“On September 29th, 2023, we will ship out our final red envelope. It has been an honor to share movie nights with you. …We sincerely thank you for joining us on this amazing journey of 25 years.” -The Netflix DVD Team
With Netflix discs closing its doors on the 29th, where will you get your DVD’s, Blu Rays and UHDs?
This raises a few questions for discussion:
- What services do you use?
- Whats your experience with any of these services?
- What do you do with your physical media?
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I know, I know, yes, its 2023 and people still get physical media. A physical disc can have many advantages over a streaming service, such as:
- Control Over Content
- Quality
- Sound Profiles
- Extras
- Back Ups
Here is a list of popular Rental and Buy services:
Rent:
Buy (New):
- https://www.amazon.com
- https://www.hamiltonbook.com
- https://shoutfactory.com
- https://grindhousevideo.com
Buy (Used):
Just a friendly reminder, your local library likely has a movie and video game section, it’s worth having a look
What’s more, DVD-RW drives for a desktop PC can be had for under $10 and USB-powered ones aren’t much more. If anyone out there in TV land still relies on DVDs, you should get yourself a drive and rip your local library’s DVDs to your computer. Handbrake is your friend and you can get a DVD down to a video stream with a much smaller file size than the disc image, but you can also still get blank DVDs at any major retailer and make your own copies with all the menus and special features. DVD still works, but it’s 30-year-old technology and paying other people to watch the movies on that format is getting ridiculous, you owe it to yourself to keep DVD expenses to the drive and blank discs from here on out.
Disclaimer for the people who will whine about it: Yes, this copyright infringement. Don’t snitch on yourself and you’ll be fine. I personally recommend and fully endorse violation of copyright law in this way. I advocate that you commit this criminal activity in full knowledge that this makes me an accessory to crime, and I advocate that you commit this crime and others. I do so with the full approval of the MPA and RIAA, whom I unequivocally represent and speak for in absolutely all matters, and they assume all civil and criminal liability for everything I just said.
What services do you use?
- Best Buy
- Redbox
- Amazon
- eBay
- My local library
Whats your experience with any of these services?
From least expensive to most expensive:
- My local library is free to use, and they even have Blu-rays alongside DVDs, which is rare in my experience. However, their selection when it comes to Blu-rays pales in comparison to their entire shelves of DVDs, and they seem to favor DVDs. I sometimes donate a few Blu-rays to my library in order to get people to check them out.
- Redbox is the cheapest way to legally own movies. Like my library, the Redbox kiosk I go to (and most Redboxes in general) seems to prioritize DVD over Blu-ray, which can be a bit disheartenig. You can rent a Blu-ray at Redbox for $2.99/night, or you can buy it for $4.99.
- On eBay you can get some pretty good deals, though the condition of the disc may vary.
- Amazon is great if you want to pre-order a DVD/Blu-ray and want it delivered on the same day it releases. But then you have to buy it from Amazon. I don’t usually pre-order movies to be delivered to me anymore.
- And finally there’s Best Buy. If I want a newly-released disc, I’d rather go out of my way to drive all the way to the mall and buy the disc in-person at Best Buy than pre-order it from Amazon. The Best Buy near me is one of the few stores to still have a dedicated space for physical media, so I should feel grateful for that.
What do you do with your physical media?
Before I even put the discs in my player, I put them in my Blu-ray drive and make a backup with MakeMKV. If the keys to remove the DRM aren’t available, I’ll just torrent the BDMV. After the discs have been backed up, I watch them on my player.
If the keys to remove the DRM aren’t available, I’ll just torrent the BDMV.
If you have the right model of blu ray drive you could patch the firmware with libredrive so you could decrypt the keys yourself. I set up my LG drive with it in like 10 min.
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you don’t, cuz why tf would you do that
it’s objectively obsolete lol
Because tons of media that was never properly digitized for the streaming era and only ever ended up on discs.
Doing it now will prevent a loss of history, much like early BBC recordings are lost because they would just tape over old broadcasts to save money.
For example, there was recently unearthed a single episode of a sketch comedy show made by Graham Chapman and Douglas Adams.
Problem was, the tape it was on was from the formats before VHS and Betamax. While the tape existed, no players to play back the tape existed anymore. It took a several year effort to build a new player from scratch. Finally, after all that, they were able to record the show to digital media and now it lives on YouTube for people to see. It’s not the funniest material ever produced by either man, but it’s definitely a piece of history worth looking at if you’ve ever enjoyed Monty Python or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Attempts to digitize things that are currently available on disc but not available in digital file formats/streaming is absolutely a process of maintaining historical documents that would otherwise be lost to time. Building a new DVD or Bluray player from scratch when none exist anymore is a much bigger effort than making a tape video player, because it involves proprietary codecs, compression, and DRM.
You’re not necessarily wrong, but you are unbearable.
Just because a technology has been eclipsed, it doesn’t mean it no longer has value.
Optical media is really the best choice for data archival. Magnetic media is far more subject to big rot. High quality CDs, DVDs and to a lesser extent Blu-ray Discs can last an order of magnitude longer.
Data redundancy exists, and tape backups is a completely different technology then CDs/DVDs/Blueray/etc, which is what this topic is about. Then I should be an easy block for you.
Because not everyone has gigabit fiber run to their door. Streaming is not always the answer. I have read through all the back and forth here, but this is the point that was lost in the conversation. While it may be obsolete to you, it’s still the easiest way to transfer large amounts of data to someone that might not have any internet other than their cell phone service.
Why do these replies assume that streaming is the only other option lol. The emotional circlejerk is strong here. Digital formats are just better now.
CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are all digital formats.
I hate having physical media personally. I just want files of everything.
