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a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.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.
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Havent had optical media since 2012, spare a few CD’s I bought to support artists I like, which I can’t listen too because no optical drive.
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Yeah if you are not a collector who wants to display their collection it makes no sense to hold on to the physical media. As long as you have digital backups (3-2-1).
Used to be the case in some countries that physical media is proof you have purchased legally. Even if you just keep the disks on a spindle (aka the spindles from writable media packs). This is how i keep my original media in the back of the cupboard.
If they have cases I pay .50 on blu ray and .15 on dvd. The binder discs are pretty much garbage but .05 a piece seems reasonable. Prices are in CAD. No one has room for clutter it seems. Good thing I have a warehouse.
Box up the media and store it away if you got space. There’s are prob more worthless stuff in a box somewhere than media. Do whatever let you sleep better at night.
I live in a small apartment (40 m², about 430 sqft), and I still like to buy physical media (although that doesn’t mean everything I own has to be on physical media).
For me it’s mostly music (~700 CDs, ~500 LPs), and a handful of DVDs/BluRays. I guess I just like to have that stuff around me. If Amazon/Netflix/Spotify/Deezer/whatever other streaming services there are all shut down tomorrow I don’t even care…
Implying there was physical media to begin with. yarrrr lol but for real im debating it. I have 4 boxes of dvd’s in the closet I havent touched since 2 house moves ago and I dont even have an optical drive in house at the moment (this moment has been since 2020 when I pulled a bluray drive out of my tower to make room for a 8x 2.5 drive dock for another raid)
My shelves are full of anime figurines. I don’t have space to store DVDs.
I’ve started throwing out DVD cases, but keeping the disks in a DVD binder like you. Still keeping the Blu-ray cases on the shelves for now.
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.
I still keep my hundreds of books and thousands of vinyl records even though I consume almost everything electronically. There’s something to be said for not having your entire culture locked up in small grey anonymous boxes.
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
I moved back in April to a much smaller place. I am having a hard time parting with over 2500 Blurays and 4k’s. On top of that thousands more of “collector” Steelbooks and custom sets from places like Nova, FilmArena, HDZeta, Manta Lab etc.
I used to have a spare bedroom dedicated to movie stuff with all my media on Billy Bookshelves and special editions and movie parapharnelia shelved and on display. Now it’s all in boxes.
I have it all ripped 1:1 on my Media server plus backups but can’t get myself to rid of the physical media.