My husband was right about DVDs
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You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen <insert meaningful show or movie here> before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them.
In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed-what-from-whom. There's even a DVD little lending library in my neighborhood. Not to mention the public library system has tons of physical media to choose from.
I love streaming and rarely turn to physical media these days, but as my kids get older and want to watch the same things over-and-over-and-over... building that DVD collection out again is looking really appealing.
(AFAIK, this last bit is how Amazon Glacier works—just with some online disk drives in between to buffer content up into Blu-Ray-sized chunks.)
With thousands of options via streaming services some of us become paralysed by choice!
I think I'll make a reminder list so I can just get siri to add them as I hear about them.
I have a terrible memory but a large ego that doesn't let me admit it so I often forget about recommendations.
It's one of those lessons I learned early in life. If you're going to lend something to someone, do so with the expectation you're never getting it back.
So maybe we can also apply it to movies and other works
It’s “the one who expect it back is a greater fool”
Or at least that was my take.
I give book back.
- signed, someone who also owns lots of CDs and DVDs, mostly old non US-produced things that are close to unfindable on streaming services :)
Then I go out of my home and it's unwatchable when streaming even original quality, which is odd because I have 20Mbit up with fiber to the premise at home and probably getting 60Mbit+ where I'm trying to watch from.
That's mostly 1080p I've been trying to watch, so 10Mbit should be sufficient. I don't know why the hardware would become a problem only when I leave home.
This article seems to have some more details and mentions that free tier users get throttled to 1Mbps. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-serve...
Not all devices support all codecs. Any disagreement means that Plex is now going to try transcoding, even if the hardware capability isn't there (and most NASs don't have the grunt to do it).
You have options.
Spend more disk space: You can tell Plex to transcode copies into lower bitrate versions it makes them available via the UI (although this isn't always obvious how, and varies on platform). Note that on a NAS this might take a day to transcode a movie. During which your ability to use the NAS for anything else is greatly reduced.
Spend more effort: Re-rip or re-encode everything into a known supported format. You will need to maintain this. Tools like Tdarr may help here.
More compute power (and some effort):
If your content is in 1080p and you want to view it in 1080p or lower then reasonably-modern Intel CPUs with support for QuickSync are pretty good at handling transcoding for 1080p. Plex Media server has an option to enable hardware-accellerated transcoding if you pay for Plex.
An older Intel NUC or Small-form-factor PC can usually do this job fine. They can also be fairly power efficient.
If you want to start throwing in 4k content, then you are going to need a GPU and the cost and complexity goes up.
So maybe sorta yes. I would be a lot easier with DVD’s though. I don’t want to be uploading 40+GB files constantly.
The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc.
But she inadvertently learned her true viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD.
But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.
The problem is that the future is uncertain. It's always possible that she might want to rewatch the X-Files at some point, even if she never actually does.
True, although …
"Difficulty discarding possessions is characterized by a perceived need to save items and distress associated with discarding them. Accumulation of possessions can result in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. Compulsive hoarding is recognized by the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5)."
It’s healthy to hang onto a few ratty t-shirts because you might need them to mow the lawn or because they remind you of good times; you can even be a bit bummed when you eventually do throw them out. It’s compulsive hoarding when you do it even though it seriously bothers you or turns your place into a death trap.
I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired.
With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.
Rip the DVDs, keep the digital copies somewhere safe, and discard the physical discs.
If you want to ensure that this remains safe, you'll need to both back up and periodically transfer the digital copies to new physical storage devices (in my case, I just upgraded from the ~4-yr-old 4TB HDD that was holding all my media to a new 16TB HDD). This is, however, kind of a necessity in any case; especially for burned DVDs, for instance of home movies, ripping them and storing the media fully digitally with a plan for long-term archival will have much better longevity. Even pressed DVDs don't last forever (especially if they are used sometimes—scratches happen!), and burned DVDs can have a lifetime of less than 5 years in some cases.
Data, however, if properly treated, can be perfectly saved forever. (Well, barring cosmic ray bit-flips, I guess.)
So if I just kept the DVDs, any time I wanted to watch something on one, I would have to:
1) Physically go to where the DVDs are
2) Locate the specific DVD I'm looking for (can be tricky if I'm looking for a specific episode of a show—I might not always remember what season it's from, and the Plex interface makes it pretty easy to scan through)
3) Get the DVD out
4) Go to the living room, where the DVD player is
5) Take exclusive control of the living room, and also bind myself to being there, for the duration of watching it
6) Put it all back when I'm done
So yes: for simple storage, as long as the DVDs you have will last the length of time you want to keep them, and you have enough physical space to keep them in comfortably, just keeping the DVDs is easier. But for actually using them on a regular basis, for places with less available space, for people who expect to be moving frequently (or just soon), and for collections where the longevity of the physical media is in doubt, digitizing is a better way to go.
Also note that page is referencing releases of Ubuntu from 2008. Maybe take it's information with a pinch of salt.
