The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?’
I feel what I’ve always felt – that DVDs and Blu-rays were the summit of the film-lovers’ experience, and that progress should have stopped forever after that. Perhaps downloads or streamable films can have the picture quality of a Blu-ray (someone will doubtless tell me they do), but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own.
…
So my Blu-ray collecting goes on, but it’s strictly finite. I don’t want any film I don’t actually love (this rules out the collected Tarkovsky or Bergman, things I’d like to think of myself as liking rather than actually wanting to watch). My ambitions in fact are modest: the middle period works of Woody Allen (they’re about £25 a piece and should be), the odd Hollywood classic (the more technicolour the better) and some of those gritty 1960s northern films (the kind Morrissey purloined for his album covers) starring Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham. Then, barring the odd hiccup, I’m done.
The answer for me is large hard drives. I have never used disks before but it can’t be easier than opening a file
What do you use to rip your collection? Or are you on the high seas? I’ve tried various ways to rip my collection but so far nothing really works for newer Blu rays.
I only sail. My go to target is Atmos HDR 2160p Remux or Web-DL.
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Or was always told web rips were poor quality…guess streaming changed that.
I use MakeMKV and an Asus BW-16D1HT in an external enclosure. Run into very few disks that I have trouble ripping, but eventually an update comes out and solves it. Or cleaning the disc and trying again, cleaning again and retrying, on and on until it works.
I’ll have to give that a try if I can find a suitable drive. Tried a different one but it’s fw must have been updated to prevent ripping.
So far so good using makemkv with my collection.
+1 for make MKV. After that Handbrake for h265 encoding
You could create NFC cards with the cover of each movie and scan them to trigger the start of a movie on your collection.
This sounds really cool, like some wall art that has a qr code or something.
How would it integrate with plex?
You could try to use home assistant which has plugins for both plex and NFC. You may need to fool around with an ESP32 or arduino board to get it all working together.
Agreed. Also, I don’t need full BluRay quality. A 3GB H265 is good enough that I can’t tell the difference unless I really pay attention.
But even a 30GB rip costs under 50¢ to store on the margin (1.4¢/GB CAD is the current for 3.5" HDDs.) (Or 75¢ if you want to RAID it in case of drive failure.)
I can understand liking physically browsing through a shelf and the tactile feeling of putting a disc into a player. I still prefer file storage, but at least I can understand
either i get to download a mkv or i pirate shamelessly
Ugh. Forget that. I need to know what movie I want to watch BEFORE I want to watch it AND I need to come up with $20 and somewhere to keep it.
And yes, I am old enough to have had a blockbuster card. Still might, actually.
Anything I value now, I download at best possible resolution then keep on a mammoth 16Tb drive, streamed through Plex. And I’m glad because, over the years, so much great TV especially has been lost forever (not even available on DVD). Because hard drives aren’t infallible, I also back it all up to iDrive.
So glad to see others here that understand the importance and advantages of owning physical media. All the best to you all.
The streaming situation has always sucked.
Yay Plex and discs
I’ve recently gone back to dvd, every couple weeks look through goodwill/an estate sale. eBay titles I’m thinking of. I just wonder if any new stuff can still be found in dvd or is that just not part of the deal anymore?
Also be sure to check local libraries.
You’re right, they’re awesome. Also, there’s still a RedBox by the supermarket
The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket.
I love how this is the first of only a few sentences before getting paywalled in the link
My household has stopped most streaming services and went back to physical media. Aside from getting up to change disks, we haven’t missed much. Plus finding used media is a fun hobby now. This may sound dumb but the task of getting up to swap a disk has helped me from just sitting all day watching . I feel like I get a bit more chores done. Still would like to set up a good media server though
We need one of them 5 disc media player back.
