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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And decent resolution: DVD is forever stuck at SD (480p MPEG). While Blu-ray can be UHD (4K HEVC).
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…
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 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
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
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.
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 !
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.
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
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
Can we stop publishing these articles? I was enjoying the cheap CDs.
its still declining, just slower
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?
