Much has been written about the demise of physical media. Long considered the measure of technological progress in audiovisual and computing fields, the 2000s saw this metric seemingly rendered obsolete by the rise of online audiovisual and software distribution services. This has brought us to a period in time where the very idea of buying a new music album, a movie or a piece of software in a physical, or even online, retail store has become largely impossible amidst the rise of digital-only media.
Even so, not all is well in this digital-only paradise, as the problems with having no physical copy of the item which you purportedly purchased are becoming increasingly more evident. From increases in monthly service costs, to items being removed or altered without your consent, as well as concerns over privacy and an inability to resell or lend an album or game to a buddy, there are many reasons why having the performance or software on a piece of off-line, physical media is once again increasing in appeal.
Even if the demise of physical data storage was mostly a trick to extract monthly payments from one’s customer base, what are the chances of this process truly reverting, and to what kind of physical media formats exactly?
The End Of Ownership
The concept of having audiovisual performances on physical media which you can play at will within the confines of your own abode is relatively new, first brought to the masses by inventions such as the phonograph, starting with wax cylinders, followed by shellac and vinyl records. This brought everything from concerts to stage performances to the home, where the proud owner of this piece of physical media could play it back on its corresponding playback device. This set the trend that would persist until the dominance of CDs.
Similarly, movies would at first be just something that you’d watch in the cinema, then you could catch it on broadcast TV along with an increasing number of series. Owning a copy of your favorite series or movie became possible with VHS, Laserdisc and so on. When home computer systems became prevalent, the software for them was found in magazines, on tapes, diskettes, CDs, etc., with in-store displays using their box art to entice potential buyers.
Yet at all of this has effectively come to an end. LG recently announced that they’ll stop making new Blu-ray players, following the recent decision by Best Buy and other stores to quit selling Blu-rays and DVDs. Optical drives are now firmly considered a legacy feature on laptops and desktop systems, with only a subset of game consoles still featuring this feature and thus doubling as a Blu-ray player with compromises.
Unlike our parents and their grandparents, it looks like today’s generations will not leave behind a legacy of (physical) media that their children and grandchildren can peruse, often not even for books, as these are equally becoming tied into online subscription services. In this Digital Media Age, it seems that the best we can hope for is to temporarily lease an ethereal digital copy by the grace of media corporate overlords.
Digital Media Is Terrible
There are many reasons to mourn the death of physical media, with some pertinent ones laid out for DVDs and Blu-rays in this AV Club article by Cindy White:
- Permanence: you purchase the copy and as long as you take good care of it, it’s yours to do with as you please.
- Better quality: owing to the video compression of digital streaming services, you’ll get a worse audiovisual experience.
- Portability: you can take the physical media with you, lend it to a friend, or even sell it.
- Better for artists: the system of residuals with DVD/BD sales was much more fair to artists.
- Extras: DVD and BD releases would come with extra content, like soundtracks, behind the scenes, interviews, and much more.
Some are beginning to feel uneasy in the face of this dawning realization that before long all our movies, series, books, games and software will be locked behind what are essentially leasing services on our (ad-sponsored) smart TVs, smart phones, smart books and smart computers/consoles in increasingly barren rooms.
Take for example this article by Amelia over at IGN on physical vs digital media and ownership and the lack thereof. An aspect raised in it is preservation in general, as a streaming platform could decide to put the proverbial torch to (part of) its library and that would be the end of that content, barring any Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)-busting copies. Even so, Amelia finds it hard to ignore the convenience of watching something on these streaming services.
The lack of visual quality is a view that Henry T. Casey over at CNN Underscored shares, with over at The National Faisal Salah and William Mullally advocating for starting that physical media collection. The permanence argument is prevalent here, while the latter article pointing out the hopeful signs of a revival of physical media by smaller (boutique) distributors, but this leaves much of mainstream content firmly digital-only, including recent games like Alan Wake 2 which only got a physical version after fans insisted.
Shallow Libraries
The convenience of flicking on the smart appliance and tuning out on-demand without having to go to a store is a tempting feature that physical media cannot really compete with, yet there’s an argument to be made that physical media sales complement streaming, not unlike how those same sales complemented broadcast TV and cinemas in the past. In fact, as a corollary one could state that digital streaming services have replaced broadcast TV, rather than physical media. This would make the latter collateral damage, whether intentional or not.
