cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4954415
The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?’
I feel what I’ve always felt – that DVDs and Blu-rays were the summit of the film-lovers’ experience, and that progress should have stopped forever after that. Perhaps downloads or streamable films can have the picture quality of a Blu-ray (someone will doubtless tell me they do), but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own.
…
So my Blu-ray collecting goes on, but it’s strictly finite. I don’t want any film I don’t actually love (this rules out the collected Tarkovsky or Bergman, things I’d like to think of myself as liking rather than actually wanting to watch). My ambitions in fact are modest: the middle period works of Woody Allen (they’re about £25 a piece and should be), the odd Hollywood classic (the more technicolour the better) and some of those gritty 1960s northern films (the kind Morrissey purloined for his album covers) starring Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham. Then, barring the odd hiccup, I’m done.
I’m sick of paywalls.
Blu-ray has a paywall per film
I think a paywall is explicitly a digital gate artificially installed in front of content you’re being teased with. I know people have started using the term more loosely but that’s pretty confusing imo
Isn’t the archive link at the end of the post?
Ah yes, because 4K Blu Rays are banned for PC users liked me, so I quite literally have to pirate it either way. Cracking the disc to copy it onto the hard drive or download out it outright. Fuck the industry.
there is a way to have benefits of owning media like with bluray as well as the convenience of streaming, piracy.
but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own.
when you go to a movie theater you don’t get anything tangible either (other than tickets ig).
Besides, the “work of art” you are holding in your hand is not the movie itself, is it? Yes, technically you can “touch the movie” and smear your grimy fingers all over the back of the disc, but that’s not what collectors are referring to methinks. They are referring to a cheapo printout of a coverar inside an equally as cheapo disc case. It’s not “holding art in your hands” if your subscription-locked HP printer can ooze the exact same thing on a piece of paper…
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I’ll be honest, as someone who never understood the concept of “owning” a movie - that is, why would I need that, at best I’ll have one more time I play it to watch it with someone in particular but then it’s just collecting dust and movies aren’t a collectible of value to me - streaming is exactly right for me:
It offers me a maybe-ephemeral but also near endless ocean of lightweight content to consume. That’s what I need movies or TV shows for, they’re not a central hobby for me, they’re not a big enrichment of my mental state (I got books for that, tbh), so yeah, I fit the target audience. Just put on some shit, and luckily “shit” never runs on any streaming platform.
I’m going to assume youre on the younger side of things based on your view. If I’m wrong here, my apologies.
But having a physical copy of media that you control is very useful. You can view it whenever you want or need. Power is out? Generator, TV, media player. Soaks up a lot less juice than a PC. Internet goes out? Still got entertainment to pass the time.
From an economic system point of view, it used to be you’d pay for something and then it was yours. That system was quietly abused and without “consent”, it’s now you pay for something you rent. So from that perspective, fuck the system. Owning is better. I bought it. I didn’t rent it. And I certainly didn’t rent it pending 6 other subsystems being able to function and some arbitrary usage agreement between corporations, who more often than not, are working together against me to just make money.
I am sadly quite old already, but no worries.
But to me, modern home consumption media is like going to the cinema. I don’t own a movie if I paid for a ticket to the movies. I just watched it once. Streaming is a monthly less-than-one-ticket and of course the quality of the presentation is lesser, but in return I also get some upsides: A selection multiple orders of magnitude than at the cinema, ability to select the time I watch, and freely pause and resume.
Neither is a way of oncsuming movies in a way where ownership is relevant to my consumption, and long before home media was a big thing going to the movies worked perfectly fine. Plus let’s not delude ourselves here (and now apologies if I assume you’re older than you are 😛): In the times of VHS, we owned very few actual movies on tape. We copied them all, and of course re-used the tapes when we no longer needed the movie around, tapes were costly. Our library was - mostly - ephemeral then as it is now.
