24 ms·

My husband was right about DVDs

324 points by tekdude 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
Not just DVD's but also music CD's. Plenty of music from the 1960's through early 2000's is no longer online for either contractual disputes, or cultural cancellation and other reasons I have yet to figure out. I assume some of this transition must be the cost issues of producing physical CD's vs. delivering online or renting the music online. When it is only available as a stream online I call it renting and every day that passes there is a risk that some of the music vanishes. When I moved I compressed my CD collection down from their hard cases to soft cases and kept all the inserts in one of the old hard-case bags minus the hard case plastic holders and I have no regrets. I assume there may be a similar risk in renting e-Books online vs. having a non-DRM copy of it.
- adamm255 4y ago
  Has this with an album recently. Released in 2012, one day it was just gone from all streaming services.
- beej71 4y ago
  A friend of mine refuses streaming. He buys CDs in bulk from the flea market and rips them to FLAC. I was just thinking of doing the same for my collection in the attic, assuming the CDs have survived a couple thousand freeze/thaw cycles. :) I like the idea of ditching the hard cases for space.
  - ghusto 4y ago
    Yup, I do the same, and can recommend it. You get the benefits of both physical media, and convenience of soft storage availability. That music is mine, and can never be sold to me again. In case some might be wondering what the "benefits" of physical media are; it's my belief that having to _commit_ to listening to a CD (not being able to flick through different albums and artists easily on Spotify, as the whim comes) is psychologically sound, and the alternative is damaging. This goes for films too. Those old enough to remember renting DVDs — or even VHS! — may remember the excitement of getting that film back to their place to watch. The whole thing was an experience, and whether the film was good or bad, you had a good time with whoever you were with, because you had an _experience_. More often than not though, you enjoyed the film, because you wanted to. You invested, so it was worth more to you. Actually this is more than "my belief", but I can't be bothered to find the research.
    - cgh 4y ago
      My personal best example of this is tape-trading (which were mostly CD-Rs, but whatever) underground metal back in the '90s. The sheer amount of work it took to find people to trade with, burn the music, send it through the mail and, best of all, get their package in return made it seem so significant. And it was the best way to find out about new bands. Even bands that eventually became huge, like Metallica after they changed their sound, built their initial fanbase via the trading scene.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    I did the same thing with DVDs, Blurays and CDs. Everything got pulled out of the hardcase unless the hardcase was a special design or unique in some way. Kept the inserts for each media type in a couple of small shoebox sized storage boxes, put each disc in to a soft sleeve that I bought in bulk for about two cents each, and then put all that into two banker's boxes. Reduced from eight or nine banker's boxes to nothing at all. The digital contents are stored on my local server and I can stream it to any local device or over the internet to my laptop or phone.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    I went the other way… back in the day, I ripped my ~400 cds to MP3’s. I still have them on my file server hard drive, but am happy paying Spotify $10/month for the convenience of having access to pretty much any album I want on any device, so I haven’t listened to my own MP3s in years. I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
- 56friends 4y ago
  I know it doesn’t replace old recordings, but moving forward there is a lot of great music on Bandcamp, usually available to download in several lossless formats like wav and flac.
- tomxor 4y ago
  Same here, although I no longer have a CD player which is kinda worrying. On my TODO list to convert them all to lossless FLAC or something to replace my previously more conservative lossy settings from when $/GB was far greater. Bookmarked the article posted on HN the other day about doing this in a reliable way. The other thing about music is it has a far higher re-play value than Film/TV... some specific albums I've listened to thousands of times, and there is simply no way I would rely on some streaming service for that. I'm not sure what the younger generations do for their favourites... or maybe it's not like that any-more, maybe their music is more ephemeral and "trending". Pretty much all of my music with replay value is from way before 2000, back to 80s - I'm not even that old.
- sexy_seedbox 4y ago
  Beautifully done CD and vinyl packaging is worth keeping physically even if they're sitting on the shelf 99% of their lifetime.
- steponlego 4y ago
  It's just nice to pop a good CD into a nice CD player and play the whole thing. Also, despite what some people may claim, there can be huge variations in sound quality between different DACs and their associated output stages, whether or not the DAC happens to be inside a CD player, your computer, or an outboard USB device and this can easily be measured and heard by people who know the program material well. Many people think the best sounding DACs are the multibit jobbers from Philips which haven't even been made in thirty+ years.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
In a similar vein, once you pirate something you also own it forever. Netflix is never gonna delete Bojack Horseman off my hard drive.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  You say 'never' but I see the capacity for companies to remotely delete things on users drives that feel like may be in copyright violation as a foregone conclusion at this point. It is an inevitability. Since both TVs and computers are usually internet enabled, you'd have to super careful to never expose that drive to the net. I mean who is going to stop them? Lawmakers? chuckle-snort. The supreme court? giggle.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    You would either download the content encrypted or use Linux, I suppose.
  - derwiki 4y ago
    How is Netflix getting root on my box?
    - dylan604 4y ago
      You'll give it to them when click the Accept button
- sdflhasjd 4y ago
  In 2035, your hard drive will have firmware with built-in CSAM filtering, which - after a legal battle in the high court - will get hijacked for copyright enforcement.
  - Karsteski 4y ago
    Guess I'll be relegated to living in a cabin in the woods if we ever get to that point...
sublinear 4y ago
[flagged]
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  I've been hoarding every bit of music I've composed since the eighties. What advice would you give, before it becomes a serious problem? I'd also like to ask: how old is the oldest thing you own? And, additionally, what are the two oldest things you own? At what point does having more than one of something become hoarding?
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Keeping your own work is completely different from keeping everything you've ever watched on Netflix. Michael W. Smith tells about being in the studio, and not being able to get something to sound right. He went back to listen to an old work tape, and realized "OK, nobody should be playing but the piano. That's what's wrong right now in the studio." If that's what you do, keep it all, even the "in process" stuff. But as I said, stuff you watched is different from stuff you made.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Humans used to gather around fires and listen story tellers at night. Now we gather around our glowing screens to watch stories unfold. You can take humans out of the woods and plains and put them in houses, but we don’t actually change much. It ain’t hoarding. It’s keeping stories around.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Do you have an actual point? If so, maybe you could state it, because this sounds like 1) speculation, 2) completely unrelated, and 3) gratuitously insulting.
  - 4y ago
fijiaarone 4y ago
Still need a VHS to watch Star Wars
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  laserdisc will do.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    why would anyone choose VHS over laserdisc I'll never understand
- Apreche 4y ago
  Looks like someone never heard of Harmy's Despecialized.
  - 986aignan 4y ago
    Or 4K77: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
    - 56friends 4y ago
      I didn’t realize how many small changes were added to the BluRay version. The worst part for me is the re-colorization into cooler tones to make it look more modern. 4K77 version looks more goofy - just like I remember it from my childhood!
- haunter 4y ago
  2006 Limited Edition DVD [0], it has the original theatrical versions on bonus discs (Yes, Han shot first). 0, https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg
  - chungy 4y ago
    Which are transferred from the 1993 LaserDisc release, aside from the text crawl of A New Hope. The 1993 LD did use the subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope", the 2006 DVDs took it from the original film again, but the rest of the movie is a LaserDisc transfer.
jzellis 4y ago
If only there were some way to download anything you wanted even if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray and isn't on streaming anymore....
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I think public discussion has moved beyond making people aware of illegal copying / streaming, and how to do it. So the people who don't engage in that probably have their reasons. If you're trying to move some readers to start doing that, you'll probably need to engage with their reasons.
- dylan604 4y ago
  So if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray, then where did the source for the torrents come from? If I saw a file with the name of something I knew wasn't available on a shiny round disc, I would be very skeptical and hesitant to download it from fear of it not being what it said it was. I damn sure don't want to go to the hassle of downloading a VHS transfer
  - fabianhjr 4y ago
    For example Final Space got cancelled and while the last season was available on streaming services the physical copy hadn't been released and was also cancelled. (So it is a webrip, got pulled from streaming services)
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - myself248 4y ago
    If a VHS transfer is the only way to re-experience something that blew me away as kid, you bet I'll be happier with a VHS transfer than with nothing at all. Not everything needs to be pixel-perfect.
    - causality0 4y ago
      What's really nice are the heroes who take those VHS transfers and SD DVD copies and release AI-upscaled versions. Particularly cartoons that never had blu-ray releases look glorious upscaled.
plusminusplus 4y ago
My understanding was there's a risk of disc degradation, is this a concern? How do you "back up" a CD/DVD?
- derwiki 4y ago
  Rip it to a hard drive or S3 bucket. Hard drive bonus is you can use Plex or Jellyfin to stream.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  For a CD, you need a program that uses libcdparanoia. Luckily, there are many. DVDs contain a proper filesystem, so you can just mount and copy that.
- toast0 4y ago
  DVDs are easy to backup. Lots of software out there, and there's nothing low level to worry about. Audio CDs also have lots of software out there, but you have to be a bit more picky if you're concerned about getting a bit for bit copy rather than just a sounds the same copy. If your discs have hidden tracks and all that kind of weird stuff, care is needed. Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >the usual rules of backups apply. which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.