A strong advantage of physical media is also that it’s not limited to being sold by a single store, while digital (streaming) services have very shallow libraries that can make finding a specific piece of content or game a complete nightmare. So the conclusion that people seem to be increasingly coming to is that while digital media isn’t bad by itself, there is a lot of value in physical media that we’re now at risk of losing forever.
Yet if CDs and Blu-rays are dying a slow death today, and the next Microsoft and Sony game consoles may not have an optical drive option any more, is there any hope for a physical media revival?
It’s The Business Model
As alluded to already, digital media-as-a-service will not go away, as it has too many advantages. Especially in terms of low distribution costs, as the logistics of physical media can get rather convoluted. Where the real business case for physical media may be is in the added value. This is something which is observed with a platform like Bandcamp, which is an online music distribution platform via which artists can sell their music and merchandise, including CDs or vinyl records.
All of which points to that the physical formats of the future will likely remain CDs, Blu-rays and even vinyl records and cassette tapes as the most popular formats. Meanwhile for video games on PCs at least there are stores like Good Old Games, who recently launched their Preservation Program that seeks to keep older titles playable on modern systems. This in addition to allowing customers to download the installer for any game they purchase and put it on any kind of physical media which they desire, courtesy of their lack of DRM.
Yet the ticking timebomb under this revival of physical media may be that good players are becoming scarce. Cassette tapes and records increasingly are being played on the same cheap mechanisms, like the Tanashin clones, that are still being churned out by factories in China as Sony and others have abandoned the market. Now it seems that optical drives are facing the same race to the bottom, until one day the only physical media players and readers can be found used for exorbitant prices.
After all, what use is physical media if you have no way to play it?
Featured image: Front panel of a GPO Brooklyn with cassette player (Credit: VSchagow, Wikimedia)
I’m not shedding tears over the loss of Blu-Ray.
$ony sucks!
But, still buy CDs, DVDs, VHS at 2nd hand outlets. I also have backup players.
BluRay is just about the only thing Sony did ever right. What a joke to attack the only good thing!
They were great, I still have one from 2005 but lost the remote , now I want to get a new one with hrd10 and all that.
What happens when streaming dies because of a massive attack on the internet and every steaming service is down, and even worse, an attack on the grid itself. For me, streaming is all is use but, I wish I had some physical backup of music and video. Just 5 years ago I lived rural and had to use redbox because our internet was so bad you could not watch movies. Now, ingrt the joy of Prime or Netflix removing the only shows or movies I wanted to watch. I’d definitely buy a new Blu-ray for the quality difference, but, they are 500.00 and I can’t afford that right now.
I mean, an attack big enough to bring down CDN’s would be impressive, and losing the internet as a whole there are far more important things I would worry about compared to losing streaming.
Not really, it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that the network are much more fragile than providers like to say they are. A big part of this is over-provisioning and the hacks (mostly local caches) done to make it seem like available bandwidth is higher than it really is.
Just look at how quickly SMS and related services fail under load, and how easily an outage can partition major regions without end users understanding what is going on.
Better quality, I don’t know about you but as long as the quality is good enough I don’t care, its entertainment not an job
Ownership? Im 45 and never really owned that much physical media, broadcast, mix tapes, video rental, heck my car is loaded with MP3’s. Never understood this obsession with filling my house from floor to ceiling with objects I might only use once or twice in my life. The only thing I ever had a collection of was video games and its a tiny fraction of what I have available on the epic store (from their free section)
Consumer mindset.
The point is to have good happy memories. I know the idea might sound crazy to pull something from a shelf and feel young again. Putting on that vinyl and have something manual to interact with. To be able to touch something. Not move a finger over a touch screen or say “Hey Alexis, play Spotifray”.
This !
Just changed the drive belt on my vinyl record player.
Every 20min or so I have to stand-up to flip side and have to use the same gesture I used to have as a kid – this is like bicycling, you never forget !
(except Klaus Schulze record which are 30min each side).
This is why I love vinyl records.
You have to realize that that is a product of your upbringing though. The nostalgia that a physical album brings to you is… because you had a physical album when you were young.
