DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media
3mon 22d ago by lemmy.world/u/return2ozma in technology from www.latimes.com
Yeah because i want to own when i buy things
I'm happy to just pirate this shit.
I don’t buy band media anymore but I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Record company middlemen and forever streaming can take a hike.
I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Who doesn't love a cool band t-shirt?
- My wife, just before she stole my band shirt
In fairness, she looks better in it
In fairness, I only bought the shirt in my size so that it would be comfortable for her to sleep in. I never actually planned to wear it. Shame that it's a fucking Disturbed shirt and that I wanna set fire to it.
at least she didn't grab the limp bizkit shirt that your older sister gave you in '02
I mean, we could burn both of them
Yeah revolutionary concept
If you don't hold it, you don't own it. Unless you take the DVD from them, you can't remove their access to the movie stored on that disc.
Technically network connected blu ray players can be updated to region lock you out of your content.
So don't connect them to the Internet
Yes, just being pedantic with a risk that people don’t think of.
I think the blu ray secret keys leaked so you can rip them anyways.
Normal blurays are easy to rip. The 4k ones need a drive with hacked firmware.
Yarrr
Sony had this bullshit on the ps3 which muted you playing certain sony media. Cinavia
Gross
Oh hell no.
Hold in your hand = physical access.
NAS counts
You can’t hold your NAS? It actually weighs very slightly more with data on it.
DVD have already polluted and currently exist and are rotting, and need to be ripped to longer term storage, especially for media that is becoming lost and needs a custodian to host so it can be pirated online. A lot of things cannot because no one has it, but it still exists in physical form.
Some may be ok with a whatever resolution streaming service webrip but I want the original dvd HD remaster, before they re-remastered it with only a single layer disk instead of double, messing up the original faithful rerelease that was already anticipated during filming when the show was filmed in HD widescreen film, but originally released in SD for broadcast due to the time. Plus, you can’t webrip the “banned” episodes if they’re not available.
DVD and especially blue ray still have DRM and license terms, which . means you still don't own it. Only way to own media is to pirate it
Yeah, that's a fair point.
license terms
In most places ownership laws make those licences unenforceable - not in the legal sense, but practically - hard to lock you out of a DVD.
Great option for those still politically opposed to pirating stuff.
Blu Ray is where it's at. Give me some actual quality bitrate baby.
And decent resolution: DVD is forever stuck at SD (480p MPEG). While Blu-ray can be UHD (4K HEVC).
I've always kinda thought about implementing a software and standard for 1080p av1 on DVD. Would be neat as a project, obviously no commercial use would exist.
Either way you can get some really impressive encodes out of av1, really neat tech.
Unless you get new DVD players to support AV1, just put the AV1 files on a data DVD..
No that's the idea, it would be to make a piece of software which if thrown on a sbc with a DVD drive becomes a player.
Which really isn't too far off of DVD and most bluray players.
Though I wouldn't be shocked if the super cheap DVD players have some sorta all-in-one integrated asic for most of the job.
Would mostly be used by hobbiest making their own burned discs and small artists releasing stuff.
I mean if you control the software on the "player" you don't really need a dedicated dvd format. Think about mp3 CDs, it never became a real format with specs and everything yet most CD players after a certain date supported them.
Yeah but if you make it an open format other hobbyists could make their own hardware/software about it.
Mostly a fantasy medium, but if people start using it for art, then hey neat.
Think about mp3 CDs...
- ..Or worse, ATRAC CDs, which thankfully also never caught on because had they caught on, given ATRAC is a proprietary Sony codec, they would've only been able to be played back on Sony CD players which supported the ATRAC codec.
That sounds interesting! I've been using AV1 more and more (thanks to SVT-AV1-PSY/-HDR and devs pushing improvements to main). Also enjoying FHD animated AVIF (vs ancient GIF, although gif.ski helps). AV1 video is not as soft as it once was (esp at high bitrates with synthetic film grain), and combined with OPUS audio, it's all wonderful.
It's not even 480p, it's 480i with a resolution of 720x480 regardless of whether the content is 4:3 or 16:9, the pixels get stretched one way or the other. That's for NTSC discs, PAL discs have a higher 576i (720x576) resolution but the movie is sped up 4% cause it forces 25fps when it should be 24.
This is a good point. Even worse! Weird anamorphic? pixel aspect ratios (or maybe pan-and-scan crops? or hopefully that's just VHS). With a bonus of interlacing! "The horror!" I haven't ripped a DVD in ages due to video quality issues.
Oh all those full screen DVDs are in fact pan and scan just like VHS.
If you ever wanna play 4K BDs on PC, you'll need a 4K-compatible drive that's been hacked with LibreDrive though, otherwise you're stuck using a dedicated set-top player for those.
1080p discs can at least be handled by libaacs and libbdplus /w the necessary files, and don't necessarily need a hacked drive to play back.
It's both for me. Some things are either not on BluRay, too rare and expensive, or the transfer on BluRay is actually worse. And besides, any BluRay player is a dvd player too.
Anyway, any physical collecting or pirating needs to encouraged because streaming is such a stupid model now.
I think part of it might be that DVDs are easier to find used or just cheaper new. GenZ isn’t really rolling in cash and in my area for example used stores rarely if ever carry Blu-ray.
We are forever fucked over lots of TV shows/movies that are caged within the stream services realm :/
People! Try Yt-dlp, when spotify decide to make Spotify Developer available again, then yt-dlp plugin integration with spotify, still, in anna's archive i think they will make available if not already the hundreds of TBs of metadata and songs managed to get from Spotify so media preservation and ownership will also be in the digital space
FYI, Tidal is approximately the same price as Spotify and there are several tools floating around on GitHub which will allow you to download high quality flac files from that service.
qobuz too!
For families, Tidal is even cheaper. But it's majority owned by that Twitter asshole Jack Dorsey. Just another fucking billionaire.
Lets also put "quitting your job" on there because thats what i see a lot of ppl not doing because they feel bad about it
3D printing your own guns
Just buy a normal fucking gun, this is America ffs there are more guns than people.
What are you, Swiss? Australian? Irish?
