DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media
8 months ago by return2ozma to c/technology
I'm happy to just pirate this shit.
I don’t buy band media anymore but I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Record company middlemen and forever streaming can take a hike.
I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Who doesn't love a cool band t-shirt?
- My wife, just before she stole my band shirt
If you don't hold it, you don't own it. Unless you take the DVD from them, you can't remove their access to the movie stored on that disc.
Technically network connected blu ray players can be updated to region lock you out of your content.
So don't connect them to the Internet
Yes, just being pedantic with a risk that people don’t think of.
I think the blu ray secret keys leaked so you can rip them anyways.
Gross
Hold in your hand = physical access.
NAS counts
You can’t hold your NAS? It actually weighs very slightly more with data on it.
DVD have already polluted and currently exist and are rotting, and need to be ripped to longer term storage, especially for media that is becoming lost and needs a custodian to host so it can be pirated online. A lot of things cannot because no one has it, but it still exists in physical form.
Some may be ok with a whatever resolution streaming service webrip but I want the original dvd HD remaster, before they re-remastered it with only a single layer disk instead of double, messing up the original faithful rerelease that was already anticipated during filming when the show was filmed in HD widescreen film, but originally released in SD for broadcast due to the time. Plus, you can’t webrip the “banned” episodes if they’re not available.
license terms
In most places ownership laws make those licences unenforceable - not in the legal sense, but practically - hard to lock you out of a DVD.
Great option for those still politically opposed to pirating stuff.
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Blu Ray is where it's at. Give me some actual quality bitrate baby.
I've always kinda thought about implementing a software and standard for 1080p av1 on DVD. Would be neat as a project, obviously no commercial use would exist.
Either way you can get some really impressive encodes out of av1, really neat tech.
No that's the idea, it would be to make a piece of software which if thrown on a sbc with a DVD drive becomes a player.
Which really isn't too far off of DVD and most bluray players.
Though I wouldn't be shocked if the super cheap DVD players have some sorta all-in-one integrated asic for most of the job.
Would mostly be used by hobbiest making their own burned discs and small artists releasing stuff.
That sounds interesting! I've been using AV1 more and more (thanks to SVT-AV1-PSY/-HDR and devs pushing improvements to main). Also enjoying FHD animated AVIF (vs ancient GIF, although gif.ski helps). AV1 video is not as soft as it once was (esp at high bitrates with synthetic film grain), and combined with OPUS audio, it's all wonderful.
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.
If you ever wanna play 4K BDs on PC, you'll need a 4K-compatible drive that's been hacked with LibreDrive though, otherwise you're stuck using a dedicated set-top player for those.
1080p discs can at least be handled by libaacs and libbdplus /w the necessary files, and don't necessarily need a hacked drive to play back.
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.
People! Try Yt-dlp, when spotify decide to make Spotify Developer available again, then yt-dlp plugin integration with spotify, still, in anna's archive i think they will make available if not already the hundreds of TBs of metadata and songs managed to get from Spotify so media preservation and ownership will also be in the digital space
qobuz too!
For families, Tidal is even cheaper. But it's majority owned by that Twitter asshole Jack Dorsey. Just another fucking billionaire.
3D printing your own guns
Just buy a normal fucking gun, this is America ffs there are more guns than people.
What are you, Swiss? Australian? Irish?
The same applies.
Planet is choked with guns. They're everywhere and very easy to get. Absolutely no reason you need one that's been churned out by a printer you got on Temu.
Don't 3D printed guns have normal parts except for the slide and handle which are 3D printed?
No, vinyl is still the new vinyl. Tons and tons of new vinyl on Bandcamp. And tapes!
I totally get it. Kids missed out on everything good.
Too bad DVDs and CDs will quit being made soon, and disc rot sets in on most discs in 20 years. Luckily mine have survived. But make backups. Although that's why "they (the rich)" want to drive up the price of HDDs so we can't afford it, so we are tied to their cloud systems forever.
Good luck young people !
Too bad DVDs and CDs will quit being made soon
We're still making vinyl records. What on earth makes you think we're going to stop making DVDs?
Vinyl has hipster vibes and false audiophile claims. CDs and DVDs dont. They won't be profitable in a few years and then bye bye factories. Just like vhs. I'd still be buying vhs takes if they made them but they dont. Same with CRTs.
