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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

For me, the advantage is that I don't have to go find the disc and physically insert it, and deal with whatever disc was in there before. I get to just watch my movie when I want.

I also don't have to physically store the discs, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like. I really don't want shelves and shelves of books and movies in my house. I have a few bookcases of our favorites, and that's it.

Even better is monthly streaming services, though. Then I don't pay nearly as much and get almost all the convenience, but with the risk that any particular movie might no longer be streaming.

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Former me would agree with you, but I hit my breaking point when I saw Microsoft eBooks stop working, or shows I liked pulled from streaming services. There is no permanence no matter how much I pay when media has DRM.

I for one only pull dvds out of the box once ever.

It is easy enough to rip DVDs or Blu-rays to a NAS and use Kodi.

Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives.

Accept the monthly fees, tracking, and proprietary devices/apps or no entertainment for you.

The only reason I built a home media server was because I was sick of the splintering of streaming services. Now we buy, rip, and store physical media. Honestly, I think that it's something that, if people understood how easy it was today, more people would do.

I got it all figured out but I don't think it's easy. I have a stack of discs awaiting the ambition to start swapping and ripping and converting again.

Shows removed from a streaming service is not really the same, because you don't pay specifically for that particular show. You pay for access to the library which is updated every now and then. Just like your taxes might pay for a public library in which certain books are sold off every now and then.

The problem here is when you buy a movie, show, book, album ect. that you suddenly do not have access to. That is problematic.

This is why I built a home media server with Jellyfin and Navidrome. Nothing will "go away", short of a fire or multiple drives failing at once. I keep a physical copy in a separate house, and back up the essentials with duplicacy to backblaze b2.

In the last few years I've spent more than ever on cds through discogs.com.

"Sadly that option is becoming less and less possible as many shows become streaming platform exclusives."

Certain websites say otherwise. Luckily my main focus is music, where nearly everything I want is already in the used market, so the original artist won't see any money.

Not to mention instant loading and the sheer bliss of being offline if you want.

Yeah, I go back and forth.

I had a decent blu ray collection, DVD collection before that, I'm not that old and now they are all essentially outdated tech when I could upgrade to 4k.

I love the idea of saving the space that any decent film/tv collection would take up, especially living in a 1BR place. Then again usually when you watch "4k" on Netflix or whatever it's still not up to the same quality of an ACTUAL 4k disk would be played through a PS5 or whatever. That is unless you have crazy fast broadband. And even then I'd bet it's a degraded quality compared to a lossless 4k source.

> Even better is monthly streaming services, though. Then I don't pay nearly as much and get almost all the convenience, but with the risk that any particular movie might no longer be streaming.

That's it for me. If I buy something now I'm looking for a DRM free version (even though are Blu Rays even DRM fee? I'm sure there's a day when the certs or licenses will expire), otherwise it's streaming services. If I never buy something from a digital store I'm not sad when it disappears.

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