cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4954415
The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?’
I feel what I’ve always felt – that DVDs and Blu-rays were the summit of the film-lovers’ experience, and that progress should have stopped forever after that. Perhaps downloads or streamable films can have the picture quality of a Blu-ray (someone will doubtless tell me they do), but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own.
…
So my Blu-ray collecting goes on, but it’s strictly finite. I don’t want any film I don’t actually love (this rules out the collected Tarkovsky or Bergman, things I’d like to think of myself as liking rather than actually wanting to watch). My ambitions in fact are modest: the middle period works of Woody Allen (they’re about £25 a piece and should be), the odd Hollywood classic (the more technicolour the better) and some of those gritty 1960s northern films (the kind Morrissey purloined for his album covers) starring Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham. Then, barring the odd hiccup, I’m done.
But how do you know if you love a film before buying it’d dvd if you watch only on dvd ? And if you watched it already somewhere else, what’s the point of buying the dvd ?
I can maybe fill one small shelf with DVD of movies that I enjoying re watching (maybe 20, top 30). Otherwise for nearly all the movie I watch them once and that’s done. So streaming or piracy are the best for my use case.
The same way we did before streaming…? Trusted reviews. Gut instinct. That sorta thing. You take a chance and go with it. I still do it with music hard copies. Sometimes I’ve never even heard of the artist I’m buying, I just like the artwork, or someone in the store will say something about it. I pirate a lot myself, been on some forums for near on 2 decades now, a lot of the people I know on them still buy media. I mean, it’s kinda like going out to eat, you don’t always get a winner every time, but the hits usually outweigh the misses.
You could rent DVD’s at Blockbuster etc. We did it all the time in the 90’s. Bunch of guys all hit the Blockbuster on a Friday night and grab 2-3 movies and then sit back and drink our faces off. Then we’d forget to return them and would get charged an amount equal to the cost of the DVD itself in late fees. Ah, good times.
My dad was an OG pirate. He would burn the dvds we got at blockbuster if he liked the movie
Except blockbuster fully no longer exists anymore.
I still rent from Redbox and the library. Sure the library is only DVD quality but it is free. For most movies that is fine and I can upgrade later to Blu-ray or 4K if I like the movie later.
Of course not. Everyone moved to streaming services. Zero physical media and you get to charge people whatever you want and can increase your prices yearly, while dropping content you love. For me, that’s not working so I pirate everything.
I still have 300+ DVD’s but I’ve downloaded them all once I got my Plex home media server setup and now I don’t even care what streaming services are out there. I got everything I need and it works when my internet doesn’t.
I’m with you. I agree that it’s silly that physical media has all but disappeared. It’s especially sad that it happened right after bluray became affordable. The picture quality on them is astounding. The banding/artifacts you sometimes see on streaming services should not be acceptable at all, but honestly I think a lot of people do not notice them at all!