A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates

I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never watch blu-rays directly, because I don't want to muck with physical discs. Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server.

I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any damages from my habits.

Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it's also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it's more failure-proof.

That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it's something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse.

Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.

It’s frustrating to me how every studio / network feels it needs its own streaming service, one where they control the entire experience. It’s stupidly user hostile and yet there’s no alternative other than physical media (with all its negatives) or piracy.

For those that have not visited your local library lately. Along with books, I regularly borrow audiobooks, whole tv series, movies, switch and ps5 games. And they give me access to yet another movie and music streaming service that they pay for. Once I add in the library system and requesting stuff from other libraries it is rarely that I can't get access to something I am interested in.

This isn't the library I went to as kids that had a tiny rack of VHS tapes in the back. They seem to have fully embraced the digital era.

I no longer care that "piracy is wrong"

You know whats wrong, you price gouging me for 15 services that are all awful.

Unlike TV where channels compete for eyeballs, unlike the theater where they only make money when you show up streaming services have perverse incentives.

What is the ideal streaming customer: one who pays, and never watches. The content only has to be good enough often enough to make you not want to unsub and resub. I have to suspect that these servcies are programing this way.

It explains why free + ads is a model for better content. You only get paid for what I watch... It means that 800 hours of shit content isnt worth having up, and you need to have better stuff.

My wife has churned through a few video services, netflix, amazon, disney, etc.

I've seen her frustration as series come and go from the catalogs, and the lack of things that we can watch together. So recently I've gone back to DVDs.

Many local shops sell used DVDs for €1 each, and I recently discovered a store in Helsinki which is lined with DVDs basically from floor to ceiling - a little more expensive, but not much. It was fun spending an hour browsing around looking for things I remembered or wanted to see for the first time.

Sure DVDs won't last forever, but I think having TV shows, and films, on disk is going to keep me going for the next 10+ years quite happily. Maybe after that I'll switch to something else, but I struggle to imagine it.

I may be crazy but I just pay to rent movies on my Apple TV. $5 or so for a movie once it’s available to rent, watch it, and I’m done. Essentially every movie is available this way… if its on blu-ray, it’s on the Apple TV. If we know we’re really going to like a movie we sometimes buy it. I know we don’t really “own” the movies because they’re DRM’d, but I feel like Apple will keep them available for quite a long time, essentially “forever”, and if they ever lose the rights or shut the service down I’ll feel a lot more justified in pirating any movies I lost access to.

Decades ago my wife and I would go to blockbuster every Friday night and pick the movie we wanted to watch for the weekend. Now we do the same thing, just by streaming it instead of getting a physical copy and having to take it back. I have no complaints.

I think at the end of the day the economics of streaming just aren’t there. Rights holders saw how much Netflix was making off their content and realized they could get way more if they cut out the middle man. But the cost of creating quality content requires selling it for way more than a monthly subscription that people are willing to pay (or else you get ads). There’s a reason movies cost 5 bucks to rent on Amazon or 15 bucks to buy outright.

For me the straw that broke the camel’s back was Amazon Prime wasting billions in shows that almost no one wants to see (Rings of Power, anyone?) and now realizing they have to show me ads to stop them from hemorrhaging money.

No, I’ve gone back to pirating everything with Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin and the likes. Enough is enough.

I live in a smallish apartment building with 50 apartments and in the basement we have a little building community library where people put books/DVDs/Blu-ray disks that they’re done with. Last weekend I grabbed The Goodfellas and The Dark Night and will put them back when I’m done.

I think it would be really cool if there were ways for people to share their physical media because I don’t have the room to maintain a big media library, and also don’t have the energy to rip and store locally.

I also want to add that I’ve changed my streaming behavior- I will subscribe and immediately cancel the subscription so that it expires after a month so that I don’t end up with a bunch of active subscriptions that I’m not actively using.

When I do subscribe I always pay for the more expensive ad-free versions but recently I couldn’t get anything to play on Paramounts streaming service. After some trial and error I found that their “ad-free” service won’t run with my blocker running on my router and I needed to allowlist some ad services for it work. That’s pretty annoying.

Do any of the media server solutions retrieve metadata (that someone has made, if they have) for you? I would happily rip discs while I do other things so I can have the convenience of playing from a server and the ability to pick up where I left off. But I draw the line at entering all the metadata and sample images and stuff for seasons of a TV series.

