Why buy second hand DVDs to clutter your house when piracy exists? Either way the rights holders earn no money.
DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media
Submitted 1 day ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 8 hours ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
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
Psythik@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Cus I like em
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
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.
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
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.
yopyop@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
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?
Enekk@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
MrWrinkles@leminal.space 20 hours ago
No, vinyl is still the new vinyl. Tons and tons of new vinyl on Bandcamp. And tapes!
ecvanalog@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Yes but vinyl’s resurgence is like a decade old now. People were actively abandoning DVD while stocking up on vinyl.
LittleBorat3@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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
GarboDog@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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.
LittleBorat3@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Way too many DVDs are interlaced/telecined though.
Or worse, some hellish combination through the producers editing mixed stuff together. It makes scaled footage, panning, and some motion look really awful once you notice it.
Sludgeyy@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
scala@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
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.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Heck CRTs were standard at 480p and nobody had any problems
Katana314@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
jj4211@lemmy.world 18 hours 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.
FG_3479@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
MakeMKV is the easiest way. The license key is always in the forum.
ecvanalog@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
Nalincah@feddit.org 21 hours ago
What? DVD is perfectly fine
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 9 hours ago
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.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
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.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
No. No they’re not.
The reason vinyl is vinyl is because the format requires very careful mastering of the source audio since the format is very sensitive to such things. This is why people say vinyl can sound better than a compressor digital file like an mp3 or a mass produced MP3.
Nothing about a DVD precludes any additional mastery of the media. If anything it is simply cheap to buy DVDs from second hand sources or even places like eBay.
With the way the world is now I understand why people want physical media like disks so as to own their movies which could explain a resurgence of dvd sales.
But they’re not the next vinyl. They still make vinyl.
No is putting hd video on dvd disks.
pfr@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
AI music has entered the chat
m3t00@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Blu Ray is where it’s at. Give me some actual quality bitrate baby.
babyfarmer@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
vanontom@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And decent resolution: DVD is forever stuck at tiny 480p MPEG. While Blu-ray is up to 4K HEVC.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
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.
Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
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.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
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.
lance20000@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
detren@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
kratoz29@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
We are forever fucked over lots of TV shows/movies that are caged within the stream services realm :/
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Technically network connected blu ray players can be updated to region lock you out of your content.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
So don’t connect them to the Internet
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 day ago
That’s completely bullshit. I can’t hold any of the thousands of videos on my NAS, yet they can’t remove access to them.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Hold in your had = physical access.
NAS counts
Sineljora@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
Rinox@feddit.it 11 hours ago
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
unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
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.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Yeah, that’s a fair point.
maudelix@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The sneakernet and non volatile memory is the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
peetabix@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Reminds me of this PS4 ad:
yuriRO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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
brandon@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
TuxEnthusiast@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
qobuz too!
red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
For families, Tidal is even cheaper. But it’s majority owned by that Twitter asshole Jack Dorsey. Just another fucking billionaire.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
3D printing your own guns
Just buy a normal fucking gun, this is America ffs there are more guns than people.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yeah. 3D printing a gun is a great way to blow your hand off.
Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
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
Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 day ago
Oh awesome the memes are proliferating.
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 4 hours ago
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.
Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Blu-rays are great, DVDs not so much unless it’s an old title that was never released in 1080p
Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Or classic 2d animation.
1080p simpsons vs 720p Simpsons look really close
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 1 day ago
*480
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
DVDs are fine, but the subtitles look god-awful - and they’re bitmaps so there is no easy way to make them not suck
Blackmist@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
I think they’re bitmaps on Blu-rays as well. Just higher resolution.
Streaming tends to use text formats.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Blu ray has copy protection…
Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
So does DVD and can be bypassed just as easily these days
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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
stoly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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
Mwa@thelemmy.club 11 hours ago
i also very rarely still see Video Games being sold in CD/DVDS.
actually only one.m3t00@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
eli@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
mlg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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 !
tehn00bi@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
probably the same reason I refused to leg 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.
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
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.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were more used.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
impynchimpy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Ajen@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Just make sure you back them up. Bit rot is real.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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.
Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Yeah because i want to own when i buy things
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m happy to just pirate this shit.
puppinstuff@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
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 can take a hike.
W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Image
Strider@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Yeah revolutionary concept