Considering the switch from local ripped media to iTunes purchases.

Rip or download. The videos you purchase from iTunes will be 5GB in size or larger. The same quality can easily be in a <2GB package.

Storage is cheap. Don't waste time and money with 2.5 inch drives. Get full-size drives

I use seagate backup plus 3TB USB 3 drives. Ive got two of them. The nice thing is the drive enclosure pops off the base, which basically gives me a USB3 to SATA adapter

Additionally, I can remove the drives from there enclosures and install them into an enclosure later. Last time I checked, Seagate was using the high quality barracuda line up

I don't know why theyre so expensive now. They were around $100 ea for the 3TB last year

After viewing a BR copy of Alien and then the same copy that I had purchased on iTunes, the BR copy is so much more superior. The sharpness and details in the BR copy are just outstanding.

Unless I can't find a BR copy of a movie, I doubt that I will be buying many more movies in iTunes. TV shows are another story. I'll continue to but those and stream from Apples servers.

I had a 1 TB Seagate drive go bad (actually it crashed) on me this week. It had about 88 or so BR rips on it. Disk Utility could still see the disk so I decided to run some recovery software on it. It took over 12 hours to scan the drive and when it was finished, it brought up every movie I had on the drive but every file was damaged beyond recovery. Some were too small to have been whole files. These were only 700-800MB in size, others were broken into 2-3 chunks, again too small to be usable. I reformatted the drive and it's been running solid for a few days now but I'm afraid to put anything back on it yet.

These are some of the risks we take by using drives. Every drive will eventually fail, it's just a question of when. I have one 2TB drive and 6 1TB drives. Too many to try and back up so I end up losing stuff every few years when a drive goes bad.

shorn said:

I have a Mac Mini as a dedicated media machine hooked up to an AppleTV. Its a late 2011 model, with 2 WD FW800 drives attached. One 2TB and a 1.5TB one. Ripped movies on one, TV Shows on the other.

I'm running out of space, and starting to think about my media going forward.

I am seriously considering selling all this gear and using the proceeds to purchase movies/tv shows as and when I want to watch them from iTunes. (or when they are on a good deal).

On the plus side, I can purchase a movie/tv show and its then available to the Apple TV, and all my other iDevices via the cloud. No back up worries, no iTunes needed to be running etc. Also no time spent ripping/tagging/adding to a library.

On the minus side, eventually it's going to get quite expensive I think. Also, I'm not sure I could get by with no dedicated iTunes library at all. Especially for when certain titles are not on iTunes (or not in HD). My other worry is the stories I've read (although not experienced) of titles being lost after being purchased because the copyright owner has changed hands.

Wondered if anyones managed to make this switch?

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I have about 13tb's worth of Movies and shows, and a Huge library of TV DVD's and blu rays I've ripped, the only reason I don't buy off ITunes or Amazon is I like to use Plex to stream the content, plus I usually buy the discs used thru Amazon and other sources and it ends up being a lot cheaper than the season prices in itunes

shorn said:

Thank for the replies everyone, good to see other perspectives. This is rather timely but I've just had an issue that might stop me from making the switch!

I'm certainly not going to invest £100's if not £1000's into iTunes if this happens.

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IMO the best way to use Cloud Media Streaming is to preview what's available. e.g. I Netflix stuff that looks interesting and if I really like it and want to see it more than once, then I get a copy to store locally. With Netflix the growth of my local store has reduced a lot !

Ripping, encoding, storing of media has worn me down. I think I'll not bother for items that I can either stream from Vudu or iTunes, or buy via iTunes. I'm in a space where I need to refresh my drive pool and it's a silly expense.

You don't have to rip since you could just buy from iTunes and save it.