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Missed opportunity IMO there should totally be a piracy product or site called VHS

they are what your torrents evolved from.

Because I'm uncreative, I'm just going to steal the joke from Sseth.

Because the vehicle in From Software's game, Elden Ring, is called "Torrent", I can't wait for the next From Soft character "Punjabi Codex Denuvo, pre-cracked Novirus [MeGusta]".

Have you heard of doing both? (^_-)

Only if you pay for them 🏴‍☠️

Perhaps even a crime.

where owning media is considered a luxury.

Much more likely that it will simply be impossible to legally own any media.

Back when people bought analog media, I don't know if it was fully spelled out what you did and didn't actually own. Obviously you didn't own the copyright to whatever it is you were buying. But, you did own the physical item. What rights were transferred to you when you bought the record in the record store? Probably an unlimited right to play the record at home, but not the right to play it in a dance club. I wonder if the "copyright license" was ever actually spelled out though.

In the digital era there is no longer any physical item to own, and since you never did own the "information" encoded into the physical medium, ownership of digital files is already on shaky ground. In the past you could buy MP3s, and these days it's still occasionally possible to buy DRM-free e-books. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the future just having media stored locally will be presumed to be illegal.

Bluray was always luxury.

not everyone lives in countries with local libraries that have videos

My local torrent site has them without getting off the couch.

Not in all countries.

I've got no way to play DVDs though I'd have to go and buy a DVD player. Streaming content is much more convenient I would like to be able to do it legally and without hassle. But the content creating companies don't seem to be interested in providing me an option to do that.

Anyway my local library isn't really that local it's a 25-minute drive and probably an hour plus walk up a really steep hill.

instructions unclear, set fire to my entire DVD collection

Or save them redundantly to several archive-quality hdds. Why have 20 blu-ray dvds for one copy of a collection when you could have 3 complete copies on 3 hdd. Both are life limited media, both will eventually require re-archiving. One has potential for mechanical failure, the other more likely to physically degrade. Pick your poison, or do one of each.

Genuinely curious how are publishers limiting physical media? I haven't bought a blu-ray in a long while.

"The powers that be" aren't doing some kind of nefarious thing here. Physical media is only worth producing if they're doing it at incredibly high volumes. The smaller the run, the more expensive it is for each individual unit. Fewer and fewer people are buying, and there are fewer and fewer physical devices out there capable of playing the media.

For them, it's a simple calculation of the cost of producing physical media, getting it from the factory to stores, paying the stores to shelve it, etc. vs. simply having a website with media files on it.

While there are some people who still prefer physical media, for the most part consumers also prefer just going to a website and clicking a button vs. driving to a store, parking, searching the shelves in the hope they have what they're looking for, and so-on. In addition, as fewer companies put out physical media, it's harder to find the physical media you want in the stores, so more people prefer to go online, which leads to less demand for physical media, fewer choices on the shelves, and more demand for streaming.

I'm sure the bonus of consumers rarely having a way to view a movie or listen to a song an unlimited number of times without paying is something the media companies also enjoy. But, the main reason physical media is disappearing isn't some kind of conspiracy by the mysterious "powers that be", it's a simple profit calculation by accountants at Sony and Disney.

oh man I used to have (way long ago, the statue of limitations has crumbled) the most extensive collection of early simpsons. then my family started buying me plastic simpson head collections for birthdays and holidays, so I stopped downloading. still have a great collection.

now instead my hard drive is filled with so much music. more music than games, which my wife refuses to believe (but half of it is hers).

and we have an entire cd collection, and vinyl collection to rip if I ever get bored.

there was this old blues program on the local npr station that I'd listen to religiously in high school. I was trying to learn sax. I kind of did, but I've got a stack of those tapes taller than me. I just right now found out the guy who ran the program died last month so I'm trying to dig out a cassette deck. here's a song i got off his program.

and fill up my hard drives.

This is the real cost of your method. Luckily hard drive costs halve every 2 years or so.

I watched my first anime, Tenchi Muyo, by streaming it on Real Player at like 90p.

Workin' on it! Got me a used laptop that's about as recent as possible to still have a slim bluray slot built in. Learning all the things.

I highly suggest that you make ripped backups. I learned the hard way, I digitised my grandfather's CD collection and some of his DVDs, some of which were already damaged beyond repair. Some of his broken DVDs are less than 20 years old. They are not scratched, they are in mint condition.

My Spotify playlists get greyed-out sections in them with disturbing regularity. As soon as I figure out how to download them without installing software that gives me a million viruses, I'll be deleting my account...

I just don't have nearly the amount of places to get them anymore. Still, I have a small wall worth of DVDs and Blu-ray.

I’d still rather have on demand streaming over broadcast. Having to time-shift by recording live shows was super annoying.

That must mean you have the original Lilo & Stitch.

Excellent.

you got Blu Rays from before Steamboat Willy?

Disney has always been shit, especially their business practices.

Those are the same things

The corpo sold ones were.
The ones you could DIY, on the other hand...

Some players/remotes are more helpful than others.