That being said, being able to watch without internet is a concern of course. And I suspect if my go-to form of entertainment for such times were movies or shows, I would be more into physical media, yeah. It isn’t, so that’s little problem to me (like I said above I read instead) but I can see that as a very good reason to own media in an offline format.
Same. I watch a movie for the experience of the movie. I won’t rewatch it over and over and over. Given that one Bluray case is as big as a harddrive these days, it will just block space in my house after that. If I’ve seen the movie, the experience is in my head and that’s what counts at the end of the day.
A 4K movie, uncompressed is usually around 70gb. A 12 TB iron wolf NAS drive will cost you about $200. That will hold over 150 movies.
I was referring to the physical drive. An external hard drive takes up almost the same amount of space a BluRay cover does.
Yeah. Stream and watch or download, watch, delete. Repeat whenever needed, usually not needed.
I think it’s time to hit the thrift store and set up a media server at home.
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I’ve pivoted back to 4K BluRays for a while now. The image quality is perceptively better than in most streaming services, it’s given me a great fallback to tell Netflix to GTFO with their ongoing price bumps for their 4K tier and I am no longer worried that I’ll lose access to them.
Plus there are actually good ways to serve your own multiplexed video out of those now if you care about it that much.
But how do you know if you love a film before buying it’d dvd if you watch only on dvd ? And if you watched it already somewhere else, what’s the point of buying the dvd ?
I can maybe fill one small shelf with DVD of movies that I enjoying re watching (maybe 20, top 30). Otherwise for nearly all the movie I watch them once and that’s done. So streaming or piracy are the best for my use case.
The same way we did before streaming…? Trusted reviews. Gut instinct. That sorta thing. You take a chance and go with it. I still do it with music hard copies. Sometimes I’ve never even heard of the artist I’m buying, I just like the artwork, or someone in the store will say something about it. I pirate a lot myself, been on some forums for near on 2 decades now, a lot of the people I know on them still buy media. I mean, it’s kinda like going out to eat, you don’t always get a winner every time, but the hits usually outweigh the misses.
You could rent DVD’s at Blockbuster etc. We did it all the time in the 90’s. Bunch of guys all hit the Blockbuster on a Friday night and grab 2-3 movies and then sit back and drink our faces off. Then we’d forget to return them and would get charged an amount equal to the cost of the DVD itself in late fees. Ah, good times.
My dad was an OG pirate. He would burn the dvds we got at blockbuster if he liked the movie
Except blockbuster fully no longer exists anymore.
I still rent from Redbox and the library. Sure the library is only DVD quality but it is free. For most movies that is fine and I can upgrade later to Blu-ray or 4K if I like the movie later.
Of course not. Everyone moved to streaming services. Zero physical media and you get to charge people whatever you want and can increase your prices yearly, while dropping content you love. For me, that’s not working so I pirate everything.
I still have 300+ DVD’s but I’ve downloaded them all once I got my Plex home media server setup and now I don’t even care what streaming services are out there. I got everything I need and it works when my internet doesn’t.
I’m with you. I agree that it’s silly that physical media has all but disappeared. It’s especially sad that it happened right after bluray became affordable. The picture quality on them is astounding. The banding/artifacts you sometimes see on streaming services should not be acceptable at all, but honestly I think a lot of people do not notice them at all!
I literally bought my self a Xmas gift of a Blu Ray player. Arrives by end of the week.
People pay for movies and tv shows? 🏴☠️
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The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket.
Then it fades into a paywall, lol.
Isn’t the archive link at the end of the post?
As someone that used to own hundreds of dvds then upgraded to bluray and now have a smaller collection of 4k uhd’s for only movies that i really want to experience to the best that they can be viewed. On the flip side i have inherited my dad’s laserdisc collection which started in the early 90’s but generally looks horrible on a modern tv. They don’t take up much space but i should sell them.
I also have a server with 50tb of space but forever having drives fail it’s a costly situation so now i generally use stremio or kodi and a realdebrid subscription and stream 4k or 1080 and don’t collect anything anymore.