- haunter 4y ago
  For Audio CDs you want to rip it lossless with something that support AccurateRip so you can be sure that others made the same copy byte-to-byte. Fortunately there are several options https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip#Software_that_uses_AccurateRip https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip#Soft... For DVDs you can use the infamous DVD Decrypter to make ISO files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter or MakeMKV which straight copies the MPEG2 files (.vob) into a nice MKV container https://www.makemkv.com/ https://www.makemkv.com/
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jasode 4y ago
>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc. But she inadvertently learned her true viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD. But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.
- edu 4y ago
  This is my same conclusion. With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. But that’s less than 10% of my media consumption.
  - JuettnerDistrib 4y ago
    > With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired. With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      I have books I've never opened since I read them that is just a marker like that. I have one copy I've never opened: I read it as an e-book but got the physical copy just to complete my set and have it on my shelf. I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.
rektide 4y ago
And now it feels like 2/3rds of media doesnt have a dvd or blu-ray release! So awful. This has been such an ever enmissserating situation. Started as a high & mighty &bgood convenience, but we're ending up worse than where we started; fragmented & ephemeral.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I remember the middle section of shelves at Blockbuster. I'm quite content not having access to a lot of that schlock any more. A lot of it didn't deserve to be put on DVD! I'm reading the "so awful" within the context of this thread more of an accusation for someone making the decision to not allow content vs I just wish it were on DVD for my convenience. It's not all conspiracy theories. Sometimes, it's just financial. Some older content was done on such a cheap budget and companies that we'll just call fly by night. These types of places might not be able to remaster their content for blu-ray either because they no longer exist, don't have the funding to re-transfer the film to a higher scan, or just physically no longer have the materials.
claviska 4y ago
Years ago, I stupidly got rid of my entire South Park DVD collection because they were on Netflix. Until they eventually weren’t. Chris was right.
deleted 4y ago
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photochemsyn 4y ago
One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on. For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services. One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on. Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.
- iambateman 4y ago
  This is like keeping a shotgun in your house to protect against the government. If the government is ready to conduct systematic disinformation campaigns, your DVD’s probably won’t help.
  - 15155 4y ago
    How did Vietnam and Afghanistan fare against "the government?"
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      Better than the Confederacy my cherry picking cliche replyguy.
snapplebobapple 4y ago
Her husband ian't right about dvds, the government is wrong about how they are regulating streaming services. The government needs to enforce reasonable content licencing across all the services like they did with music and radio stations decades ago so all content is on all services and the services start competing on vectors that actually matter to consumers like interface design and fast content delivery networks.
- Terretta 4y ago
  It's crazy that you can go to a grocery store as distribution aggregator and buy any type and brand of food in one place. You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week. At least, that's what studios and labels think.
  - layer8 4y ago
    If food was infinitely replicable at basically no cost, you’d only be allowed to eat your cereals at the respective store.
    - undersuit 4y ago
      Like a restaurant almost.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      You're implying that piracy was killing media markets until physical copies were replaced with streaming, but hasn't that been debunked?
      - layer8 4y ago
        No, I’m saying that food companies would act like media companies do if food was trivially replicable, and therefore the fact that they currently don’t is not an argument for anything.
  - harvey9 4y ago
deergomoo 4y ago
Availability and ownership aside, Blu-ray is far better quality than what you’ll get on most streaming services. If I really care about a movie or show, I always get it on Blu-ray. That said, if they could shift 1080 BDs down to DVD pricing and UHD BD down to what BD costs now I would buy a lot more. I’m starting to build up a collection of UHD Blu-rays but Jesus, £20-30 per movie really adds up. Definitely paying the enthusiast tax there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chungy 4y ago
  1080p Blu-rays are very often single-digit dollars, at least here in the US. UHD does come with a higher price point, especially for new releases; it goes down, but it can take many months for it to do so.
- expensive_news 4y ago
  I started buying UHDs (mostly Criterions) recently. I mostly don’t like owning too many things (and even buy most of my 4Ks on iTunes when they go on sale for $5) but for some films the extra quality is worth it (plus you can’t get the Criterions films in 4K anywhere else, and I like having the access to the features). I always am wondering if I’ll regret it in 10 years when you may be able to stream super high bitrates, but as always, the future is uncertain anyways.
- steponlego 4y ago
  We learned after the Universal fire that many Blu-Rays are just high quality rips of Laserdiscs.
stackedinserter 4y ago
> But I also wish that streamers would create Blu-rays of their original content. I should be able to purchase the complete Bojack Horseman on Blu-ray to hold on to it forever—what if something happens to Netflix? Like you or not, MKV files on your own hard drive and piracy in general is the answer.
nvr219 4y ago
This goes back to the classic backup calculation. Never spend more to protect the data than the data is worth, right? That means the husband will be right or wrong on a user by user basis. If you have room to keep binders and binders of DVDs in your house, you need to calculate - is that space worth it for the data on there? Me, personally, once I've seen a movie or a TV show I rarely watch it again. There are a few that I do repeat watch, enough that I have a backup of those movies or shows even though I can get it on my streaming subscription today. But I'm not keeping binders or DVDs because that data is not important enough for me to back up.
tpmx 4y ago
People tend to shit on Spotify (while still using it), but they did manage something that we all want: Access to (almost everything), for a nominal monthly fee. We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.
- 56friends 4y ago
  I think the era of Spotify dominance and music availability is coming to an end. Not sure what the next stage is going to look like - but I personally just canceled my subscription after over a decade of using Spotify exclusively. There is a lot of music that has never been available on Spotify, plus some music is disappearing due to artists and labels realizing they are not making any money from Spotify streaming. Plus no lossless, plus the relentless upsell of podcasts and now audio books. I would be fine subscribing to a specialized streaming music service, or two.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I'm super happy with my Spotify subscription. Sure, maybe 5% of the things I want are missing, but 95% is pretty good.
    - 56friends 4y ago
      I left for 2 reasons: 1. Their recommendations became unbearable. I love discovering music but Spotify is not the right service for that anymore. Daily playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Genre playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Track radio is just several of my favorite artists shuffled. “Best of techno” playlist? Floating Points and Four Tet - both artists I listen to a lot, but they are not techno, and are not “best techno” - a genre that spans decades. I don’t know if they overfitted their models and at this point I don’t care. 2. I am fed up with the podcast and audio book push. Not interested in either, don’t want to see it anywhere.
      - tpmx 4y ago
ubermonkey 4y ago
I'm a very happy Apple Music subscriber, but I'm also 52 and so own thousands of CDs and hundreds of LPs. I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle, and couldn't be done on the move. Moreover, while this scenario made sense to ME, my wife found it so off-putting that I discovered she was just not listening to music on her phone at all. AM solved this problem pretty well. PLUS, AM has a feature where it will give you access via Apple Music to weird, indie, or out of print stuff in your library that might not exist in Apple Music's library. A case in point is the 1990 Wendy & Lisa record Eroica. It's one of my favorites, and has always been part of my library -- it's even been re-ripped, because the first time I digitized it I only used 128Kbps MP3, and I wanted it at 256Kbps AAC. But it's also 100% not available via any streaming service because of rights issues of some kind. YOU can't get it from Apple Music, but I can because Apple Music sees it in the library on my music server. That's pretty cool.
- 56friends 4y ago
  Interesting. Do you know if this extends to basically all digitized music regardless of the specifics of artist/label streaming preferences? Eg King Crimson’s catalog was never added to Spotify, if I link my ripped CDs to AM, would it make it available for me to stream on my phone?
  - jonathantf2 4y ago
    I believe, yes. I have various live versions of albums that have been ripped from streams and radio, Apple tries to match them to their library to save space and then just lets you wifi sync them. Shows up right next to the other music in your library.
  - mrkstu 4y ago
    The feature is called iTunes Match- you can actually get it standalone from Apple Music (at least you could, not sure if they have changed anything recently,) but AM includes it: Links: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2C%20the%20Apple%20Music%20subscription,pending%20renewal%20of%20iTunes%20Match https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2....
satysin 4y ago
I get the point the author is making but keeping all the DVDs also isn't the answer IMHO. At least it wasn't for me, it was just annoying to find a place to store it all, to move it when we moved country would have cost money for basically nothing of value. I had a purge of pretty much all my physical media a bit over a decade ago. I had a little over 1000 DVDs and Blu-rays. Probably 200 VHS too. God knows how many CDs and tapes. Rather than ditch them and say "I will just use streaming to watch/listen when I want to" which is very naive IMHO I ripped them all to hard disks and archived them to some LTO tapes I had. Granted not everyone has access to this kind of equipment but these days there are other options anyway. I don't use LTO anymore. Today I have full access to my entire movie, music, photo, and software collection near instantly from my NAS. Some stuff isn't online (as in not powered up) as it would just be a waste of power but I can switch it on if I ever feel the need to watch something I haven't watched in two decades but don't want to delete forever :) I have some redundancy via RAID as well as on site/offline duplication should something really go wrong. Plus I have an off site backup. It isn't actually as much space as you would think even for a pretty huge number of movies as old stuff is pretty small. It is only recently with 4K HDR movies that we are looking at ~90GB for some movies. Storage isn't very expensive these days. When I did a quick comparison a while back I worked out it was less for the HDDs than it was to ship them all from one country to another let alone the non-quantifiable cost of my time packing, moving, unpacking, and physical storage space. Ideally I would share the cost with others as it is kinda stupid for there to be multiple copies of the same movies and TV shows for no reason but sadly there isn't a solution for this and with the copyright laws and all that it is unlikely there ever will be something as reliable as doing it yourself.