I find myself nostalgic for winamp, midi and chiptunes, because thats what was around when I was in my youth.
I’d warrant that I experience the same biochemical process from scrolling through my old mp3 collection that you get from thumbing through your albums.
“I’d warrant that I experience the same biochemical process from scrolling through my old mp3 collection”
So how do you stroll through an old streaming playlist when it’s curated on a platform that’s free to eliminate it whenever they want?
The phrase “physical media” is probably wrong here: maybe “personally owned media” is more appropriate. The issue isn’t what format the media is stored in or on, it’s that it’s stored at all.
There is an extra aspect, as that you cannot replicate a vinyl yourself (faithfully), yet everyone can copy a digital file from storage media A to storage media B.
I’m sure Baudrillard would entertain your curiosity. Especially the real, hyperreal, the simulacra and the simulation. How is a digitized copy still the original? Is orange flavoured tap water still a type of orange juice?
Or just an abstraction layer? Is the ship of Theseus still the original ship? You can never really browse the internet of the ’90s again as even internet archives are not complete. We have now entered the realm of philosophy.
Does a chiptune output by a physical Amiga or Gravis Ultra sound better than one output by an emulator? These are difficult questions.
@Pat I was specifically replying to Carl’s experience of tangible media having extra significance, not the overall loss of personally owned media, which I absolutely agree with you would be a terrible loss.
@ Carl Breen
As we (apparently) grew up in different times, it’s impossible for me to compare my own experience to yours, but for me my level of nostalgia does not feel impacted by scarcity or authenticity. I get the same kick out of booting up my Batocera minipc and playing snes roms as I do playing the authentic machine, which has largely been gathering dust since I set up the emulator. For myself, and again I can only speak for myself, it’s not the nuanced minutia of having the coil whine of a CRT or I suppose, physically playing a needle on a record which excites me. It’s the artistic vision that comes from a specific place in time, whether it’s music, broadcast media, video games or something else. Sometime that belongs to the time when I was developing as a person, and can be imitated but never reproduced in the world today because people are fundamentally different, as they always are.
I absolutely respect how the way you interact with media is special to you, how it means something to you. My only point here is that I don’t believe it is an objectively superior experience to the experience of later generations. I grew up in a time where physical media was generally an annoying experience. Tape cassettes being eaten, CDs being scratched, floppy disks mysteriously becoming corrupted overnight. I don’t have the warm fuzzies for the media, but I do for what the media carried.
By having ripped it to HDD back in the day when you were listening to it. What, you don’t keep copies?
Part of the experience was ripping shows and keeping a collection of your favorites, in part because then you could listen to them offline without busting your data caps, or taking them with you in the car.
I’m probably a touch younger than you are then and I can still enjoy the appeal of Vinyl/Cassette/CD type systems, with Vinyl being probably the most satisfying – the act of doing and actively being involved physically to get a result more than just clicking a single button is something humans are just wired for. Though a small thing the few moments you spend flicking through the collection, dusting the Vinyl, setting the deck RPM (or forgetting to end up with playback speed errors and hilarity when you finally notice), and then flipping it over to get at the other side all get that part of your brain going. And you can actually watch the magic happen in Vinyl and Cassette too (at least a bit), same sort of thing that makes Animusic appealing, but real.
I really don’t play with the records very much, with the few that are ‘mine’ tucked in Dad’s collection. I probably wouldn’t ever buy a player unless I happened across a record I really wanted to listen to and couldn’t borrow one. But still I can see why some folks would, and it is not just nostalgia. Though that absolutely can be part of it.
Missing the point, personal ownership and future access. Streaming services don’t give you that, chances are high some of the services you use now won’t exist in 15-20 years. You have been taught not to care about this.
Once you spend time with uncompressed or at least high quality compressed audio/video on a device that can actually turn that data into sound and light with something resembling accuracy it is very hard to go back.
Watching a potato quality scene with crackling audio and big blocky compression artifact ruining all the detail (which is particularly bad on dark scenes most of the time) is just not entertaining or enjoyable in the same way as actually being able to see what is going on and hear maybe even with genuine positional audio… And that sort of barely useable quality experience is not exactly uncommon with the streaming services – might be sufficient to put on as background noise, but to actually be immersed in it and really enjoy it as entertainment in its own right…
yea but that’s not most streaming services these days (unless your on like 1mbs internet) a little 35$ stick and 300 meg fiber streams 4k on mutiple devices at once well enough it would is indistinguishable from a blu-ray
Blu-ray 4K UHD has a 128 mbps max bitrate. Netflix’s max 4K bitrate, which you have to pay extra for, is 12 mbps.