For a purely Linux way (as you linked to an Ubuntu Page) this[2] is a reasonable guide (giving it a quick skim) using MakeMKV. This should also work on Windows. (Ignore the Haandbrake steps here).
If you're on Windows (or know how to setup a VM with USB passthru for the Bluray drive) and don't mind paying for a license AnyDVD HD[2] is very good.
Both of the above will strip the DRM and leave you with the raw files from the disk (AnyDVDHD also gives the option to make an ISO). You can keep there as a 1:1 backup of the disk or you can further refine.
Without going to a massive rabbit hole and reproducing some (unfortunately private) guides verbatim you have 3 main things you can do from here if you don't want the raw source files.
1. Straight Remuxing: Take the video/audio as is from the `m2ts` container and stick it in an MKV, this won't save you any real space but makes archiving the film alone easier, you'll save some space from extras etc. by deleting the raw source files here. Takes about as long as a copy operation would. You can do this with ffmpeg on the cli in a single command.
2. Audio transcode remuxing. Take the raw video, transcode the audio to something smaller. You use a bunch of tools to strip the Audio[4][5], then transcode it using eac3to, then remux everything[6]. Realistically you've saving maybe a gig here if you're just transcoding the main audio track and dumping the rest. Some time spend recompressing the audio, then remuxing maybe an hour once you know what you're doing. This is usually what you'll see as a "Remux" on the high seas.
3. Compress Audio/Video: This is where you'd use something like Handbrake[7] to recompress the video, you can use the presets and get a watchable file but not the best quality but usually a significant size reduction. You can also tweak a lot of knobs here for excellent quality with little to no visual fidelity loss (a transparent encode) but this will take a lot of time. If you're using a preset you're probably looking at roughly the film's length encoding (more with slower processors). This is usually what you'll see tagged as a "BluRay" release on the high seas.
Obviously this is all for backing up your legitimately owned media in jurisdictions which allow it.
1. https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634 2. https://www.howtogeek.com/161498/HOW-TO-BACKUP-YOUR-DVD-AND-... 3. https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html 4. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966 5. http://haali.net/mkv/ 6. https://mkvtoolnix.download/ 7. https://handbrake.fr/
1. Bluray drives are becoming increasingly rare. Few people are buying them (because many stream) which is slowly killing the market.
2. Blurays tend to be much more finichy with read errors (unfortunately). A little dust or a bad pressed disk and the entire episode is lost :(
3. Blurays aren't being produced. Sure, you can get bluray movies still, but for tv series it's becoming REALLY rare for a bluray to be produced. Funnily, you'll often find DVDs for tv series before blurays (even for brand new shows).
... but it never has.
I converted them to mid quality mp4s so can keep a copy on a 512gb usb flash drive so I can take my movie collection anywhere I travel.
Donate to the library at least.
> burned DVDs can have a lifetime of less than 5 years in some cases.
My CD-Rs from '97 are in fine shape, thanks.
I had some from around the same time that were becoming unreadable by the mid-2000s.
The point is, you can't count on them lasting unless you specifically go out and buy the archival type.
And if you're not reading them regularly, then you'll only find out they've gone bad when it's already too late.
There is a reason why transferring backups to new media is done on the regular by professionals. They know that the only way to make sure the copies are good is to ... well, make copies.
One of my old photo/video backups is on 100GB Verbatim Bluray. Don't know about these in the future so I did a parity scan on each of them so errors can be fixed if need be. Also on external HD. Let's check in, in twenty years.
I'd rip them and put them on new hard disks from time to time. AFAIK, that's the best long-term storage strategy for most people.
My wife loves Harry Potter.
So we got these ripped. We ditched her DVD collection after ripping everything. Legal copies, saving space. Don't even think we brought them to some second hand store.
Circumvention clause of the DMCA probably makes DVD rips illegal in the US, even if you keep your original copy and don’t otherwise violate copyright law.
My US ex did the same. She'd rent Netflix DVDs, rip them, and bring them back. Tho that was a long time ago as Netflix DVDs suggests (2005).
Furthermore, I do not feel morally bad about the practice, and the chance of getting into legal trouble with such (if it were illegal) is so small that I simply wouldn't care. You'd have to face a civil court, and how would any party know about your collection if you keep it private?
In terms of cost, it wasn't a waste of money to me: I spent the money to watch them that once. With a few exceptions I never bought with the expectation of rewatching in mind. That was a nice bonus. And now I have an archival copy, and while there are many I haven't rewatched, there are are plenty I have, and some I've rewatched many times, and it wasn't always predictable ahead of time. There are series I loved a lot I never rewatched, and movies I didn't know I'd like that I've rewatched half a dozen times.
These days, I don't buy if it's something really mainstream, but I still buy if it's a bit more niche and something I consider might not always remain available. Quite a lot of the DVD's I have are of things that are not available on the streaming services I have.
But separate to all of this, even for a lot of the movies people might never watch again, don't underestimate the value of that feeling of comfort to a lot of people, and the value of the physical artefact as a memento.
I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.
Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.
If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.