A couple of things: Most Blu-ray discs require an internet connection to play on most players and PCs. (don't really know why, but discovered this at work.) In order for this to happen, the DVD and BR makers are going to have to ramp up quite a bit.

Personally, I like the disc options because of no commercials. However, it does take us back to the storage problem and surely they will start putting commercials on the discs.

Realistically speaking, would it be the return of piracy streaming or VPN + BitTorrent?

Physical media was dead on arrival. This was a product of poor infrastructure eg it's faster and cheaper to ship a DVD vs transferring several GB. This no longer holds true. While streaming and ownership are complicated there's no reason to go back to physical media unless you like vinyl.

Here at Volumo (a specialized music store for pro DJs that have I co-founded) we see our future in downloads (DRM-free, of course), not streaming. With a download license, you can do anything you can do with streaming, and much more. And it allows the author to get a decent royalty instead of some "microcents".

It can sometimes take an effort to explain to an outsider why we don't do streaming and don't want to. It's like we are swimming opposite to the flow. But I see streaming as something geared towards casual listeners, while downloads are for professionals and enthusiasts.

bluray also just has better image quality and it is a little sad that the image quality of the average movie watcher has decreased slightly from bluray to streaming.

I also recently ditched the streaming services I was paying for (Netflix, Youtube, and Max). I'd love a recommendation for an external Blu-ray drive for ripping media onto a streaming server.

That said, I recently discovered Tubi, which is completely free, has a crazy amount of shows and movies, and ad blockers seem to work fine. Re-watching Andromeda while I finish up my dissertation. It's been great fun.

As an alternate pov, i don't care to own any movies or series because i don't care to rewatch any of them, with very few exceptions. I simply can't seem to sit through the same movie a second time when i know what happens and how it ends. The very few exceptions are the ones that make me feel a certain way. I rewatch them to feel that way again

Values evaporates and corporations decide what's offensive or not. They are removing excellent episodes from great tv shows just because it might be considered offensive.

Here's an example https://youtu.be/HjJQBX2Nw2A?si=awZAc-a9ZYjJv8BY

bue-rays can evaporate even faster, thanks to drm, you often find yourself with players that don't allow old blue-rays or computers with cpu's that no longer implement some protection mechanism

Can you get a Blu-Ray player that doesn't have an Internet connection?

wait till they hear about bittorrent

No, a return to piracy, unfortunately.

I WANT to pay creators I just don't want to also pay for 10 different services to watch what I want.

I just use streaming sites from Asia... ad-block ftw

I fully expect to read the following copy in the next 18 months from a company backed by a certain Tolkien-loving investor:

"Introducing the Mauhúr-1 indoor drone from Curunír Defense. This quiet and nimble drone revolutionizes clandestine operations and urban warfare by bringing unparalleled combat situational awareness to all war fighters in the base scout configuration[1]. Enemy combatants will have nowhere to hide with the infrared loadout. It can also carry out offensive duty with 4 anti-personnel shaped charges.

1. Base model starts at $500,000"

This tech is cool as hell, it's too bad it a couple of steps towards the inevitable killbots. The other major milestone will be when drones can identity and turn door knobs...

Well, if these fixed sales are cutting into our recurring revenue then they’ve got to go! Vault them all. Every last one.

Surely the problem is that we just haven’t gatekept popular culture well enough? It’s the children who are wrong.

I was watching Blu-rays for awhile (mostly borrowing them from a nearby public library branch, and also occasionally buying a boxed set of a good series I wanted to watch), and had a few problems:

1. The Blu-ray software/data design itself is a monstrosity, seemingly designed for hostility towards users, and otherwise indifferent to user experience and reliability. (DVD wasn't too bad by comparison, with the only offenses being DRM and the obnoxious unskippables mainly used for threatening police-state messages at the start of your entertainment.)

2. Even with a better recent Sony Blu-ray player, I frequently had problems playing, which slams the brakes on whatever entertainment you were having, and turns it into a work task or frustration. I guess causes probably mostly from library disc wear, but also a few discs that just wouldn't play due to to what appeared to be software problems.

3. Modern surveillance capitalism behavior by devices. Virtually all companies, and some non-companies, will spy on you and then sell/give the data to sketchy other parties, with how normalized this has gotten. Just finding a modern player console that was airgappable but should work with all/most discs was difficult, and it wasn't a great ergonomic solution.

