Since the pandemic I’ve been collecting DVDs and Blu-rays, because I started getting into filmmaking and valued the importance of physical media. One of my reasons was the horror stories I’ve read about licenses on DRM-protected purchases being revoked.
After we moved to a much smaller house, my Billy bookshelf containing around 200+ titles has been taking a huge amount of space. And the cases just sit there looking pretty. We never use the discs. There’s no Blu-ray player in our house. We all watch digital content on portable devices. I’ve filled up several hard drives with so many obscure, international films that will never get distribution here. And so, I’ve stopped buying discs. It’s also much more convenient to be able to play MKVs on every device in my house.
I was one of those people who constantly purchased discs to remux and encode them myself for use on a future server, but that’s a waste of time, energy and money as there are dozens of release groups who’ve done the work already for me.
It doesn’t make sense to keep all the clutter around. I also have 500+ DVDs in a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.
I’m thinking of selling the Blu-rays that aren’t rare to buy a cheapo Optiplex. The discs are already pretty worthless. I’m just scared that I might regret this decision.
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I purged hundreds of DVDs when I moved, movies and series I was confident I’d never rewatch, or that would be easy to find on Blu-Ray.
I still occasionally buy used DVDs, mainly foreign films and series, and mountain bike or fmx videos.
I need to do the same with my CDs. And make backups of the rare ones in case of disc rot. Vinyl likewise; but those won’t be given away.
If you want to keep the media but cut the space it takes up, but 90s style CD/DVD binders and toss the cases. I keep hundreds of my disks in 3 binders.
Personally I keep all my stuff. If the file gets lost or damaged I don’t need another copy, I can just grab mine and rescan it. Plus DVDs play in almost all of my machines (I installed a DVD drive in most of them) so there’s that.
Surprised Ctrl-F turned up zero occurrences of “copyright”. It is legal to back up CDs (which have no copy protection that would fall under DMCA), provided one keeps the originals. And I haven’t heard of an individual getting prosecuted for backing up copy-protected discs like DVDs.
I keep my originals, for legal reasons. I wish I didn’t have to keep the atoms around, but I feel like I do.
Yeah managed to sell all my dvds and blurays to a collector trying to line his basement media room with them.
I’m the opposite. I find it particularly inconvenient not having discs to simply pop on a player.
I use a couple of streaming services but those really are just a video on demand channel.
I have a few mp3’s here and there, lol many on dvd-r but finding those when they are scattered about then writing to a spare flash drive just to stick in the player to watch is just a bit inconvenient.
Use a hdd? Well I could if I had the time to collect everything together and find a hdd and a caddy but I simply cba.
Basically the primary source for video and audio in my hoard is off optical media itself. And I’m adding more and more, so will be getting a couple of Billy shelves in the new year.
I’ve been getting rid of my physical media too. I still have my UHD movies but I don’t even watch them…
I figure my DVDs and CDs don’t take much room. I have a few Case-Logic binders that hold about 400 discs each. They’re about the size of a medium-sized 3-ring binder.
Hard drives fail in a few years. Factory printed dvd blue rays and burned M disc dont fail, right? So, you just by new and larger hard drives every 10 years?
I still keep my hundreds of books and thousands of vinyl records even though I consume almost everything electronically. There’s something to be said for not having your entire culture locked up in small grey anonymous boxes.
Thrown out? I don’t understand. What does that mean?
I threw away my DVDs years back. With >1200 physical books in my 650sq ft apartment, I’m thinking of getting rid of some genre paperbacks, and replacing them with electronic versions. I’ve got a ton of collectible hardbacks, which I’ll keep forever.
I would never do this, personally. But it depends on the collection - mine consists almost entirely of 3D movies… most are out of print and many are now quite rare. If it’s a bunch of easy-to-find titles then that’s a different story
MY GF has the same problem. Huge physical media collection, tiny living space. She was on the verge of throwing it out/ donating it after I set up an Emby server for her, but managed to reach a compromise instead. Disc binders.
While still taking up space, they are much smaller than normal DVD cases and you still have them for backup.
I did throw out boxes and put them all in a folder. Saved tons of space. Simply could not keep them all like they were