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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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i can't even remember the last time i saw an optical disc. it must be several years.
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as "used". It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
Most people don't know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They're using the built in streaming apps or they've plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of "Composite II" for like a decade now.
Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying "one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like".
The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I'd be willing to guess most peoples family "collections" are still on DVD.
I'd guess that the down votes weren't because it wasn't true, but rather simply that the fact made them unhappy. Not the best use of down votes, but understandable.
With very little initial work, physical media is also very convenient.
I buy a disk, put it into a specific drive, get a instant message when its ripped, check its name and put it into a folder. From there my mediabox converts it to a managable size and adds it to the collection.
Whin I turn on my TV I see all these Movies and shows neatly presented by Kodi. I have a tiny Wireless keyboard and can start any in under a second. No buffering, no adds, no matter if the router is connected, and no fear of ever loosing access.
Its great.
Exeptions are there of couse, I would love to buy The Orville, but they just don't want my money!
For me, physical media takes up more space. It's a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it's also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it's physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don't have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it's unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
Blu-rays do not actually take up this much space: On a 1TB drive you can store about 10-12 4K movies. You need a backup and you need a second drive for your Raid setup. This takes up quiet a lot of space too.
Besides that: storing the movies on a Raid system is a lot more expensive. If I'd rip all of my blu-rays to a digital copy, I'd need like 12 TB of storage. In a raid setup with backup, that's quiet expensive!
I meant physical size, not data size. With one computer with multiple 24TB drives, you can store hundreds or thousands of Blu-rays. To have that amount of physical Blu-rays, you would need a massive shelf - or more likely, multiple massive shelves.
True, RAID is more expensive, but it also ensures your data will keep working reliably - and it's much harder to lose than a small disc. Doubly when you throw backups into the mix.
It's not that big, the cases are much smaller than DVD cases. Each case is 12-13mm wide, so on a typical shelf, you could fit >60. You can easily make them two or three deep, depending on your shelf.
I just stick them in a box after ripping them to my HDDs.
Sure, but with a full-sized PC tower, you could reasonably fit thousands of Blu-rays. The physical size difference is pretty massive in that comparison.
Sure. I'm just saying storage doesn't need to be overly burdensome. I just toss mine in a box and stick it in a closet. And if the drives die, you have the disks.
Modern hard drives come in 20 TB or larger. 4K movies don't need to be anywhere near that big either with modern compression technology.
Which has its own downside, that being the up-front cost.
I don’t want physical media because it’s a liability. It can get lost or destroyed very very easily, especially optical media.
Digital copies are portable, I can data hoard them, and, worst case, I can just re-download it.
It's very easy to make digital copies of physical media. The resulting copy is likely to be as high quality as you can find, and as portable as any digital copy can be. Pop it in a folder and point Jellyfin at it, and it's available anywhere.
It's also the easiest legal way to get a good digital copy.
And why on earth would I pay for media when I can get it for free?
My Plex server is packed with downloads and rips.
Because somebody has to create that media. And that person they have to live. (Or better that huge team when it comes to movies) So they have to earn money, so somebody has to pay them.
I also enjoy that today I can test if something fits me If I am skeptical. But I also always make sure to pay back creators for things I enjoy so that in the future there will be more things I enjoy.
Of course I understand anybody who can not afford media and am happy to subsidize them with the part I am paying for good shows. But if you have a Plex server, you can afford it. And If you say its close just start with things you like most and at least say "thank you" to them.
The creators get paid when they do the work, not from sales.
Also, a much more important note: if I couldn’t pirate it, I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway.
Where do you think the people who pay the creators get the money to pay them? From sales from the results of the last creators who worked for them.
ads, mostly.
so? they already got paid. i feel no remorse for pirating from a global megacorp.
And neither should you
edit: and - once again - if i couldn't pirate it, i wasn't going to buy it anyway. You can't even argue lost sales (which the creators never see).