There is far to video quality than resolution.
to my old eyes on my cheap TV they look the same, entertainment isnt about bitrate either
Even with those high bandwidth streams, the data is still compressed to a high degree.
For example, every single streaming service does the thing with motion prediction, where the image jerks every 1-3 seconds where the scenery moves slowly and steadily. Think a panning scene in a nature documentary from a helicopter flying over a valley. That’s because they have to keep a more or less constant data rate, so they can’t afford to add more keyframes in places where the whole picture is moving. Once you start looking for it, you’ll notice it everywhere.
On a BluRay disc, you can vary the data rate dynamically because the entire movie is already “downloaded” and in memory. Of course you can still have a badly encoded movie where they didn’t do any optimization, but that’s a different matter.
I’d have to argue that is ALL streaming services now, no matter the internet speeds you have they won’t serve you the same quality you’d get of a disk, not even close. At least with video the audio you might get the same experience.
Now if your display or eyesight are not capable of showing you the difference in the video, then you haven’t actually spent time the way I suggested – in effect you don’t know any better! I guess lucky? you if its your eyesight that would keep you from noticing. But to some extent I’m not sure your eyes can ever really be bad enough you’d not be able to notice unless they are so bad you can’t really watch the content anyway.
So if you ever do spend some time with it I am pretty sure it will be hard to go back – heck I actively hate practically everything about my current ‘monitor’ compared to the old one but the picture quality, I was seriously tempted to try and fix that old one as the quality of life features for the way I want to use my desk with PiP for up to 4 inputs at once, a decent to navigate menu, no constant harping about wanting to be connected to the internet when you turn it on, way more inputs etc….
I’m pretty sure it just blew an internal fuse with how it failed, so it probably wouldn’t have been hard to fix except for finding the large enough space to lay it down and take it apart long enough to find the fault in the small UK home, but I needed a replacement fast as I didn’t have a suitable spare so bought this one as it was available and met the bare minimum requirements while also being affordable at the time. Really intended to pass the new one on pretty quick as soon as the old was fixed, which i figured would take maybe a week or two to find the space more than anything. But darn if the image quality isn’t so so much better, with black being better and so many more levels to its greyscale making the contrast so much better, also more colour accurate, and while I don’t much care for the higher refresh rate it is nice to have too – I really wouldn’t want to go back, even though the darn thing annoys me a bit almost every day, and lacks useful features I really miss! Not that the old screen wasn’t good enough to show how crap streaming services are too, as it did, just a similar experience.
Also you don’t HAVE to keep or even buy the media, no need to fill your space at all.
As you suggested yourself there is rental (getting rare now though), and also second hand markets, which are great for being less curated and ‘tailored’ to you – buy something that catches your eye for whatever reason that might be, but often stuff no algorithm would feed you. Enjoy it or don’t if the algorithm would be right in this case but either way know you know something more about your tastes, or how versatile Micheal Caine (as he appeared in practically everything) is. If it is something you’ll want to watch/hear again keep it, if not trade it in. Having had a much better viewing experience to give it a fair shot.
For instance the extended edition Lord of the Rings movies are so darn good as a family we have gone back to watching them quite a few times, no way those dvd are ever going anywhere as giving up the quality and paying again and again to stream no doubt the shorter versions… And some things will just never be available to stream for whatever reason. But fun as some of the marvel movies might have been to watch once non of us here really love them so those would get tossed back if we picked one up at all.
It’s not that you need to keep it, but that you can keep it, and dispose of it as you want. I’m clearly not a collector neither, but it’s nice to be able to keep what I want and give/sell/lend/… what I don’t anymore.
And in fact it’s more ownership vs renting that physical vs digital. Most of the article points about physical could be in favor of owning digital files, like the MP3 in your car.