The same applies.
Planet is choked with guns. They're everywhere and very easy to get. Absolutely no reason you need one that's been churned out by a printer you got on Temu.
I'd have no idea where to get a gun in Japan. I'd rather just 3D print one if things got bad enough.
That's hilarious.I'll 3d print that toy lmao
Yeah. 3D printing a gun is a great way to blow your hand off.
Don't 3D printed guns have normal parts except for the slide and handle which are 3D printed?
Some people make their own barrels with electro chemical machining. But that's usually for people who can't get their hands on parts.
The future is self-hosted digital media. I've got no qualms with pirating media. But I am an advocate for buying digital media from artists directly.
AI music has entered the chat
No, vinyl is still the new vinyl. Tons and tons of new vinyl on Bandcamp. And tapes!
Yes but vinyl’s resurgence is like a decade old now. People were actively abandoning DVD while stocking up on vinyl.
I totally get it. Kids missed out on everything good.
Too bad DVDs and CDs will quit being made soon, and disc rot sets in on most discs in 20 years. Luckily mine have survived. But make backups. Although that's why "they (the rich)" want to drive up the price of HDDs so we can't afford it, so we are tied to their cloud systems forever.
Good luck young people !
Too bad DVDs and CDs will quit being made soon
We're still making vinyl records. What on earth makes you think we're going to stop making DVDs?
Vinyl has hipster vibes and false audiophile claims. CDs and DVDs dont. They won't be profitable in a few years and then bye bye factories. Just like vhs. I'd still be buying vhs takes if they made them but they dont. Same with CRTs.
They won’t be profitable in a few years
I just don't know where you get these claims from
History. They don't make vhs players or CRTs now do they? Even though they had huge benefits to modern (vhs, recordable and durable, CRT, durable, repairable, instantaneous response and perfect blacks) digital convenience trumps all for the majority population. Its also about control. You literally cannot buy a non smart TV any more (OK fine, digital signage, but you won't get a remote) and some of them will not even function unless you connect them to WiFi. Hekk no.
They don’t make vhs players or CRTs now do they?
There's an enormous inventory of New Old Stock and refurbished units that more than meet demand.
You literally cannot buy a non smart TV any more
That's absolutely not true. The real limit on Dumb TVs is the size. Emerson and Westinghouse both make dumb TVs, but they cap out at 50".
Wrong, CRTs are getting very hard to find now and people smash them for fun. 10 years they'll all be gone or many thousands of dollars.
Where did you find those TVs? I'd like to know!
CRTs are getting very hard to find now and people smash them for fun.
:-/
Surely you see the contradiction
Properly manufactured Audio CDs are actually quite resilient, obviously not so much to scratches, but out of all my 100+ CDs (I'd say half of which are older than 25 years) only one has disc rot and that one is a pressing made by PDO who're known for their bad pressings that are prone to disc rot.
I don't really store my CDs in a special way either.
The life span of CD/DVD is not on the printed media but on the media we make/made our backups on. Of my many spindles from back in 2k (some disks are almost 25 yrs old), so far maybe 5 disks have gone partially or completely unreadable, lucky I didn't lose much. Baring scratches or other physical damage, the printed disks will last decades where my disks have outlasted prediction
CDs were so much better for my kids than any other digital player. Especially when they couldn't read yet. It's much easier to choose a CD and put it into a player than opening an app to search for something.
And gets them away from screens!! We don't need more screens in today's world.
I've used CDs with my kid for music, it works well for us too
that’s why “they (the rich)” want to drive up the price of HDDs so we can’t afford it, so we are tied to their cloud systems forever
That seems like a reach. Hanlon's says they're just buying HDDs for their Artificial Imbecile service.
Maybe, but its not surprising that it fits their agenda perfectly. Build the slop generator and make it impossible for the population to own their means of computing. Future computing will be a dumb terminal on bezos net, and you will be an ostracized weirdo for not using it.
Blu-rays are great, DVDs not so much unless it's an old title that was never released in 1080p
Or classic 2d animation.
1080p simpsons vs 720p Simpsons look really close
*480
DVDs are fine, but the subtitles look god-awful - and they’re bitmaps so there is no easy way to make them not suck
I think they're bitmaps on Blu-rays as well. Just higher resolution.
Streaming tends to use text formats.
even then, many bluerays are just cheap upscales with no other changes. I made that mistake once with a boxset only to find that it was a very obvious DVD. this after I was roasted on reddit for complaining about that being a possibility and everyone angrily promised me that it was not that. it was that. I'm still bitter
Blu ray has copy protection...
If you have a blu ray player it's not really that much of a problem. And if you need a back up there's still ways
So does DVD and can be bypassed just as easily these days
This has been the biggest and dumbest take I've seen come from the GenZ/GenA crowd. Polaroids were a big hit a few years ago and I can't help but wince at this stuff. Yeah it's cute or whatever to hold it in your hand, but in 1, 5, 10, 30 years...when that photo or DVD is bent/scratched/lost, you'll be kicking yourself in the ass for even bothering with it.
Just pirate your content, take photos with your $1000 phones and print the photos out, and learn to backup your own shit. Buy a 2 bay NAS and backup your shit to it. And then backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.
My dad has been doing this since the early 2000s. We have our family photos AND videos from 1990-2026 all backed up on a NAS, which syncs to backblaze. ~600GBs of data. And the cloud backup on backblaze is $7.25 a month for that data.
Literally anyone can go buy a a $200 2-bay NAS, then grab two 1TB hard drives for $40 each. $280 for a NAS that will last you YEARS. And then figure out whatever service you want to backup to for a cloud backup.
While I agree with the general idea, your example prices are no longer valid since storage costs are now through the roof. The best defense of kids using DVDs is that you can borrow them from the library for free.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00519B0UO
https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-DH2300-2-Bay-Capacity-Diskless/dp/B0FNWHSPXF
Please at least Google something before talking out of your ass
I think you missed his point. The NAS is cheap. The disks to put in it no longer are.
I didn't miss his point. I wrote what the price of the drives are, he said nope, and I linked drives for that price.
