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My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

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Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#11
post #3

> The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang onto forever, you can’t really go wrong. Am I the only one who thinks that this premise is flawed? DVDs, like any physical storage medium, have a limited lease on life. If I was serious enough about movies to go into a store and pick them by hand, the first thing in would do is to create a digital backup. A…

What's going to live longer - a piece of plastic stored properly, or you? I have vinyl records from owners who are now deceased, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#12
post #3

> The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang onto forever, you can’t really go wrong. Am I the only one who thinks that this premise is flawed? DVDs, like any physical storage medium, have a limited lease on life. If I was serious enough about movies to go into a store and pick them by hand, the first thing in would do is to create a digital backup. A…

Well. With DVDs you CAN rip them and store the backups. Not sure though about blueray disks.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#13
This is the paradox of choice, really. There are books written on the topic. I find that with fewer choices of media to consume comes deeper analysis and appreciation of what you do choose to consume.

If I have a dozen music CDs and that's all the music I get to listen to, I am going to start hearing the music on a deeper level, picking out the individual instruments and following them through the song, taking notice of the quality of the vocal swing in a singer's voice, relating the narratives presented in the music to my own life in different ways, etc...

The paradox of choice is not just a problem in the artistic media we are exposed to, but also our information diet in general.

How many people seem to know a little bit about everything currently happening in the world? How many of those people have deep knowledge of any of those things?

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#15
post #2

I'm quite annoyed that netflix let their DVD service just rot. For quite awhile I was using it as a nice value add to the couple of streaming services I had, to watch new movies or catch a single show from some service I wasn't interested in subscribing too. But then they stopped even replacing broken discs so there were holes in series so it lost a lot its usefulness.

How does Redbox compare? I always see their kiosks, but I never think to look. I'm also surprised and amused to learn it's owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul. Yes, that Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Most I've used have a very small selection, maybe 30 total options, but a lot of those can be out of stock. If you have any sort of criteria (like I'm often looking for movies we could watch with our kids) there might only be one or two choices.

I'd compare it to showing up at a cinema and just hoping to find a show that looked interesting and happened to be starting soon.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#16
post #3

> The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang onto forever, you can’t really go wrong. Am I the only one who thinks that this premise is flawed? DVDs, like any physical storage medium, have a limited lease on life. If I was serious enough about movies to go into a store and pick them by hand, the first thing in would do is to create a digital backup. A…

DVDs and Blu-Rays can be easily backed up.

I can vouch for MakeMKV and Plex as a good solution. Now I have a streaming service that's only full of my media, and my interests.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#17
All businesses wanting recurring revenue now is a shame, subscription fatigue is definitely setting in and slowly draining my wallet.

With my “adult” schedule, I find now that I often don’t even watch more than 2 or 3 movies in the month, for which I could easily just purchase a “forever” physical copy second hand.

My concern is now for the video games industry where if we go all digital, we will be locked into these services with no option to only buy that one game you player for a one off fee.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#18
post #2

I'm quite annoyed that netflix let their DVD service just rot. For quite awhile I was using it as a nice value add to the couple of streaming services I had, to watch new movies or catch a single show from some service I wasn't interested in subscribing too. But then they stopped even replacing broken discs so there were holes in series so it lost a lot its usefulness.

Agreed. I stuck with it until the bitter end since the catalog was far larger, and curiously, at least here in the USA, streaming in french (or spanish) is not available in many cases, while the DVDs usually had the french I suppose to cover Québec.

Another annoyance is once they killed off the service I was unable to get my DVD queue out to import into https://www.cafedvd.com/ despite going through their EU data request mechanism. They had the rest of the info on my account but they'd either deleted that data (unlikely for a large company to throw out a source of user preference info) or made it inaccessible to the team fulfilling the request. After repeated requests I gave up.

Re: My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

#19
post #3

> The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang onto forever, you can’t really go wrong. Am I the only one who thinks that this premise is flawed? DVDs, like any physical storage medium, have a limited lease on life. If I was serious enough about movies to go into a store and pick them by hand, the first thing in would do is to create a digital backup. A…

Well. With DVDs you CAN rip them and store the backups. Not sure though about blueray disks.

You can with blueray too, but the legality is dubious.
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