“Never understood this obsession with filling my house from floor to ceiling with objects I might only use once or twice in my life.”
because if they’re important, that once or twice more time might be with your kids or grandkids
and it might be important to them, so they keep it to use once or twice more
with their kids and grandkids.
It’s called history, and not caring about preserving things is how you lose it.
As hard as I’d like to mash the like button on this, sorting, crating up then carrying out some 8000+ opera records from my inlaws’ house was pretty miserable and you literally can’t give that crap away. I think we bought like 40 of the special vinyl stowage boxes and they weigh like 50lbs each.
So what we like now may not be well liked by there generations is what I’m saying. I saw citizen Kane. Boring AF.
It doesn’t all have to be preserved, it just has to be preserved at all. The issue with streaming stuff nowadays is that it isn’t. There are already creations that are just flat out gone from a handful of years ago!
“I saw citizen Kane. Boring AF.”
Yeah, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is just super-derivative. I mean, how many “Love Potion Accidentally Goes On Wrong People” stories do we need? And don’t get me started on Romeo and Juliet, oh, another pair of lovers doomed to die? Yawn.
You don’t preserve this stuff because it’s always going to be entertaining. You preserve this stuff because it allows you to teach the history of where everything around it came from.
And if it disappears because a younger generation doesn’t appreciate it, at least they had the option of deciding it wasn’t worth it, rather than it being a tax writeoff by a megacorporation.
Your copy of Citizen Kane isn’t going to be relevant to future generations. What the future generations want is the digitally remastered scans of the actual film, and that’s what exists in the historical archives kept by people far more competent for the job than you or I.
Our stash of old DVDs is just a heap of plastic trash when we die.
I still remember and have comic books that my nearly 80 year old dad read as a young kid. I read them every time I went to my Grandpa’s house. So I get it.
yea I am sure my grandkids are going to give a single shit about the VHS copy of the goonies at my mom’s house
Point #1 cannot be overstated. Accessing media on a digital platform requires cooperation from many different parties:
1) The platform itself must continue to exist (not go out of business or be shut down)
2) The platform must honor your “purchase” and continue to offer the specific piece of media
3) Your ISP must allow you to access that platform
4) The manufacturers of your devices must continue to allow you to access said platform
5) The creator of the content must resist the temptation to alter your media to fit their idea of modern standards
There have been instances of all 5 of these in the news over the last decade or so. No one should be under the illusion that anything they access on an online digital platform is anything but a rental. If you truly want to own your content, you must physically posses it.
Agreed. Also, I’m fairly certain there have been instances of all 5 of these in just the past year or 2. Add into that the risk of the platform or publisher deciding to block your particular region for one reason or another (looking at you Sony).
This can be emphasized by Fandango ending support for some older devices that supported 3D. A number of films in 3D were only offered in 3D in digital format. Now people that purchased them can’t play them.
Is the thumbnail a new Joe Kim, but it’s not the featured image? I want to see the full flame!
It’s from this post: https://hackaday.com/2024/07/25/end-of-an-era-sony-cuts-production-of-writable-optical-media/
Point #1 cannot be overstated. Accessing media on a digital platform requires cooperation from many different parties:
1) The platform itself must continue to exist (not go out of business or be shut down)
2) The platform must honor your “purchase” and continue to offer the specific piece of media
3) Your ISP must allow you to access that platform
4) The manufacturers of your devices must continue to allow you to access said platform
5) The creator of the content must resist the temptation to alter your media to fit their idea of modern standards
There have been instances of all 5 of these in the news over the last decade or so. No one should be under the illusion that anything they access on an online digital platform is anything but a rental. If you truly want to own your content, you must physically posses it.
I am looking at hi fi systems, looking to move back to records this year. Not an audiophile, just like the idea and look. Also just in case the S&&T hits the fan and the internet is killed. Recently setup my own media server. Been buying boxes of music CD’s from eBay. For £50 I got 300 excellent classical music CDs. All different. Absolute win. Just have to rip them all. I am an urban prepper. ;)
Good call! There are plenty of people who didn’t think anything could stop their internet or power. It can happen.. Besides, stupid services all broke up into a thousand different services and it would cost 500.00 a month to sub them all.
Internet on cell and fiber went down yesterday. I was dead in the water for remote work. The family was listless, the music, tv and movies were unavailable, the robot vacuum didn’t come out, I don’t even know how to code, spin up a board, or play games without the internet.
