Wars Trilogy
Princess Bride
Blade Runner
Old Boy
Jaws

 

[Britalian]

Originally Posted by MyHeartIsMyProphet

Well, its pretty impossible to restrain it to 10 movies, I'll try by not having more than one movie per director!

Robert Bresson - Au hazard Balthazar
Yasujiro Ozu - Tokyo Story
Federico Fellini - 8 1/2
Wong Kar Wai - In the mood for love
Ingmar Bergman - Persona
C.T. Dreyer - The passion of Joan of Arc
Stanley Kubrick - 2001 Space Odissey
Andrej Tarkosvkij - Mirror
Francois Truffaut - Jules and Jim
Ritwik Gathak - The cloud capped star
Mikhail Kalazotov - Soy Cuba!

It's 11, but I couldn't do more (and I left out Satyajiit Ray, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Tarr, Lynch,Renoir,...)
I would second most of these.

Some of the teeny shite forwarded previously as suggestions is laughable.

 

[Ataturk]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

^^ It's true. It's not even worth the cost to steal them anymore. Given the increased storage requirements of a BR movie, ripping them is not really worth the time/effort/cost to store.

/nerd

A 1 TB drive is about $80 last time I checked--external is about $100. Infrequent use means that you wouldn't need to worry about reliability when the MTBF is rated in tens or hundreds of thousands of hours. Hard drive space is insanely cheap these days.

 

[Fuuma]

How much are blue-ray burners, I assume they're still too pricey for consumers to purchase but this should change soon...

 

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by Ataturk

A 1 TB drive is about $80 last time I checked--external is about $100. Infrequent use means that you wouldn't need to worry about reliability when the MTBF is rated in tens or hundreds of thousands of hours. Hard drive space is insanely cheap these days.
Ya, but with 1TB drives you're going to run out of physical space in your case pretty fast, although it is cheaper per gigabyte. MTBF is a valid point, but with the sheer amount of time it takes to rip everything, I personally just wouldn't want to chance it. FWIW, I bought a 2 TB drive recently and had to return it because it was making loud clicking noises soon after I bought it. The same thing happened with the replacement I got. For the extra cost of RAID 5, I don't see the point in not doing it, if you're going to go in that direction. I work in IT and i've seen all sorts of drives fail, some for expected reasons and others not.

Originally Posted by Fuuma

How much are blue-ray burners, I assume they're still too pricey for consumers to purchase but this should change soon...
They're not that expensive. $250. The real issue is the cost of the media. Blanks are still $7-8 per 25GB disc. I'm sure the 50GB discs are more but i didn't really look. More movies than not are sold on 50GB disc. Sure, you can rip and transcode them, but due to the sheer size of the content, it takes more time. When I was a bit younger I didn't care, but I have other things to do now than rip movies for marginal savings. It also took a long time for the dual-layer DVDs to come down to a reasonable price so i'd expect the same for BR. And adoption is going to be slower since people need entirely new TVs to benefit from it, which they didn't for DVD. We're probably a couple years away from really cheap media imo. FWIW, my initial BR order was for 23 movies at an average price of $13. I used to pirate everything but as I make more money, I prefer to support the people that create movies/games/software.

 

[MyHeartIsMyProphet]

Originally Posted by Britalian

I would second most of these.

Some of the teeny shite forwarded previously as suggestions is laughable.

I couldn't agree more.
Maybe our 'good taste' is dependent on being both from Italy?

 

[bengal-stripe]

I can't understand it, why has nobody mentioned:

 

[Fuuma]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

Ya, but with 1TB drives you're going to run out of physical space in your case pretty fast, although it is cheaper per gigabyte. MTBF is a valid point, but with the sheer amount of time it takes to rip everything, I personally just wouldn't want to chance it.

FWIW, I bought a 2 TB drive recently and had to return it because it was making loud clicking noises soon after I bought it. The same thing happened with the replacement I got. For the extra cost of RAID 5, I don't see the point in not doing it, if you're going to go in that direction. I work in IT and i've seen all sorts of drives fail, some for expected reasons and others not.



They're not that expensive. $250. The real issue is the cost of the media. Blanks are still $7-8 per 25GB disc. I'm sure the 50GB discs are more but i didn't really look. More movies than not are sold on 50GB disc. Sure, you can rip and transcode them, but due to the sheer size of the content, it takes more time. When I was a bit younger I didn't care, but I have other things to do now than rip movies for marginal savings. It also took a long time for the dual-layer DVDs to come down to a reasonable price so i'd expect the same for BR. And adoption is going to be slower since people need entirely new TVs to benefit from it, which they didn't for DVD. We're probably a couple years away from really cheap media imo.