It does take a but of time to spot fakes, and you need to give the community time to aggregate good content and weed out the fakes, but it's definitely not the experience you describe. It sounds like you last tried a decade or two ago.
Oh, that's easy! You want to see <movie>, so you search for "<movie> 1080p" (or better) and after a few minutes you have it on your PC and can watch it 1,000 of times if you want; even when offline (!). It's also free. This is why people like pirate movies.
>in a day or two ...
LOL
But somehow if I pirate that, i cause them 'damage'.
Luckily on most sites, pirated videos have keywords in filename (720p, 1080p, 4k,... x264, x265,... ) so you can see the quality and choose what filetype you want/need.
Its actually really easy, it only takes seconds to get the right torrent going. I've never accidentally torrented anything I didn't intend to.
I'll buy the bluray/dvd, then download the torrent for the movie to put into Plex. Like a backup, but MUCH better and easier on the size than I would be able to do myself.
Takes about 1.5 hours to set up - you now have a Netflix-like UI with an easy option of requesting TV Shows and Movies from a nice UX.
You can get any media in any quality you want, without ever stepping into any red light district.
[0] https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ [2] https://jellyfin.org/
ps: I just bought a dvd from CL
I wrote a Python app that runs on a Raspberry Pi that continually plays the content that I have accrued. Some of the content I schedule, other content is random.
It just runs on a downstairs TV. I enjoy accidentally catching some old film, or a musical or something I pulled down from YouTube of a guy making furniture....
When I moved I compressed my CD collection down from their hard cases to soft cases and kept all the inserts in one of the old hard-case bags minus the hard case plastic holders and I have no regrets.
I assume there may be a similar risk in renting e-Books online vs. having a non-DRM copy of it.
I was just thinking of doing the same for my collection in the attic, assuming the CDs have survived a couple thousand freeze/thaw cycles. :)
I like the idea of ditching the hard cases for space.
You get the benefits of both physical media, and convenience of soft storage availability. That music is mine, and can never be sold to me again.
In case some might be wondering what the "benefits" of physical media are; it's my belief that having to _commit_ to listening to a CD (not being able to flick through different albums and artists easily on Spotify, as the whim comes) is psychologically sound, and the alternative is damaging.
This goes for films too. Those old enough to remember renting DVDs — or even VHS! — may remember the excitement of getting that film back to their place to watch. The whole thing was an experience, and whether the film was good or bad, you had a good time with whoever you were with, because you had an _experience_. More often than not though, you enjoyed the film, because you wanted to. You invested, so it was worth more to you.
Actually this is more than "my belief", but I can't be bothered to find the research.
I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
The other thing about music is it has a far higher re-play value than Film/TV... some specific albums I've listened to thousands of times, and there is simply no way I would rely on some streaming service for that. I'm not sure what the younger generations do for their favourites... or maybe it's not like that any-more, maybe their music is more ephemeral and "trending". Pretty much all of my music with replay value is from way before 2000, back to 80s - I'm not even that old.
Many people think the best sounding DACs are the multibit jobbers from Philips which haven't even been made in thirty+ years.
How does that happen? No redundancy?
I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.
You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week.
At least, that's what studios and labels think.
We live in pretty much the golden age of content where more is produced than ever before and more is being spent on it than ever before I cannot see how what you're proposing doesn't end up with a decline in both of those things because there would no longer be competition in content.
I had a purge of pretty much all my physical media a bit over a decade ago. I had a little over 1000 DVDs and Blu-rays. Probably 200 VHS too. God knows how many CDs and tapes.
Rather than ditch them and say "I will just use streaming to watch/listen when I want to" which is very naive IMHO I ripped them all to hard disks and archived them to some LTO tapes I had. Granted not everyone has access to this kind of equipment but these days there are other options anyway. I don't use LTO anymore.
Today I have full access to my entire movie, music, photo, and software collection near instantly from my NAS. Some stuff isn't online (as in not powered up) as it would just be a waste of power but I can switch it on if I ever feel the need to watch something I haven't watched in two decades but don't want to delete forever :)
I have some redundancy via RAID as well as on site/offline duplication should something really go wrong. Plus I have an off site backup. It isn't actually as much space as you would think even for a pretty huge number of movies as old stuff is pretty small. It is only recently with 4K HDR movies that we are looking at ~90GB for some movies. Storage isn't very expensive these days. When I did a quick comparison a while back I worked out it was less for the HDDs than it was to ship them all from one country to another let alone the non-quantifiable cost of my time packing, moving, unpacking, and physical storage space.
Ideally I would share the cost with others as it is kinda stupid for there to be multiple copies of the same movies and TV shows for no reason but sadly there isn't a solution for this and with the copyright laws and all that it is unlikely there ever will be something as reliable as doing it yourself.
I have ~1500 DVDs stored that way in less than a meter of shelf space.
I do still use a binder for the papers from the cases.
If you're trying to move some readers to start doing that, you'll probably need to engage with their reasons.
