Data Hoarder

116 readers

1 users here now

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Has anybody here thrown out their physical media? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Since the pandemic I’ve been collecting DVDs and Blu-rays, because I started getting into filmmaking and valued the importance of physical media. One of my reasons was the horror stories I’ve read about licenses on DRM-protected purchases being revoked.

After we moved to a much smaller house, my Billy bookshelf containing around 200+ titles has been taking a huge amount of space. And the cases just sit there looking pretty. We never use the discs. There’s no Blu-ray player in our house. We all watch digital content on portable devices. I’ve filled up several hard drives with so many obscure, international films that will never get distribution here. And so, I’ve stopped buying discs. It’s also much more convenient to be able to play MKVs on every device in my house.

I was one of those people who constantly purchased discs to remux and encode them myself for use on a future server, but that’s a waste of time, energy and money as there are dozens of release groups who’ve done the work already for me.

It doesn’t make sense to keep all the clutter around. I also have 500+ DVDs in a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.

I’m thinking of selling the Blu-rays that aren’t rare to buy a cheapo Optiplex. The discs are already pretty worthless. I’m just scared that I might regret this decision.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Still got some but I only have a couple dozen.

I quit buying physical media many years ago.

Just not any point, It's never more convenient to carry around a physical book to read when I already have a tablet that has hundreds.

I'm never going to want to have to physically find and insert a dvd or bluray just to sit through previews and warnings that I'm only subject to because I dared pay $20 for a physical disc.

Plus they're impractical for the same reasons as physical books.

I can watch pretty much any movie on my phone now from practically anywhere.

The only thing I think you might regret and realistically this is only a concern for older releases as this is pretty much completely not a thing anymore is the disc bonus features. Most modern stuff just flat doesn't have anything extra but used to you could get director's commentary and deleted scenes and stuff on the disc, things that online releases don't often include.