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My husband was right about DVDs

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Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#301
Every time I want to watch a specific movie I have to search all the streaming services I have access to and often its not there.

So these days I just buy the DVD from ebay from a few bucks, it arrives in a couple of days. Feels no different to the 1980's when I went to the video shop and brought home a VHS.

I've gone back to physical media. Streaming has shot itself in the foot.

I've cancelled most of my streaming services cause in Australia the free to air streaming services are really great anyway.

I do pay for Britbox for the classic Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and other dorky delights.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#302
post #11

Not just DVD's but also music CD's. Plenty of music from the 1960's through early 2000's is no longer online for either contractual disputes, or cultural cancellation and other reasons I have yet to figure out. I assume some of this transition must be the cost issues of producing physical CD's vs. delivering online or renting the music online. When it is only available as a stream online I call it renting and every d…

A friend of mine refuses streaming. He buys CDs in bulk from the flea market and rips them to FLAC. I was just thinking of doing the same for my collection in the attic, assuming the CDs have survived a couple thousand freeze/thaw cycles. :) I like the idea of ditching the hard cases for space.

I went the other way… back in the day, I ripped my ~400 cds to MP3’s. I still have them on my file server hard drive, but am happy paying Spotify $10/month for the convenience of having access to pretty much any album I want on any device, so I haven’t listened to my own MP3s in years.

I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#303

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed…

One added bonus of having a limited selection to pick from was the quicker decision making time. With thousands of options via streaming services some of us become paralysed by choice!

I keep a list of media that I have heard enough good things about in my notes app to prevent this.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#304

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed…

I need some automated streaming-service ripper that will burn DVDs whenever I pop in a blank disk. And maybe generate nice sticker label PDFs from some intermediate scene with the title.

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Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#305
post #19

>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned" . She had a DVD…

Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours. I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.

Someone has to have it on DVD/BD first for it to get on the Pirate Bay.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#306
post #267

Our legal department has stores of blank DVDs. It turns out that some legal artifacts must be stored in a permanent medium.

Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. If your storage requirements are more than a couple of years you might have already experienced some pretty major data losses.

> Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time.

They do degrade, but a "couple of years" is pessimistic. My earliest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they're still good.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#307
post #19

>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned" . She had a DVD…

Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours. I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.

I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies.

Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.

If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#309
post #19

>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned" . She had a DVD…

I'd be curious in a few years. I don't watch old things anymore and keep consuming youtube stuff, but honestly I don't like it anymore. It's not the same somehow.

ps: I just bought a dvd from CL

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#310
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a very heavy perspective. Among the recurrent signs, the following suffices: > inviting laughter and derision toward the... community No. Just finding an occasion for the selected direction in creativity. Which the writer of the article seems to want to make ideological, with the exception of one use of the expression "«cheap laugh»" (which, for that matter, may bring attention to the other "celebrated" subplot…

Nah dude. I recently re-watched the whole show, and while I liked certain parts of it... it's a very transphobic show. And it's not just that episode; that episode gets callbacks in future episodes all the time. It's a mean spirited gag, and the mere fact of being transgender is the punch line, over and over. It sucks. It makes revisiting the show more cringey and less fun.

Since you raised your doubts, I just re-watched it - series 3, episode 4. And I confirm the view.

The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: «It really isn't that funny» - of course, because it is tragic.

While I could see that the "It's over" scene could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have supposed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.

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