I damn sure don't want to go to the hassle of downloading a VHS transfer
Not everything needs to be pixel-perfect.
you kids with your universal formats; we used to have to make camera copies to watch PAL shows on NTSC...
"Good" times.
If it's something old without a DVD/BluRay release these will usually be a WEBRip (literally a screen recording of DRM'd content) or a WEB-DL (someone has cracked the DRM, or it was DRM free).
You'll only find VHS rips on highly specialized trackers (usually).
That said, if they could shift 1080 BDs down to DVD pricing and UHD BD down to what BD costs now I would buy a lot more. I’m starting to build up a collection of UHD Blu-rays but Jesus, £20-30 per movie really adds up. Definitely paying the enthusiast tax there.
I always am wondering if I’ll regret it in 10 years when you may be able to stream super high bitrates, but as always, the future is uncertain anyways.
I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle, and couldn't be done on the move.
Moreover, while this scenario made sense to ME, my wife found it so off-putting that I discovered she was just not listening to music on her phone at all.
AM solved this problem pretty well. PLUS, AM has a feature where it will give you access via Apple Music to weird, indie, or out of print stuff in your library that might not exist in Apple Music's library.
A case in point is the 1990 Wendy & Lisa record Eroica. It's one of my favorites, and has always been part of my library -- it's even been re-ripped, because the first time I digitized it I only used 128Kbps MP3, and I wanted it at 256Kbps AAC. But it's also 100% not available via any streaming service because of rights issues of some kind.
YOU can't get it from Apple Music, but I can because Apple Music sees it in the library on my music server. That's pretty cool.
Links:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2....
Story time: I was watching Star Trek Voyager. That show is obviously a lot of episodes. So sometime around season 5 it was removed from Netflix. Got pissed, downloaded it, kept watching.
Was recently watching benjamin buttons first time on amazon. Didn't get to finish it that day. Turns out the next day it goes for cash only.
Piracy is honestly the simplest and most consistent way to do this. And if a friend wants it? Bring a USB and it is yours. Sure teeeeechnically we can both watch it, but how often do I re-watch a movie that my friend is currently also watching at home.
Point is that I really hate the current distribution models.
Down side of DVDs is that they degrade.
And to be completely truthful, if everything older than say... 15 years was available in the public domain, we can stop all this wasteful redundant storage everywhere. But due to copyright laws, things so so so old, that they shouldn't be making money anymore continue to be behind "pay walls" of sorts and only because they are protecting a distribution model that hasn't been necessary in over a decade.
On the other hand, when I look something up from my past, I'm always thankful for the random archivist who still has a copy.
The only reason I still have my stack of disks is because I haven't had time to rip them and their special features yet. That and we keep the disks for kids movies because the van doesn't have streaming support or AppleTV yet. :)
DVDs are durable, but not immortal. I have several that have failed.
I appreciate the ask. Ripping DVDs is just a lot of work, time, storage, and fiddling. I don’t wish ripping 15 seasons of ER on anyone.
But, the truth is, the things break down.
Popped in deathly hallows part 2 this very evening a few minutes before everyone was ready. Couple of kites later I turn on the tv and it’s playing some advert for some rom com or some sort
It reminded me why I stopped buying dvds. They aren’t happy with selling me a product for a cost, they have to double dip by advertising stuff.
Eventually I’m sure streaming will go that way, and once again The High Seas will be the only way to get the product. If there one thing the entertainment industry can be counted on it’s killing the goose.
Like you or not, MKV files on your own hard drive and piracy in general is the answer.
Welcome to my Ted Talk…
They would have to outlaw personal computing, and not allow you to build your own servers with no firmware-enforced filtering, which given the current direction, is not particularly farfetched, but at that point battle is lost anyway and your DVD rips are the least of your problems.
There are multiple productions on YouTube, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuL7EbjFBBw
Description on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Pla...
So these days I just buy the DVD from ebay from a few bucks, it arrives in a couple of days. Feels no different to the 1980's when I went to the video shop and brought home a VHS.
I've gone back to physical media. Streaming has shot itself in the foot.
I've cancelled most of my streaming services cause in Australia the free to air streaming services are really great anyway.
I do pay for Britbox for the classic Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and other dorky delights.
This has been such an ever enmissserating situation. Started as a high & mighty &bgood convenience, but we're ending up worse than where we started; fragmented & ephemeral.
I'm reading the "so awful" within the context of this thread more of an accusation for someone making the decision to not allow content vs I just wish it were on DVD for my convenience. It's not all conspiracy theories. Sometimes, it's just financial. Some older content was done on such a cheap budget and companies that we'll just call fly by night. These types of places might not be able to remaster their content for blu-ray either because they no longer exist, don't have the funding to re-transfer the film to a higher scan, or just physically no longer have the materials.
> My beloved Beforeigners—a deeply weird and delightful show in which suddenly people from the Stone Age, Viking era, and 19th century begin appearing around the world—is gone.
You can still watch this on Apple TV. You just need to pay a few dollars to rent it. How much is shelf space worth?