Those arent drives. Those are NAS housings. Specifically listed as "diskless" meaning they don't contain any hard drives or ssds
The last two links are drives.
I linked the NAS over and over from different storefronts as a petty response.
I know what diskless is. My entire original post has a paragraph explicitly saying to buy a NAS and drives and their prices, because shocker I searched for current prices of items before posting my original comment, so then I'm not caught talking out of my ass like some other commenters are doing here in response to my post.
Please don't use google or amazon
Idk what to say to you other than you're being intentionally flippant. These are very simply things to search for online. The fact that I linked items proving my price claims are accurate and you sit there and move the goal posts and change the subject is the most moronic thing I have ever seen.
Go touch some grass and then find something else to occupy your time with.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822995008?item=N82E16822995008&source=region
https://www.microcenter.com/product/703359/DH2300_NASync_2-Bay_Diskless_NAS?storeID=101
https://www.adorama.com/udh2300.html
https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-000B-00KK3?item=9SIA5ADK9A1326
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-desktop-hdd-st500dm002-500gb/p/N82E16822148767?item=9SIAAEE5MZ4108
Insted of saying "just google it" instead say "just search it" or "just look it up". There are many different search engines available, and do we really want google to be our word choice here? Akin to advertising imo. fuck promoting these companies.
i do appreciate the links, but that's not what I meant.
There is a bit of a romantic feeling in only having a physical copy of a photo though, and Polaroids are the easiest ones to do this with.
And that's completely valid, but I just want to warn others that physical items deteriorate.
I'm currently digitally archiving photos of my great-great grandparents. You know how disappointing it is to have these photos, but then see they are all water damaged or torn or crumbled to all hell because of improper storage? Some scans are ok, others are terrible and will require work on my end to restore them digitally.
I'm sure we have thousands of digital photos of ourselves, but how many of those are backed up properly? How many of us will be regretting not backing things up properly and we can't share these photos with our grandkids or great grandkids or to reminisce because our phones died or Instagram shutdown or we stopped paying for iCloud?
All I'm saying is take your Polaroids, but also take plenty of digital photos and back them up as well.
Digital things degrade too, and faster than youd think
And drives can fail. And data can get corrupted. You could get a virus.
You deteriorate. We all deteriorate. What's the point of that illusion of having a perfect eternal storage medium for data? It's the experience that matters.
What's the point of having the experience when our memory deteriorates?
See how stupid that argument sounds?
Guess what, you can do both!
I can't note anything sound 'stupid' there.
Experiences AND memories do vanish. That's a fact, it's completely natural and fine and it's not a general necessity to fight against that. I found that it is possible to accept transience.
Guess what, we can have new experiences any moment.
Spending much time and money to preserve all the present experiences without gaps and to combat the fleeting nature of all things and to capture every moment of my life for the future seems wasteful. I did this too in the past but the older I get the more I find that I'd rather spend my time in the present moment than in the archive.
Not having so much, being more. The more we collect and accumulate, the more that holds us back.
But hey, I don't want to discourage anyone and I can understand the approach.
Yes, and yes. I'm running TrueNAS and I test a restore once a quarter or so, worst case once every 6 months.
I haven't had to do a full restore...so that'll be the true test, but I do have a sister TrueNAS at an off-site location for off-site backups. I went simple with this off-site one and just use Tailscale and Syncthing.
Out of curiosity how do you test your restore? Do you just choose a file and try to recover it from backup? I have a synology NAS that I should backup but haven't really looked into the complexities of backing it up.
I cut/paste a single file or folder, depending on my mood, out of a directory that is backed up and then do a PULL/sync through the TrueNAS GUI from Backblaze
Not sure on Synology...I'm sure there is a method though
easy with that logic, killer.
Its Blu-ray not DVD right? DVD was an impossibly low resolution, that really isn't fun to watch today.
Blu ray works perfectly on today's hardware
DVD is perfectly fine resolution, not everyone even has a 4K screen or TV. Most people still have 720x1080 or 1080x1920p screens or TVs. Our tv personally is 720x1080 and it looks just fine.
That's a 15 year old TV at least and of course you don't see a difference on that. My 4k is at least 6 years old. If I bought one now I would not be able to buy lower res.
DVD is pal or ntsc and if you played that on a monitor the picture is as small as phone. It's like the lowest SVGA res
Yeah but we’ve also seen 4k screens and the iMac at our vocational school class was an 8k display. We get it’s an us thing but like we’ve experienced higher resolution screens before and unless it’s for productivity like for work, resolution wasn’t the determining factor of enjoying content, it was whether the content was good or not in the first place :P
I found out the hard way that 4k Blu-ray need a special player. That it won't work on Ps2/PS3/PS4 I already have. Only "regular blue-ray play on those.
Yeah, you need a PS5 to play ultras. But what's even dumber is neither 4 nor 5 can play regular old music CDs
UHD blu-rays didn't even come out until 2016 which is years after any of the devices you listed. Also the discs themselves hold twice as much data as a regular blu-ray so it makes sense that playstations released before it even existed don't have drives capable of reading the discs.
Heck CRTs were standard at 480p and nobody had any problems
People did have problems,, there just wasn't an (affordable) alternative. If you would go back to the 70/80's and offered anyone the choice between 480p and 1080p, all else being equal. Would anyone pick 480? I know I wouldn't
It's not because we learned to live with it or didn't know better, that it was the best option.
I lived through the 70s and 80s. Didn't know what 480p even was til the 90s, so I have direct experience with CRT usage. Bonus: we didn't even have a color TV til the mid 80s at my house
Because you didn't know it was called 480p or knew of better options doesn't mean you can't see that it wasn't great or improvable. You knew colour existed before getting a colour, TV so you knew it could be better...
People had 56k modems and no one had any problems, my Gameboy was monochrome and you saw nothing in the sun, no problems there either...
Distance and size makes the most difference.
If you're sitting ~7' back from a 50" TV it really doesn't matter if it's 720, 1080, 4k, or 8k.
You have to be right up on it to tell or have a huge screen.