- layer8 4y ago
  You can store them in CD wallets like this one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/388541-REG/Case_Logic_CDW320_CDW_320_320_Capacity_CD.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/388541-REG/Case_Logic... I have ~1500 DVDs stored that way in less than a meter of shelf space.
  - tzfld 4y ago
    This may be space saving, but not a recommended way to store discs for long periods.
drewcoo 4y ago
Does is bother anyone else that a column named "future tense" has story titles, none of which seem to be in the future tense? Talk about bait and switch . . .
chad_strategic 4y ago
I have a completely different perspective. I rarely watch anything twice. I have also found there are many things to occupy my time other than watching things I have already seen.
j45 4y ago
Similar to music whether steamed or downloads to your device, the issues are similar for kindle books that you think you’ve purchased and owned at anytime but that can also disappear at any time.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
And this is why I've rebuilt my digital music, tv, and movie collections. For the media I care about, I want to own it, not license it, thank you very much. When streaming first came out I ended this practice. Then, the licensing disputes started and content started moving or disappearing. That's a trust they won't earn back.
- cogman10 4y ago
  I recently went through this. Every TV channel having a streaming service is just nuts. Particularly flagrant is the likes of Disney, who owns Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and will happily sell subscriptions to all 3 + addons throughout. Also abhorrent is the fact that these slimy companies are constantly moving content around the services, trying to get you subscribe to everything under the sun just to follow a favorite TV show. "Oh, it's on amazon, now netflix, now hulu, now disney+, now paramount+, now peacock, now britbox, now acorn"
whartung 4y ago
I strongly suggest that if DVDs are important to you, that you find some convenient mechanic to rip them. DVDs are durable, but not immortal. I have several that have failed. I appreciate the ask. Ripping DVDs is just a lot of work, time, storage, and fiddling. I don’t wish ripping 15 seasons of ER on anyone. But, the truth is, the things break down.
LesZedCB 4y ago
Agreed. We have small number of movies and TV shows which is growing. Pro tip: thrift store DVDs and "friends of the library" sales. I got every season of ST:TNG for about $40 ($1/disk)
jedberg 4y ago
This is silly. Just rip them and give them away. You'll spend less on mirrored hard drives than storage for the disks. And you can always BitTorrent movies you already own on DVD/BluRay guilt free. The only reason I still have my stack of disks is because I haven't had time to rip them and their special features yet. That and we keep the disks for kids movies because the van doesn't have streaming support or AppleTV yet. :)
- agiacalone 4y ago
  Ripped all my DVDs in 2010, donated them, and haven't looked back. Nowadays with Plex, I see no reason to ever use physical media again
ksec 4y ago
> Y: X was right. Why are we always in the cycle where X is the contrarian and minority but was pushed aside while Y enjoy all the frames and glories but is fundamentally wrong. I am putting X and Y here simply because this observation hold true not just in tech, in streaming but everywhere else. It is not like they were not warned. Back to the subject. We really something better than BluRay. Smaller but also much higher in storage capacity, and when stored properly that could last a hundred year. While being cheap to produce.
- suprfnk 4y ago
  Because 1. most ideas start as fringe hypotheses, and 2. survivorship bias. People will have 1001 ideas and hypotheses, ranging from "hey, smoking might be unhealthy" to "the government is controlling us with 5g" and "aliens walk among us". For the ones that make it through, like smoking, people can say "see, I told you so, we warned you". The other 999, you will, mostly, never hear from again.
mihaaly 4y ago
Same with music streaming. I went back to my offline collection just recently, keeping one service for the occasional discovery of something new or to me unknown. Too many favourites disappeared, or just reuploaded corrupting my playlist. Too much garbage flow at us (mostly means the video streaming where they decide for you what to list in the prime space of the interface, what you want is unimportant) to be comfortable. The quality of the players are decreasing due to bugs and eroding user friendliness. It is not fun anymore.
sergiotapia 4y ago
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was butchered on streaming platforms, so I agree with you OP! Taiwan Tammy? GONE! Martina Martinez? GONE! Santa asking: "Is he retarded?" when Charlie just stares at him frozen in rage? GONE! Lots of funny moments missed by new fans unfortunately. Related: Why have hard drive sizes stagnated? It feels like 8TB has been the golden standard going on 8 years now. I'm very close to doing the following: Putting 6 drives in a portable RAID device, and ripping my movies to 720p x265 for storage. I can store a near limitless amount of movies and TV shows this way, and honestly I don't notice 720p. At least not enough to trade a 1GB movie for a 45GB 4k Remux. And I own a latest brand new 65 inch LG OLED and Sony OLED. Added benefit is that its trivial to stream this anywhere at home or remotely. The files are so small that even scanning around the movie is instant. The only thing holding me back is 8TB hard drives. So I wait patiently and continue to pay for a plexserver some guy manages for me.
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  Here's the real question: why have backup disc sizes stagnated? We went from CD to slightly larger CDs, to DVDs, then double-layer DVDs, but BD-Rs haven't really taken off and we ought to be at something much, much larger by now.
- andrewmackrodt 4y ago
  I'm not sure of prices in your region, but I see 20TB drives priced competitively to 8TB drives in terms of price/terabyte. I've been thinking of building a new media array to replace my existing 8TB drives and similar storage capacity would cost me less now than 3 years ago, for arguably better drives too. I've been thinking of using the Seagate Exos X18 (18TB drives) but haven't made the purchase yet to form an opinion.
dkarter 4y ago
You can have both hard copies and streaming by ripping your DVDs and putting them on a NAS with Jellyfin. https://youtu.be/RZ8ijmy3qPo https://youtu.be/RZ8ijmy3qPo
amelius 4y ago
In the old days it was legal to record shows on your VCR. What happened to the laws around that?
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  The laws didn't change, but what happened is almost everybody threw out their VCRs. Or never had them.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Surely the laws are more general than VCRs? Or should I add a tape drive to my computer to make it legally a VCR?
- kalleboo 4y ago
  You can still record broadcast TV all you want, a popular solution is the Channels app using a HDHomeRun box - https://getchannels.com https://getchannels.com https://www.silicondust.com https://www.silicondust.com Decrypting the shows downloaded from streaming services, however, is likely a violation of the DMCA.
jsz0 4y ago
Alternatively consider reducing your addiction to television/movies and stop worrying about where your next fix is coming from. In the golden era of piracy I used to be a huge media pack rat spending hours a day obtaining more media to stash away. One day my ZFS array puked and I lost almost everything. I wasn't even upset. It was a blessing in disguise to be liberated from caring about hoarding media. Never seeing your favorite television/movies again is going to have almost zero impact on your life. It's not worth wasting much of your time and money on.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  >One day my ZFS array puked How does that happen? No redundancy?
  - jsz0 4y ago
    Totally self inflicted. I was using a beta version of OpenZFS on a beta version of OSX. Begging for problems and I finally found one. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for an off-ramp of the burden of managing my horde of data. All my personal data was backed up so I just restored that and let the media horde go.
- Sakos 4y ago
  I have terabytes of movies and series. I've spent like 1 hour in the past 12 months adding some stuff to my collection. HDD space is extremely cheap and keeping a local copy is such low effort that I don't see why I should get rid of my collection. Some of it is also so rare as to be impossible to find unless you're a member of some private sharing sites (try finding a complete archive of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show). I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.
  - jsz0 4y ago
legitster 4y ago
Paramount+ was kind of the last straw for me on streaming. A streaming platform entirely made from licenses they ripped back from existing platforms. And the new shows are trashy and lazily written. I don't need to be on the zeitgeist any more. For all the old shows I want to catch up on, DVD box sets cost less than the streaming services to watch them on.
taeric 4y ago
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, but media is a ridiculous money pit for folks. Don't get me wrong, I've done it. And I'll probably continue to buy some physical media for a while. But I have a hard time justifying the cost of giant personal libraries. They are almost certainly destined for a landfill after an estate sell.
adamgordonbell 4y ago
We just got a DVD player again, because my wife wanted to watch 'The Wonder Years' and because of all the music in it (which is great, btw) my understanding is it can't stream anywhere anymore. (Or that is the theory I heard why no one is streaming it.) Other shows got redone with other music so they could release it, but music is pretty heavily used in the wonder years.
- chriscjcj 4y ago
  > Other shows got redone with other music so they could release it WKRP in Cincinnati is another example. I don't know if they still exist, but there used to be torrents of VHS rips of WKRP so that it could be viewed with the original music.
prepend 4y ago
My husband was right about piracy.
baxtr 4y ago
I have started ordering Kindle books that I really like as hardcopies. You never know…
efficax 4y ago
although i love the cinema and watch a lot of tv, i'm kind of indifferent to the problem of streaming content disappearing. before streaming content i watched a lot less and read a lot more, and i think i was better for it. so if they took it all away and made it harder to find it might be to my benefit
causality0 4y ago
In my opinion the true advantage of discs is all the extra content. Sure, I can download or stream a copy of any movie I want but it's pretty damned hard to get it with the commentary track without buying a disc.
pkdpic 4y ago
I completely agree but one unfortunate reality I've noticed as a still-active dvd collector / aficionado is where the heck to buy them. $4+ on ebay for an 80% chance low-res bootleg stopped working for me 3ish years ago and I still haven't found a preferable method without resorting to full on pirating which feels like a little too time-consuming of a hobby for more mainstream titles at least.