4. Assembling a better media player with Linux (despite being very familiar with Linux tinkering) looked time-consuming, duct-tape-ish, and legally questionable. Out-of-box solutions I tried seemed piracy-oriented, with disc-playing an afterthought. And search hits would overwhelming be SEO pages full of BS-ing sales pitches to sell sketchy VPN services or occasionally trick people into installing malware.

(Streaming, OTOH, has gotten ridiculous, with the services I've tried recently having mostly disposable content, and sometimes user-hostile UI. I canceled Amazon Prime mainly because Prime Video had gotten blatantly user-hostile in such ways that I think Bezos would've picked up that customer's chair in a meeting, and thrown it at people pitching the changes. But Netflix does some anti-user things too.)

More generally, my current mode as a consumer who doesn't like to be violated is to pick up tablescraps of value while minimizing harm. While wistfully keeping an eye out for the elusive collaborations of people who aren't just expending their energy towards extracting money by making the world worse for everyone else.

I'm happy with DVDs from the public library. I find higher-resolution videos disturbing. Like, it's already fake, just really sharply so. Fuzz it a bit and I have an easier time suspending disbelief.

I've got several bookshelves filled with DVDs I've accumulated through the years: through charity shops, pawn shops, other collectors, estates, etc.

Its always wonderful to discover something amazing going for a steal. And I think DVDs hit a good sweet spot between having good-enough quality (after some upscaling), being cheap, and being quick and "fun" to rip and backup.

Its on the more minimalistic side of hoarding at least.

I maintain an Apple TV+ subscription and that one is definitely worth it. For the rest I’m sailing the high seas, and whatever I manage to catch in my nets I enjoy via a combination of a cheap WebDAV server in the cloud + Infuse on all my devices.

The problem is that government helping big corporations make piracy less effective (dmca, forcing telco to give up customer names) and the lack of effective piracy doesn't put enough pressure on media company becoming better and offering a decent service

I buy collector's edition blu-rays of films I love but mostly because of the film stock bookmarks, I love those. But I actually never ever watched a film from blu-ray disc (or DVD). I just make a copy with MakeMKV.

Services like Popcorn Time and the many spin-offs will just continue to improve and show what 'streaming' can be like if not for the futile attempts at trying to contain the technology. When commercial streaming took off there seemed to be a sigh of relief, finally the industry has gotten the message than people are willing to pay for 'content' just as long as the user experience is up to par. Well, the message seems to have entered one ear to escape out the other and the high seas have started to look quite inviting again. Arrrrr, matey!

What annoys me is when you buy something UHD and they won't stream it in UHD because of DRM.

HBO Max is good, YouTube is not for example

I have so many UHD movies on YouTube can only watch in 480P less I buy an ad ridden tv

where I live in Portland Oregon there is a store called Movie Madness that has about a 80 thousand titles on dvd and vhs (you can rent a vhs player with an adapter). The films are sorted by director country and genre. It’s pretty amazing. I’m there every week because it’s a few blocks from my place, it blows away streaming because they have everything I come across online.

I have a nice Sony OLED TV, I have calibrated it with a hardware colorimeter, and I use MadVR ML upscaling to 4K for all my files. I have a ripped a lot of blu-ray discs (especially Dario Argento). Is there a quality issue, rather than censorship, to go beyond that?

Sadly, I suspect that pirate torrent sites will preserve a lot of this stuff better than the streaming owners of the IP. We are in kind of a golden age for quality transfers of niche films. Even if there are still significant gaps.

The article was good and I was happy to learn about Arrow Video, which reminds me a lot of Limited Run Games.

I will say there is a big downside of physical media that has to be mentioned: the physical space. In my apartment it really makes the whole thing a bit of a non-starter unless I’m willing to discard jackets and put discs into soft binders like my old CD setup that I had in my 1999 Civic.

That issue can be made worse if you’re just not the type of person to watch and rewatch content over and over. That’s where streaming shines: I’m sure to some people, the fact that content rotates in and out isn’t that much of a downside. They just want to watch “whatever is on.”

I am also not a big fan of how much ripping and data hoarding becomes a hobby. In terms of the fact that you’re doing something illegal (breaking cryptographic protection to rip a personal collection), your risk certainly minimal, but it’s technically a non-zero risk. You’re technically supposed to keep those movies on their discs and not decrypt their content in order to back them up.