Nicer TVs do have better color and contrast that you can tell from any distance. But generally you have to have something to compare it to for it to really matter. Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
But many times they're encoded dreadfully anyway, and DVDs tend to be better in this respect.
Interlacing is awful though.
Dvd video on a cell phone looks great
Way too many DVDs are interlaced/telecined though.
Or worse, some hellish combination of both, because the producers edited different sources together. It makes scaled footage, panning, and some motion look really awful or jittery once you notice it.
Blu rays don't necessarily escape this either, as they butcher the conversion to 24p and then you can't even fix it.
For all their problems, streaming giants usual do this better. Amazon (and probably Netflix) had employees hanging out in the doom9 A/V forums long ago.
It's a bit trickier last time I did it to be confident I can rip a Blu-Ray.
I actually don't want to juggle discs to watch stuff, I like the general concept of streaming, but I don't like paying eternally for it, for shows to jump between providers and for my access to cut out part way through and/or even if I have the new service, my progress being forgotten so I have to try to look for where I left off.
So I want to rip content. DVDs are always dead simple. As I rip blu-rays, MakeMKV is kind of a hassle, it wants to expire itself all the time, and like right this second the place to update from seems down. Maybe someone will comment with some easy way to rip blu ray that internet search doesn't make obvious.
If folks sway me, might go buy a 4k friendly Blu Ray drive and hop to it.
MakeMKV is the easiest way. The license key is always in the forum.
The issue with blurays are the unskippable intros before the menu hits
I thought a BD duplicator. Multiple drives, just put the professional disc in the top and a blank in one or more of the others. Obviously blanks are less resilient than pressed discs but it’s a backup and I didn’t need to have specialized skills to do it.
Eh, I'm not really interested in disc based copies, really the disc is there for ripping and then stored, jellyfin to stream it to watch as I please. Once ripped then I can handle the resultant file nice and easy.
What? DVD is perfectly fine. I dont even have a 4K TV
It's a little fuzzy, but that's OK on a lot of older movies (especially lower budget ones) because they were always a little fuzzy to start with.
You can have all the pixels you want, but you're not going to get a lot of extra detail out of Critters or Masters of the Universe.
Many old movies that are restored perfectly. Yes it's a lot of film grain but you can also see a lot in the background etc. Also id rather have the film grain.
The movies where shot for cinema on 16mm or so and that is pretty high res.
Oh boy, they weren't fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.
Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won't notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.
¹: BTW, it doesn't matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.
What? VHS is perfectly fine. I don't even have a color TV
This is how you sound BTW. 4k or even 1080p is objectively better than DVDs' 480p. There is no reason to still use them other than cost or being a contrarian.
My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable.
I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.
DVD actually still holds up for 2D animation, as 2D animation is probably the only medium that holds up well upscaled from 480p, there's just not a lot of detail to lose in the upscaling process compared to live action or even 3D animation to some extent.
Not to ruin people getting off of streaming, but the biggest bang for buck in storage will be regular old hard drives unless you need to backup like >500Tb of storage (then tape drives).
DVDs are cool but they only have a 4/8Gb capacity.
BluRay pushes it to 70/100/120gb which is great for one 4K movie lol.
Yeah, my vinyl collection is a decoration. The 20TB of storage connected to my PC is where the magic happens.
DVDs also have a rather limited shelf life
Yeah, even with the extra cost, HDDs are still cheaper than DVDs simply due to being rewritable.
Most people don't burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
I've been collecting physical media for over 30 years. Started with VHS, CD's and DVD's back in the day. Now I'm primarily a blu ray/4k collector as the image and sound quality is closest to the filmmaker's intentions.
It's been hard to see physical media slow down production over the past 5 years. The biggest loss is the wealth of information from all the special features that are now considered over and above what studios are willing to pay for. It's unfortunate that the newer generation can't expect features on par with what Peter Jackson shared on his Lord of the Rings Extended discs. (I know there are still boutique labels putting out great discs loaded with features, but they are fewer by the year and costly.)
There are some moments in time where the world really surprises though, and it's been a pleasant turn of events to see Gen Z embrace VHS!? The resurgence of vinyl was understandable as the sound exhibits a warmth and depth. VHS is a bit of a head-scratcher, but I can understand its nostalgic appeal. Just happy that people are enjoying physical media in any form.
The resurgence of vinyl was understandable as the sound exhibits a warmth and depth
Only because it is adds pleasing artifacts to the original and people connect a turn table up to something to listen to it with. When used to hearing crappy encoded digital, with a bad DAC through lossy bluetooth to a tiny speaker, vinyl sounds better.
Funny thing is that you can record vinyl digitally and that recording will sound exactly the same on good equipment which tells you it isn't the vinyl itself that sounds good.
In any case vinyl is extremely disappointing to see come back. It is a very energy intensive process, using PVC often mixed with lead. It is very heavy and bulky to move around, so transportation costs are high.
I understand the desire to have a physical thing, but only its flaws make it be a reproduction of the source material AND is environmentally not good.
A lot of young people I know love vhs and miss it. But its getting expensive to get into now and you gotta know how to repair things.
The sneakernet and hard drives are the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
Reminds me of this PS4 ad:
probably the same reason I refused to let it go.
I actually own it, control it, and can use it at my wimsy.
vs streaming, which I could buy it and still have it taken away from me cause you never own anything when its streaming/digital download.
That's cool I guess. I have a shelf full of switch games. And a NAS full of hundreds of movies, tv shows, audio books, music and more. I'll take digital so long as I'm in control.
Its like going physical you get both with the right ripper
True, but then you gotta rip it and store it
And a NAS full of hundreds of movies, tv shows
This is me, but I made the bad decision of starting with a two bay NAS, my 10 TB filled up fairly quickly (not even 4K media), that is why I recently added to my Arr Stack Decypharr to the equation, and I am kinda impressed how well it behaves with my RD cloud (the content there is prone to disappear due to inactivity, but Decypharr has certain tools to avoid that to happen).
Most DVDs produced will be rotted out within 20/30 years at most, only option is ripping what you can and migrate the collection to a new drive every decade, just make sure it's a secondary drive and is of archival quality.
