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a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.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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I assume hard drives are not considered “physical” for some reason?
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.
I backed all mine up and sold it. I can’t justify dedicating a whole room in my house to media when I can fit it all on a few hard drives.
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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.
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).
I’m in the process of throwing everything away. I have got a digital copy(s) of all my content and even remasters of DVD media. I don’t even have a DVD player.
I tried selling it on market place and it’s not getting any offers. Time for the bin.
Buy > Rip > Donate to thrift store. This way I can make someone else happy.
Yep, tossed hundreds of discs. Most of them were “backups” of Netflix discs, but they are long gone.
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 threw away my DVDs years back. With >1200 physical books in my 650sq ft apartment, I’m thinking of getting rid of some genre paperbacks, and replacing them with electronic versions. I’ve got a ton of collectible hardbacks, which I’ll keep forever.
I never understood people that say physical media takes too much space. It’s literally a binder or two.
Chuck the boxes, keep the sleeves.
MY GF has the same problem. Huge physical media collection, tiny living space. She was on the verge of throwing it out/ donating it after I set up an Emby server for her, but managed to reach a compromise instead. Disc binders.
While still taking up space, they are much smaller than normal DVD cases and you still have them for backup.
I just throw out the cases. Buy used, rip, store disk in a collection case.
Never throw away physical media. If space is a problem, remove disks from cases and store on spindles (the packages that CD-R blanks come in are ideal).
Most people run a compression pass on media rips (handbrake) to make storage feasible with today’s disks and budgets. The day is rapidly approaching when hard disks will be large enough and cheap enough to store bit exact copies of your media. You’ll want to rerip then, and having the media will make that possible.
Physical media serves as long term stable backup. It should be part of your backup plan, just like multiple physical backup disks sets, offsite storage, cloud storage, etc.
If space is an issue, there are easy solutions. Disks do not have to be in cases, and they’re too useful to part with.