FWIW, my initial BR order was for 23 movies at an average price of $13. I used to pirate everything but as I make more money, I prefer to support the people that create movies/games/software.

The sad reality is that for many movies I want to see "pirating" is often the only choice as they're OOP or very hard to find.

 

[Ataturk]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

Ya, but with 1TB drives you're going to run out of physical space in your case pretty fast, although it is cheaper per gigabyte. MTBF is a valid point, but with the sheer amount of time it takes to rip everything, I personally just wouldn't want to chance it.

FWIW, I bought a 2 TB drive recently and had to return it because it was making loud clicking noises soon after I bought it. The same thing happened with the replacement I got. For the extra cost of RAID 5, I don't see the point in not doing it, if you're going to go in that direction. I work in IT and i've seen all sorts of drives fail, some for expected reasons and others not.

Sure, but if it was an external drive that only had movies on it, you'd only be running it for a few hours at a time. Don't get me wrong, my home PC has raid (mirroring), and I wouldn't use anything else for irreplaceable data. But stuff I can replace or don't care about goes onto an external drive.

 

[billsayers]

My top 15 list (in no particular order):

• The Beat That My Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard
  
• Fallen Angels by Wong Kar Wai
  
• Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders
  
• Y Tu Mamá TambiÃ
  
  n by Alfonso Cuarón
  
• Stolen Kisses by François Truffaut
  
• A Man and a Woman by Claude Lelouch
  
• All About My Mother by Pedro Almodóvar
  
• The Asphalt Jungle by John Huston
  
• Cool Hand Luke by Stuart Rosenberg
  
• Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater
  
• GoodFellas by Martin Scorsese
  
• The Last of the Mohicans by Michael Mann
  
• The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson
  
• Harold and Maude by Hal Ashby
  
• This is Spinal Tap by Rob Reiner

 

[Roy]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

^^ It's true. It's not even worth the cost to steal them anymore. Given the increased storage requirements of a BR movie, ripping them is not really worth the time/effort/cost to store.

Some posts made me think about the various costs of renting/ripping and outright buying them. Assuming you are careful with your purchasing and get good prices on discs, and don't pay full price for them the day after they release, you could very easily build a library for an average of $15/movie, and if you're willing to take more time and wait for particular movies to decrease in price, probably $12/movie.

Or, you can rent & rip (most people don't have internet connections that are cheap enough to download high quality rips on a regular basis):

A 2TB drive=$250.

You need a minimum of 2 drives for a raid 1 array, but you're better with 3 for a raid 5 array. If yuo don't do RAID, you run the risk of losing all your movies with a single disk crash.

3x2TB drives in RAID 5=3700GB usable space
2x2TB drive in RAID 1=2000GB usable space


@ 40GB/Movie=92movies fit on RAID 5 or 50 on RAID 1

Cost/movie=$750/92 and $500/50
Cost/movie=$8.15/movie on RAID 5 or $10/movie on RAID 1

But, we're not done yet because we haven't factored in the cost to rent them. Zip.ca (canadian netflix) charges $50 month for 22 movies with 8 out at a time. I'm assuming you can get a similar pricing plan from netflix. That works out to a cost of $2.27 per movie, so we're now up to $10.42/movie or $12.27/movie, respectively.

This all assumes you already have the hardware for RAID and running an HTPC to play them on your HDTV, otherwise the costs increase again. Then factor in the hassle of ripping discs (it takes 35-45 min to rip a blu-ray), and it's just not worth it. Burning isn't really an option either because the discs are still too expensive.

As a longtime user of HTPCs, it will be nice when they catch up because it's pretty awesome to have all your movies sorted automatically by genre, just a couple clicks away. Media centers need included blu-ray support and they need to be able to output the new codecs over HDMI, which they cannot do at present. They're limited to Dolby Digital/DTS via HDMI. They can output some of the newer formats over analog, if you have software to decode them. If you care about sound that means you need a high quality sound card, so factor in another $200-300. I was going to build an array for my blu-rays later next year, but instead i'm pumping that money into new speakers.

/nerd

This is worth it's own thread imho. HTPCs are cool when done well. XBMC is working on building in Blu-Ray support in it's new version I've heard/