Related: Why have hard drive sizes stagnated? It feels like 8TB has been the golden standard going on 8 years now.
I'm very close to doing the following: Putting 6 drives in a portable RAID device, and ripping my movies to 720p x265 for storage. I can store a near limitless amount of movies and TV shows this way, and honestly I don't notice 720p. At least not enough to trade a 1GB movie for a 45GB 4k Remux. And I own a latest brand new 65 inch LG OLED and Sony OLED.
Added benefit is that its trivial to stream this anywhere at home or remotely. The files are so small that even scanning around the movie is instant.
The only thing holding me back is 8TB hard drives. So I wait patiently and continue to pay for a plexserver some guy manages for me.
When streaming first came out I ended this practice. Then, the licensing disputes started and content started moving or disappearing. That's a trust they won't earn back.
Particularly flagrant is the likes of Disney, who owns Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and will happily sell subscriptions to all 3 + addons throughout.
Also abhorrent is the fact that these slimy companies are constantly moving content around the services, trying to get you subscribe to everything under the sun just to follow a favorite TV show. "Oh, it's on amazon, now netflix, now hulu, now disney+, now paramount+, now peacock, now britbox, now acorn"
My conclusion is not that the author's husband is right. But rather that I should get rid of these remaining DVDs. I've never thought much about digital nomadism, but I suppose I practice it. There's always something new to watch.
Piracy doesn't help much either as theses translations were never digital in the first place. There's many show from my youth that I can't find with Quebec translation, even some that I can't find in their original language.
If I had the cash and time it's something that I would wish to try, getting the distributions rights of a few of theses old shows. There's no way it would be that expensive (probably take quite a bit of time though) and nostalgia would works quite well I believe to attract enough viewership to support it.
Pro tip: thrift store DVDs and "friends of the library" sales.
I got every season of ST:TNG for about $40 ($1/disk)
I live about 5 months per year in my RV in the middle of a desert. Internet is a phone-tethered experience. What is this "streaming" thing you talk about? I'd be buffering all night.
And so, yes, there are good reasons for many of us to retain, in some form, all the DVD's we can get.
I rarely watch anything twice.
I have also found there are many things to occupy my time other than watching things I have already seen.
We live in a world of media superabundance, and life only goes on for so long. I can't possibly consume even a tiny fraction of what's out there in my time on this world. I find that to be an incredible relief: I will always be able to find something interesting to read, watch, or listen to, regardless of whether I choose to fill my living space with shelves full of media. It's just not something I need to worry about.
If anything, I find I have the opposite problem: too many options makes it hard to decide. A year or two ago I got rid of almost all my books, including many dearly loved favorites. My personal library would now fit in a laundry basket. (Still too many, but I have a sizable backlog of books I haven't read yet and that would be difficult or expensive to replace.) And the most notable consequence is that I now spend more time actually reading, and less time trying to decide what to read.
I also still buy CD's for many reasons, but the main one is that more often than not, most streaming services offer only modern remasters that are loud as hell and have no dynamic range whatsoever. Yes, there are some remasters that are loads better than 80s CD's, but often not, especially if they're from the 00s during the iPod era.
How do you "back up" a CD/DVD?
DVDs contain a proper filesystem, so you can just mount and copy that.
Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.
which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.
For DVDs you can use the infamous DVD Decrypter to make ISO files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter
or MakeMKV which straight copies the MPEG2 files (.vob) into a nice MKV container https://www.makemkv.com/
Why are we always in the cycle where X is the contrarian and minority but was pushed aside while Y enjoy all the frames and glories but is fundamentally wrong.
I am putting X and Y here simply because this observation hold true not just in tech, in streaming but everywhere else.
It is not like they were not warned.
Back to the subject. We really something better than BluRay. Smaller but also much higher in storage capacity, and when stored properly that could last a hundred year. While being cheap to produce.
People will have 1001 ideas and hypotheses, ranging from "hey, smoking might be unhealthy" to "the government is controlling us with 5g" and "aliens walk among us".
For the ones that make it through, like smoking, people can say "see, I told you so, we warned you". The other 999, you will, mostly, never hear from again.
$4+ on ebay for an 80% chance low-res bootleg stopped working for me 3ish years ago and I still haven't found a preferable method without resorting to full on pirating which feels like a little too time-consuming of a hobby for more mainstream titles at least.
(Or that is the theory I heard why no one is streaming it.)
Other shows got redone with other music so they could release it, but music is pretty heavily used in the wonder years.
WKRP in Cincinnati is another example. I don't know if they still exist, but there used to be torrents of VHS rips of WKRP so that it could be viewed with the original music.
I don't need to be on the zeitgeist any more. For all the old shows I want to catch up on, DVD box sets cost less than the streaming services to watch them on.
We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.
I would be fine subscribing to a specialized streaming music service, or two.
1. Their recommendations became unbearable. I love discovering music but Spotify is not the right service for that anymore. Daily playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Genre playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Track radio is just several of my favorite artists shuffled. “Best of techno” playlist? Floating Points and Four Tet - both artists I listen to a lot, but they are not techno, and are not “best techno” - a genre that spans decades.
