According to this site the average lifespan of the cheapest type of bluray is 5-10 years. So a personal backup with makemkv (and maybe handbrake) might not be a bad idea.
You’re talking about writable discs. Normal blue-ray discs have a much longer life expectancy than most other mediums including HDDs. Standards and manufacturing have improved too. Modern discs have a life expectancy for at least 50-150 years.
I have a collection of over 300 discs. 100 of them are 10 years or older. None of them have failed on me. And I don’t have a temperature controlled room or anything like that. A lot of HDDs have failed on me during that time.
It’s a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD’s for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It’s cheaper and doesn’t clutter up my house. It’s a shame that there’s nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so its trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
I’ve seen some niche bands release (free) official torrents of their music on a certain piracy website. It’s kind of surreal. Just goes to show that piracy is and always has been about sharing culture
I have too many Blu-rays with unskippable ads at the start. I really don’t need to be shown ads for movies that came out 5 years ago before being allowed to watch the movie I purchased and own.
You can always skip the movie trailers if you have the right player. I have 300+ blue-rays and not a single one has unskippable trailers. There are also players that’ll skip them automatically. Besides, you can just rip the disc and remove the ads.
Certainly not. I just insert the disc and it starts playing. How can it be easier than that? It’s also really hard to get the best possible quality of every movie and all the extras with piracy. It’s not very convenient.
Besides, you don’t support the artists in any way doing that. I want more movies to be produced that I like. The only way to incentivize that is with my wallet. Blue-rays is probably the best way to do it.
Acquiring:
Blu-Ray - Drive to the store, find the movie you want, (In some cases make sure it has the special features if you want those, which will cost more), wait at the checkout, pay, drive home.
Alternatively - Go the the store’s website, type the movie name, enter credit card details, wait for delivery.
Piracy - Go to Torrent site, type movies name, download. (Optional - spend an extra minute looking for the torrent of a lower quality because your TV can’t display 1080p anyway, and making sure it has special features if you want those)
Movie is ready to play in less time than it would take to drive to the store.
Playing:
Blu-ray - Find the disc, put in player, wait for ads on media you have purchased and own, (alternative - pay more for a better player that skips ads you don’t want to watch on the media you paid for and own), wait through needless menu animations, watch movie.
Piracy - Go to your movies folder, open the file.
There is no metric by which Blu-ray is more convenient than Piracy unless you live somewhere with lousy internet. I have on more than one occasion downloaded a torrent for a movie I own the Blu-Ray for because that was faster than finding the disk with the added bonus of skipping all the faff on the disk (ads, menu transitions). The only argument for purchasing a Blu-ray is to support the creators, and if they want me to spend money for a worse experience then the studios should not be making it even worse by including ads.
Every time I purchase a Blu-ray to support media I like, I watch it and I am immediately reminded of all the annoyances that make me regret my decision.
Netflix was so successful because it was easier than piracy. Now there’s a dozen different “me too!” services and I could check each of them to see if they have the movie/show I’m looking for, or I could just go to a torrent site that I know has it.
You keep repeating the same things that I’ve already invalidated.
All ads are skippable and with the right player will skip automatically
You can digitize your movie collection. No need to insert any disc if that’s what you prefer
Blu-rays have much better video and sound quality. If you do find a Blue-ray rip you’ll quickly run out of storage unless you spend a thousand dollars on harddrives. Each Blue-ray rip takes between 50 and 100 GB of storage. No, don’t even start with shitty compression. I don’t want that.
Some people want the Blue-ray menu. They are actually really nice sometimes. There are even movies with director commentary, recording functionality or other fun gimmicks. You don’t have to use it. But you have it as sold and intended.
But all of the points above are irrelevant when you consider that pircary does not support the creators at all and ensures that companies make even shittier content and services. They need the money to produce the content so they will squeeze everyone else even more if they don’t get anything from you. Piracy makes everything worse.
You keep repeating the same things that I’ve already invalidated.
Ditto
All ads are skippable and with the right player will skip automatically
Not on mine. Buying a different player isn’t exactly “easier”, they sure as fuck try to make is difficult for me to avoid the ads on the media I paid for, and I shouldn’t have to.
You can digitize your movie collection. No need to insert any disc if that’s what you prefer
So once again, piracy is easier (My entire thesis here). I can acquire it already digitized for me.
Blu-rays have much better video and sound quality. If you do find a Blue-ray rip you’ll quickly run out of storage unless you spend a thousand dollars on harddrives. Each Blue-ray rip takes between 50 and 100 GB of storage. No, don’t even start with shitty compression. I don’t want that.
I frequently spend time looking for torrents of lower quality because the most popular, easy to acquire files, are higher quality than my system is capable of.
The easiest to acquire file will have identical quality to a Blu-ray for me because the source is not what is limiting the quality.
Some people want the Blue-ray menu. They are actually really nice sometimes. There are even movies with director commentary, recording functionality or other fun gimmicks. You don’t have to use it. But you have it as sold and intended.
Bully for them, I don’t. Most torrents include all sorts of special features, from multiple sources, that sometimes you wouldn’t be able to get them all on a single Blu-ray. Different audio tracks exist for files, it doesn’t require a disk to have the commentary track.