They won’t be profitable in a few years
I just don't know where you get these claims from
History. They don't make vhs players or CRTs now do they? Even though they had huge benefits to modern (vhs, recordable and durable, CRT, durable, repairable, instantaneous response and perfect blacks) digital convenience trumps all for the majority population. Its also about control. You literally cannot buy a non smart TV any more (OK fine, digital signage, but you won't get a remote) and some of them will not even function unless you connect them to WiFi. Hekk no.
Properly manufactured Audio CDs are actually quite resilient, obviously not so much to scratches, but out of all my 100+ CDs (I'd say half of which are older than 25 years) only one has disc rot and that one is a pressing made by PDO who're known for their bad pressings that are prone to disc rot.
I don't really store my CDs in a special way either.
The life span of CD/DVD is not on the printed media but on the media we make/made our backups on. Of my many spindles from back in 2k (some disks are almost 25 yrs old), so far maybe 5 disks have gone partially or completely unreadable, lucky I didn't lose much. Baring scratches or other physical damage, the printed disks will last decades where my disks have outlasted prediction
CDs were so much better for my kids than any other digital player. Especially when they couldn't read yet. It's much easier to choose a CD and put it into a player than opening an app to search for something.
And gets them away from screens!! We don't need more screens in today's world.
that’s why “they (the rich)” want to drive up the price of HDDs so we can’t afford it, so we are tied to their cloud systems forever
That seems like a reach. Hanlon's says they're just buying HDDs for their Artificial Imbecile service.
Maybe, but its not surprising that it fits their agenda perfectly. Build the slop generator and make it impossible for the population to own their means of computing. Future computing will be a dumb terminal on bezos net, and you will be an ostracized weirdo for not using it.
Blu-rays are great, DVDs not so much unless it's an old title that was never released in 1080p
Or classic 2d animation.
1080p simpsons vs 720p Simpsons look really close
*480
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
DVDs are fine, but the subtitles look god-awful - and they’re bitmaps so there is no easy way to make them not suck
Blu ray has copy protection...
If you have a blu ray player it's not really that much of a problem. And if you need a back up there's still ways
So does DVD and can be bypassed just as easily these days
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.
While I agree with the general idea, your example prices are no longer valid since storage costs are now through the roof. The best defense of kids using DVDs is that you can borrow them from the library for free.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00519B0UO
Please at least Google something before talking out of your ass
I think you missed his point. The NAS is cheap. The disks to put in it no longer are.
Idk what to say to you other than you're being intentionally flippant. These are very simply things to search for online. The fact that I linked items proving my price claims are accurate and you sit there and move the goal posts and change the subject is the most moronic thing I have ever seen.
Go touch some grass and then find something else to occupy your time with.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822995008?item=N82E16822995008&source=region
https://www.microcenter.com/...
And that's completely valid, but I just want to warn others that physical items deteriorate.
I'm currently digitally archiving photos of my great-great grandparents. You know how disappointing it is to have these photos, but then see they are all water damaged or torn or crumbled to all hell because of improper storage? Some scans are ok, others are terrible and will require work on my end to restore them digitally.
I'm sure we have thousands of digital photos of ourselves, but how many of those are backed up properly? How many of us will be regretting not backing things up properly and we can't share these photos with our grandkids or great grandkids or to reminisce because our phones died or Instagram shutdown or we stopped paying for iCloud?
All I'm saying is take your Polaroids, but also take plenty of digital photos and back them up as well.
Digital things degrade too, and faster than youd think
And drives can fail. And data can get corrupted. You could get a virus.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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...
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.
Dvd video on a cell phone looks great
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.
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.
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.
The issue with blurays are the unskippable intros before the menu hits
It's a little fuzzy, but that's OK on a lot of older movies (especially lower budget ones) because they were always a little fuzzy to start with.
You can have all the pixels you want, but you're not going to get a lot of extra detail out of Critters or Masters of the Universe.
Many old movies that are restored perfectly. Yes it's a lot of film grain but you can also see a lot in the background etc. Also id rather have the film grain.
The movies where shot for cinema on 16mm or so and that is pretty high res.
Oh boy, they weren't fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.
Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won't notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.
¹: BTW, it doesn't matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.
What? VHS is perfectly fine. I don't even have a color TV
This is how you sound BTW. 4k or even 1080p is objectively better than DVDs' 480p. There is no reason to still use them other than cost or being a contrarian.