I think there is a strong case for physical media to span internet gaps, or to handle a longer more intentional outage.
For films and series’ DVD is surely the format to consider as the eternal standard. There’s been far more things released on DVD than on blu-ray, and far more machines have the capacity to play them. Remember every blu-ray player can play DVDs, the opposite is not true. For music that standard is probably the CD disc. For games it’s a much trickier proposition, given they are executable programs rather than plain media files and often designed to function only on a specific cpu architecture or operating system (which on both cases have gone legacy a long time ago for many games), having a permanent standard here is harder.
I find it amusing.
20 years ago my 400 CD/200 album collection was impressive.
10 years ago it made me pathetically backward and out of touch.
Today it means I had foresight. :-)
Such is the cycle of technology :)
I ripped my collection of CDs and threw the discs away.
Over the years, my boombox broke, by CD Walkman was stolen, my computer no longer has an optical drive, and neither does my car… so what would I do with a stack of CDs? Meanwhile, I can still copy my entire collection to my phone’s SD card and stream it to my stereos over bluetooth.
You possess the files on a hard drive and SD card. You could share some with me if you wanted. That’s physical ownership, same as if you still had the disks.
Recent proof to this, the Netflix Voltron series cannot legally be watched (in the US at least), because the deal between DreamWorks and Netflix expired so Netflix pulled it from watching.
This is the problem with this and really all content we can consume in some way. We are limited to consuming what “they” want us to consume, how and where “they” want us to consume it and much of that is driven by money/power.
Oh, that’s not the worst. The worst ones are the series that literally do not exist anywhere in legally watchable form because the creator wrote them off for tax purposes. Losing a licensing deal at least means the original owner has incentive to find a new home for them. Writing them off means the creator has negative incentive to make it available.
Disney+ had a slew of original content that’s now just totally unavailable. Anywhere. You’re entirely relying on the good graces of a megacorporation to preserve the artistic creation of hundreds of people for future generations.
Yeah. That’ll happen.
I like physical media. No, I don’t like storing it, but even with music, if you paid for it, you should be able to sell it to someone else if you want. Can’t do it with streaming media or with copies of movies or music Even though you paid for it, it’s not yours. Makes me wonder what would happen if the Steam service went under???
-I don’t want yet another pile of crap collecting dust in my house
-I don’t want to pay for 50 shitflix-tier subscription services
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
seems like conflating a lot…
permanent vs modifiable storage?
local vs remote storage?
who manages it?
how is it licensed?
i just don’t like being so imprecise in the language…’digital’ or ‘physical’ doesn’t imply an answer, really, to any of those questions. even ‘cloud’ doesn’t answer all of them. i use a lot of cloud resources but i manage them myself (e.g., linode) so it’s not the same as being at the mercy of amazon’s licensing.
This is why I do not feel the least bit bad about my multi-terabyte collection of dubiously-obtained music, software, eBook, and movie files. I have never considered the streaming services as having my interests at heart, and if I want to make sure I have something, I keep a copy of it locally. Massive harddrives make this very easy to do. Also: it makes my media easily portable into areas with dubious internet connectivity.
This! I recently made a full backup of all my digital media and put the HD in a friends house, so even in a fire I won’t lose everything. (Although his house is in the same floodplain…)
A river whose waters have flown will never come back. Subscriptions are bad, I know, but not being able to listen to a small band from another country because you didn’t have the CD, even worse.
Why is it that when this top comes up, so many people act like the only possibilities for music are physical media or some streaming service? Audio files still exist. My “mp3” collection is backed up offsite, is totally under my control, and mostly is encoded in formats that are indistinguishable from CD quality in double blind testing on anything from cheapo ear buds to five figure sound systems in treated rooms. It’s far more portable than CDs could ever be, without any of the shortcomings of spotify et al.
It means my cell phone has to have enough storage to fit my library, but as long as it does I can listen when and wherever I want, no network connection required.
While some providers (such as Amazon) allow you to download and store your own copies of legally purchased audio files, I know of no such equivalent for legally purchased video. So for video your only choices are physical discs or piracy.
You can, of course, choose to rip your legally purchased video discs into files and store them on your own hard drive to get the convenience you mention.
