The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’
The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’
As more movies vanish from streaming services, cinephiles are rallying to physical media. Can they save a seemingly dying format?
I am thoroughly enjoying all these comments. But 4k Blu rays are visually, audibly, and aurally superior to streaming. That said, I have seen and heard some pretty darn good rips of 4k stuff, so I'm not even sure anymore. I may or may not own numerous hard drives containing a large PLEX library as well as a sizeable collection of my favorite repeat watchers on 4k Blu ray.
Storage is so cheap these days, and especially shows are unreliable on where or even if they stay streaming.
And if you wait till they're off streaming to archive, it's hard to find good copies.
It's just a prudent choice to get your own copy just in case. Even a short term lose of internet.
Streaming lowers quality/bit rate to save bandwidth
Rips play the files from the blu-ray so you shouldn’t suffer any quality differences
eyeroll keep your stupid DVDs I'm just gonna pirate and self-host.
This article starts with such a contrived scenario that I can't take it seriously enough to read the rest. If I had a generator and a DVD player with a bunch of DVDs, sure, I might watch the DVDs. I'd be far more likely to just go get a hotel room somewhere that has power and internet access. If the world has collapsed so far that you need a genny for entertainment, just go ahead and take the next step and start doing an oral history of your people, and don't forget to boil your water.
You won't be laughing when somehow all the hard drives die but DVD players still work.
I suppose a magnetic storm and in this scenario the earth's magnetosphere has failed but you're in a shielded bunker so you don't turn to soup from all the hard radiation but didn't bring hard drives?
Look whatever man spinny plastic goes brrrrrrrr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
😉 the free market has decided
My favorite quote:
"“My husband’s a very sick man,” she joked, who meticulously researches films on a website called DVDBeaver. “I thought he was looking at porn.”"
They should partner with uiPlatypus or DesignAxolotl
If laser disc taught us anything, even mastered optical media has a shelf life. The glue holding the layers together going to fail and those discs are going to be worthless... My discs are going to be worthless
This will help you digitize all of em easily. All you need is a pc with a disc drive and enough IT-confidence to manage setting up the server. (I do recommend docker)
https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine
When its all setup you simply put in a dvd, you wait, it automatically ejects and you swap it for the next one.
output the files to a jellyfin server and watch them from basically any device with zero hassle.
I've got 30+ year old CDs and DVDs that read fine.
No, DVDs are shit. Blu-ray are so much better.
Whoosh 😂😂😂
Most all of these were released before blu ray was even a thing, kid. Licensing prevents them from making a blu ray I'm assuming.
Loads of old movies are remade in Blu-ray and many are even made for 4K Blu-rays.
If I really really wanted to watch an old movie that's not available online at all, I would just go to the national film archive and borrow it or watch it there. But most films that are on DVD are pretty new.
There was an article the other day where like so many TB fit on a disc with a new laser, and really made me think, how much TB on a disc would it take to make our internet look like pigeon mail again?
I mean we need the media quality to utilise it all, but it doesn't yet cos of the cost of storage and portability. But if 5TB fit on a disc, man would the landscape change.
Once unlimited fiber internet comes to somebody’s neighborhood, it seems like we’d need a new use case to make sneakernet / pigeonverse worth it for consumer use. People download 100+GB games every day without a second thought.
Maybe there are some cases where it would be nice to carry a ton of data physically with you, but you can already fit a lot of data in a small portable hard drive.
Certain scientific applications require really large amounts of raw data, collected from sensors and the like. Radio telescopes, for example, require each sensor to send petabytes of data to a central place to be analyzed. For example, the Event Horizon telescope has sensors all over the world, and hard drives of the recorded data get sent to be analyzed in the United States and Germany.
For residential applications, though, yeah. There currently isn't much of a use case for sneakernet where you can get terabytes of data with latency above a few days.
I am impressed by the breadth and depth of that article.
Eh, I'll be satisfied with a collection of microSD cards, an external hard drive and a OrangePi4. I'll have movies, books and games in one neat package.
It doesn't take much to kill streaming, all you need is road work cutting your internet connection.
Ours was down for 7 hours a week or so ago.
No worries, plenty of movies and games.
I just picked up the 4K Warriors. Looks good!
I check in on Blu Ray.com to see what new stuff is coming or what I might have missed.
For example... Disney is doing physical editions of their Disney+ content. More coming on April 30th.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/releasedates.php
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Andor-The-Complete-First-Season-4K-Blu-ray/356918/
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Obi-Wan-Kenobi-The-Complete-Series-4K-Blu-ray/356916/
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Moon-Knight-The-Complete-First-Season-4K-Blu-ray/356931/
Which will go well with the stuff they already released:
Mandalorian, The : Season 1 [4K UHD] https://a.co/d/7CTif6b
Mandalorian, The : Season 2 [4K UHD] https://a.co/d/6sUaoTA
Loki : Season 1 [4K UHD]
https://a.co/d/c1Ukcn5WandaVision : Season 1 [4K UHD] https://a.co/d/5IgVmTt
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again.
Physical media fans of all types tend to see themselves as survivalists prepping for apocalypse – “When the streaming sites took off,” someone told me, “people thought I was crazy for still collecting, but now I feel like my time has finally come” – or like the Irish monks and Arab scholars who, during the Dark Ages, are said to have protected the knowledge of antiquity while Europe burned books as firewood.
Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT.
Streaming isn’t wholly bad – it’s convenient, still cheaper than cable, and can give people outside metropolitan areas easier access to new series and films, including international pictures, like 2019’s Parasite, that might have been slower to circulate in the Blockbuster days.
“It became clear to me, roughly at the time of Netflix’s transition from sending hard-copy discs to your home to the streaming era, that there was value in retaining your own physical media,” the writer and podcaster Sean Fennessey, of The Ringer, told me.
The modest online store that he and his wife ran from their home near Philadelphia, DiabolikDVD (“Demented discs from the world over”), began doing such brisk business that he moved the operation to a warehouse and hired four employees.
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