Burned disks, you'll probably lose some over 30 years, i've lost a few in 20 years, most are still readable.
Poorly pressed disks, you might lose one here or there. I had a two where the aluminum was poorly sealed and flaked off the label side.
I have hundreds of DVD's in the 20-30 year range and have never had a problem reading any of them that weren't scratched save the couple that were lacking in top lacquer.
Rotted within 20/30 years? Honest question where did you get that ? I have 40 yo cds that are in pristine condition why would dvds be different?
The density of DVDs makes them less resilient than CDs, but CDs will also suffer the same fate. It's going to be a very serious conservation problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Exactly, and I imagine blurays and DL dvds will suffer even quicker. However the quality of the plastic is also important, we started cheaping out and it's noticable, look at VHS or Tapes as we moved forward the quality of them dropped.
We started buying BR and CDs for our daughter because we found the physical selection more rewarding to her and interactive. With the exception of the PBS app, no way that could all be a collection.
Its not just DVDs. I switched to all local mp3s for music and i get a lot of them by scoring cds from second hand stores.
I'm currently working on ripping all my CDs to my old laptop and looking at mp3 players, but only because I don't really want to use my phone storage to hold everything. I was still buying physical CDs of new releases up until a few years ago, but I've gone back to that too.
Never started streaming music, makes no sense music is so collectible on HDD. I have 25 year old files, 128kb sucks lol but survived very easily.
Local library is another great source to get those CDs to rip mp3s
I like to think that if streaming didn't take over, the industry would have shifted to selling USB sticks with the media/game. Even if they did something goofy to "lock" it, at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Imagine a nicely organized self of DvDs turned into nighmare pile of flash drives of different shapes and sizes as each movie tries to make theirs stand out to make up the lack of a cover.
We have this audiobook player for children in my country. That works by buying those little figures and if you place them on the player, the audiobook plays. I think that a system like that for "adult music" would be awesome. Buy some little figures and art pieces by your favorite band, display them on a shelf and use them to play music? Yeah, that would be awesome
But you know the media is not in the figurine, right? Tonies only have a small RFID chip in them that give the Tonybox an ID to download from their server. Once the company dies these things will turn into bricks.
My small nephews also have these and I think they're great. Just not very resilient, data conservation wise
Yeah, I know.
Nintendo sells essentially a SD card variant in a case for the swtich. So you're not far off :)
The Dreamcast VMUs, which doubled as tomigotchis or whatever
The NGage even used literal SD cards.
at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Actualy, thumb drive flash is the lowest quality, cheapest one (the yield thing, the outer parts of the waver). Do not expect your data to keep longer than a few hours weeks.
Edit:
Because that's how yields work, defective areas get firmware-disabled in the factory. Lower quality has only more of them, with less strict quality requirements to count as ok.
To add, it's a gamble; most are ok, some get data corruption on write, some after weeks. The "cheap" part is, because they aren't expected to last more than a few TBW.
Is this supposed to be a joke about storing data on your thumb? Also thumbs are not cheap, probably....I hope.
Not a joke. And why the downvote? Quality distribution is generally SSD > SD-cards > thumbdrives. Thumbdrives are no backup medium.
Wasn't me, but I'm guessing because you said they only last a few hours? I took that ridiculous exaggeration and assumed you meant writing notes on your thumb.
I said, don't expect your data to last longer than a few hours. Because that's how yields work, defective areas get firmware-disabled in the factory. Lower quality has only more of them, with less strict quality requirements to count as ok.
To admit, i've had few and late hours sleep the last few days, the autism sticks through. I'll revisit the original comment.
Don't worry, you're damn right about the quality of those things. They have crap flashes, they're slow and fail all the time, even most of the "better" ones. I'm shocked sometimes at how much people can trust these devices for some reason
Realistically the connector would have been proprietary, but I can see a world where we got cartridges that came in little cases like the games for nintendo ds or switch.
A system of organization would be invented. Idk maybe a wooden stepped board with USB sized holes that you store/display your collection in, just to use the first idea I pull directly from ass. Actually make it silicone for the grippy, already improving it, then sell the wood as a fancier looking one, and inlay a few with idk brass or something for a "pro" version, boom, marketing.
I'm sure there would be a million options, yours sounds quite fancy, and it will work great until Disney decides to sell giant mouse shaped drives ruining the whole thing.
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were used more.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
I have bad news for you - Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung have all stopped production on BR-R discs.
Verbatim still manufactures their DataLifePlus series of BD-Rs, and they are excellent. The market otherwise is pretty bleak... Ritek offers nothing that compares to the DLP discs.
Also, side note, Pioneer (once a leading manufacturer of BD burners), no longer makes them. LG is the lone surviving manufacturer I believe.
Yeah, Verbatim still remains... For now.
Oh that's right - I forgot that the drives were slowly going disco too. Bleak indeed.
they might bring it back with HDD drives going AIxtinct.
Agree and this is very informative about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9Xq7hb6Q0
He also has another video somewhere to stress test some of the disk types I think
My wife is "xennial" and her music tastes skew younger. Lots of younger artists are selling cassettes and CDs at their merch tables. We have more tapes and discs in our house than I ever had in the 90s.
How do you even play them? I could only see myself taking these media, ripping them and putting them back on the shelf.
Which is a nostalgic hobby
Thrift store boombox.
With a nice stereo system? There is also specialized hardware that can play and digitize any kind of retro media (cassettes, vinyl, disks)
I prefer dedicated digital players over physical media, for instance, a FLAC player with a digital library over CDs, but I'm glad to see this trend catching up. Anything that gets people building their own collections, escaping algorithms and escaping DRM/streaming is a huge win in my book.
I'm curious as to why?
Physical media scratches, rots, burns down, etc. They also require a lot of space, and you can't have it all with you easily.
My FLAC library is got the same or better audio quality, I can backup and copy in seconds for myself or friends, I can carry everything, or just curated playlists, with the toggle of a button, and I can preserve them on any medium I find - mechanical HDs, SD cards, SSDs, etc.
Though I am very curious about vinyl...