tracker1 4y ago
And this is why I have a NAS with a dozen 12tb drives on two raid 6 arrays. Most of it is h265 encoded, which is smaller, and the blur of h265 doesn't annoy me like the blockiness of h264. I am only using about 22tb currently, upgraded about two years ago.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
If you want to save physical space, you can rip them all and store them on a drive that's smaller then the DVD player you use to play your DVDs. That's what I do.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  The DVDs actually doesn't take up a ton of space. What we did was buying the cheapest version of a movie and just throw away the cover. You can get DVD/BluRay binders that will hold 200 - 400 discs in the space of a few large books. I find ripping movies a little tiresome. Getting the quality, sound and subtitles right can be challenging.
a13o 4y ago
I did a physical media purge a few years back, and kept just a drawer-ful of my absolute favorites. This past Christmas I thought I'd watch one of them - but then I realized I don't even own a DVD player. I don't think I ever did. Some game console would play it, or my PC. But now the PC has no 5.25" bays, and the game consoles are all-digital. My conclusion is not that the author's husband is right. But rather that I should get rid of these remaining DVDs. I've never thought much about digital nomadism, but I suppose I practice it. There's always something new to watch.
marmetio 4y ago
I put all my old disks in sleeves or stacked on spindles, organized alphabetically. They take up almost no space and it's practical enough for infrequent use.
galleywest200 4y ago
I have been buying DVDs at the thrift store and ripping them to my personal Plex server. I do not feel bad, I paid for the media and I am the only person with access to this server -- its pretty much the same as me watching that DVD alone.
distantsounds 4y ago
no, you were both wrong. rip the discs to an external drive and play it over your local network. or even better, over the internet with plex/emby/jellyfin. how are these articles getting up voted? what boomers are reading HN on a Saturday and going 'yeah I miss my DVD collection'?
nixpulvis 4y ago
Music too! Oh god my music...
rcme 4y ago
Lots of comments here about whether or not the author’s husband is right or wrong. What about the author herself? > My beloved Beforeigners—a deeply weird and delightful show in which suddenly people from the Stone Age, Viking era, and 19th century begin appearing around the world—is gone. You can still watch this on Apple TV. You just need to pay a few dollars to rent it. How much is shelf space worth?
schmichael 4y ago
I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen <insert meaningful show or movie here> before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed-what-from-whom. There's even a DVD little lending library in my neighborhood. Not to mention the public library system has tons of physical media to choose from. I love streaming and rarely turn to physical media these days, but as my kids get older and want to watch the same things over-and-over-and-over... building that DVD collection out again is looking really appealing.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I need some automated streaming-service ripper that will burn DVDs whenever I pop in a blank disk. And maybe generate nice sticker label PDFs from some intermediate scene with the title.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - derefr 4y ago
    Consider instead: a Plex library backed by a “disk drive” that’s actually a DVD/Blu-Ray jukebox. You can fish the disks out if you really want, but most of the time they’re just “online” as part of your library. Buy a new one? Feed it to the jukebox. Ideally, rip one “into the library” and the jukebox will consume a blank disk to burn it, then file it. (AFAIK, this last bit is how Amazon Glacier works—just with some online disk drives in between to buffer content up into Blu-Ray-sized chunks.)
    - bradknowles 4y ago
      I'd be real surprised if it was anything beyond tape drives, plus a local cache. Check out the storage capacity on the latest LTO tapes, and the tape storage capacities of the large room-size tape robots.
hbarka 4y ago
Our legal department has stores of blank DVDs. It turns out that some legal artifacts must be stored in a permanent medium.
- cogman10 4y ago
  Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. If your storage requirements are more than a couple of years you might have already experienced some pretty major data losses.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. They do degrade, but a "couple of years" is pessimistic. My earliest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they're still good.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      CD-Rs will last longer than DVDs because the pits being written are larger. Further, audio can experience more degradation without perceptible impact. I've had DVD-Rs fail in 2 years. The type of DVD matters, of course. Here's a handy guide: https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
mumblemumble 4y ago
I have a hard time agreeing. We live in a world of media superabundance, and life only goes on for so long. I can't possibly consume even a tiny fraction of what's out there in my time on this world. I find that to be an incredible relief: I will always be able to find something interesting to read, watch, or listen to, regardless of whether I choose to fill my living space with shelves full of media. It's just not something I need to worry about. If anything, I find I have the opposite problem: too many options makes it hard to decide. A year or two ago I got rid of almost all my books, including many dearly loved favorites. My personal library would now fit in a laundry basket. (Still too many, but I have a sizable backlog of books I haven't read yet and that would be difficult or expensive to replace.) And the most notable consequence is that I now spend more time actually reading, and less time trying to decide what to read.
midasuni 4y ago
We’re watching Harry Potter with the kids, probably haven’t watched the blu rays since they were born (now 10) Popped in deathly hallows part 2 this very evening a few minutes before everyone was ready. Couple of kites later I turn on the tv and it’s playing some advert for some rom com or some sort It reminded me why I stopped buying dvds. They aren’t happy with selling me a product for a cost, they have to double dip by advertising stuff. Eventually I’m sure streaming will go that way, and once again The High Seas will be the only way to get the product. If there one thing the entertainment industry can be counted on it’s killing the goose.
asfarley 4y ago
In the genre of “Stallman was right”
andrewstuart 4y ago
Every time I want to watch a specific movie I have to search all the streaming services I have access to and often its not there. So these days I just buy the DVD from ebay from a few bucks, it arrives in a couple of days. Feels no different to the 1980's when I went to the video shop and brought home a VHS. I've gone back to physical media. Streaming has shot itself in the foot. I've cancelled most of my streaming services cause in Australia the free to air streaming services are really great anyway. I do pay for Britbox for the classic Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and other dorky delights.
christkv 4y ago
I've started browsing second hand blue rays and picking up some every week. Lots of special editions and other extra material you don't get on streaming and tons of movies I can not even find on either Netflix, HBO or Prime.
ericyd 4y ago
I don't relate to the author's sentiments at all. If something isn't available for streaming, then that's my cue to watch something different
npteljes 4y ago
A hard drive with movie rips goes much further than a bunch of disks. Copies don't have the adverts, unskippable anti-piracy bullshit, or region locking. And letting go, and adapting to new media goes even further. On the other hand, when I look something up from my past, I'm always thankful for the random archivist who still has a copy.
bobby_bbb 4y ago
This is ycom, so the replies are of course biased towards the "I always have good internet" paradigm. I live about 5 months per year in my RV in the middle of a desert. Internet is a phone-tethered experience. What is this "streaming" thing you talk about? I'd be buffering all night. And so, yes, there are good reasons for many of us to retain, in some form, all the DVD's we can get.
Justsignedup 4y ago
Piracy. This is why piracy is great. Its a tiny digital collection of all the things I care about. Story time: I was watching Star Trek Voyager. That show is obviously a lot of episodes. So sometime around season 5 it was removed from Netflix. Got pissed, downloaded it, kept watching. Was recently watching benjamin buttons first time on amazon. Didn't get to finish it that day. Turns out the next day it goes for cash only. Piracy is honestly the simplest and most consistent way to do this. And if a friend wants it? Bring a USB and it is yours. Sure teeeeechnically we can both watch it, but how often do I re-watch a movie that my friend is currently also watching at home. Point is that I really hate the current distribution models. Down side of DVDs is that they degrade. And to be completely truthful, if everything older than say... 15 years was available in the public domain, we can stop all this wasteful redundant storage everywhere. But due to copyright laws, things so so so old, that they shouldn't be making money anymore continue to be behind "pay walls" of sorts and only because they are protecting a distribution model that hasn't been necessary in over a decade.
ei8ths 4y ago
Besides being pulled from streaming, what if they altered the movie or show, to add on to it or censorship past views to fit modern views. I don't like original content being altered, especially the original star wars. :)
6451937099 4y ago
[dead]
randomcarbloke 4y ago
He was wrong, digitise and discard
deafpolygon 4y ago
Soon there won't be any DVDs or BluRays to buy and collect.
dwild 4y ago
I learned that quite early, mostly because I'm from Quebec, there's so many of our translation that get lost (I guess it's a question of rights, the translation and original content have 2 different owners). The one that made me realize that first is Pokémon, there's just no way to get the original Quebec version (and funnily enough, it's the same French translation, just with the English Pokémon names). I had to buy the original VHS to be able to get it, and still just the first season seems to have been made in VHS. Piracy doesn't help much either as theses translations were never digital in the first place. There's many show from my youth that I can't find with Quebec translation, even some that I can't find in their original language. If I had the cash and time it's something that I would wish to try, getting the distributions rights of a few of theses old shows. There's no way it would be that expensive (probably take quite a bit of time though) and nostalgia would works quite well I believe to attract enough viewership to support it.
mistyvales 4y ago
A lot of movies I want to see aren't on any streaming platform, plus the quality is pretty damn poor on a larger screen. Compression artifacts and color banding are just too damn annoying in a lot of shows or movies, especially ones with a lot of dark scenes. I also still buy CD's for many reasons, but the main one is that more often than not, most streaming services offer only modern remasters that are loud as hell and have no dynamic range whatsoever. Yes, there are some remasters that are loads better than 80s CD's, but often not, especially if they're from the 00s during the iPod era. https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/