Skip doesn't work? Try menu, fast forward, etc

Man if there was only a convenient program that can be used to make mkv’s from optical media

Exactly just like CD's huge, unpractical and fragile.
While you could have mp3's and movie files at about the same time.
I don't understand people's choices sometimes, and now I can't get how everyone pays for this ridiculous Spotify, with it's scummy practices and worse, when you're at some houseparty and the host asks what I want to hear it doesn't have my music since it's not mainstream enough.
Glad I'm old and don't have to deal with this BS where consumers can choose from the same multinational corporate pushed garbage they hear everywhere and nothing else.
And they're OK with it too since it's all they know.

I just got mine set up with a custom domain name and CloudFlare tunnel, it seems to work a treat. Now to start selling user accounts... 🤔

You got it backwards. The Sith are the corpos and the resistance is piracy.

In the movie, Robert Downey Jr's character said...

I know you're talking about Tropic Thunder, but how many other people would?

The extended DVD for 40 Year Old Virgin features all the "how I know you're gay" that didn't make the movie itself. I giggled extensively.

Many libraries have large DVD collections.

There are some still around believe it or not. There's one local to me that's been around forever. They don't have anything that's exclusive to streaming services, but that have loads of new movies and a massive collection of old movies. They're pretty handy to get movies that are in limbo due to rights disputes.

Same bro. I don't get people who want to watch Dirty Dancing and The Lion King two million times. It's good but... I want new things! New experiences! I get bored revisiting what I already know.

You dont have a favourite show or movie?

Yep! It's how I learned about that Poop Cruise documentary. Or Tiger King. Or all the trash Isekai.

Things I would never walk into a store and just outright buy them. And if I did, it would be like $10-50 bucks, the price of the subscription.

Yes, but there's no reason why Nebula wouldn't enshittify in the future. At least they dare to offer a lifetime account so it's not just one more subscription. And I just want google to loose.

I could not get jellyfish to work

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They come out with new releases all the time. Brick and mortar stores just don't always carry them. In the past year Target and Best Buy stopped. Here's a list of physical media that came out this week: https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=36930

There are still DVDs and Blurays being made for new movies. Some movies are 100% digital, but in my experience they tend to be the ones that the streaming platforms produce themselves and they have an interest in keeping people on their service.

But most other movies still get dvds and blurays made and are still sold in stores.

I guess it's not technically a new movie, but I just bought the 4k blu ray rerelease of Dark City that came out this year. So there are still some new releases in the format.

I have a media converter made from a raspberry pi I use for all of my old consoles so I can play them on modern TVs. I bet it would work great for vhs tapes as well. Tape degradation might be a different issue though...

My vcr and all old consoles actually work fine on my shitty insignia flat-screen. But I'd rather play on my crt or projector tv.

Keep a 13-inch TV around?

There was auto tracking towards the end. It was the rewind that done it for me.

I'll only watch a VHS, if it's a weird Japanese anime OVA from the 80s.

They look okay on CRTs hooked up with composite. I tried watching one on a modern LCD and yeah it was awful.

3-4? That's when things were going wrong lmfao. Talk to me about the days of Netflix being a champ and Hulu having a free tier.

I'm anticipating a crackdown on piracy in the near future. Even if you use a VPN that could get you flagged and traffic analyzed maybe even dropped from your ISP.

I don't miss physical media either tho. I always hated that they force you to watch an anti piracy ad on a disc you bought, and force feed you trailers. Just let me see the movie i paid for.

I remember that they had pretty much stopped doing that entirely, half the time it was a slip of paper w/ an advert on it, or some sort of legal compliance form.

I'm kind of the same way with music.

Region zones do indeed suck, but I installed custom firmware on my PS3 to remove the DVD/Blu-Ray region lock, and now it's a non-issue.

And I use disc binders for most of my collection, unless it's something I really want to display. Long-term, once my collection is complete, I do plan to rip everything.

I keep bards and othersuch minstrels in the back yard (don't worry, they're fenced in) and have them play for me whenever I clap my hands. I can clap them off too

Laserdisk, I had this friend who collected all sorts of junk and this was impressive Tek from decades ago.

May I interest you in the piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com wiki/megathread? Yo ho yo ho...

I support creators as I can, but when there's literally no other option to own it in a way it can't be just taken from you I don't feel there's any strong argument against it.

I think progress by definition is good. Change is not always good. Not all change is progress.

I don't know if that changes by know, but some years back when I was looking trying to play a Blu-ray (got for birthday) and there was no legal way to play it on Linux. It was so frustrating to tinker with that I ended up downloading the movie and put the disc on top of the PC, just to pretend.

Bring back Blockbuster so I can just pay, like, $3 once to rent a movie instead of $20/month when I'm probably only gonna watch 1 or 2 movies in that time. The rental prices aren't much cheaper than buying a copy on digital platforms.

Have you heard of our Lord and Saviour, Jellyfin?

Does it require a subscription? If it does they will make it worse and worse as they try to squeeze out every last penny they can from it. Maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually. Or they'll close shop and you'll have nothing to show for it. Unless they let you download videos that are drm free . Which I doubt

While some of the cited services have done some egregious stuff all on there own, I was taking it as mostly about how you have just so many of them and you have to keep track of what content is available via what service and how that changes over time.

Curiosity isn't part of the content shuffling part of it, but it is still a reminder of just how fractured the general experience is.