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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

I am hoarding DVDs and it's because a.) it's cheap, b.) it's reliable c.) it's future-proof and d.) I don't trust tomorrow's political/cultural landscape to not disappear things down the memory hole as well as subtly editing out offensive material or otherwise altering things in hard to detect ways. Case in point, not long ago a family member witnessed "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke that ran afoul of today's censors. With streaming, you have absolutely no control over what version of a movie you're seeing. What are you going to do? Store the bits and compare it to your neighbors'? That right there is a crime.

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Well you do you. If you ask me, DVD quality (480p) is not really watchable anymore these days. Looks like what VHS looked like when DVDs were new now that we have full HD and 4K to compare it to.

Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in a country where it's de facto legal.

I’m pretty impressed with the upconversion quality of the Xbox One for better viewing on a modern television.

I think calling DVDs and 480p "unwatchable" is a pretty extreme take. Sure you might not be able to count an actor's eyelashes, but a well-shot film on anamorphic DVD properly upscaled can still look pretty fantastic. If watching on a tablet or phone (as more and more people seem to do nowadays) it would probably be hard for your average consumer to even tell the difference unless you were running them side by side. And that doesn't even take into account that most 4K content is consumed on streaming services that save money by serving content at the lowest bitrate possible, leading to compression artifacts (notably distracting banding and loss of detail in films with a lot of low-lit scenes), where watching an uncompressed DVD could arguably be said to look superior.

> watching on a tablet or phone

Damn, I must've missed the models that come with DVD drives haha.

Honestly imo even on a tiny phone you can still tell the difference between 480p and 720p, not to mention 1080p. Not having high levels of compression definitely helps but only to a degree. I have a decent DVD collection from the pre-fiber era and honestly these days I rather just download a FHD version in a few minutes it takes to complete than take it out of the box and find a machine that still somehow has a drive. It's all just collecting dust.

If only DVDs were 480p. Its much much much worse: 480i (or something a bit higher but still interlaced)

Agreed. Now if I have a TV show I haven't seen, I check if I've already downloaded it years back and watch the downloaded version rather than stream it. I can't trust streaming services to show me anything as it is, ever since Netflix removed the Community episode with blackface (it was parodying blackface, that was the point).

> "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke

Which one?

Seemingly this: https://etcanada.com/news/660724/scrubs-blackface-episodes-b...

It wasn't that, it was a one-liner by McGinley's character that just got inexplicably stricken.

DVDs have a limited lifespan as well

My oldest one is 25 years old and still works with no issues. Technically every physical object breaks down over time, but I expect that with proper storage and handling with care, a pressed DVD could last 50 years. And then you can also rip the bits and store them.

I have a disc from 2004 that had been in its original shrink wrap until this year but it had read errors when I tried to rip it and was showing signs of rot. Some discs are from bad batches, and you don't really have any way of knowing if a disc is bad until it starts rotting.

Luckily, the data on them does not. Storing a 5GB file locally is basically free, at $15 ish per terabyte for modern HDDs.

With MKV transcoding you can get them down to around 300MB, DVD quality is pretty shit.

That's exactly my point. Even if you just rip it and do nothing else to the data, storing the resultant raw files is basically no effort.

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