324 points by tekdude 4y ago

Not just DVD's but also music CD's. Plenty of music from the 1960's through early 2000's is no longer online for either contractual disputes, or cultural cancellation and other reasons I have yet to figure out. I assume some of this transition must be the cost issues of producing physical CD's vs. delivering online or renting the music online. When it is only available as a stream online I call it renting and every day that passes there is a risk that some of the music vanishes. When I moved I compressed my CD collection down from their hard cases to soft cases and kept all the inserts in one of the old hard-case bags minus the hard case plastic holders and I have no regrets. I assume there may be a similar risk in renting e-Books online vs. having a non-DRM copy of it.

adamm255 4y ago
Has this with an album recently. Released in 2012, one day it was just gone from all streaming services.
beej71 4y ago
A friend of mine refuses streaming. He buys CDs in bulk from the flea market and rips them to FLAC. I was just thinking of doing the same for my collection in the attic, assuming the CDs have survived a couple thousand freeze/thaw cycles. :) I like the idea of ditching the hard cases for space.
- ghusto 4y ago
  Yup, I do the same, and can recommend it. You get the benefits of both physical media, and convenience of soft storage availability. That music is mine, and can never be sold to me again. In case some might be wondering what the "benefits" of physical media are; it's my belief that having to _commit_ to listening to a CD (not being able to flick through different albums and artists easily on Spotify, as the whim comes) is psychologically sound, and the alternative is damaging. This goes for films too. Those old enough to remember renting DVDs — or even VHS! — may remember the excitement of getting that film back to their place to watch. The whole thing was an experience, and whether the film was good or bad, you had a good time with whoever you were with, because you had an _experience_. More often than not though, you enjoyed the film, because you wanted to. You invested, so it was worth more to you. Actually this is more than "my belief", but I can't be bothered to find the research.
  - cgh 4y ago
    My personal best example of this is tape-trading (which were mostly CD-Rs, but whatever) underground metal back in the '90s. The sheer amount of work it took to find people to trade with, burn the music, send it through the mail and, best of all, get their package in return made it seem so significant. And it was the best way to find out about new bands. Even bands that eventually became huge, like Metallica after they changed their sound, built their initial fanbase via the trading scene.
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  I did the same thing with DVDs, Blurays and CDs. Everything got pulled out of the hardcase unless the hardcase was a special design or unique in some way. Kept the inserts for each media type in a couple of small shoebox sized storage boxes, put each disc in to a soft sleeve that I bought in bulk for about two cents each, and then put all that into two banker's boxes. Reduced from eight or nine banker's boxes to nothing at all. The digital contents are stored on my local server and I can stream it to any local device or over the internet to my laptop or phone.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  I went the other way… back in the day, I ripped my ~400 cds to MP3’s. I still have them on my file server hard drive, but am happy paying Spotify $10/month for the convenience of having access to pretty much any album I want on any device, so I haven’t listened to my own MP3s in years. I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
56friends 4y ago
I know it doesn’t replace old recordings, but moving forward there is a lot of great music on Bandcamp, usually available to download in several lossless formats like wav and flac.
tomxor 4y ago
Same here, although I no longer have a CD player which is kinda worrying. On my TODO list to convert them all to lossless FLAC or something to replace my previously more conservative lossy settings from when $/GB was far greater. Bookmarked the article posted on HN the other day about doing this in a reliable way. The other thing about music is it has a far higher re-play value than Film/TV... some specific albums I've listened to thousands of times, and there is simply no way I would rely on some streaming service for that. I'm not sure what the younger generations do for their favourites... or maybe it's not like that any-more, maybe their music is more ephemeral and "trending". Pretty much all of my music with replay value is from way before 2000, back to 80s - I'm not even that old.
sexy_seedbox 4y ago
Beautifully done CD and vinyl packaging is worth keeping physically even if they're sitting on the shelf 99% of their lifetime.
steponlego 4y ago
It's just nice to pop a good CD into a nice CD player and play the whole thing. Also, despite what some people may claim, there can be huge variations in sound quality between different DACs and their associated output stages, whether or not the DAC happens to be inside a CD player, your computer, or an outboard USB device and this can easily be measured and heard by people who know the program material well. Many people think the best sounding DACs are the multibit jobbers from Philips which haven't even been made in thirty+ years.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago

In a similar vein, once you pirate something you also own it forever. Netflix is never gonna delete Bojack Horseman off my hard drive.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
You say 'never' but I see the capacity for companies to remotely delete things on users drives that feel like may be in copyright violation as a foregone conclusion at this point. It is an inevitability. Since both TVs and computers are usually internet enabled, you'd have to super careful to never expose that drive to the net. I mean who is going to stop them? Lawmakers? chuckle-snort. The supreme court? giggle.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  You would either download the content encrypted or use Linux, I suppose.
- derwiki 4y ago
  How is Netflix getting root on my box?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    You'll give it to them when click the Accept button
sdflhasjd 4y ago
In 2035, your hard drive will have firmware with built-in CSAM filtering, which - after a legal battle in the high court - will get hijacked for copyright enforcement.
- Karsteski 4y ago
  Guess I'll be relegated to living in a cabin in the woods if we ever get to that point...

sublinear 4y ago

[flagged]

InCityDreams 4y ago
I've been hoarding every bit of music I've composed since the eighties. What advice would you give, before it becomes a serious problem? I'd also like to ask: how old is the oldest thing you own? And, additionally, what are the two oldest things you own? At what point does having more than one of something become hoarding?
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Keeping your own work is completely different from keeping everything you've ever watched on Netflix. Michael W. Smith tells about being in the studio, and not being able to get something to sound right. He went back to listen to an old work tape, and realized "OK, nobody should be playing but the piano. That's what's wrong right now in the studio." If that's what you do, keep it all, even the "in process" stuff. But as I said, stuff you watched is different from stuff you made.
BirAdam 4y ago
Humans used to gather around fires and listen story tellers at night. Now we gather around our glowing screens to watch stories unfold. You can take humans out of the woods and plains and put them in houses, but we don’t actually change much. It ain’t hoarding. It’s keeping stories around.
humanistbot 4y ago
[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Do you have an actual point? If so, maybe you could state it, because this sounds like 1) speculation, 2) completely unrelated, and 3) gratuitously insulting.
- 4y ago

fijiaarone 4y ago

Still need a VHS to watch Star Wars

hprotagonist 4y ago
laserdisc will do.
- dylan604 4y ago
  why would anyone choose VHS over laserdisc I'll never understand
Apreche 4y ago
Looks like someone never heard of Harmy's Despecialized.
- 986aignan 4y ago
  Or 4K77: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
  - 56friends 4y ago
    I didn’t realize how many small changes were added to the BluRay version. The worst part for me is the re-colorization into cooler tones to make it look more modern. 4K77 version looks more goofy - just like I remember it from my childhood!
haunter 4y ago
2006 Limited Edition DVD [0], it has the original theatrical versions on bonus discs (Yes, Han shot first). 0, https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg
- chungy 4y ago
  Which are transferred from the 1993 LaserDisc release, aside from the text crawl of A New Hope. The 1993 LD did use the subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope", the 2006 DVDs took it from the original film again, but the rest of the movie is a LaserDisc transfer.

jzellis 4y ago

If only there were some way to download anything you wanted even if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray and isn't on streaming anymore....

CoastalCoder 4y ago
I think public discussion has moved beyond making people aware of illegal copying / streaming, and how to do it. So the people who don't engage in that probably have their reasons. If you're trying to move some readers to start doing that, you'll probably need to engage with their reasons.
dylan604 4y ago
So if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray, then where did the source for the torrents come from? If I saw a file with the name of something I knew wasn't available on a shiny round disc, I would be very skeptical and hesitant to download it from fear of it not being what it said it was. I damn sure don't want to go to the hassle of downloading a VHS transfer
- fabianhjr 4y ago
  For example Final Space got cancelled and while the last season was available on streaming services the physical copy hadn't been released and was also cancelled. (So it is a webrip, got pulled from streaming services)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- myself248 4y ago
  If a VHS transfer is the only way to re-experience something that blew me away as kid, you bet I'll be happier with a VHS transfer than with nothing at all. Not everything needs to be pixel-perfect.
  - causality0 4y ago
    What's really nice are the heroes who take those VHS transfers and SD DVD copies and release AI-upscaled versions. Particularly cartoons that never had blu-ray releases look glorious upscaled.

plusminusplus 4y ago

My understanding was there's a risk of disc degradation, is this a concern? How do you "back up" a CD/DVD?

derwiki 4y ago
Rip it to a hard drive or S3 bucket. Hard drive bonus is you can use Plex or Jellyfin to stream.
dsr_ 4y ago
For a CD, you need a program that uses libcdparanoia. Luckily, there are many. DVDs contain a proper filesystem, so you can just mount and copy that.
toast0 4y ago
DVDs are easy to backup. Lots of software out there, and there's nothing low level to worry about. Audio CDs also have lots of software out there, but you have to be a bit more picky if you're concerned about getting a bit for bit copy rather than just a sounds the same copy. If your discs have hidden tracks and all that kind of weird stuff, care is needed. Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >the usual rules of backups apply. which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.
haunter 4y ago
For Audio CDs you want to rip it lossless with something that support AccurateRip so you can be sure that others made the same copy byte-to-byte. Fortunately there are several options https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip#Software_that_uses_AccurateRip https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip#Soft... For DVDs you can use the infamous DVD Decrypter to make ISO files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter or MakeMKV which straight copies the MPEG2 files (.vob) into a nice MKV container https://www.makemkv.com/ https://www.makemkv.com/