I don’t know if they overfitted their models and at this point I don’t care.
2. I am fed up with the podcast and audio book push. Not interested in either, don’t want to see it anywhere.
And another thing - I've discovered lots of artists through Spotify and Youtube. If they weren't there - I would't even know that they existed.
And audiobooks! Audible is stupid.
IOW - stupid.
I am only using about 22tb currently, upgraded about two years ago.
What happened to the laws around that?
Decrypting the shows downloaded from streaming services, however, is likely a violation of the DMCA.
I find ripping movies a little tiresome. Getting the quality, sound and subtitles right can be challenging.
They do degrade, but a "couple of years" is pessimistic. My earliest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they're still good.
I've had DVD-Rs fail in 2 years.
The type of DVD matters, of course. Here's a handy guide:
https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
how are these articles getting up voted? what boomers are reading HN on a Saturday and going 'yeah I miss my DVD collection'?
For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services.
One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on.
Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.
They already do this frequently. 4chan has been tracking it for ages now.
It’s a good example how selective presentation of scientific realities can be abused to mislead.
Chromosomal defects in a binary system don’t constitute a new or between-state, and it also isn’t commonly described that way: XXY (Kleinfeltner) affecting males is the mainstream position.
Chromosomal abnormalities would be the modern term, it applies to both sexual as well as other chromosomal abnormalities like Down.
But to answer the question as asked: Yes, it fulfills the definition of the older term.
> Is it a birth defect?
In humans syndromes that lead to ambiguous (“intersex”) presentation and/or chromosomes are still operating in a binary system, eh Klinefelter affects boys.
The same is true for (very) rare hermaphroditism: in this case both gametes could in theory be produced, in practice though individuals are sterile.
Modern aircraft still have ashtrays in the washrooms because they’d much prefer that somebody choosing to sneak a smoke puts their cigarette somewhere other than the washroom trash bin where there’s a history of them starting fires.
I took a cross-country Amtrak trip right before the pandemic, and most of the conductor's announcements were just to tell us when the next smoke break would be.
When the train got stuck waiting for cross traffic at a freight yard in rural North Dakota, an incipient passenger mutiny forced them to break the rules and let everyone pop out for some light trespassing and nicotine consumption.
It felt strange in a similar, but opposite way to what you're describing.
The other three cases were all wars - an apples to oranges comparison.
Remember the Chinese military had no problem mowing down protestors if their bosses give the order.
That said, it is easier and safer to defend yourself from a government in modern society with information and free uncensored communication than with guns.
You seem to be completely off-base.
No, in the United States, the military and all federal employees explicitly swear an oath to the Constitution, and are forbidden from executing illegal orders, regardless of the chain of command.
Yeah, PLA goons in Communist China certainly do things differently.
In the United States, the people are the government. Where are you?
Also note all the leaked footage of our military gleefully mowing down children and keeping score. They are never prosecuted for war crimes either. Just part of the job.
That is how humans work everywhere. The US is not special.
Yeah, you've never been in the military and appear to have a knowledge based on memes of it. Read the officer's oath and see what we're trained to do.
And of course we have public libraries with all kinds of good media.
I don't think the comment your replying to is even talking about public libraries. I believe they're saying if society determines a person is cancelled and it's on a streaming service, it can instantly disappear from most streaming media.
Most public libraries don't have the resources to archive materials. That's mostly down to academic and specialist libraries, and the library of congress.
That was the result of a specific deal Twitter made early on (itself a marketing stunt, of sorts). It doesn't mean the Library of Congress is generally in the business of archiving DRM-ed media on streaming services.
Also, the person above could have been talking about compared to days past. I can tell you the libraries I had access to when and where I grew are less funded (many closed), but again depends on where and what you’re comparing against.
The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
[1] https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/best-countries-book-lov...
This is only the case if you think the proper level of funding is a function of population size or wealth instead of whatever is required to obtain sufficient results. If you're looking for results, it seems the proper level of funding would actually scale with population density (sparser areas require higher funding per capita to provide the same access).
I think you can make a case for that sort of model, but I don't think it's "fairly obvious".
I’m in Illinois; under state law libraries exist as independent taxing bodies - the only way to underfund or otherwise interfere with them is at the ballot box, and it would take years of concerted effort by at least 60% of the local population (indicating that this is really what they want).
I have some family in Indiana; their libraries are funded and controlled at the county level to maximize what they can do cost-wise and to ensure that rural farmers also have access to all the resources. That structure also makes it much harder for goofballs to interfere.
The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface).
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
I'm not the type to rail against such things generally, but IMO it was unnecessary and misguided to remove these episodes: their humor came deliberately from how oblivious Dee was to the offensiveness of her act.
Indeed, her portrayals are usually immediately and explicitly critiqued by her fellow characters as being racist and insane.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hflb6t/list_of_its_a...
> After the series' release, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that suicide among teenagers rose by 28.9% in the month after Netflix launched the show.