DVD actually still holds up for 2D animation, as 2D animation is probably the only medium that holds up well upscaled from 480p, there's just not a lot of detail to lose in the upscaling process compared to live action or even 3D animation to some extent.
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.
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.
DVDs also have a rather limited shelf life
Most people don't burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
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 resurgence of vinyl was understandable as the sound exhibits a warmth and depth
Only because it is adds pleasing artifacts to the original and people connect a turn table up to something to listen to it with. When used to hearing crappy encoded digital, with a bad DAC through lossy bluetooth to a tiny speaker, vinyl sounds better.
Funny thing is that you can record vinyl digitally and that recording will sound exactly the same on good equipment which tells you it isn't the vinyl itself that sounds good.
In any case vinyl is extremely disappointing to see come back. It is a very energy intensive process, using PVC often mixed with lead. It is very heavy and bulky to move around, so transportation costs are high.
I understand the desire to have a physical thing, but only its flaws make it be a reproduction of the source material AND is environmentally not good.
A lot of young people I know love vhs and miss it. But its getting expensive to get into now and you gotta know how to repair things.
Reminds me of this PS4 ad:
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.
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.
True, but then you gotta rip it and store it
And a NAS full of hundreds of movies, tv shows
This is me, but I made the bad decision of starting with a two bay NAS, my 10 TB filled up fairly quickly (not even 4K media), that is why I recently added to my Arr Stack Decypharr to the equation, and I am kinda impressed how well it behaves with my RD cloud (the content there is prone to disappear due to inactivity, but Decypharr has certain tools to avoid that to happen).
Most DVDs produced will be rotted out within 20/30 years at most, only option is ripping what you can and migrate the collection to a new drive every decade, just make sure it's a secondary drive and is of archival quality.
Burned disks, you'll probably lose some over 30 years, i've lost a few in 20 years, most are still readable.
Poorly pressed disks, you might lose one here or there. I had a two where the aluminum was poorly sealed and flaked off the label side.
I have hundreds of DVD's in the 20-30 year range and have never had a problem reading any of them that weren't scratched save the couple that were lacking in top lacquer.
The density of DVDs makes them less resilient than CDs, but CDs will also suffer the same fate. It's going to be a very serious conservation problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Exactly, and I imagine blurays and DL dvds will suffer even quicker. However the quality of the plastic is also important, we started cheaping out and it's noticable, look at VHS or Tapes as we moved forward the quality of them dropped.
I'm currently working on ripping all my CDs to my old laptop and looking at mp3 players, but only because I don't really want to use my phone storage to hold everything. I was still buying physical CDs of new releases up until a few years ago, but I've gone back to that too.
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.
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.
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were used more.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
Verbatim still manufactures their DataLifePlus series of BD-Rs, and they are excellent. The market otherwise is pretty bleak... Ritek offers nothing that compares to the DLP discs.
Also, side note, Pioneer (once a leading manufacturer of BD burners), no longer makes them. LG is the lone surviving manufacturer I believe.
they might bring it back with HDD drives going AIxtinct.
Agree and this is very informative about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9Xq7hb6Q0
He also has another video somewhere to stress test some of the disk types I think
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
The NGage even used literal SD cards.
at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Actualy, thumb drive flash is the lowest quality, cheapest one (the yield thing, the outer parts of the waver). Do not expect your data to keep longer than a few hours weeks.
Edit:
Because that's how yields work, defective areas get firmware-disabled in the factory. Lower quality has only more of them, with less strict quality requirements to count as ok.
To add, it's a gamble; most are ok, some get data corruption on write, some after weeks. The "cheap" part is, because they aren't expected to last more than a few TBW.
Is this supposed to be a joke about storing data on your thumb? Also thumbs are not cheap, probably....I hope.
Not a joke. And why the downvote? Quality distribution is generally SSD > SD-cards > thumbdrives. Thumbdrives are no backup medium.
Wasn't me, but I'm guessing because you said they only last a few hours? I took that ridiculous exaggeration and assumed you meant writing notes on your thumb.
A system of organization would be invented. Idk maybe a wooden stepped board with USB sized holes that you store/display your collection in, just to use the first idea I pull directly from ass. Actually make it silicone for the grippy, already improving it, then sell the wood as a fancier looking one, and inlay a few with idk brass or something for a "pro" version, boom, marketing.
