Found Something I Still Need Windows For (For Now)

Recently I had the desire to re-watch what is probably my favorite TV series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because of David Ellison's takeover of Paramount and Bari Weiss licking Trump's boots, I no longer have a Paramount+ subscription to easily watch the series. Luckily, I have the entire series on DVD. Owning physical media for the win.

The downside of the DVDs is I'm limited to where I can watch the show as I need a screen with a DVD player. I'd like to be able to watch the series on my iPad, or on the TV in my gym. Neither of which have a DVD player hooked up to them. Fortunately, one can pull the episodes off the DVD into a digital format and then use Plex to stream them to any device with access to the Plex app. Bingo!

I did this for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I can now stream the series on all of my devices and TVs. Sadly though, I struggled to get it working on Linux. I tried a bunch of tutorials and eventually I was able to get it, but with the downside that each 45 minute episode was nearly 2GB. My NAS has a lot of storage, but with 176 episodes, that would still take up over a third of a terabyte. Not ideal. With Windows, I was able to do the same thing with each episode only taking up around 800MB. That's significantly less space overall.

So I was stuck in Windows for several days getting them archived and digitized for my personal use. As someone who has very much preferred to exist in Linux and MacOS, it was annoying. Alas, it just means something else for me to figure out so that when I get a hankering to do the same thing for Star Trek Voyager, I can avoid Windows all together.