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Comment by kjakm | Hacker News Reader

You can also solve the “what streaming service” issue by buying the movie on DVD or Blu Ray allowing you to go back to it whenever you want. Additionally if you’re ok with DRM iTunes has most stuff.

Useful tip for finding which streaming service a film is on: google “film name streaming” and google lists the answers in a box at the top of the results.

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googling for film name streaming doesn't work, most of the results are specific to the USA instance of Netflix/Prime, not all content is available globally. Most of the websites that list content are spammy looking.

I put my country name on the end of my query. It is a bit hit or miss though.

I'm not trying to promote piracy but an HD with hundreds of my favorite movies on it is 1000x better than hundreds of Blu-Rays and DVDs. Some Blu-Rays have 3-6 minutes of un-skippable ads. Even if your player overrides the "not skippable" part you still have click through 3 to 10 segments to get the movie playing. Seeking on Blu Ray is much worse. And, just the hassle of taking them out of their case, loading them, unloading them, putting them back in their case, just sucks. I have a few hundred DVDs and Blu Rays. I haven't put one in to a player in > 7 yrs.

DVDs are also pretty poor quality now-a-days being interlaced and ripping either is slow and painful. It's funny how DVDs looked so good at one point. Now they look pretty poor on a 60inch 4k TV.

And, since we're talking about mostly old movies, I recently tried to purchase as a gift 8 famous award winning USA movies from the 30s-40s as DVDs or Blu-Rys, most of them are out of print. One claims to be in print but was out of stock according to Amazon. A few you could get for ridiculous prices out of some collectors store. A movie from 1940 is 80yrs old. It really shouldn't cost $60 in fact arguably those movies should be public domain but I'm not crossing my fingers it will ever happen.

yeah, do not over look ebay. a hint with regards to using ebay is to search across a week or two to get an idea of availability and what a good price is.

I find Justwatch.com very useful.

The problem with recommending that people buy the DVD/Blu-Ray is that the agreed-upon canon of great films stretches into the many hundreds of titles (Ebert’s list at 364 titles is only an abridged canon.) Therefore, for someone seeking a cultural education, buying the physical releases would run into the thousands and thousands of dollars. It would be a challenge even for North Americans or Western Europeans to amass a suitable collection, let alone people in lower-income countries. Consequently, a person can only realistically learn about great cinema by streaming from multiple subscription sites, or torrenting, and people disappointed by the former ought to remember that the latter exists.

If you have some local friends with taste, you can each buy one disc a month, and watch them together (when that becomes available again) or just trade. Doesn't get you as much variety as fast, but it also makes it easy to rewatch things since you're not subject to catalog changes or roughing up by the mpaa.

This doesn't sound like a realistic solution. Firstly, few people are fortunate to have local friends with the same tastes – high culture is infamously a niche thing. Secondly, one might want to rewatch certain great films every 5-10 years of one’s life (because our own life experiences can deepen our appreciation of great art), but 1) is one still going to be friends with the same exact cinephiles decade after decade, when people naturally lose touch with friends as the years go by, and 2) is one even still going to have a functional player for physical releases?

You don't have buy all at once, you can't watch all at once. If buying old DVDs and bluray, you can get a lot of movies very cheap. If cancelling whatever streaming service(s) you had, it goes a long way.

I'm much more worried of the day when Bluray and DVD won't be made anymore. Which might be pretty soon. Also storing hundreds of discs is a big chore. I rip everything, but that is beyond the abilities of most and the equipment is becoming even more niche than the play equipment. (Some people don't even know their Playstation can play DVD and Bluray movies!)

What?

Srsly?

I had a simple DVD Collection of over 100. If you buy 1-4 DVDs per Week, you already have min. 100 dvds after 2 years.

It is neither expensive nor difficult to do.