I'm sure there would be a million options, yours sounds quite fancy, and it will work great until Disney decides to sell giant mouse shaped drives ruining the whole thing.
Realistically the connector would have been proprietary, but I can see a world where we got cartridges that came in little cases like the games for nintendo ds or switch.
I prefer dedicated digital players over physical media, for instance, a FLAC player with a digital library over CDs, but I'm glad to see this trend catching up. Anything that gets people building their own collections, escaping algorithms and escaping DRM/streaming is a huge win in my book.
I'm curious as to why?
Physical media scratches, rots, burns down, etc. They also require a lot of space, and you can't have it all with you easily.
My FLAC library is got the same or better audio quality, I can backup and copy in seconds for myself or friends, I can carry everything, or just curated playlists, with the toggle of a button, and I can preserve them on any medium I find - mechanical HDs, SD cards, SSDs, etc.
Though I am very curious about vinyl...
I recently revived my record player and CD player and I've been enjoying three things:
- You have to think about what to listen to,
- the player is completely offline and separate from the devices you work and communicate on, so nothing will interrupt and you feel you're doing something different, and
- it means you listen to whole albums, not mixed up playlists, so you get deeper into it.
What I don't enjoy is that records in particular are ridiculously expensive now. I don't know who can afford them. So I'm stuck with the records and CDs of my youth and whatever I can find in bargain bins.
I do also use Qobuz and... other means of obtaining music.
Nothing a decent backup strategy can't mitigate. Also less portable? Between the massive storage available on digital audio players and using jellyfin with something like symphonium digital audio is massively more portable.
But... those other storage mediums can also get damaged, burn, rot, etc
Sure can. You know what else they can do? Instantly and cleanly copy their data to any other storage device, they can even do so automatically every day!
Throw a self hosted Jellyfin server in the mix, and you can access your entire FLAC library from any device you want! Your friends can listen at the same time, if you want to give them logins.
Your hard drive can be erased in many ways. And soon you wont be able to afford them or be allowed to own them.
Vinyl lasts forever. Its only damaged if you play it 😐
Your hard drive can be erased in many ways.
I'm willing to bet my main SSD, my backup HDD, my FLAC player's SD card, and my laptop SSD all carrying the same file are going to be more durable than a piece of plastic.
They make record players that use lasers so they don’t slowly wear down the grooves
"Ooh I wanna listen to [song], let me just....find the CD....put the CD in the tray...find the track number...skip to that track...wait for CD player to scan and start..."
FLAC is everything good about CDs minus the headache. Sure you can't physically hold the liner notes but it's not like that hasn't been digitized, too!
I only listen to albums all the way through when using CDs and vinyl, so track search doesn't matter to me. CDs are the pinnacle of digital physical media for audio. Large enough, copyable, portable, not too big to store.
Large enough
Too short.
But the rest still applies so in what ways are a CD better than FLAC? Flash drives take up even less space and can hold hundreds of albums. Arguably even more "portable" because disc drives aren't common anymore
Because that's not cool.
Because its information overload (name even 50 albums and the songs on them. Humans dont need thousands of albums. Our brains are not meant for this much information. You can't appreciate 1000 albums)
It has no resale value. And if that HDD dies or you die and your family doesn't know how to use it or how to decrypt it, its useless.
I don't consider HDDs physical media per se. No one is handing down hard drives or selling them at yard sales. I can play my great grandpas 1890 shellac records. Think a hard drive will be able to do that? Hell no.
I don’t consider HDDs physical media per se.
Ok. But I can touch mine ... they seem very physical.
No one is handing down hard drives or selling them at yard sales
Because it's easier to just copy the data to someone else's drive, no need to physically hand it over. Also you can still keep the CDs after copying them to another medium.
Because its information overload
That seems more like a personal problem than a technical one.
It has no resale value. And if that HDD dies or you die and your family doesn’t know how to use it or how to decrypt it, its useless.
Have you looked at HDD prices recently? You can definitely resell them. The ones I bought 3 years ago now cost double the price! And all data should be backup anyway so you don't lose anything on a disc failure. And the last point can be addressed by either just not encrypting your drive or leave the proper instructions behind.
All in all those are minor inconveniences compared to dealing with thousand of CDs.