You have to know where to look assuming you have working optics.
I also don’t care to look
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I quit optical media around 03. Haven’t even owned anything with an optical drive for nearly a decade.
same here. the last optical drive i had was used to rip my girlfriends dvd collection about 12 years ago. all still here on hunks of spinning rust if needed, but the space consuming load of dvds went to the flea market.
They're a very common form of personal backup. A few discs and an USB writer and you get a very long lasting medium for passwords, personal files, family photos etc.
Can also archive multimedia of course, the smallest discs are 25 GB and can pack a few films, a season of a series, or a lot of music.
i guess, but they're not great for backup. Eps. R/RW optical media doesn't last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged. You'd be better off with tape for long-term storage. or an M-Disk or some similar magnetic backup solution.
I beg to differ. I've been backing things up to optical for 25 years now with minimal issues. CDs could be easily scratched but it hasn't been the case for DVD and BR.
M-DISK uses in-organic substances that make the discs mostly immune to exposure but it's a more recent invention. Proper storage and handling still goes a long way towards protecting discs even if they're not in-organic.
M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.
Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.
They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.
In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.
That all sounds like it’s still terrible idea to use optical media for backups
Politely disagree. M-disc for BD-Rs are still absolutely worth the money if you want to properly archive something. NIST has agreed that the archival lifetime of a M-Disc BD-R is 100+ years.
You have to be careful with normal BD-Rs because there are two different types of recording material on the market: High to Low and Low to High (LTH). You want to stay away from BD-R LTH discs as their longevity isn’t as good as the High to Low discs.
Politely agree to disagree and I'll elaborate. Thanks for your input.
LTH are all marked as such. MABL normal (non LTH) discs such as verbatim sells for less than half the cost of M-Discs have the same physical properties as M-Discs, the protective layers are the same, the recording methods are the same using the same materials. Therefore the longevity is the same or near the same without getting into M-Disc's ridiculous marketing claims of 1000 years (when NIST and others agree the poly-acrylic protective layer would degrade and decompose after a century or two at most even in ideal circumstances).
/r/Datahoarder has had this argument several times and the consensus so far seems to comes out to the fact that M-Discs were a DVD-era innovation that in the BD era offer no meaningful advantages in technologies.
I'd rather have two BD's from a reputable company like Verbatim (not fly by night plain white discount bulk BD's from who knows where) from separate batches bought 6 months apart stored properly than rely on one overly expensive M-Disc that isn't going to last any longer and probably isn't made to meaningfully tighter tolerances.
NIST only estimates the lifetime of M-Discs, real world abuse tests on BD's (non LTH, should have mentioned that to be honest) show good endurance that far exceeds DVDs. It comes down to however burning it right and storing it right. A pile of M-Disc left in a window in your uninsulated garage year after year and burned at 16x are not on the whole going to be in a better state in 20 years than a pile of BD-R's burned at 4x, stored in protective sleeves in a case in a temperature controlled, insulated environment. Add in having a back-up copy and the chances of total data failure on both primary and backup disc and you're looking at better survivability. NIST numbers generally assume things like storage in archival quality environments such as old salt mines which are a controlled environment, low humidity, neither excessively hot or cool and not subject to shifts in temperature. Most people can't store things in an environment like that and those who can usually have the finances for a better solution like multiple tape copies and/or continually updating and refreshing hashed/checksumed files and moving on a schedule to new better storage mediums (e.g. keeping files in a raid array in a plugged in NAS, checking for failures regularly, replacing disks and upgrading disks every 5-10 years one at a time).
I wouldn't trust any media not professionally stored in a purpose-built archival environment and with at least two copies to last more than 25 years without degradation or loss. Anyone trying to store stuff really long-term and cannot afford degradation or loss needs to have a plan to update their archival copies every 15 years or at least do an assessment that often and survey the options as well as the physical and ideally logical state of their chosen back-ups.