With that in mind if you’re already getting into ripping content and setting up Plex/Jellyfin for yourself you might as well just go the whole way and start downloading off of Usenet.

Aside from that, I also think that digital purchases and downloads can be a decent way to go. I’ve heard of some providers like Sony removing purchases from libraries but that also seems extremely rare. I have a few random movies purchased on iTunes (now renamed/moved to the Apple TV app but still available) and they’re still there many years later, but it would be nice to get that as more of a guarantee. Apple’s streaming quality is also second excellent and certainly close enough to what you get on Blu-Ray for 99.9% of people.

I went full streaming in 2007 and I always knew that it would become this. So I made a rule that when Netflix got ads I'd bail on streaming altogether. I've been digital only for video games for a few generations so just picked a video ecosystem and buy content when it's at its cheapest. I'm not playing this game where my collection requires extra time and maintenance. If a company takes a license away then the won't get anymore money from me. There are a few video game companies that will never get money from me ever again. They need my money more than I need to give it to them.

Just lately there was an article about one of the last 50 surviving video stores in Germany that has recently seen an uptick in customers. They have a huge collection of DVDs. They get a lot more requests for DVDs rather than Blu-rays.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/dvd-vs-streaming-eine-d...

Has anyone looked into recreating the original Netflix with dvd by mail?

Yes, streaming is that bad.

I've been using my raspberry pi 4 as a server for my local network. Just plugged in some external hard drive, some samba configuration and I'm all set. I was thinking about investing in my offline catalog again, since I get less and less content worth watching in streaming platforms.

Update: https://i.ibb.co/52Q5cfr/Screenshot-20240323-152512.png

I started picking up blurays and DVDs at record stores that also stock them. I got into record collecting during the pandemic as many did and more physical media is not a big leap from there. You can find good movies sometimes for cheaper than on Amazon or itunes.

I was just learning to rip blurays onto my disk server. I did this a lot during the DVD era, but the tooling is now slightly different. (Still ffmpeg or mencoder and the like, but now libaacs. And matroska is much more of a thing.) Sometimes I'm picking up higher res copies of stuff I already collected from that era.

The cost of being able to watch a reasonable cross-section of media has risen faster than wage growth. All of the diffuse streaming services without sharing agreements have, in their greed to not share the pie, put themselves into competition with grocery stores. Being able to afford two streaming services — or one, based on Netflix’s hostility to account sharing! — is a luxury that fewer can afford each year. They can scrabble all they want for the shrinking pie of available money to spend on entertainment, but unless they stop siloing and start accepting cross-membership across the board, they’ll all go bankrupt once someone realizes that the Blockbuster store model with its $2 rentals and the collapse of commercial real estate is about to become viable again.

"Where will streaming video go next? My guess is that media conglomerates with ties to communications companies will form a team-up. Comcast (NBCUniversal) and AT&T (Warner) may partner with Disney to take the lead on at least one unified streaming service"

The end result of the streaming services era seems like it will look no different than the cable era that people were fleeing.

Physical UHD disc players will only be worth it when there’s a UHD release of “No Country for Old Men”.

Blu-Rays? No thanks. DVD's all you need. Plus they're dirt cheap used.

The boutique Blu-ray market has become fairly well served in the last five years. I suspect this may partially be because of the pandemic, but it seems to be sustaining.

Most people have heard of Criterion and of course they’re still going strong. But there are easily a dozen labels of various sizes dedicated to physical media these days. Arrow is one. Vinegar Syndrome tends to focus on more exploitative titles plus they act as distributor for many smaller labels. Severin does a lot of horror. The UK’s Radiance Video is carving out an interesting niche in more obscure genre offerings. Kino Lorber has a lot of classics. And so on, and so on.

I don’t know the financials behind this but a lot of the print runs seem to be around 3K copies and many of these labels have sustained for a few years now. Radiance and Vinegar Syndrome both have subscription programs which probably help with predictability. Some people buy these for the movies, some because they’re collectors, and some for both reasons.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/blu-ray-labels-film... is a decent article on all of this.

I love pirating everything. I pay 5 bucks for my vpn. You guys should do that.

A question/poll on the choice ethics, legality, and convenience.

Is it OK/legal to download/torrent a movie/show (media) if you buy/own/paid for a physical copy Blu-ray/vinyl, etc.?