I recently revived my record player and CD player and I've been enjoying three things:
- You have to think about what to listen to,
- the player is completely offline and separate from the devices you work and communicate on, so nothing will interrupt and you feel you're doing something different, and
- it means you listen to whole albums, not mixed up playlists, so you get deeper into it.
What I don't enjoy is that records in particular are ridiculously expensive now. I don't know who can afford them. So I'm stuck with the records and CDs of my youth and whatever I can find in bargain bins.
I do also use Qobuz and... other means of obtaining music.
But... those other storage mediums can also get damaged, burn, rot, etc and are also less portable (excluding the SD cards anyway).
You have a point except the portability. A single USB drive is infinitely more portable than a large cd collection.
Nothing a decent backup strategy can't mitigate. Also less portable? Between the massive storage available on digital audio players and using jellyfin with something like symphonium digital audio is massively more portable.
But... those other storage mediums can also get damaged, burn, rot, etc
Sure can. You know what else they can do? Instantly and cleanly copy their data to any other storage device, they can even do so automatically every day!
Throw a self hosted Jellyfin server in the mix, and you can access your entire FLAC library from any device you want! Your friends can listen at the same time, if you want to give them logins.
Your hard drive can be erased in many ways. And soon you wont be able to afford them or be allowed to own them.
Vinyl lasts forever. Its only damaged if you play it 😐
Your hard drive can be erased in many ways.
I'm willing to bet my main SSD, my backup HDD, my FLAC player's SD card, and my laptop SSD all carrying the same file are going to be more durable than a piece of plastic.
Sure, but that's a lot of work and worry to keep all those backups going and syncd...ugh. I hate dealing with it. Takes hours of my life. Now, you're probably an IT admin or programmer like most people on Lemmy, but I don't have 13 hours to sit on a computer and troubleshoot why Borg won't work on my restic fluffywhatever. I'm sure you'll say "its easy, justtttt..." Yeah, its not easy, I've lived it.
And in the end, you have a computer hooked to your stereo, the one place I'm trying to escape the constant computing.
A CD works just fine and I can burn another physical copy if I want it.
I'm glad your setup works for you! I have a nas packed full of stuff as well but I rarely use it for the reasons listed. Its a hassle.
Sure, but that's a lot of work and worry to keep all those backups going and syncd
I think it took me 15 minutes to first install SyncThing and Vorta? I literally haven't worried about this for the last two years
Now, you're probably an IT admin or programmer
I'm a biologist :) (though to be fair, mastering in bioinformatics, but this setup came first!)
And in the end, you have a computer hooked to your stereo, the one place I'm trying to escape the constant computing.
My stereo is a Gradiente from the 70s, no computers there. My portable player does connect to a computer to sync sometimes... but I do this when charging, so out of mind.
They make record players that use lasers so they don’t slowly wear down the grooves
Those dont work great and are no longer made,
Those never worked well. They pick up every tiny bit of dust and scratch, far more than a stylus does. If you keep your stylus in good condition, changing it regularly, and set up your tonearm correctly, it shouldn't harm the records.
"Ooh I wanna listen to [song], let me just....find the CD....put the CD in the tray...find the track number...skip to that track...wait for CD player to scan and start..."
FLAC is everything good about CDs minus the headache. Sure you can't physically hold the liner notes but it's not like that hasn't been digitized, too!
I only listen to albums all the way through when using CDs and vinyl, so track search doesn't matter to me. CDs are the pinnacle of digital physical media for audio. Large enough, copyable, portable, not too big to store.
Large enough
Too short.
But the rest still applies so in what ways are a CD better than FLAC? Flash drives take up even less space and can hold hundreds of albums. Arguably even more "portable" because disc drives aren't common anymore
Its much less user friendly. I hate the permeation of computers in every aspect of life. When i want to listen to music, I turn on my stereo stack with turntable, 5 disc changer, and reel to reel. So relaxing. Computers have too much going on, updates, notifications, crashes, hard drives dying, blargh. I deal with that all day long. A record or CD is the fastest way to enjoyment without distraction.
I should mention I don't really listen to music outside my home as it will never sound as good as my home speakers. Dynamic music sounds like trash in cars and headphones will never be as good as speakers for spatial recognition. I don't even have wireless earbuds.
You don't need a computer at all, there are dedicated media players (yes they're still "computers" but not PCs with updates and other stuff on it)
True! Maybe someday I'll get one. But I don't need more devices
A decent music library would require thousands of CDs, it would be a huge hassle. Why deal with that when you can just copy all of that to one hard drive?
-
Because that's not cool.
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Because its information overload (name even 50 albums and the songs on them. Humans dont need thousands of albums. Our brains are not meant for this much information. You can't appreciate 1000 albums)
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It has no resale value. And if that HDD dies or you die and your family doesn't know how to use it or how to decrypt it, its useless.
I don't consider HDDs physical media per se. No one is handing down hard drives or selling them at yard sales. I can play my great grandpas 1890 shellac records. Think a hard drive will be able to do that? Hell no.
I don’t consider HDDs physical media per se.
Ok. But I can touch mine ... they seem very physical.
No one is handing down hard drives or selling them at yard sales
Because it's easier to just copy the data to someone else's drive, no need to physically hand it over. Also you can still keep the CDs after copying them to another medium.
Because its information overload
That seems more like a personal problem than a technical one.
It has no resale value. And if that HDD dies or you die and your family doesn’t know how to use it or how to decrypt it, its useless.
Have you looked at HDD prices recently? You can definitely resell them. The ones I bought 3 years ago now cost double the price! And all data should be backup anyway so you don't lose anything on a disc failure. And the last point can be addressed by either just not encrypting your drive or leave the proper instructions behind.
All in all those are minor inconveniences compared to dealing with thousand of CDs.
HDDs are not designed to last very long. Neither are SSDs. That's one reason to prefer dedicated physical media.
Ssds die randomly without warning. Ask me how I know. Then worrying about all your backups, are they going to work? Are those drives failing? Its a huge headache for a real world person that doesn't spend 24/7 talking about Linux on Lemmy.