A few additional concerns with the paper:
-The authors made no effort to try and determine if any of the people who died had seen the show, or even had heard of it.
-Suicides were up the month before the show was released as well.
-In fact, suicides in that age group had been trending up for years according to their data, which is not mentioned in the discussion of results at all.
> inviting laughter and derision toward the... community
No. Just finding an occasion for the selected direction in creativity. Which the writer of the article seems to want to make ideological, with the exception of one use of the expression "«cheap laugh»" (which, for that matter, may bring attention to the other "celebrated" subplot of "the elders of the Internet" - using the same perspective, it would be as if "making cheap laughs through a sort of "ableism"").
It's a mean spirited gag, and the mere fact of being transgender is the punch line, over and over. It sucks. It makes revisiting the show more cringey and less fun.
The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: «It really isn't that funny» - of course, because it is tragic.
While I could see that the "It's over" scene could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have supposed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.
> Whether a show came out in 1955 or 1999, I just enjoy it as a product of it's time.
This is great when one can do it, and I think it's a fine approach. But of course, if you were gay in 1955 or trans in 1999, there's probably a lot of shows where certain issues— common enough at the time— would have really diminished your enjoyment and maybe even triggered some dysphoria, even 'at the time'.
with censorship nobody can watch it.
Now... I will admit, it isn't always wrong (CP). But it often is the fruit of an unwitting narcissism.
"I mean", as if Douglas Reynholm (the "phobic" - finally, a literal case - in the episode) was drawn as an exemplary character, a model of a human being... "I mean II", I checked on a search engine for the spelling of the surname, and the first under-link stub that resulted is «Douglas Reynholm was an incredibly arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, cruel and elitist egomaniac who considered himself to be somewhat above everybody else. He viewed women as objects to feel and manipulate to his incredible sexual mania»...
--
Edit: Furthermore. As "everyone" knows, Graham was a humble watchman in the hospital where Dr. Rick Dagless worked (the "Darkplace"), and probably does not even speak TCP today. So, when he wrote the scene of the people who believe they have in front of them "the Internet" - like the one called "«stupid cow»" by an adlibber because she did not realize "the internet is weightless" (and so also must be "the box which is the Internet" in the scene) -, when he wrote that, did he mean to diminish and elicit contempt for all the non technically inclined, probably including himself?
60s cartoons are contraband. Stupid.
Do we know who actually pulled the content? Netflix clearly doesn't have a policy against streaming partial amount of content when they can't get it all from a provider but it's not clear to me if Netflix pulled a single episode of Community or if the licensers maybe refused to license that episode. I think I read that Sony was supportive of the episode being pulled.
I think most of this content will come back once the industry as a whole sort of figures out the positioning. There are something the creators are embarrassed by and it might never come back but I expect there to be a new rating or something similar (Disney+ does this already) where they'll indicate before the media plays that it may be offensive or insensitive. News shows do this when covering certain types of crimes.
Some smart-ass comic gets up on the stage and leads with "I always said you were the two talented ones in the family."
Ouch. And double-ouch at the big laugh it got from the audience.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one; though I don't think the ep should be removed, it is in poor taste and arguably defeats its own comic intentions. I suspect the deeper objection is not to the content per se but how it reads in the context of Graham Linehan subsequently aligning himself as a massive transphobe and making it into a political cause.
I don't know Linehan personally, but grew up near him and followed his career since long before he went into television, when he was writing film and TV reviews in an alt-weekly paper for beer money. He has always been a comic genius, able to turn excruciating social pain into hilarious farce, while also being willing to cheer on success. I remember he once opened a movie review for a film called Eat the Peach with 'At last, an Irish movie that does not make me want to run to the toilets and lick all four walls.'
That kind of self-criticality and emotional nakedness has deep roots in the Irish identity, and it is what makes Roy, an Irish man working for an incomprehensible and irrational corporation in London, such a compelling character. I find the show especially entertaining because I've been that person, doing that exact job, working for those kind of companies in London, often under bosses like Jen or Denholm/Douglas Reynholm. Linehan's character portraits, even for a single episode or scene, are incredibly sharp and truthful. In The Work Outing, where Roy and Moss unwillingly accompany Jen to the theater, there's a scene where Jerome, an extroverted PR guy, is introduced to Roy & Moss. No sooner has Roy diffidently said hello than Jerome exclaims 'Oh my god you're Irish! I love Irish people! They're all mad aren't they! They're just mad!' and the exchange spirals downward into cringe. The whole episode is a comic masterpiece, but this brief scene has a special place in my heart as I've had that conversation hundreds of times in my life.
In this scene but also in general, the engine of comedy is the mismatch between characters who are quirky and self-conscious (like Roy and Jen) and those who are quirky but oblivious (like Moss, Douglas Reynholm, and here, Jerome). When characters go against their 'natural' type they get punished in hilarious ways, by being stuck with the baggage of their transgression which then multiplies itself exponentially. The plot frame for this episode is that Jen tries to be oblivious in pursuit of a date with another oblivious-seeming person, who turns out to be even more painfully self-aware than she is. As in all restorative comedies, the characters who transgress end up feeling worse but wiser, nothing really bad happens, and everything returns to normal.