My Matrix DVD I bought brand new still works just fine.
But rot is real, but also highly situational
rip backups; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Why buy second hand DVDs to clutter your house when piracy exists? Either way the rights holders earn no money.
I sorted out my DVD's Kept the collectors stuff, moved the cheaper but beloved stuff to binders and threw away the chaff i bought for a dollar a disk when blockbuster went under.
I can keep my entire original collection easily on 2 hard drives these days
The only reason I can think of is for the bonus content. When you pirate, you generally just get the movie/show and nothing else. No behind the scenes extras, no deleted scenes, no director's commentary, etc. Even Blu Ray discs are often lacking in this category. DVDs were peak for special features.
Cus I like em
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
magnetic media good?
Found the Sumerian.
Cave painting better
4D Glass Hypercube
You can pull it on HDD and that should be good enough preservation
Most people are braindead and mindless consumers across all generations, but there's a really large portion of people who are more conscious about the value of personal property. Weird that most of them are the communists and socialists while liberals and right wingers in general basically all want big corpos to violate our anuses with as much brutality as possible
FR, people are also using digital media way more than they're popping on a vinyl. It's okay that these are niche subcultures. Not sure why everything has to be framed like it's a cultural or political revolution.
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.
a few years ago I ripped all my cds/dvds to mp3/mp4 for easier uses. google music used to let you download everything as mp3. apple never did. for a while just uploading one song could get you the whole album. loaded on thumbdrives and distributed as gifts,, backups for legal purposes.
No, they’re not.
The reason vinyl is vinyl is because the format requires very careful mastering of the source audio. The medium is physically sensitive to dynamic range, frequency response, and groove spacing. That is why people argue that vinyl can sound better than a compressed digital file like an MP3 or a mass-produced CD.
Nothing about a DVD inherently requires special mastering of the video. If anything, DVDs are simply inexpensive to buy on the secondhand market, whether from local sellers or platforms like eBay.
Given the current state of digital licensing and streaming volatility, I understand why people want physical media like discs in order to truly own their movies. That could explain a modest resurgence in DVD sales. But DVDs are not the next vinyl. Vinyl never went away; it remained in production.
And no one is putting HD video on DVD discs.
I'd much rather have to find space for my server than for 1000s of Blu-rays/DVDs/CDs.
If I had to collect, it would be vinyl. If all DVD's had no player, we'd be screwed. With vinyl however, you might be able to find someone clever enough to whip up some sort of mechanical/electrical solution to extract the sounds.
I don’t care for the medium, I just want to watch my shows. In Canada we get basically the same shows as the US, but many are not available for streaming. So I want to watch Danny Phantom for example, I can’t. It’s not on any channel not streaming services.
And the same goes for dozens of other shows ranging from obscure like Martin Mystery to the ultra popular like The Fairly Odd Parents.
Heck even Disney doesn’t have everything.
DVD does and it cost less than most of these services.
I wonder why specifically DVDs... It's not like with audio formats where the experience is almost as or even more important than the quality; Blu-Ray delivers far better quality with the same experience. If they were into Laserdisc I'd understand, but DVD?
They're not even that much more expensive. Maybe the initial cost of getting a player is higher?
I haven't read the article yet, so apologies if this is addressed.
Bluray has always been a niche product in many/most parts of the world, DVD is ubiquitous.
It pains me to say this, but people generally just do not care about the difference in picture quality between the two formats. At least not enough to pay the Bluray premium.
The equipment itself is more expensive, as are the discs. Your subjective "not even much more expensive" is very dismissive of the economic situation for huge numbers of people around the world. It's often $3 - $4 more per disc in a retail setting, sometimes higher. And DVDs go on deep discount far more often in my experience, furthering the cost divide. And the bluray players aren't just more expensive, they're way more troublesome, slower, clunkier, and many/most/all require a stable internet connection (at least periodically) or you'll be locked out of watching your discs.
The money aspect isn't a concern for wealthier households. But, wealthier households tend to have higher adoption rates for stable, reliable, unlimited, high speed internet. They've largely switched to streaming only, and have little to no need for discs and players. They've also got many other entertainment options. They went from DVD to streaming, skipped Bluray.