You can still keep the CDs around for archive purposes, but to me CDs are no longer a viable option for actual media playback.
If you spend a lot of time sitting next to a CD player they're still OK for now. For music on the move, not so much. And when the player breaks it will be hard to replace. So they're definitely not perfect.
Even if you're at home and do have a CD player it's just not practical. Sure, if you only listen to a handful of CDs that's workable.
But my current music collection would require 1400+ CDs .. and good luck finding a specific song in that pile, even if you do know the exact album it's on. It's so much better to just have a searchable library.
All your points about HDDs being physical assume you have computer knowledge to know what to do with a HDD.
There's USB ones, but that's what your limited to when it comes to casual users who just want it to work.
Everyone old enough knows how to handle a CD.
Even if you don't use a USB one, you basically just put the thing in the slot and start up the machine, maybe it needs some formatting. It's not brain surgery. Again, it still easily beats dealing with unmanageable number of CDs.
Everyone old enough knows how to handle a CD.
Actually, more and more people are too young to know how to handle CDs these days.
"Put the thing in the slot".
Which slot? Where?
"Formatting it"
Format a drive? What's that?
"Its nor brain surgery".
Your assuming a tech literacy that simply doesnt exisit in the general populace.
This is lemmy. They think every person on earth has a homelab, solely run Linux, only use social media in the fediverse, and host their own matrix server.
They have no idea what real life is like!
CDs and record beat hard drives hands down. Not every damn thing needs a computer attached to it. My home listening setup sure doesn't.
Which slot? Where?
The one shaped like the thing ...
Format a drive? What’s that?
Depending on your setup it will even promt you do do this, all you have to do is click a couple of dialogs. Or lookup like a 5 step guide on the internet.
Your assuming a tech literacy that simply doesnt exisit in the general populace.
I think I'm making a very reasonable assumption about tech literacy here ... yours might just be below the general populace.
your thinking the average as the mean.
I'm meaning average to be 20th percentile.
meaning "most" people where your average would only include half of all people.
my favourite park ranger quote was talking about why bear proof bear garbage containers weren't better. The answer was along the lines of there's a siginificat overlap between cleaver bears, and not so cleaver people.
you have to account for more than average, you have yo account for below it, so that its accesaible to more than 50% of people.
Everything you just said is a HUGE amount more work than my shelf of CDs and just taking one out and popping it in my stereo. Plus then I have the art and lyrics there. No screens.
Nothing beats physical media for simple enjoyment.
Just make sure you back them up. Bit rot is real.
My Matrix DVD I bought brand new still works just fine.
But rot is real, but also highly situational
It's fine until it's not... The problem is you can't really predict when it will fail.
Why buy second hand DVDs to clutter your house when piracy exists? Either way the rights holders earn no money.
I sorted out my DVD's Kept the collectors stuff, moved the cheaper but beloved stuff to binders and threw away the chaff i bought for a dollar a disk when blockbuster went under.
I can keep my entire original collection easily on 2 hard drives these days
The only reason I can think of is for the bonus content. When you pirate, you generally just get the movie/show and nothing else. No behind the scenes extras, no deleted scenes, no director's commentary, etc. Even Blu Ray discs are often lacking in this category. DVDs were peak for special features.
Cus I like em
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
magnetic media good?
Clay media best.
Found the Sumerian.
𒂆𒆬𒌓𒌨𒀭𒐈𒄫𒋗𒁀𒋾𒀀𒁀𒀭𒌓𒁶𒂊𒀭𒁕𒌇
Cave painting better
4D Glass Hypercube
Yeah :)
I mean I guess if they distributed movies on thumb drives it would be more convenient. But optical discs are used for a very good reason: they are extremely dense for the price.
You can pull it on HDD and that should be good enough preservation
rip backups; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
..... No they aren't. Way more are just keeping their own digital media on their own storage. Even more are still just streaming. The least are watching DVD and Blu Ray.
Most people are braindead and mindless consumers across all generations, but there's a really large portion of people who are more conscious about the value of personal property. Weird that most of them are the communists and socialists while liberals and right wingers in general basically all want big corpos to violate our anuses with as much brutality as possible
FR, people are also using digital media way more than they're popping on a vinyl. It's okay that these are niche subcultures. Not sure why everything has to be framed like it's a cultural or political revolution.
Can we stop publishing these articles? I was enjoying the cheap CDs.
I miss walking the aisles and running across some film I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in ages. Having heavily curated list of films recommended for me makes me uninterested in even looking. Of course I’d enjoy this film, I’ve watched 6 times over the last 10 years, thank you algorithm.
a few years ago I ripped all my cds/dvds to mp3/mp4 for easier uses. google music used to let you download everything as mp3. apple never did. for a while just uploading one song could get you the whole album. loaded on thumbdrives and distributed as gifts,, backups for legal purposes.
i also very rarely still see Video Games being sold in CD/DVDS.
thats only one franchise i know of though.
but imagine it was more common for video games too.
I'd much rather have to find space for my server than for 1000s of Blu-rays/DVDs/CDs.
No, they’re not.
The reason vinyl is vinyl is because the format requires very careful mastering of the source audio. The medium is physically sensitive to dynamic range, frequency response, and groove spacing. That is why people argue that vinyl can sound better than a compressed digital file like an MP3 or a mass-produced CD.
Nothing about a DVD inherently requires special mastering of the video. If anything, DVDs are simply inexpensive to buy on the secondhand market, whether from local sellers or platforms like eBay.
Given the current state of digital licensing and streaming volatility, I understand why people want physical media like discs in order to truly own their movies. That could explain a modest resurgence in DVD sales. But DVDs are not the next vinyl. Vinyl never went away; it remained in production.
And no one is putting HD video on DVD discs.
They’re likely at the point of not just wanting to own things but not being able to afford subs. .
If I had to collect, it would be vinyl. If all DVD's had no player, we'd be screwed. With vinyl however, you might be able to find someone clever enough to whip up some sort of mechanical/electrical solution to extract the sounds.
I don’t care for the medium, I just want to watch my shows. In Canada we get basically the same shows as the US, but many are not available for streaming. So I want to watch Danny Phantom for example, I can’t. It’s not on any channel not streaming services.
