We started buying BR and CDs for our daughter because we found the physical selection more rewarding to her and interactive. With the exception of the PBS app, no way that could all be a collection.
Blu Ray is where it’s at. Give me some actual quality bitrate baby.
And decent resolution: DVD is forever stuck at SD (480p MPEG). While Blu-ray can be UHD (4K HEVC).
It’s not even 480p, it’s 480i with a resolution of 720x480 regardless of whether the content is 4:3 or 16:9, the pixels get stretched one way or the other. That’s for NTSC discs, PAL discs have a higher 576i (720x576) resolution but the movie is sped up 4% cause it forces 25fps when it should be 24.
This is a good point. Even worse! Weird anamorphic? pixel aspect ratios (or maybe pan-and-scan crops? or hopefully that’s just VHS). With a bonus of interlacing! “The horror!” I haven’t ripped a DVD in ages due to video quality issues.
Oh all those full screen DVDs are in fact pan and scan just like VHS.
We are forever fucked over lots of TV shows/movies that are caged within the stream services realm :/
Its Blu-ray not DVD right? DVD was an impossibly low resolution, that really isn’t fun to watch today.
Blu ray works perfectly on today’s hardware
DVD is perfectly fine resolution, not everyone even has a 4K screen or TV. Most people still have 720x1080 or 1080x1920p screens or TVs. Our tv personally is 720x1080 and it looks just fine.
That’s a 15 year old TV at least and of course you don’t see a difference on that. My 4k is at least 6 years old. If I bought one now I would not be able to buy lower res.
DVD is pal or ntsc and if you played that on a monitor the picture is as small as phone. It’s like the lowest SVGA res
I found out the hard way that 4k Blu-ray need a special player. That it won’t work on Ps2/PS3/PS4 I already have. Only "regular blue-ray play on those.
Heck CRTs were standard at 480p and nobody had any problems
People had 56k modems and no one had any problems, my Gameboy was monochrome and you saw nothing in the sun, no problems there either…
Blu-rays are great, DVDs not so much unless it’s an old title that was never released in 1080p
DVDs are fine, but the subtitles look god-awful - and they’re bitmaps so there is no easy way to make them not suck
even then, many bluerays are just cheap upscales with no other changes. I made that mistake once with a boxset only to find that it was a very obvious DVD. this after I was roasted on reddit for complaining about that being a possibility and everyone angrily promised me that it was not that. it was that. I’m still bitter
The sneakernet and hard drives are the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
I like to think that if streaming didn’t take over, the industry would have shifted to selling USB sticks with the media/game. Even if they did something goofy to “lock” it, at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Imagine a nicely organized self of DvDs turned into nighmare pile of flash drives of different shapes and sizes as each movie tries to make theirs stand out to make up the lack of a cover.
Nintendo sells essentially a SD card variant in a case for the swtich. So you’re not far off :)
The Dreamcast VMUs, which doubled as tomigotchis or whatever
at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Actualy, thumb drive flash is the lowest quality, cheapest one (the yield thing, the outer parts of the waver). Do not have any expectancy of thumbdrives keeping your data longer than a few hours.
Edit: …
Is this supposed to be a joke about storing data on your thumb? Also thumbs are not cheap, probably…I hope.
Not a joke. And why the downvote? Quality distribution is generally SSD > SD-cards > thumbdrives. Thumbdrives are no backup medium.
Wasn’t me, but I’m guessing because you said they only last a few hours? I took that ridiculous exaggeration and assumed you meant writing notes on your thumb.
I said “don’t expect your data to last longer than a few hours”. Because that’s how yields work, defective areas get firmware-disabled in the factory. Lower quality has only more of them, with less strict quality requirements to count as ok.
To admit, i’ve had few and late hours sleep the last few days, the autism gets stronger. I’ll revisit the original comment.
If you don’t hold it, you don’t own it. Unless you take the DVD from them, you can’t remove their access to the movie stored on that disc.
My wife is “xennial” and her music tastes skew younger. Lots of younger artists are selling cassettes and CDs at their merch tables. We have more tapes and discs in our house than I ever had in the 90s.
How do you even play them? I could only see myself taking these media, ripping them and putting them back on the shelf.
Which is a nostalgic hobby
With a nice stereo system? There is also specialized hardware that can play and digitize any kind of retro media (cassettes, vinyl, disks)
Not to ruin people getting off of streaming, but the biggest bang for buck in storage will be regular old hard drives unless you need to backup like >500Tb of storage (then tape drives).