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jasode 4y ago

>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc. But she inadvertently learned her true viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD. But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.

edu 4y ago
This is my same conclusion. With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. But that’s less than 10% of my media consumption.
- JuettnerDistrib 4y ago
  > With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired. With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I have books I've never opened since I read them that is just a marker like that. I have one copy I've never opened: I read it as an e-book but got the physical copy just to complete my set and have it on my shelf. I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.

rektide 4y ago

And now it feels like 2/3rds of media doesnt have a dvd or blu-ray release! So awful. This has been such an ever enmissserating situation. Started as a high & mighty &bgood convenience, but we're ending up worse than where we started; fragmented & ephemeral.

dylan604 4y ago
I remember the middle section of shelves at Blockbuster. I'm quite content not having access to a lot of that schlock any more. A lot of it didn't deserve to be put on DVD! I'm reading the "so awful" within the context of this thread more of an accusation for someone making the decision to not allow content vs I just wish it were on DVD for my convenience. It's not all conspiracy theories. Sometimes, it's just financial. Some older content was done on such a cheap budget and companies that we'll just call fly by night. These types of places might not be able to remaster their content for blu-ray either because they no longer exist, don't have the funding to re-transfer the film to a higher scan, or just physically no longer have the materials.

claviska 4y ago

Years ago, I stupidly got rid of my entire South Park DVD collection because they were on Netflix. Until they eventually weren’t. Chris was right.

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photochemsyn 4y ago

One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on. For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services. One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on. Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.

iambateman 4y ago
This is like keeping a shotgun in your house to protect against the government. If the government is ready to conduct systematic disinformation campaigns, your DVD’s probably won’t help.
- 15155 4y ago
  How did Vietnam and Afghanistan fare against "the government?"
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    Better than the Confederacy my cherry picking cliche replyguy.

snapplebobapple 4y ago

Her husband ian't right about dvds, the government is wrong about how they are regulating streaming services. The government needs to enforce reasonable content licencing across all the services like they did with music and radio stations decades ago so all content is on all services and the services start competing on vectors that actually matter to consumers like interface design and fast content delivery networks.

Terretta 4y ago
It's crazy that you can go to a grocery store as distribution aggregator and buy any type and brand of food in one place. You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week. At least, that's what studios and labels think.
- layer8 4y ago
  If food was infinitely replicable at basically no cost, you’d only be allowed to eat your cereals at the respective store.
  - undersuit 4y ago
    Like a restaurant almost.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    You're implying that piracy was killing media markets until physical copies were replaced with streaming, but hasn't that been debunked?
    - layer8 4y ago
      No, I’m saying that food companies would act like media companies do if food was trivially replicable, and therefore the fact that they currently don’t is not an argument for anything.
- harvey9 4y ago

deergomoo 4y ago

Availability and ownership aside, Blu-ray is far better quality than what you’ll get on most streaming services. If I really care about a movie or show, I always get it on Blu-ray. That said, if they could shift 1080 BDs down to DVD pricing and UHD BD down to what BD costs now I would buy a lot more. I’m starting to build up a collection of UHD Blu-rays but Jesus, £20-30 per movie really adds up. Definitely paying the enthusiast tax there.

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chungy 4y ago
1080p Blu-rays are very often single-digit dollars, at least here in the US. UHD does come with a higher price point, especially for new releases; it goes down, but it can take many months for it to do so.
expensive_news 4y ago
I started buying UHDs (mostly Criterions) recently. I mostly don’t like owning too many things (and even buy most of my 4Ks on iTunes when they go on sale for $5) but for some films the extra quality is worth it (plus you can’t get the Criterions films in 4K anywhere else, and I like having the access to the features). I always am wondering if I’ll regret it in 10 years when you may be able to stream super high bitrates, but as always, the future is uncertain anyways.
steponlego 4y ago
We learned after the Universal fire that many Blu-Rays are just high quality rips of Laserdiscs.

stackedinserter 4y ago

> But I also wish that streamers would create Blu-rays of their original content. I should be able to purchase the complete Bojack Horseman on Blu-ray to hold on to it forever—what if something happens to Netflix? Like you or not, MKV files on your own hard drive and piracy in general is the answer.

nvr219 4y ago

This goes back to the classic backup calculation. Never spend more to protect the data than the data is worth, right? That means the husband will be right or wrong on a user by user basis. If you have room to keep binders and binders of DVDs in your house, you need to calculate - is that space worth it for the data on there? Me, personally, once I've seen a movie or a TV show I rarely watch it again. There are a few that I do repeat watch, enough that I have a backup of those movies or shows even though I can get it on my streaming subscription today. But I'm not keeping binders or DVDs because that data is not important enough for me to back up.

tpmx 4y ago

People tend to shit on Spotify (while still using it), but they did manage something that we all want: Access to (almost everything), for a nominal monthly fee. We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.

56friends 4y ago
I think the era of Spotify dominance and music availability is coming to an end. Not sure what the next stage is going to look like - but I personally just canceled my subscription after over a decade of using Spotify exclusively. There is a lot of music that has never been available on Spotify, plus some music is disappearing due to artists and labels realizing they are not making any money from Spotify streaming. Plus no lossless, plus the relentless upsell of podcasts and now audio books. I would be fine subscribing to a specialized streaming music service, or two.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I'm super happy with my Spotify subscription. Sure, maybe 5% of the things I want are missing, but 95% is pretty good.
  - 56friends 4y ago
    I left for 2 reasons: 1. Their recommendations became unbearable. I love discovering music but Spotify is not the right service for that anymore. Daily playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Genre playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Track radio is just several of my favorite artists shuffled. “Best of techno” playlist? Floating Points and Four Tet - both artists I listen to a lot, but they are not techno, and are not “best techno” - a genre that spans decades. I don’t know if they overfitted their models and at this point I don’t care. 2. I am fed up with the podcast and audio book push. Not interested in either, don’t want to see it anywhere.
    - tpmx 4y ago

ubermonkey 4y ago

I'm a very happy Apple Music subscriber, but I'm also 52 and so own thousands of CDs and hundreds of LPs. I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle, and couldn't be done on the move. Moreover, while this scenario made sense to ME, my wife found it so off-putting that I discovered she was just not listening to music on her phone at all. AM solved this problem pretty well. PLUS, AM has a feature where it will give you access via Apple Music to weird, indie, or out of print stuff in your library that might not exist in Apple Music's library. A case in point is the 1990 Wendy & Lisa record Eroica. It's one of my favorites, and has always been part of my library -- it's even been re-ripped, because the first time I digitized it I only used 128Kbps MP3, and I wanted it at 256Kbps AAC. But it's also 100% not available via any streaming service because of rights issues of some kind. YOU can't get it from Apple Music, but I can because Apple Music sees it in the library on my music server. That's pretty cool.

56friends 4y ago
Interesting. Do you know if this extends to basically all digitized music regardless of the specifics of artist/label streaming preferences? Eg King Crimson’s catalog was never added to Spotify, if I link my ripped CDs to AM, would it make it available for me to stream on my phone?
- jonathantf2 4y ago
  I believe, yes. I have various live versions of albums that have been ripped from streams and radio, Apple tries to match them to their library to save space and then just lets you wifi sync them. Shows up right next to the other music in your library.
- mrkstu 4y ago
  The feature is called iTunes Match- you can actually get it standalone from Apple Music (at least you could, not sure if they have changed anything recently,) but AM includes it: Links: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2C%20the%20Apple%20Music%20subscription,pending%20renewal%20of%20iTunes%20Match https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2....

satysin 4y ago

I get the point the author is making but keeping all the DVDs also isn't the answer IMHO. At least it wasn't for me, it was just annoying to find a place to store it all, to move it when we moved country would have cost money for basically nothing of value. I had a purge of pretty much all my physical media a bit over a decade ago. I had a little over 1000 DVDs and Blu-rays. Probably 200 VHS too. God knows how many CDs and tapes. Rather than ditch them and say "I will just use streaming to watch/listen when I want to" which is very naive IMHO I ripped them all to hard disks and archived them to some LTO tapes I had. Granted not everyone has access to this kind of equipment but these days there are other options anyway. I don't use LTO anymore. Today I have full access to my entire movie, music, photo, and software collection near instantly from my NAS. Some stuff isn't online (as in not powered up) as it would just be a waste of power but I can switch it on if I ever feel the need to watch something I haven't watched in two decades but don't want to delete forever :) I have some redundancy via RAID as well as on site/offline duplication should something really go wrong. Plus I have an off site backup. It isn't actually as much space as you would think even for a pretty huge number of movies as old stuff is pretty small. It is only recently with 4K HDR movies that we are looking at ~90GB for some movies. Storage isn't very expensive these days. When I did a quick comparison a while back I worked out it was less for the HDDs than it was to ship them all from one country to another let alone the non-quantifiable cost of my time packing, moving, unpacking, and physical storage space. Ideally I would share the cost with others as it is kinda stupid for there to be multiple copies of the same movies and TV shows for no reason but sadly there isn't a solution for this and with the copyright laws and all that it is unlikely there ever will be something as reliable as doing it yourself.