We’re not talking about mass-market movies, the DVDs of which you can pick up at your local hypermarket for just a few $currency_units. We’re talking about the "great movies". These are often only available in rather expensive editions that are rarely discounted substantially, such as the Criterion Collection in the English-speaking world. Not only are these editions expensive in terms of their list price, but in most of the world they are not available locally, and if you wish to order them, you must pay substantial shipping fees and deal with customs hassles.

Also, your 100 DVDs is nothing when the canon of great films in the opinion of most film scholars would easily approach a thousand titles.

Can you please elaborate what movies i can't get at amazon?

I'm serious.

I'm only aware of this issue for specific smaller docus which haven't been aired much and not much interest exists. I had to buy that from different countries etc.

> rather expensive editions that are rarely discounted substantially, such as the Criterion Collection

Criterion's web store (https://www.criterion.com/shop) has sales all the time. There's one on right now through June 15 that gives you 30% off all titles. I picked up two titles through a 50% off sale last month. Subscribe to their email list or follow them on social media and they'll give you a heads up when the next one is coming.

Criterion’s web store won’t ship abroad, because Criterion’s licensing agreement with the rights owners stipulates that they will only sell to North American consumers. So, sales there are little help to cinephiles elsewhere.

I have checked a few movies on their site and all movies i checked randomly, were available on amazon.

You can sub to one streaming service and never run out of great films to watch (in part because titles rotate, not in spite of, but that's beside the point). Justifying piracy because, for example, you're disappointed that Netflix is missing one great film, is disingenuous.

You misunderstand my point. It’s not that a person might be looking just for "great films to watch", in which case any streaming site might satisfy them. It is that a person might be looking for the great films, that entire canon of films which scholars hold to be important. Netflix is never going to have them all regardless of how much they rotate.

That doesn't really affect my point. No streaming service will meet your unreasonable demands (for many reasons, first of all is that there is not an objectively agreed upon list of the great films), and therefore justifying piracy because of it is disingenuous.

That a service should have it all is not an unreasonable demand, and it is peculiar that you chide someone for "justifying piracy". After all, the HN crowd is generally very sympathetic to Library Genesis, which is aiming to gradually contain all books on all subjects, and therefore the curious reader can conveniently and at no cost learn about classic 20th-century literature, copyright be damned. Someone who wants the same solid cultural education with regard to films will not be served very well by the commercial offerings compared to torrent communities, but a cultural education is more precious than anyone’s claim to copyright.

As for "there is not an objectively agreed upon list of the great films", there may not be one single list, but as a broad consensus one can take the overlapping suggestions of the critics who contribute to the Sight and Sound poll, the winners at Cannes and Venice, those films and directors who have been celebrated year after year in Cahiers du Cinéma, and so forth.

That a service should have it all is not an unreasonable demand

Yes it is, especially when you said that it is a requirement for a service to have a certain list of movies, and then admit that that no such list exists. Therefore, a service can never meet your stated requirements (and therefore, you've created a self fulfilling framework to justify your piracy of certain movies). If you're playing so fast and loose with what constitutes a list of great films, then you can subscribe to the Criterion Collection and call it a day.

it is peculiar that you chide someone for "justifying piracy"

You said piracy of certain films was ok because of their lack of inclusion in a service didn't meet your requirements, requirements that could never be met. I'm saying it's wrong to knowingly create unrealistic requirements and justifying piracy based on that.

If you're going to change your argument to say that certain films should be free to all, due to certain significance to the public, that's a different stance (and one I'm more sympathetic to).

Have you looked at Netflix's film catalog lately? I'd guess there are under 300 great films. The rest is filler garbage they get for cheap.

Netflix is just an example, but 300 movies is too. So consider:

How long does it take to watch all the great films on a streaming service (not end to end, I mean as far as watching movies fits into your weekly schedule)?

A streaming service will have a different set of movies by then. Yes, some movies will have left the platform, but some will have been added. Some will have remained too!

If you're going to come back and say you've reached the end, you've watched everything you wanted to and were still left wanting, first off, congratulations. Second, I would argue that most regular streaming services are not meant for (or marketed toward) a cinephile such as yourself.

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