But all of the points above are irrelevant when you consider that pircary does not support the creators at all and ensures that companies make even shittier content and services. They need the money to produce the content so they will squeeze everyone else even more if they don’t get anything from you.
I’ve already agreed that the only reason to buy a Blu-ray is to support the creators. The fact that companies apparently need you to purchase Blu-rays or they will go out of business is all the more reason for the companies to not enshittify the Blu-rays with ads.
Piracy makes everything worse.
Capitalism makes everything worse. That’s why ads are on the Blu-ray in the first place. It’s not enough for the company to make money from the sale, they have to make more money selling ads, which makes my experience as the purchaser of the product worse.
If companies allowed me to pay them directly for a digital download of a video file, without any ads included in it, I’d be happy to do so. But that’s never going to happen because of [see meme above].
Why not? They’re cheap as fuck now, and if you have a xbox one or ps4 or newer (one that still has a disc drive), you already have a fucking blu ray player.
My last console was a N64. I still play those old games on occasion. My PC gaming experience isn’t equalled by consoles. I’d actually buy a Blu-ray player for my PC, it’s connected to my TV and sound system - but I hate most of the movies made today. Maybe I still will, just to preserve some old classics in my library.
That’s not the point. You specifically may not own a Blu-Ray player, but there have been 280 million non-dedicated devices from a single company sold that play them. That’s not counting other consoles like Xbox One and Series X, computers with BD drives, and dedicated BD players.
Seems like a far cry from your statement that nobody owns one. Even as hyperbole, it’s just false.
Do you have a tower PC? I have a stack of DVD read/write drives +/- that I need to get rid of pretty soon, I won’t have a place to store them after the next couple of months. I’d offer to ship you one, but I have to put an asterisk in there. The last time I offered to ship a guy some RAM it turned out there was a lot of international barriers and it was going to cost me about 10 times what the RAM was worth to ship it to him, with no guarantee he’d actually receive it. So… ?
I have a tower pc or two, but I gotta go pick it from the attic, hose it down, and then see if the cd tray still works
But I appreciate your reply, even if I took my time to reply
Farewell, friend 🙏
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It’s worth noting disk video is usually uncompressed much less compressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.
It’s worth noting disk video is usually uncompressed
Just being a bit pedantic here, but they’re much less compressed since their source is generally the original recordings. Anything you get from streaming services is much more heavily compressed, and anything you’re likely to pirate is compressed from DVD or Blu-ray sources (or worse, they can be compressed from already compressed streaming sources.)
Buy Blu-rays. Highly underrated.
According to this site the average lifespan of the cheapest type of bluray is 5-10 years. So a personal backup with makemkv (and maybe handbrake) might not be a bad idea.
You’re talking about writable discs. Normal blue-ray discs have a much longer life expectancy than most other mediums including HDDs. Standards and manufacturing have improved too. Modern discs have a life expectancy for at least 50-150 years.
I have a collection of over 300 discs. 100 of them are 10 years or older. None of them have failed on me. And I don’t have a temperature controlled room or anything like that. A lot of HDDs have failed on me during that time.
It’s a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD’s for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It’s cheaper and doesn’t clutter up my house. It’s a shame that there’s nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so its trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
Some people probably sell torrents of their movies, but I haven’t seen it yet
I’ve seen some niche bands release (free) official torrents of their music on a certain piracy website. It’s kind of surreal. Just goes to show that piracy is and always has been about sharing culture
Don’t start buying records off band camp, it addictive
Found a movie I couldn’t buy digitally, but could buy the bluray.
It’s a forgotten art form. There were hidden things in the menus and fun little menu transitions.
And it was trivially easy to make my own digital copy. I fully support this post.
I have too many Blu-rays with unskippable ads at the start. I really don’t need to be shown ads for movies that came out 5 years ago before being allowed to watch the movie I purchased and own.
You can always skip the movie trailers if you have the right player. I have 300+ blue-rays and not a single one has unskippable trailers. There are also players that’ll skip them automatically. Besides, you can just rip the disc and remove the ads.
So once again, as per the meme, it’s easier to just pirate in the first place
Certainly not. I just insert the disc and it starts playing. How can it be easier than that? It’s also really hard to get the best possible quality of every movie and all the extras with piracy. It’s not very convenient.
Besides, you don’t support the artists in any way doing that. I want more movies to be produced that I like. The only way to incentivize that is with my wallet. Blue-rays is probably the best way to do it.
Acquiring:
Blu-Ray - Drive to the store, find the movie you want, (In some cases make sure it has the special features if you want those, which will cost more), wait at the checkout, pay, drive home.
Alternatively - Go the the store’s website, type the movie name, enter credit card details, wait for delivery.
Piracy - Go to Torrent site, type movies name, download. (Optional - spend an extra minute looking for the torrent of a lower quality because your TV can’t display 1080p anyway, and making sure it has special features if you want those)
Movie is ready to play in less time than it would take to drive to the store.