Poorer households are far more likely to have no/less reliable internet, let alone unlimited data. If you don't have internet, you will be locked out of watching at least some of your blurays. You certainly won't be streaming, at least not regularly and reliably. That $3 - $4 difference in the price of each disc is money for gas or a loaf of bread. The $50 difference in the player is potentially a big financial blow. If you want to watch something cheap, you can find a huge selection of DVDs at the thrift store or even rent for free from the library, or you can pay a little more for the one bluray they have for sale (it's an Adam Sandler comedy from 20 years ago where he dresses up as a woman) and does funny voices.
Many places over here have stopped to carry DVDs and, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure all the major studios have stopped selling them; my comment is entirely referring to the used market where Blu-Ray can be $3-$4 more expensive but they don't have to be if you look around. I've bought many films on BD for $2 or less on eBay.
Plus, I assume the article is largely talking about the western market (most likely the US in particular) where the situation is similar. Blu-Ray players are much more expensive, so the cost of entry is higher. I've never heard of them requiring an internet connection to work, though, that's certainly a point against them. I only ever used the various game consoles with BD drives to watch BD discs and have never encountered such limitation (then again they were connected to the internet most of the time regardless).
Personally I never upgraded from DVD to Bluray because of the costs and DRM. And while I waited for those to be solved streaming got good enough.
Perhaps these kids' parents are the same, so they just use what they have.
Or the article's author just calls every video disc a DVD.
But both formats have DRM and sometimes the Blu-ray is basically the same price or even cheaper. Sure DVD was easier to crack but that's not an issue these days.
When I bought my dream machine it was the first one without an optical drive... and then I bought an external blu-ray player/DVD burner.
Because they are too computer illiterate to simply download what they want?
Its the fact of unrevokable ownership.
I can buy and mp3 off amazon. But if amazon decides to take down the artist i spent money and lost acess to what i bought.
If i buy the CD, i rip it and put it on my navidrome server. I own it forever, if the server explodes or somebody claims i dont own the music, i go to my storage room and pull out my BIG ASS container of CDs.
I OWN A PERSONAL LICENSE TO MY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR MUSIC ON PHYSICAL MEDIA THAT CANNOT BE PURPOSELY OR INNCIDENTALLY REMOTELY DELETED. NOBODY CAN STOP ME FROM LISTENING TO MY MUSIC COLLECTION, NOT SOME CORPRATE FUCK RAISING A SUPSCRIPTION PRICE.
I started a year ago collecting physical media, and i can genuinely say owning it makes it sound and look better.
I seldom have any subscriptions, and the one thing that hurts is when i play the mental game of "ok so i could pay for it still which would cost a decent amount of money" or i could not.
"Does this service provide me enough value for the economic loss of my personal funds?"
But not having to "bend over" because spotify is doing evil shit and i dont want to support.
Funny thing is i recently read about the AI bullshit and shit there doing with Spotify. Told my friends and they didnt want to leave spotify because of there playlists.
Theres a service that takes playlists and converts them amoung services for $2.
Both friends have been enjoying the shit about tidal! And gladly cancled there Spotify
Counterpoint : I can buy DRM free .flac from qobuz and actually own them, unrevokably, and store them on my jellyfin server. Absolutely no need for physical optical disks here.
Yes, music. Can you buy DRM free movies anywhere?
Not that I know of, sadly.
If you download something, nobody can take that away either. By getting the physical copy you are just creating extra steps.
I am making the point that it seems we have a generation that doesn't understand how to go and get files and/or share them.
Nothing I said was about subscriptions.
Personally, I could do without the physical media, that is just going backwards and I don't want to own all that crap. But it also means the only services I use are ones I make myself so I can listen to my collection anywhere in the world and on any device I own. But its my service.
For what its worth, I never have subscribed to spotify or any other music service. I do chip in a bit of money for SOMAFM, and I guess it is streaming, but it's listener supported radio basically.
There is so much to listen to, and so much fan traded and openly traded music, whats the point of paying someone?
You can pay the artists even more if they don't have to spend on packaging.
And at what point do you quit paying them? For older groups, you buy the tape, then the CD, then the extended remix, then vinyl, and on and on with half of them seeing only pennies every step of the way anyway.
Fortunately for me my collection is 90% freely shared because the money is in the performances anyways.
You didn't hear that they want you to own nothing (in digital media)?
um...because they are dumb, like their parents.
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Yeah because i want to own when i buy things
save