layer8 4y ago
You can store them in CD wallets like this one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/388541-REG/Case_Logic_CDW320_CDW_320_320_Capacity_CD.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/388541-REG/Case_Logic... I have ~1500 DVDs stored that way in less than a meter of shelf space.
- tzfld 4y ago
  This may be space saving, but not a recommended way to store discs for long periods.

drewcoo 4y ago

Does is bother anyone else that a column named "future tense" has story titles, none of which seem to be in the future tense? Talk about bait and switch . . .

chad_strategic 4y ago

I have a completely different perspective. I rarely watch anything twice. I have also found there are many things to occupy my time other than watching things I have already seen.

j45 4y ago

Similar to music whether steamed or downloads to your device, the issues are similar for kindle books that you think you’ve purchased and owned at anytime but that can also disappear at any time.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

And this is why I've rebuilt my digital music, tv, and movie collections. For the media I care about, I want to own it, not license it, thank you very much. When streaming first came out I ended this practice. Then, the licensing disputes started and content started moving or disappearing. That's a trust they won't earn back.

cogman10 4y ago
I recently went through this. Every TV channel having a streaming service is just nuts. Particularly flagrant is the likes of Disney, who owns Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and will happily sell subscriptions to all 3 + addons throughout. Also abhorrent is the fact that these slimy companies are constantly moving content around the services, trying to get you subscribe to everything under the sun just to follow a favorite TV show. "Oh, it's on amazon, now netflix, now hulu, now disney+, now paramount+, now peacock, now britbox, now acorn"

whartung 4y ago

I strongly suggest that if DVDs are important to you, that you find some convenient mechanic to rip them. DVDs are durable, but not immortal. I have several that have failed. I appreciate the ask. Ripping DVDs is just a lot of work, time, storage, and fiddling. I don’t wish ripping 15 seasons of ER on anyone. But, the truth is, the things break down.

LesZedCB 4y ago

Agreed. We have small number of movies and TV shows which is growing. Pro tip: thrift store DVDs and "friends of the library" sales. I got every season of ST:TNG for about $40 ($1/disk)

jedberg 4y ago

This is silly. Just rip them and give them away. You'll spend less on mirrored hard drives than storage for the disks. And you can always BitTorrent movies you already own on DVD/BluRay guilt free. The only reason I still have my stack of disks is because I haven't had time to rip them and their special features yet. That and we keep the disks for kids movies because the van doesn't have streaming support or AppleTV yet. :)

agiacalone 4y ago
Ripped all my DVDs in 2010, donated them, and haven't looked back. Nowadays with Plex, I see no reason to ever use physical media again

ksec 4y ago

> Y: X was right. Why are we always in the cycle where X is the contrarian and minority but was pushed aside while Y enjoy all the frames and glories but is fundamentally wrong. I am putting X and Y here simply because this observation hold true not just in tech, in streaming but everywhere else. It is not like they were not warned. Back to the subject. We really something better than BluRay. Smaller but also much higher in storage capacity, and when stored properly that could last a hundred year. While being cheap to produce.

suprfnk 4y ago
Because 1. most ideas start as fringe hypotheses, and 2. survivorship bias. People will have 1001 ideas and hypotheses, ranging from "hey, smoking might be unhealthy" to "the government is controlling us with 5g" and "aliens walk among us". For the ones that make it through, like smoking, people can say "see, I told you so, we warned you". The other 999, you will, mostly, never hear from again.

mihaaly 4y ago

Same with music streaming. I went back to my offline collection just recently, keeping one service for the occasional discovery of something new or to me unknown. Too many favourites disappeared, or just reuploaded corrupting my playlist. Too much garbage flow at us (mostly means the video streaming where they decide for you what to list in the prime space of the interface, what you want is unimportant) to be comfortable. The quality of the players are decreasing due to bugs and eroding user friendliness. It is not fun anymore.

sergiotapia 4y ago

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was butchered on streaming platforms, so I agree with you OP! Taiwan Tammy? GONE! Martina Martinez? GONE! Santa asking: "Is he retarded?" when Charlie just stares at him frozen in rage? GONE! Lots of funny moments missed by new fans unfortunately. Related: Why have hard drive sizes stagnated? It feels like 8TB has been the golden standard going on 8 years now. I'm very close to doing the following: Putting 6 drives in a portable RAID device, and ripping my movies to 720p x265 for storage. I can store a near limitless amount of movies and TV shows this way, and honestly I don't notice 720p. At least not enough to trade a 1GB movie for a 45GB 4k Remux. And I own a latest brand new 65 inch LG OLED and Sony OLED. Added benefit is that its trivial to stream this anywhere at home or remotely. The files are so small that even scanning around the movie is instant. The only thing holding me back is 8TB hard drives. So I wait patiently and continue to pay for a plexserver some guy manages for me.

at_a_remove 4y ago
Here's the real question: why have backup disc sizes stagnated? We went from CD to slightly larger CDs, to DVDs, then double-layer DVDs, but BD-Rs haven't really taken off and we ought to be at something much, much larger by now.
andrewmackrodt 4y ago
I'm not sure of prices in your region, but I see 20TB drives priced competitively to 8TB drives in terms of price/terabyte. I've been thinking of building a new media array to replace my existing 8TB drives and similar storage capacity would cost me less now than 3 years ago, for arguably better drives too. I've been thinking of using the Seagate Exos X18 (18TB drives) but haven't made the purchase yet to form an opinion.

dkarter 4y ago

You can have both hard copies and streaming by ripping your DVDs and putting them on a NAS with Jellyfin. https://youtu.be/RZ8ijmy3qPo https://youtu.be/RZ8ijmy3qPo

amelius 4y ago

In the old days it was legal to record shows on your VCR. What happened to the laws around that?

theandrewbailey 4y ago
The laws didn't change, but what happened is almost everybody threw out their VCRs. Or never had them.
- amelius 4y ago
  Surely the laws are more general than VCRs? Or should I add a tape drive to my computer to make it legally a VCR?
kalleboo 4y ago
You can still record broadcast TV all you want, a popular solution is the Channels app using a HDHomeRun box - https://getchannels.com https://getchannels.com https://www.silicondust.com https://www.silicondust.com Decrypting the shows downloaded from streaming services, however, is likely a violation of the DMCA.

jsz0 4y ago

Alternatively consider reducing your addiction to television/movies and stop worrying about where your next fix is coming from. In the golden era of piracy I used to be a huge media pack rat spending hours a day obtaining more media to stash away. One day my ZFS array puked and I lost almost everything. I wasn't even upset. It was a blessing in disguise to be liberated from caring about hoarding media. Never seeing your favorite television/movies again is going to have almost zero impact on your life. It's not worth wasting much of your time and money on.

meindnoch 4y ago
>One day my ZFS array puked How does that happen? No redundancy?
- jsz0 4y ago
  Totally self inflicted. I was using a beta version of OpenZFS on a beta version of OSX. Begging for problems and I finally found one. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for an off-ramp of the burden of managing my horde of data. All my personal data was backed up so I just restored that and let the media horde go.
Sakos 4y ago
I have terabytes of movies and series. I've spent like 1 hour in the past 12 months adding some stuff to my collection. HDD space is extremely cheap and keeping a local copy is such low effort that I don't see why I should get rid of my collection. Some of it is also so rare as to be impossible to find unless you're a member of some private sharing sites (try finding a complete archive of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show). I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.
- jsz0 4y ago

legitster 4y ago

Paramount+ was kind of the last straw for me on streaming. A streaming platform entirely made from licenses they ripped back from existing platforms. And the new shows are trashy and lazily written. I don't need to be on the zeitgeist any more. For all the old shows I want to catch up on, DVD box sets cost less than the streaming services to watch them on.

taeric 4y ago

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, but media is a ridiculous money pit for folks. Don't get me wrong, I've done it. And I'll probably continue to buy some physical media for a while. But I have a hard time justifying the cost of giant personal libraries. They are almost certainly destined for a landfill after an estate sell.

adamgordonbell 4y ago

We just got a DVD player again, because my wife wanted to watch 'The Wonder Years' and because of all the music in it (which is great, btw) my understanding is it can't stream anywhere anymore. (Or that is the theory I heard why no one is streaming it.) Other shows got redone with other music so they could release it, but music is pretty heavily used in the wonder years.

chriscjcj 4y ago
> Other shows got redone with other music so they could release it WKRP in Cincinnati is another example. I don't know if they still exist, but there used to be torrents of VHS rips of WKRP so that it could be viewed with the original music.

prepend 4y ago

My husband was right about piracy.

baxtr 4y ago

I have started ordering Kindle books that I really like as hardcopies. You never know…

efficax 4y ago

although i love the cinema and watch a lot of tv, i'm kind of indifferent to the problem of streaming content disappearing. before streaming content i watched a lot less and read a lot more, and i think i was better for it. so if they took it all away and made it harder to find it might be to my benefit

causality0 4y ago

In my opinion the true advantage of discs is all the extra content. Sure, I can download or stream a copy of any movie I want but it's pretty damned hard to get it with the commentary track without buying a disc.

pkdpic 4y ago

I completely agree but one unfortunate reality I've noticed as a still-active dvd collector / aficionado is where the heck to buy them. $4+ on ebay for an 80% chance low-res bootleg stopped working for me 3ish years ago and I still haven't found a preferable method without resorting to full on pirating which feels like a little too time-consuming of a hobby for more mainstream titles at least.