Playing:
Blu-ray - Find the disc, put in player, wait for ads on media you have purchased and own, (alternative - pay more for a better player that skips ads you don’t want to watch on the media you paid for and own), wait through needless menu animations, watch movie.
Piracy - Go to your movies folder, open the file.
There is no metric by which Blu-ray is more convenient than Piracy unless you live somewhere with lousy internet. I have on more than one occasion downloaded a torrent for a movie I own the Blu-Ray for because that was faster than finding the disk with the added bonus of skipping all the faff on the disk (ads, menu transitions). The only argument for purchasing a Blu-ray is to support the creators, and if they want me to spend money for a worse experience then the studios should not be making it even worse by including ads.
Every time I purchase a Blu-ray to support media I like, I watch it and I am immediately reminded of all the annoyances that make me regret my decision.
Netflix was so successful because it was easier than piracy. Now there’s a dozen different “me too!” services and I could check each of them to see if they have the movie/show I’m looking for, or I could just go to a torrent site that I know has it.
You keep repeating the same things that I’ve already invalidated.
Ditto
Not on mine. Buying a different player isn’t exactly “easier”, they sure as fuck try to make is difficult for me to avoid the ads on the media I paid for, and I shouldn’t have to.
So once again, piracy is easier (My entire thesis here). I can acquire it already digitized for me.
I frequently spend time looking for torrents of lower quality because the most popular, easy to acquire files, are higher quality than my system is capable of.
The easiest to acquire file will have identical quality to a Blu-ray for me because the source is not what is limiting the quality.
Bully for them, I don’t. Most torrents include all sorts of special features, from multiple sources, that sometimes you wouldn’t be able to get them all on a single Blu-ray. Different audio tracks exist for files, it doesn’t require a disk to have the commentary track.
I’ve already agreed that the only reason to buy a Blu-ray is to support the creators. The fact that companies apparently need you to purchase Blu-rays or they will go out of business is all the more reason for the companies to not enshittify the Blu-rays with ads.
Capitalism makes everything worse. That’s why ads are on the Blu-ray in the first place. It’s not enough for the company to make money from the sale, they have to make more money selling ads, which makes my experience as the purchaser of the product worse.
If companies allowed me to pay them directly for a digital download of a video file, without any ads included in it, I’d be happy to do so. But that’s never going to happen because of [see meme above].
Thing is, nobody owns a Blu-ray player.
Why not? They’re cheap as fuck now, and if you have a xbox one or ps4 or newer (one that still has a disc drive), you already have a fucking blu ray player.
My phone has a VPN client, a torrent client, and a video player, but it doesn’t have a Blu-ray player.
Do you expect me to watch movies on some sort of non-portable screen? What is this, 1997?
If I’m not mistaken, vlc supports MKV, you just have to back it up.
Watching movies on a tiny screen seems like a step back to me.
I rip my Blu-rays and upload to my Plex server. Once that’s done, I can stream the movies to my phone via the Plex app. It’s super easy.
My last console was a N64. I still play those old games on occasion. My PC gaming experience isn’t equalled by consoles. I’d actually buy a Blu-ray player for my PC, it’s connected to my TV and sound system - but I hate most of the movies made today. Maybe I still will, just to preserve some old classics in my library.
Playstation 3, 4, and 5 sold a combined 280 million units, that’s a decent number of Blu-Ray players.
I haven’t bought a console since the N64, PC gaming has just been better ever since. I still have my N64 and NES though.
That’s not the point. You specifically may not own a Blu-Ray player, but there have been 280 million non-dedicated devices from a single company sold that play them. That’s not counting other consoles like Xbox One and Series X, computers with BD drives, and dedicated BD players.
Seems like a far cry from your statement that nobody owns one. Even as hyperbole, it’s just false.
I think basically that’s it. I don’t even have a CD player to rip my own CDs
Edit: guess that’s on me, though
Do you have a tower PC? I have a stack of DVD read/write drives +/- that I need to get rid of pretty soon, I won’t have a place to store them after the next couple of months. I’d offer to ship you one, but I have to put an asterisk in there. The last time I offered to ship a guy some RAM it turned out there was a lot of international barriers and it was going to cost me about 10 times what the RAM was worth to ship it to him, with no guarantee he’d actually receive it. So… ?
I have a tower pc or two, but I gotta go pick it from the attic, hose it down, and then see if the cd tray still works
But I appreciate your reply, even if I took my time to reply Farewell, friend 🙏
Turns out some things the damn Gen Z guys were using are actually bussin fr no cap
How high res is bluray?
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It’s worth noting disk video is usually
uncompressedmuch less compressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.Just being a bit pedantic here, but they’re much less compressed since their source is generally the original recordings. Anything you get from streaming services is much more heavily compressed, and anything you’re likely to pirate is compressed from DVD or Blu-ray sources (or worse, they can be compressed from already compressed streaming sources.)
Different compression, not “no-compression”.
A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 4 minutes of uncompressed 24fps 4k video.
Usually 4k.
The 4K UHD Blu-Rays are in 4K HDR. But the average Blu-Ray is 1080p.
Up to 100MBit/s video. Audio bitrate is usually lossless and has a higher bitrate than the entire video + audio stream of most streaming services.