Buy Blu-rays. Highly underrated.
- The sound and video quality is the best you'll get anywhere.
- It selectively supports the movies and artists you like.
- You get amazing extras and documentaries about the movie.
- Nobody can take the movie away from you.
- You can rip the disc with MakeMKV to view digitally with Jellyfin.
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.
True. I missed that. With 10-20 years the general point still stands though. There should be quite a few movie blurays out there that are close to the end of their life.
It's based on the same stuff as CDs and DVDs.
I don't think they last forever, but if the CDs and DVDs aren't failing in mass numbers yet, I don't see why the Blu-ray discs would be.
Estimate for CD lifespans was in the 100 year range, but the only way to really put that to the test is to try them in 100 years.
How they're stored probably plays a major role as well. Most of mine are just stored in my living room in the boxes they came in. If you leave them lying in direct sunlight, or attics and garages at unusual temperatures and humidity levels, they'll likely die a lot sooner.
Estimate for CD lifespans was in the 100 year range, but the only way to really put that to the test is to try them in 100 years.
FWIW, I have some CDs that are pushing 40+ years at this point. They work fine, scratches and all.
In my experience, CDRs and other record-able media can't handle a single summer in a hot car. Mistakes were made. If you have your hands on anything like that, I agree: focus there first for your data hoarding activities.
Yeah, definitely had a few CD-Rs die in the car. We don't normally have particularly extreme weather in the UK so they last a few years normally. The combination of CD player heat, engine heat and summer heat makes them the temperature of a hot drink. They don't like that.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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?
•
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.
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 🙏
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.)
Different compression, not "no-compression".
A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 4 minutes of uncompressed 24fps 4k video.
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.
That's far Cry 6 for me. Bought it off the epic site when it first came out and it didn't work because of the drm. (Needed sse 4.3? which my old assed pc doesn't have.)
Downloaded a cracked torrent, worked like a charm.
Guess the drm could only run on sse4. Or the devs were paid off to put that check into their game to help sell more pcs. Probably both.
I feel old, alright?
If you bought a thing to be used for the thing on the thin, then download a backup for that thing on the thin.... Tired of typing it...
Certainly a beautiful buccaneer.
Or sweaty swashbuckler.
You sure that's for anticheat? Just sounds like the game was compiled for newer CPUs because SSE provides a huge performance boost in some areas.
I believe it was Denuvo that was the issue. The cracked version with denuvo stripped from it worked without a hiccup and ran smooth.
To their credit, Denuvo has been very effective for the past year. Now instead of playing some games I wouldn't have bought anyway, I just don't play them.
In a perfect world:
-
Game publisher release Game with DRM
-
DRM gets cracked by pirates
-
Game publisher acknowledges the DRM has been cracked and compiles a new binary without DRM and redistributes it to customers.
In a perfect world no one would pirate video games. So I guess this is more of a realistic compromise.
But you don't understand, this time my DRM experts assure me it will take at least two days to crack this time! (for realsies this time)
This topic always reminds me of one of my co-op jobs where I was working with a piece of software to develop an importer for its file format. Getting the software running properly with its licensing system took a couple of weeks. We had the license all along, but it used a license server that needed to be set up on my machine, plus a dongle that it used.
Once it was up and running, I did like the software and one day decided to also use it to produce files for a personal project I was doing for fun at home. Downloaded a pirated version and had it running by that evening no issue.
The DRM just made for a crappy experience for the paying customer and wasn't even noticed by those it was meant to prevent using their software.
Though I now wonder if that was deliberate because they'd still catch that in corporate audits (I think? Not really sure how those work tbh), so allowing individual users to easily bypass the DRM could help them build market share that they get paid for by businesses buying licenses when users say it's their preferred platform.
The DRM is there so the managers at the software developer can say to their bosses they did everything possible to prevent someone stealing the software. And the same arguments goes on case of legal issues. Although some use it as a way to force substitutions these days.
It’s a lot like locks on a house.
Picking a lock is not prohibitively difficult. It’s just there to provide a form of friction to make clear that you should not expect to burgle homes.
However, a world that puts every single item of any value behind bulletproof glass and deadbolts because of pervasive thieves is oppressive. And yet, that’s what we aim for when everyone decides to take whatever they feasibly can. A good world would mostly rely on honor policy.
This is kind of a shit metaphor because if we extend it to how piracy actually works it highlights how stupid DRM is in the first place. A lock on your house has to be picked by each individual robber, unless they all show up on the same day. A cracked game would be like if only one person has to pick the lock on your house, but they don't actually take anything they just make a perfect copy of your house without the draconian 12 step lock you installed and gives copies to whoever wants one. If you never noticed all the people sharing magical copies of your house with each other you would never know you lost anything, because you didn't. Only your blind greed was injured by the thought that those people might have been willing to pay to use your house if only it had been locked down against those damn house copiers. On your next house you make the locks even more invasive and complex, to the point they block half the driveway or make the oven and bathroom unusable. Then that same one person spends an extra half day to pick it and makes a copy but without the crazy lock so they actually get a better house than you're selling. Whether people like it or not, digital media has always been on the honor system, and always will be. DRM just punishes people for doing the honorable thing and paying.
True, most metaphors around DRM related to physical items collapse reasonably quickly. The thing about home locks was only worthwhile for the topic of how dysfunctional society gets with locks on everything and no trust.
Most DRM metaphors start with “A person has X object, and is greedy for money” - nothing written as to how they obtained that object.
The more intricate comparison is that someone has produced a good that is easily copied, but required deep financial investment on their part to first create. It’s disingenuous to forget that part or imply all people selling something digital are rich by those or other means. People put large investments into the idea that their copiable works would be desired by other people. No one’s obligated to buy it, but they’re betting enough people will want it to pay for it and recoup costs. “It’s okay, we didn’t delete your copy from your hard drive” means nothing.
The extension to the thought about “we don’t put locks on everything because we trust most people act honorably” is this: If we naturally expected all players to pirate all games, then there would be much, much fewer artists dedicated to creating media. There are many cases of people writing software for donations, and they often need additional funding. Firefox is unfortunately a prime example of that, being primarily funded by Google.
By the way, Google puts out its free software thanks to ads. Don’t you love those? Makes you prefer a different financial relationship with consumers.
I've just come back to piracy after such a long time, and things are still the same, it's like meeting an old trusty friend again.
I was gonna say "trusty?" But in all honesty I'd much rather trust digital pirates than corporations.
Perfect example for this is read dead redemtion 2, if they do it with gta 6 too I'm going to crack it