And the same goes for dozens of other shows ranging from obscure like Martin Mystery to the ultra popular like The Fairly Odd Parents.
Heck even Disney doesn’t have everything.
DVD does and it cost less than most of these services.
I wonder why specifically DVDs... It's not like with audio formats where the experience is almost as or even more important than the quality; Blu-Ray delivers far better quality with the same experience. If they were into Laserdisc I'd understand, but DVD?
They're not even that much more expensive. Maybe the initial cost of getting a player is higher?
I haven't read the article yet, so apologies if this is addressed.
Bluray has always been a niche product in many/most parts of the world, DVD is ubiquitous.
It pains me to say this, but people generally just do not care about the difference in picture quality between the two formats. At least not enough to pay the Bluray premium.
The equipment itself is more expensive, as are the discs. Your subjective "not even much more expensive" is very dismissive of the economic situation for huge numbers of people around the world. It's often $3 - $4 more per disc in a retail setting, sometimes higher. And DVDs go on deep discount far more often in my experience, furthering the cost divide. And the bluray players aren't just more expensive, they're way more troublesome, slower, clunkier, and many/most/all require a stable internet connection (at least periodically) or you'll be locked out of watching your discs.
The money aspect isn't a concern for wealthier households. But, wealthier households tend to have higher adoption rates for stable, reliable, unlimited, high speed internet. They've largely switched to streaming only, and have little to no need for discs and players. They've also got many other entertainment options. They went from DVD to streaming, skipped Bluray.
Poorer households are far more likely to have no/less reliable internet, let alone unlimited data. If you don't have internet, you will be locked out of watching at least some of your blurays. You certainly won't be streaming, at least not regularly and reliably. That $3 - $4 difference in the price of each disc is money for gas or a loaf of bread. The $50 difference in the player is potentially a big financial blow. If you want to watch something cheap, you can find a huge selection of DVDs at the thrift store or even rent for free from the library, or you can pay a little more for the one bluray they have for sale (it's an Adam Sandler comedy from 20 years ago where he dresses up as a woman) and does funny voices.
Many places over here have stopped to carry DVDs and, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure all the major studios have stopped selling them; my comment is entirely referring to the used market where Blu-Ray can be $3-$4 more expensive but they don't have to be if you look around. I've bought many films on BD for $2 or less on eBay.
Plus, I assume the article is largely talking about the western market (most likely the US in particular) where the situation is similar. Blu-Ray players are much more expensive, so the cost of entry is higher. I've never heard of them requiring an internet connection to work, though, that's certainly a point against them. I only ever used the various game consoles with BD drives to watch BD discs and have never encountered such limitation (then again they were connected to the internet most of the time regardless).
There's a reason it's called Blu-Ray DVD
Personally I never upgraded from DVD to Bluray because of the costs and DRM. And while I waited for those to be solved streaming got good enough.
Perhaps these kids' parents are the same, so they just use what they have.
Or the article's author just calls every video disc a DVD.
But both formats have DRM and sometimes the Blu-ray is basically the same price or even cheaper. Sure DVD was easier to crack but that's not an issue these days.
its still declining, just slower
When I bought my dream machine it was the first one without an optical drive... and then I bought an external blu-ray player/DVD burner.
GenZ are so hollow with things like this. They embrace it as fashion.
Because they are too computer illiterate to simply download what they want?
Its the fact of unrevokable ownership.
I can buy and mp3 off amazon. But if amazon decides to take down the artist i spent money and lost acess to what i bought.
If i buy the CD, i rip it and put it on my navidrome server. I own it forever, if the server explodes or somebody claims i dont own the music, i go to my storage room and pull out my BIG ASS container of CDs.
I OWN A PERSONAL LICENSE TO MY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR MUSIC ON PHYSICAL MEDIA THAT CANNOT BE PURPOSELY OR INNCIDENTALLY REMOTELY DELETED. NOBODY CAN STOP ME FROM LISTENING TO MY MUSIC COLLECTION, NOT SOME CORPRATE FUCK RAISING A SUPSCRIPTION PRICE.
I started a year ago collecting physical media, and i can genuinely say owning it makes it sound and look better.
I seldom have any subscriptions, and the one thing that hurts is when i play the mental game of "ok so i could pay for it still which would cost a decent amount of money" or i could not.
"Does this service provide me enough value for the economic loss of my personal funds?"
But not having to "bend over" because spotify is doing evil shit and i dont want to support.
Funny thing is i recently read about the AI bullshit and shit there doing with Spotify. Told my friends and they didnt want to leave spotify because of there playlists.
Theres a service that takes playlists and converts them amoung services for $2.
Both friends have been enjoying the shit about tidal! And gladly cancled there Spotify
Counterpoint : I can buy DRM free .flac from qobuz and actually own them, unrevokably, and store them on my jellyfin server. Absolutely no need for physical optical disks here.
Yes, music. Can you buy DRM free movies anywhere?
Not that I know of, sadly.
If you download something, nobody can take that away either. By getting the physical copy you are just creating extra steps.
I am making the point that it seems we have a generation that doesn't understand how to go and get files and/or share them.
Nothing I said was about subscriptions.
Personally, I could do without the physical media, that is just going backwards and I don't want to own all that crap. But it also means the only services I use are ones I make myself so I can listen to my collection anywhere in the world and on any device I own. But its my service.
For what its worth, I never have subscribed to spotify or any other music service. I do chip in a bit of money for SOMAFM, and I guess it is streaming, but it's listener supported radio basically.
There is so much to listen to, and so much fan traded and openly traded music, whats the point of paying someone?
Maybe pay the artists?
You can pay the artists even more if they don't have to spend on packaging.
And at what point do you quit paying them? For older groups, you buy the tape, then the CD, then the extended remix, then vinyl, and on and on with half of them seeing only pennies every step of the way anyway.
Fortunately for me my collection is 90% freely shared because the money is in the performances anyways.
You didn't hear that they want you to own nothing (in digital media)?
um...because they are dumb, like their parents.