No, vinyl is still the new vinyl. Tons and tons of new vinyl on Bandcamp. And tapes!
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.
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
It’s a bit trickier last time I did it to be confident I can rip a Blu-Ray.
I actually don’t want to juggle discs to watch stuff, I like the general concept of streaming, but I don’t like paying eternally for it, for shows to jump between providers and for my access to cut out part way through and/or even if I have the new service, my progress being forgotten so I have to try to look for where I left off.
So I want to rip content. DVDs are always dead simple. As I rip blu-rays, MakeMKV is kind of a hassle, it wants to expire itself all the time, and like right this second the place to update from seems down. Maybe someone will comment with some easy way to rip blu ray that internet search doesn’t make obvious.
If folks sway me, might go buy a 4k friendly Blu Ray drive and hop to it.
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 did have problems, there just wasn’t an (affordable) alternative. If you would go back to the 70/80’s and offered anyone the choice between 480p and 1080p, all else being equal. Would anyone pick 480? I know I wouldn’t
It’s not because we learned to live with it or didn’t know better, that it was the best option.
I lived through the 70s and 80s. Didn’t know what 480p even was til the 90s, so I have direct experience with CRT usage. Bonus: we didn’t even have a color TV til the mid 80s at my house
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…
What? DVD is perfectly fine. I dont even have a 4K TV
It’s a little fuzzy, but that’s OK on a lot of older movies (especially lower budget ones) because they were always a little fuzzy to start with.
You can have all the pixels you want, but you’re not going to get a lot of extra detail out of Critters or Masters of the Universe.
Many old movies that are restored perfectly. Yes it’s a lot of film grain but you can also see a lot in the background etc. Also id rather have the film grain.
The movies where shot for cinema on 16mm or so and that is pretty high res.
I miss walking the aisles and running across some film I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in ages. Having heavily curated list of films recommended for me makes me uninterested in even looking. Of course I’d enjoy this film, I’ve watched 6 times over the last 10 years, thank you algorithm.
If I had to collect, it would be vinyl. If all DVD’s had no player, we’d be screwed. With vinyl however, you might be able to find someone clever enough to whip up some sort of mechanical/electrical solution to extract the sounds.
I don’t care for the medium, I just want to watch my shows. In Canada we get basically the same shows as the US, but many are not available for streaming. So I want to watch Danny Phantom for example, I can’t. It’s not on any channel not streaming services.
And the same goes for dozens of other shows ranging from obscure like Martin Mystery to the ultra popular like The Fairly Odd Parents.
Heck even Disney doesn’t have everything.
DVD does and it cost less than most of these services.
The sneakernet and hard drives are the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
Reminds me of this PS4 ad:
The future is self-hosted digital media. I’ve got no qualms with pirating media. But I am an advocate for buying digital media from artists directly.
AI music has entered the chat
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
I mean I guess if they distributed movies on thumb drives it would be more convenient. But optical discs are used for a very good reason: they are extremely dense for the price.
You can pull it on HDD and that should be good enough preservation
magnetic media good?
Yeah :)
Clay media best.
Found the Sumerian.
4D Glass Hypercube
Cave painting better
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.
We have this audiobook player for children in my country. That works by buying those little figures and if you place them on the player, the audiobook plays. I think that a system like that for “adult music” would be awesome. Buy some little figures and art pieces by your favorite band, display them on a shelf and use them to play music? Yeah, that would be awesome

But you know the media is not in the figurine, right? Tonies only have a small RFID chip in them that give the Tonybox an ID to download from their server. Once the company dies these things will turn into bricks.
My small nephews also have these and I think they’re great. Just not very resilient, data conservation wise
Yeah, I know.
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 expect your data to keep longer than a few hours.
Edit:
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 add, it’s a gamble; most are ok, some get data corruption on write, some after weeks. The “cheap” part is, because they aren’t expected to last more than a few TBW.
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.
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
Realistically the connector would have been proprietary, but I can see a world where we got cartridges that came in little cases like the games for nintendo ds or switch.
A system of organization would be invented. Idk maybe a wooden stepped board with USB sized holes that you store/display your collection in, just to use the first idea I pull directly from ass. Actually make it silicone for the grippy, already improving it, then sell the wood as a fancier looking one, and inlay a few with idk brass or something for a “pro” version, boom, marketing.
I’m sure there would be a million options, yours sounds quite fancy, and it will work great until Disney decides to sell giant mouse shaped drives ruining the whole thing.
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.
DVDs also have a rather limited shelf life
Yeah, my vinyl collection is a decoration. The 20TB of storage connected to my PC is where the magic happens.
Yeah, even with the extra cost, HDDs are still cheaper than DVDs simply due to being rewritable.
Most people don’t burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were more used.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
Agree and this is very informative about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9Xq7hb6Q0
He also has another video somewhere to stress test some of the disk types I think
I have bad news for you - Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung have all stopped production on BR-R discs.
Verbatim still manufactures their DataLifePlus series of BD-Rs, and they are excellent. The market otherwise is pretty bleak… Ritek offers nothing that compares to the DLP discs.
Also, side note, Pioneer (once a leading manufacturer of BD burners), no longer makes them. LG is the lone surviving manufacturer I believe.
Yeah, Verbatim still remains… For now.
Oh that’s right - I forgot that the drives were slowly going disco too. Bleak indeed.
they might bring it back with HDD drives going AIxtinct.
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
I think they’re bitmaps on Blu-rays as well. Just higher resolution.
Streaming tends to use text formats.
Or classic 2d animation.
1080p simpsons vs 720p Simpsons look really close
*480
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
Blu ray has copy protection…
So does DVD and can be bypassed just as easily these days
If you have a blu ray player it’s not really that much of a problem. And if you need a back up there’s still ways
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.
















