The future is self-hosted digital media. I’ve got no qualms with pirating media. But I am an advocate for buying digital media from artists directly.
AI music has entered the chat
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
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.
Nintendo sells essentially a SD card variant in a case for the swtich. So you’re not far off :)
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.
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.
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.
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were more used.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
I have bad news for you - Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung have all stopped production on BR-R discs.
they might bring it back with HDD drives going AIxtinct.
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.
Most people don’t burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
… No they aren’t. Way more are just keeping their own digital media on their own storage. Even more are still just streaming. The least are watching DVD and Blu Ray.
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.
Just make sure you back them up. Bit rot is real.
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
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
probably the same reason I refused to leg 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.
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
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.
easy with that logic, killer.
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
https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-DH2300-2-Bay-Capacity-Diskless/dp/B0FNWHSPXF
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.
I didn’t miss his point. I wrote what the price of the drives are, he said nope, and I linked drives for that price.
Those arent drives. Those are NAS housings. Specifically listed as “diskless” meaning they don’t contain any hard drives or ssds
The last two links are drives.
I linked the NAS over and over from different storefronts as a petty response.
I know what diskless is. My entire original post has a paragraph explicitly saying to buy a NAS and drives and their prices, because shocker I searched for current prices of items before posting my original comment, so then I’m not caught talking out of my ass like some other commenters are doing here in response to my post.
Please don’t use google or amazon
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/product/703359/DH2300_NASync_2-Bay_Diskless_NAS?storeID=101
https://www.adorama.com/udh2300.html
https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-000B-00KK3?item=9SIA5ADK9A1326
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-desktop-hdd-st500dm002-500gb/p/N82E16822148767?item=9SIAAEE5MZ4108
Insted of saying “just google it” instead say “just search it” or “just look it up”. There are many different search engines available, and do we really want google to be our word choice here? Akin to advertising imo. fuck promoting these companies.
i do appreciate the links, but that’s not what I meant.
There is a bit of a romantic feeling in only having a physical copy of a photo though, and Polaroids are the easiest ones to do this with.
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.
And drives can fail. And data can get corrupted. You could get a virus.
Digital things degrade too, and faster than youd think
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
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.
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.
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.
Unless you get new DVD players to support AV1, just put the AV1 files on a data DVD…
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.
We are forever fucked over lots of TV shows/movies that are caged within the stream services realm :/
I think part of it might be that DVDs are easier to find used or just cheaper new. GenZ isn’t really rolling in cash and in my area for example used stores rarely if ever carry Blu-ray.
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.
Yeah because i want to own when i buy things
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
In fairness, she looks better in it
In fairness, I only bought the shirt in my size so that it would be comfortable for her to sleep in. I never actually planned to wear it. Shame that it’s a fucking Disturbed shirt and that I wanna set fire to it.
at least she didn’t grab the limp bizkit shirt that your older sister gave you in '02
GenZ are so hollow with things like this. They embrace it as fashion.
