Live data from Hacker News

My husband was right about DVDs

slate.com

341–350 of 428 posts

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#342
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the prudes went around whacking the Johnsons off all the statues

Always gotta ask, is that prudish or kinky?

1 in 3 think it's prudish, 1 in 5 think it's kinky, and 1 in 15 think it's kinky when prudish people do it.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#343

I'm a very happy Apple Music subscriber, but I'm also 52 and so own thousands of CDs and hundreds of LPs. I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle…

Interesting. Do you know if this extends to basically all digitized music regardless of the specifics of artist/label streaming preferences? Eg King Crimson’s catalog was never added to Spotify, if I link my ripped CDs to AM, would it make it available for me to stream on my phone?

Yes. Indie stuff given to me on CD-R and ripped to my iTunes library is available to me via Apple Music, which I think would be the acid test.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#344
post #158
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2006 Limited Edition DVD [0], it has the original theatrical versions on bonus discs (Yes, Han shot first). 0, https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg

Which are transferred from the 1993 LaserDisc release, aside from the text crawl of A New Hope. The 1993 LD did use the subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope", the 2006 DVDs took it from the original film again, but the rest of the movie is a LaserDisc transfer.

Yeah I have the DVDs here right next to me. What I always disliked though is the butchered format, they letterboxed the 2.39:1 original into a non-anamorphic 4:3 frame. Wasted quality and you have to auto-crop by your video player. Maybe one day we will get a proper digital scan from the original cinema reel.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#345
A hard drive with movie rips goes much further than a bunch of disks. Copies don't have the adverts, unskippable anti-piracy bullshit, or region locking. And letting go, and adapting to new media goes even further.

On the other hand, when I look something up from my past, I'm always thankful for the random archivist who still has a copy.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#346

I'm a very happy Apple Music subscriber, but I'm also 52 and so own thousands of CDs and hundreds of LPs. I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle…

YouTube Music also has this adding your own files feature.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#347
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consider instead: a Plex library backed by a “disk drive” that’s actually a DVD/Blu-Ray jukebox. You can fish the disks out if you really want, but most of the time they’re just “online” as part of your library. Buy a new one? Feed it to the jukebox. Ideally, rip one “into the library” and the jukebox will consume a blank disk to burn it, then file it. (AFAIK, this last bit is how Amazon Glacier works—just with some…

I'd be real surprised if it was anything beyond tape drives, plus a local cache. Check out the storage capacity on the latest LTO tapes, and the tape storage capacities of the large room-size tape robots.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#348

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 lent almost none of my DVDs and VHS tapes(!) back in the day because the fact of the matter is /people never gave them back/. Not even good friends. It's one of those lessons I learned early in life. If you're going to lend something to someone, do so with the expectation you're never getting it back.

Yup, tools too. I'll come over and help ya, but nobody is going to borrow my tools.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#349

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 lent almost none of my DVDs and VHS tapes(!) back in the day because the fact of the matter is /people never gave them back/. Not even good friends. It's one of those lessons I learned early in life. If you're going to lend something to someone, do so with the expectation you're never getting it back.

One cannot lend books or DVDs, one can only gift them.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#350
This is ycom, so the replies are of course biased towards the "I always have good internet" paradigm.

I live about 5 months per year in my RV in the middle of a desert. Internet is a phone-tethered experience. What is this "streaming" thing you talk about? I'd be buffering all night.

And so, yes, there are good reasons for many of us to retain, in some form, all the DVD's we can get.

Post reply on HN