In The Speech (the 'banned' episode), hopelessly insensitive CEO Douglas Reynholm meets an attractive lady journalist, April, and romance blossoms. Despite her repeated advisories that she used to be a man, Douglas thinks he's found the perfect woman who not just tolerates but admires and enjoys his shallow hyper-masculinity, sharing and even exceeding his love of bad action movies, heavy drinking, and competitive sports. But gradually reality gets through even his dense skull and he ends the relationship - briefly taking responsibility for the situation, before reverting to type and deflecting blame back onto April. Mutual recriminations quickly escalate into a fist fight straight out of a bad action movie, with Douglas wins - thereby regaining his 'boss' status - by knocking April out. He is subsequently shown as being vilified in the press and sobbing over the loss of his erstwhile companion, with whom he was actually compatible.
(Roy, Moss, and Jen are relegated to the less-important plot frame story in this episode, which sets up but is peripheral to the emotional conflict of the main story. In dramatic and thriller forms, the emotional conflict sets up but is peripheral to the main plot action; John Wick is the purest distillation of this.)
The Speech breaks two comedy rules in that the climactic suffering is not just emotional but physical, and something really bad does happen (the knockout). While it's implied that April recovers (going on to write a negative magazine article about Douglas) and Douglas actually feels bad, the comedically awkward social conflict of incongruous gender expectations crosses a line into physical violence which writers normally avoid. The violence is also intense; while this is meant to parody the bad action movies both Douglas and April enjoy, most comedy violence involves characters either flailing around, missing their punches, and blundering into the furniture or escalating quickly to absurd extremes like explosions or natural disasters. Though there are multiple comic touches in the fight scene, it's choreographed as a conventional aggressive fistfight, with a lot of punches to the head in both directions.
This was a bit too close to reality for a lot of people, because transgender women do suffer a disproportionate amount of physical violence up to and including murder, and this often takes place in the context of relationships. Perpetrators often defend themselves in court by insisting that they were deceived by a transgender romantic or sexual partner and acted violently out of fear and panic, which many find wildly implausible. Complaints gradually mounted over a 12 year period and in 2020 the UK broadcaster of the show announced they were dropping the episode from reruns.
Graham Linehan, who wrote and directed the episode, reacted badly, announced he was cutting ties with the broadcaster (after years of fruitful partnership), and went on a vicious tirade on social which eventually led to the suspension of his Twitter account - strangely parallel to the trajectory of the fictional Douglas. Rather than compromising or de-escalating, he raised it to the level of a political issue asserting that his civil rights (of free speech) were under attack and going on to attack transgender people in general in the most vituperative terms. In the context of an ongoing trend of escalating violence towards trans people (nearly doubling in the last year) his increasingly strident position has alienated a great many of his former fans.
Curiously, in doing so, Linehan chanced upon an actual civil rights movement, of women losing single-sex spaces to males who choose to identify as women, and started championing this instead.
Though, many gender critical feminists find Graham's unasked-for presence in their activism rather embarrassing and irritating due to his generally quite aggressive behavior and his occasional bouts of sexism.
I read an article a while back about how old Friends episodes have movie posters in the background of films which were released after 2010.
Can't find any evidence of this at all.
Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up.
There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/iiay9/digitally_inser...
https://www.outsourcemarketing.com/blog/help-product-placeme...
https://gizmodo.com/digital-ads-streaming-netflix-amazon-nbc...
For another thing, there is also at least some element here of the right to be forgotten. It's obviously different for groups vs individuals but our systems should allow some amount of agency to people who regret things they have produced in the past and wish for them to be forgotten.
I see such rewriting of the past, or at least attempts of that, on Wikipedia. It's not really hidden as there is a (hopefully!) integer edit history, but who reads the edit history anyway? Usually you just look at articles as they are at the current moment.
As we don't have much "hard copies" of a lot of stuff any more around the possibility to "rewrite the past" for significant amounts of people becomes a real thread as we rely more and more on digital and purely online data.
Given how "durable" our digital data is future historians will have a very hard time. Maybe our time will become a dark age when seen form the future. Have you tried lately to open some files from the 80'es that reside on some storage medium form that time? And that's only a few years in the past. Imagine 500 yeas in the future. What will be left of all the cat videos on YouTube (and maybe some more important data)?
Every time I look at a controversial article, and I'm unconvinced by the implicit narratives, I will look at the history, and more often than not there are interesting details lurking in the past versions.
And sometimes it's just fascinating looking at how details on a situation unrolled over time. Like for instance, go look at Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia history: there was an article on him preceding the publicity of his abuse.
I am under the impression right now that Wikipedia history is quite permanent unless an article is totally deleted, and that people do not prune the history of content they wish to censor. I hope it remains this way, cynically I don't think this will always be so, prove me wrong Wikipedia!
One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back
Torrents are kind of like a community archive