DVDs are cool but they only have a 4/8Gb capacity.
BluRay pushes it to 70/100/120gb which is great for one 4K movie lol.
Yeah, my vinyl collection is a decoration. The 20TB of storage connected to my PC is where the magic happens.
I’ve been collecting physical media for over 30 years. Started with VHS, CD’s and DVD’s back in the day. Now I’m primarily a blu ray/4k collector as the image and sound quality is closest to the filmmaker’s intentions.
It’s been hard to see physical media slow down production over the past 5 years. The biggest loss is the wealth of information from all the special features that are now considered over and above what studios are willing to pay for. It’s unfortunate that the newer generation can’t expect features on par with what Peter Jackson shared on his Lord of the Rings Extended discs. (I know there are still boutique labels putting out great discs loaded with features, but they are fewer by the year and costly.)
There are some moments in time where the world really surprises though, and it’s been a pleasant turn of events to see Gen Z embrace VHS!? The resurgence of vinyl was understandable as the sound exhibits a warmth and depth. VHS is a bit of a head-scratcher, but I can understand its nostalgic appeal. Just happy that people are enjoying physical media in any form.
The resurgence of vinyl was understandable as the sound exhibits a warmth and depth
Only because it is adds pleasing artifacts to the original and people connect a turn table up to something to listen to it with. When used to hearing crappy encoded digital, with a bad DAC through lossy bluetooth to a tiny speaker, vinyl sounds better.
Funny thing is that you can record vinyl digitally and that recording will sound exactly the same on good equipment which tells you it isn’t the vinyl itself that sounds good.
In any case vinyl is extremely disappointing to see come back. It is a very energy intensive process, using PVC often mixed with lead. It is very heavy and bulky to move around, so transportation costs are high.
I understand the desire to have a physical thing, but only its flaws make it be a reproduction of the source material AND is environmentally not good.
This has been the biggest and dumbest take I’ve seen come from the GenZ/GenA crowd. Polaroids were a big hit a few years ago and I can’t help but wince at this stuff. Yeah it’s cute or whatever to hold it in your hand, but in 1, 5, 10, 30 years…when that photo or DVD is bent/scratched/lost, you’ll be kicking yourself in the ass for even bothering with it.
Just pirate your content, take photos with your $1000 phones and print the photos out, and learn to backup your own shit. Buy a 2 bay NAS and backup your shit to it. And then backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.
My dad has been doing this since the early 2000s. We have our family photos AND videos from 1990-2026 all backed up on a NAS, which syncs to backblaze. ~600GBs of data. And the cloud backup on backblaze is $7.25 a month for that data.
Literally anyone can go buy a a $200 2-bay NAS, then grab two 1TB hard drives for $40 each. $280 for a NAS that will last you YEARS. And then figure out whatever service you want to backup to for a cloud backup.
backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.
Are you encrypting your data before it goes to Backblaze? And if so, are you also testing those encrypted backups?
Yes, and yes. I’m running TrueNAS and I test a restore once a quarter or so, worst case once every 6 months.
I haven’t had to do a full restore…so that’ll be the true test, but I do have a sister TrueNAS at an off-site location for off-site backups. I went simple with this off-site one and just use Tailscale and Syncthing.
Out of curiosity how do you test your restore? Do you just choose a file and try to recover it from backup? I have a synology NAS that I should backup but haven’t really looked into the complexities of backing it up.
I cut/paste a single file or folder, depending on my mood, out of a directory that is backed up and then do a PULL/sync through the TrueNAS GUI from Backblaze
Not sure on Synology…I’m sure there is a method though
easy with that logic, killer.
probably the same reason I refused to leg it go.
I actually own it, control it, and can use it at my wimsy.
vs streaming, which I could buy it and still have it taken away from me cause you never own anything when its streaming/digital download.
Its not just DVDs. I switched to all local mp3s for music and i get a lot of them by scoring cds from second hand stores.
Never started streaming music, makes no sense music is so collectible on HDD. I have 25 year old files, 128kb sucks lol but survived very easily.
Local library is another great source to get those CDs to rip mp3s
I’d much rather have to find space for my server than for 1000s of Blu-rays/DVDs/CDs.
its still declining, just slower