tracker1 4y ago

And this is why I have a NAS with a dozen 12tb drives on two raid 6 arrays. Most of it is h265 encoded, which is smaller, and the blur of h265 doesn't annoy me like the blockiness of h264. I am only using about 22tb currently, upgraded about two years ago.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

If you want to save physical space, you can rip them all and store them on a drive that's smaller then the DVD player you use to play your DVDs. That's what I do.

mrweasel 4y ago
The DVDs actually doesn't take up a ton of space. What we did was buying the cheapest version of a movie and just throw away the cover. You can get DVD/BluRay binders that will hold 200 - 400 discs in the space of a few large books. I find ripping movies a little tiresome. Getting the quality, sound and subtitles right can be challenging.

a13o 4y ago

I did a physical media purge a few years back, and kept just a drawer-ful of my absolute favorites. This past Christmas I thought I'd watch one of them - but then I realized I don't even own a DVD player. I don't think I ever did. Some game console would play it, or my PC. But now the PC has no 5.25" bays, and the game consoles are all-digital. My conclusion is not that the author's husband is right. But rather that I should get rid of these remaining DVDs. I've never thought much about digital nomadism, but I suppose I practice it. There's always something new to watch.

marmetio 4y ago

I put all my old disks in sleeves or stacked on spindles, organized alphabetically. They take up almost no space and it's practical enough for infrequent use.

galleywest200 4y ago

I have been buying DVDs at the thrift store and ripping them to my personal Plex server. I do not feel bad, I paid for the media and I am the only person with access to this server -- its pretty much the same as me watching that DVD alone.

distantsounds 4y ago

no, you were both wrong. rip the discs to an external drive and play it over your local network. or even better, over the internet with plex/emby/jellyfin. how are these articles getting up voted? what boomers are reading HN on a Saturday and going 'yeah I miss my DVD collection'?

nixpulvis 4y ago

Music too! Oh god my music...

rcme 4y ago

Lots of comments here about whether or not the author’s husband is right or wrong. What about the author herself? > My beloved Beforeigners—a deeply weird and delightful show in which suddenly people from the Stone Age, Viking era, and 19th century begin appearing around the world—is gone. You can still watch this on Apple TV. You just need to pay a few dollars to rent it. How much is shelf space worth?

schmichael 4y ago

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen <insert meaningful show or movie here> before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed-what-from-whom. There's even a DVD little lending library in my neighborhood. Not to mention the public library system has tons of physical media to choose from. I love streaming and rarely turn to physical media these days, but as my kids get older and want to watch the same things over-and-over-and-over... building that DVD collection out again is looking really appealing.

Scoundreller 4y ago
I need some automated streaming-service ripper that will burn DVDs whenever I pop in a blank disk. And maybe generate nice sticker label PDFs from some intermediate scene with the title.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 4y ago
  Consider instead: a Plex library backed by a “disk drive” that’s actually a DVD/Blu-Ray jukebox. You can fish the disks out if you really want, but most of the time they’re just “online” as part of your library. Buy a new one? Feed it to the jukebox. Ideally, rip one “into the library” and the jukebox will consume a blank disk to burn it, then file it. (AFAIK, this last bit is how Amazon Glacier works—just with some online disk drives in between to buffer content up into Blu-Ray-sized chunks.)
  - bradknowles 4y ago
    I'd be real surprised if it was anything beyond tape drives, plus a local cache. Check out the storage capacity on the latest LTO tapes, and the tape storage capacities of the large room-size tape robots.

hbarka 4y ago

Our legal department has stores of blank DVDs. It turns out that some legal artifacts must be stored in a permanent medium.

cogman10 4y ago
Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. If your storage requirements are more than a couple of years you might have already experienced some pretty major data losses.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. They do degrade, but a "couple of years" is pessimistic. My earliest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they're still good.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    CD-Rs will last longer than DVDs because the pits being written are larger. Further, audio can experience more degradation without perceptible impact. I've had DVD-Rs fail in 2 years. The type of DVD matters, of course. Here's a handy guide: https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...

mumblemumble 4y ago

I have a hard time agreeing. We live in a world of media superabundance, and life only goes on for so long. I can't possibly consume even a tiny fraction of what's out there in my time on this world. I find that to be an incredible relief: I will always be able to find something interesting to read, watch, or listen to, regardless of whether I choose to fill my living space with shelves full of media. It's just not something I need to worry about. If anything, I find I have the opposite problem: too many options makes it hard to decide. A year or two ago I got rid of almost all my books, including many dearly loved favorites. My personal library would now fit in a laundry basket. (Still too many, but I have a sizable backlog of books I haven't read yet and that would be difficult or expensive to replace.) And the most notable consequence is that I now spend more time actually reading, and less time trying to decide what to read.

midasuni 4y ago

We’re watching Harry Potter with the kids, probably haven’t watched the blu rays since they were born (now 10) Popped in deathly hallows part 2 this very evening a few minutes before everyone was ready. Couple of kites later I turn on the tv and it’s playing some advert for some rom com or some sort It reminded me why I stopped buying dvds. They aren’t happy with selling me a product for a cost, they have to double dip by advertising stuff. Eventually I’m sure streaming will go that way, and once again The High Seas will be the only way to get the product. If there one thing the entertainment industry can be counted on it’s killing the goose.

asfarley 4y ago

In the genre of “Stallman was right”

andrewstuart 4y ago

Every time I want to watch a specific movie I have to search all the streaming services I have access to and often its not there. So these days I just buy the DVD from ebay from a few bucks, it arrives in a couple of days. Feels no different to the 1980's when I went to the video shop and brought home a VHS. I've gone back to physical media. Streaming has shot itself in the foot. I've cancelled most of my streaming services cause in Australia the free to air streaming services are really great anyway. I do pay for Britbox for the classic Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and other dorky delights.

christkv 4y ago

I've started browsing second hand blue rays and picking up some every week. Lots of special editions and other extra material you don't get on streaming and tons of movies I can not even find on either Netflix, HBO or Prime.

ericyd 4y ago

I don't relate to the author's sentiments at all. If something isn't available for streaming, then that's my cue to watch something different

npteljes 4y ago

A hard drive with movie rips goes much further than a bunch of disks. Copies don't have the adverts, unskippable anti-piracy bullshit, or region locking. And letting go, and adapting to new media goes even further. On the other hand, when I look something up from my past, I'm always thankful for the random archivist who still has a copy.

bobby_bbb 4y ago

This is ycom, so the replies are of course biased towards the "I always have good internet" paradigm. I live about 5 months per year in my RV in the middle of a desert. Internet is a phone-tethered experience. What is this "streaming" thing you talk about? I'd be buffering all night. And so, yes, there are good reasons for many of us to retain, in some form, all the DVD's we can get.

Justsignedup 4y ago

Piracy. This is why piracy is great. Its a tiny digital collection of all the things I care about. Story time: I was watching Star Trek Voyager. That show is obviously a lot of episodes. So sometime around season 5 it was removed from Netflix. Got pissed, downloaded it, kept watching. Was recently watching benjamin buttons first time on amazon. Didn't get to finish it that day. Turns out the next day it goes for cash only. Piracy is honestly the simplest and most consistent way to do this. And if a friend wants it? Bring a USB and it is yours. Sure teeeeechnically we can both watch it, but how often do I re-watch a movie that my friend is currently also watching at home. Point is that I really hate the current distribution models. Down side of DVDs is that they degrade. And to be completely truthful, if everything older than say... 15 years was available in the public domain, we can stop all this wasteful redundant storage everywhere. But due to copyright laws, things so so so old, that they shouldn't be making money anymore continue to be behind "pay walls" of sorts and only because they are protecting a distribution model that hasn't been necessary in over a decade.

ei8ths 4y ago

Besides being pulled from streaming, what if they altered the movie or show, to add on to it or censorship past views to fit modern views. I don't like original content being altered, especially the original star wars. :)

6451937099 4y ago

[dead]

randomcarbloke 4y ago

He was wrong, digitise and discard

deafpolygon 4y ago

Soon there won't be any DVDs or BluRays to buy and collect.

dwild 4y ago

I learned that quite early, mostly because I'm from Quebec, there's so many of our translation that get lost (I guess it's a question of rights, the translation and original content have 2 different owners). The one that made me realize that first is Pokémon, there's just no way to get the original Quebec version (and funnily enough, it's the same French translation, just with the English Pokémon names). I had to buy the original VHS to be able to get it, and still just the first season seems to have been made in VHS. Piracy doesn't help much either as theses translations were never digital in the first place. There's many show from my youth that I can't find with Quebec translation, even some that I can't find in their original language. If I had the cash and time it's something that I would wish to try, getting the distributions rights of a few of theses old shows. There's no way it would be that expensive (probably take quite a bit of time though) and nostalgia would works quite well I believe to attract enough viewership to support it.

mistyvales 4y ago

A lot of movies I want to see aren't on any streaming platform, plus the quality is pretty damn poor on a larger screen. Compression artifacts and color banding are just too damn annoying in a lot of shows or movies, especially ones with a lot of dark scenes. I also still buy CD's for many reasons, but the main one is that more often than not, most streaming services offer only modern remasters that are loud as hell and have no dynamic range whatsoever. Yes, there are some remasters that are loads better than 80s CD's, but often not, especially if they're from the 00s during the iPod era. https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/