Another issue with online only? Pull up a video and realize the only copies, surviving on line now, have the top & bottoms cropped off.
Nothing like trying to watch some “how to” video and the project has been clipped off of bottom of the screen.
Or a documentary with the same hack job done to it.
I’ve even begun to notice some “archival” sites doing it to their streams.
I’ve been buying and ripping DVDs (and sometimes Blue-ray, but success there is a mixed bag) to host locally with Jellyfin. I also purchase my music in either CD or MP3/etc form. That too goes on the server. I get the any-device streaming experience, without needing a working internet connection or worrying about some licensing deal removing my content.
A few months back we had a multi-day internet outage, and it was wonderful to be able to tell the family “You can still watch stuff on the Roku, just use this app.” It really bothers me how much the internet has intertwined itself into my life, considering I spent the first 15 years of my life entertaining myself without it.
Moderation hit heavy nah? what was wrong with my previous comment?
I just do both. Pretty much any movie or album I buy.
Vinyl record from Amazon included a CD and digital download (locally to my machine) all for the same $10 or so just the digital version would cost. All new movies purchased I get the 4k disc, also includes a Blu-ray and digital download code. I usually don’t bother downloading.
Does that download code get you an actual file you can store on your hard drive and play with any app? Or does it just let you stream it from some service for “life”?
MP3 typically downloaded to local machine.
When the first version of Secure Disk was being talked about the secure part was that it would police your files for Napster etc. sourced files.
In 1997 the music industry demoed buried inaudible tone codes that were robust enough to be picked up on a mic somewhere in the room. Radio listening could audited with a poling device for ratings in real time.
Then there was notching b# for prohibiting recording on any audio device mandated to have this stuff built in.
Four friends go on a trip and files were going to be locked to each personal sourced player no sharing.
Today, it could have been worse doesn’t mean they aren’t trying still.
“After all, what use is physical media if you have no way to play it?”
It’s ovbious to this crowd but there are so many good examples of “lost” material that we only have because it was on physical media. If the media exists then there is still a chance that someone will figure out how to restore it. None of this would have happened without physical media:
Playing audio recordings from as far back as 1850–when no method of playing them even existed! (https://www.firstsounds.org/)
Lost music recovered because someone kept unreadable wire recordings. (https://www.musicbox-online.com/interviews/restoring-woody-guthrie-0403200802.html)
Lost/overpainted art made visible. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mystery-lost-australian-painting-finally-solved-180976392/)
Documents recovered from 79 AD. (https://scrollprize.org)
Digital media can just disappear. Personally, I’d rather not see parts of our culture fall victim to a Delete button.
Benefit of having a physical guitar :-)
Oh, but my charts are all on the iPad…
i did resurrect my last cd drive by changing the belt on the load mechanism. next the job of figuring our how to rip all my old discs to save the contents from bit rot, because that’s a muscle i haven’t flexed in a very long time.
If I own the media I’m the boss, if not I’m a bitch (to put it plainly).
yar har not my problem
I have so many movies stored up from torrent. Internet goes down as we are snowed in like today and we just pick a show or movie from the archive. Movies take up a tiny amount of space compared to security cameras even with me replacing with 4k hdr when I can.
Typical pattern is we think of a theme, I ask chatgpt to list a bunch of movies about said theme, pirate bay, then I stream with webtorrent.
Now me and my 7 year old wrote a local website that does this all for you. Chatgpt api gets list, when you click it, it searches pirate bay, gets magnet links, finds most likely file name inside torrent and plays. Cool thing was it automatically worked with music too.
Figured this is how most of us tech literate people do it.
I have so many movies stored up from torrent. Internet goes down as we are snowed in like today and we just pick a show or movie from the archive. Movies take up a tiny amount of space compared to security cameras even with me replacing with 4k hdr when I can.
Typical pattern is we think of a theme, I ask chatgpt to list a bunch of movies about said theme, pirate bay, then I stream with webtorrent.
Now me and my 7 year old wrote a local website that does this all for you. Chatgpt api gets list, when you click it, it searches pirate bay, gets magnet links, finds most likely file name inside torrent and plays. Cool thing was it automatically worked with music too.
Figured this is how most of us tech literate people do it.