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a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.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.
Do you have a system of backups for your digital library? For example at minimum do you have a physical backup of the data on drives not connected to your main computer AND an offsite backup (cloud storage or storing backed up physical media offsite)?
If not then you’re risking losing your entire library to one power spike caused by a nearby lightning strike or any other number of random events such as malfunctioning drives… etc.
I’m in the process of throwing everything away. I have got a digital copy(s) of all my content and even remasters of DVD media. I don’t even have a DVD player.
I tried selling it on market place and it’s not getting any offers. Time for the bin.
I keep my physical discs. I do however throw out the cases and put the discs themselves into a 400 disc binder. They take up a lot less space and then I can bring them with if I go someplace without Internet or pull them out if my Plex server crashes and I can’t be bothered to fix it.
I have two boxes of burned CDRs, that I’ve replaced with better rips. Remember DiVX? Fit a 90 minute movie on a 700MB disc with obvious artifacting even at SD resolutions. Still can’t bring myself to get rid of them.
Checked a few of them a couple years ago and they all still worked. Taiyo Yuden made good stuff.
Surprised Ctrl-F turned up zero occurrences of “copyright”. It is legal to back up CDs (which have no copy protection that would fall under DMCA), provided one keeps the originals. And I haven’t heard of an individual getting prosecuted for backing up copy-protected discs like DVDs.
I keep my originals, for legal reasons. I wish I didn’t have to keep the atoms around, but I feel like I do.
I assume hard drives are not considered “physical” for some reason?
all of it. about 15 years ago when i started collecting digitally. never looked back.
Remux 4K on the NAS. Discs only if I can’t find what I’m looking for with other means. Then rip and shelve until someone I know wants them.
Reminds me of back in the day when cd’s went to mp3. I had spindles of retail cd’s that I couldn’t fit into binders. Ripped everything to flac and gave away the cd’s.
Everything is digital/streaming now.
I backed all mine up and sold it. I can’t justify dedicating a whole room in my house to media when I can fit it all on a few hard drives.
I never really like rewatching stuff so I never really had a collection, sold all my cds for pennies a decade ago.
i’m moved from video (dvd/blu/4kblu) to vinyl as my financial disaster hobby
will be selling off my large collection of movies early in the new year, including a large criterion collection mostly unopened
Don’t buy books/video/music on physical media unless it’s hard/impossible to get a digital version. But also don’t rely on IP subscription services either. The Cloud is great as part of a backup strategy: but not as an exclusive service that could gate your access to your content.
Digital storage is great because it can hold anything: books, shows, games, whatever. And it can be easily copied, and sent around the world. Have some space you own: redundant and automatically backed-up to a Cloud service… then enjoy it for years. It will feed your ebook readers and media players and homelab devices for a long time, and take up almost no space.
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.
Kept the discs, tossed the cases. You can fit a lot of discs in a sleeve book and they make convenient backups.
I donated all of my physical copies of things once I had a good system of doing it all digitally. It was one thing when the physical copies were what I used to enjoy the content, but when I realized I was regularly going to the digital copies of things I had physically, all of the shelves full of DVDs, albums, CDs, and books started feeling like little more than weird little trophy cases. In that context, the amount of space I devoted to them seemed silly.