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.
It’s both for me. Some things are either not on BluRay, too rare and expensive, or the transfer on BluRay is actually worse. And besides, any BluRay player is a dvd player too.
Anyway, any physical collecting or pirating needs to encouraged because streaming is such a stupid model now.
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.
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
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
Yeah but we’ve also seen 4k screens and the iMac at our vocational school class was an 8k display. We get it’s an us thing but like we’ve experienced higher resolution screens before and unless it’s for productivity like for work, resolution wasn’t the determining factor of enjoying content, it was whether the content was good or not in the first place :P
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.
Yeah, you need a PS5 to play ultras. But what’s even dumber is neither 4 nor 5 can play regular old music CDs
UHD blu-rays didn’t even come out until 2016 which is years after any of the devices you listed. Also the discs themselves hold twice as much data as a regular blu-ray so it makes sense that playstations released before it even existed don’t have drives capable of reading the discs.
Distance and size makes the most difference.
If you’re sitting ~7’ back from a 50" TV it really doesn’t matter if it’s 720, 1080, 4k, or 8k.
You have to be right up on it to tell or have a huge screen.
Nicer TVs do have better color and contrast that you can tell from any distance. But generally you have to have something to compare it to for it to really matter. Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
But many times they’re encoded dreadfully anyway, and DVDs tend to be better in this respect.
Interlacing is awful though.
Way too many DVDs are interlaced/telecined though.
Or worse, some hellish combination of both, because the producers edited different sources together. It makes scaled footage, panning, and some motion look really awful or jittery once you notice it.
Blu rays don’t necessarily escape this either, as they butcher the conversion to 24p and then you can’t even fix it.
For all their problems, streaming giants usual do this better. Amazon (and probably Netflix) had employees hanging out in the doom9 A/V forums long ago.
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
Because you didn’t know it was called 480p or knew of better options doesn’t mean you can’t see that it wasn’t great or improvable. You knew colour existed before getting a colour, TV so you knew it could be better…
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…
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.
MakeMKV is the easiest way. The license key is always in the forum.
I thought a BD duplicator. Multiple drives, just put the professional disc in the top and a blank in one or more of the others. Obviously blanks are less resilient than pressed discs but it’s a backup and I didn’t need to have specialized skills to do it.
Eh, I’m not really interested in disc based copies, really the disc is there for ripping and then stored, jellyfin to stream it to watch as I please. Once ripped then I can handle the resultant file nice and easy.
What? DVD is perfectly fine. I dont even have a 4K TV
My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable.
I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.
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 sneakernet and hard drives are the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
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.
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.
Yeah, even with the extra cost, HDDs are still cheaper than DVDs simply due to being rewritable.
DVDs also have a rather limited shelf life
Most people don’t burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
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.
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
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
Thrift store boombox.
With a nice stereo system? There is also specialized hardware that can play and digitize any kind of retro media (cassettes, vinyl, disks)
That’s cool I guess. I have a shelf full of switch games. And a NAS full of hundreds of movies, tv shows, audio books, music and more. I’ll take digital so long as I’m in control.
Its like going physical you get both with the right ripper
True, but then you gotta rip it and store it
probably the same reason I refused to let 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.
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.
rip backups; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
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.
Local library is another great source to get those CDs to rip mp3s
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.
