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Comment by deergomoo | Hacker News Reader

I fear that the death of physical media releases for movies is not far off now.

Ownership issues of streaming or DRM-encumbered digital releases aside, it’s a shame because Blu-rays are typically so much better quality, and as a movie buff there’s no substitute. Triple the bitrate of streaming versions is not uncommon.

Anecdotally, on streaming services I find that original content (e.g. Netflix originals) are good, but licensed content is often complete crap—low bitrate, SDR, often limited to 1080p, horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes. Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.

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I just moved into a place with no storage, which leaves me wondering what to do about my DVD collection.

On the one hand, even finding a DVD player that still works can be an uphill battle, and 480p looks like shit when it gets upscaled by a modern TV.

On the other hand, there are 100 titles that I already own outright. I don't have to chase down which service they're on or sit through all the ads it injects. I know that they'll always be there, even if a reality TV exec buys a prestige studio and starts deleting their backlog over in pursuit of some handwavey Hollywood accounting.

I should probably donate them and save my space for things I actually use, but I have a hard time committing to this world where we're perpetually renting access to our cultural heritage.

> I just moved into a place with no storage, which leaves me wondering what to do about my DVD collection.

2 options:

- Rip them all and serve yourself using Jellyfin or Plex.

- If you don't want to go to the effort of ripping a hundred DVDs, you can, ah, take a trip to the high seas. Your legally-purchased DVDs serve as a license, for which the digital versions count as allowed "backups".

> - If you don't want to go to the effort of ripping a hundred DVDs, you can, ah, take a trip to the high seas. Your legally-purchased DVDs serve as a license, for which the digital versions count as allowed "backups".

This is a pattern of thinking with no legal basis.

Over the years I've come around to "just pirate whatever you want". Not for music, where you can actually buy a digital copy and get a real file that you can download and play. But for non-indie video, may as well. The media/legal complex won't give you any credit for trying to be moral about it, and even accessing the DVDs you bought is usually a DMCA violation, so fuck them.

The second is very legally dubious especially if you're using torrents where you'd be seeding facilitating/making unauthorized copies even if the legal theory that you could download a copy instead of making your own held up.

I'm in the process of ripping all of my media so I can play it with Jellyfin and get the disks out of my living room.

I bought a cheap Blu Ray burner from Microcenter for less than $50. Flashed with an image I found online and it rips DVDs and Blu-rays no problem. I did all that because I'm in the same boat you are: I have a ton of media and it's too much trouble to dig it out and move it around when my wife wants to watch something.

> On the one hand, even finding a DVD player that still works can be an uphill battle

Doesn't every blu-ray player, Xbox Series X, and some of the PS5s play DVDs?

PS5 with a drive can play DVDs, interestingly however, it can't do audio CDs.

I've never owned any of those things.

I believe both my parents' DVD and Blu Ray players have crapped out over the years. I still had a 24" iMac that would be a great DVD player for its size, but it didn't make the move. It's in my parents' garage now.

I think you can use a Wii as a DVD player if you find the right homebrew for it, but I haven't dug deeply.

DVDs I would rip and donate personally, purely because if you care about image quality they are just not going to look very good on modern TVs. Maybe if you have any special editions, cool box sets, or stuff with sentimental value then hold onto just those?

I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.

I've seen some games on Steam that use filters to emulate a CRT to try to make pixel games look more like we remember them.

I wonder what a similar endeavor would look like for video. I've been messing with my old Wii this weekend and am kinda shocked at how bad it looks - just stretched to fit with an awful anti-aliasing filter over the top. It's probably not worth the effort at any scale, but there's gotta be a better way to upscale old content than to just blur it. It didn't look blurry in its day.

Hm, I’m curious too now. One could quite easily, though not cheaply, put this to the test with a RetroTink 4K which has excellent CRT emulation options.

I suspect it would look pretty cool, and probably better in some way than a plain upscale that a TV might do.

The big difference is that old games were often designed around the characteristics of a CRT, whereas films were (obviously) targeting film and cinema first and foremost. CRTs were the best those games ever looked, whereas at the time a tube TV was the worst way to watch a movie—albeit it the only one accessible at home.

I think the effect would be quite impressive for old TV shows shot on tape though!

People all over like to watch movies, including in locations that lack solid, unmetered Internet access.

And for whatever reason, DVD is still king for compatibility and still costs less than Blu-Ray.

>DVDs I would rip and donate personally,

That is copyright infringement.

So is all the stuff I pirate because I have no reasonable path to get it elsewhere

https://www.makemkv.com/ and if you need only dvd then any 20$ external dvd drive

> horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes

I don't know if Netflix just hates me, but I get that on all their stuff. It's to the point I pirated Midnight Club to watch it instead of just using my Netflix account because the show was unwatchable using their service.

Just last month I bought a Blu-ray 4K player and several discs because of the extra features you get on the disc that don't seem to be available on streaming. For example, the disc for Coco, a movie I love dearly, has a feature about the film's Italian heritage among others.

("Film"? Yes. If anyone objects, I will "dial" my phone so we can discuss.)

Streaming platforms would do well to incorporate more bonus features into their releases.

OK, you sometimes get some trailers, promotional featurettes, etc. But nothing like the cool stuff I remember from the best DVD and Blu-ray discs. Interactive elements, themed menus, director & cast commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc... I miss that stuff!

I have started building a UHD Blu-ray collection too now the price of discs has come down a little vs regular Blu-ray. They’re fantastic.

I have a new annoyance though: many new movies are offered in Dolby Vision on streaming services, but the UHD BD release is only HDR10. I saw a comment on Reddit from someone involved in the industry who said that the additional work in getting the different metadata in line on discs is often just skipped. On streaming they can just serve different files for all combinations of resolution and HDR offered.

It’s annoying because if I’m paying a premium to get the best-of-the-best option, I want it to actually be the best.

Regarding the Italian heritage, of course I was referring to another favorite of mine, Luca. D'oh!

Coco does have some great extra features about its Mexican heritage.

> Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.

Is it really? My experience has been that 4K downscaled seems to make for a very solid resulting 1080p image. I've been kind of thankful for 4K streams in that way.

I generally do freeze-frame comparisons of stills in landscape/conversational scenes, however. It might be different for jittery action sequences?

If it’s a good 4K stream then yes, it’s fine. The problem is many of them aren’t, whereas damn near all Blu-rays look spectacular even upscaled 1080 -> 4K. Bitrate is the issue, not resolution.

Maybe it's better now, but Blu-Ray looks substantially better in how color gets encoded. It's not a limit in the format, there just isn't enough bitrate in streaming to get dithering-like effects to go through.

Apple is pretty much the only company that cares about this it seems, I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between 4K HDR content available on iTunes/TV+ vs Blu Ray.

If you subscribe to Paramount+ in the TV app, you get the entire library in a higher bitrate compared to actually using Paramount+, it’s incredible how unwatchable some shows were bc P+ basically just thought 1080p 8mbps H264 was good enough for everyone.

Apple are setting a good example for sure, I use them a lot for rentals if it's something I don't know if I want to physically yet, or otherwise just want to watch there and then.

Their original content on TV+ looks and sounds incredible, and while you do sometimes come across licensed stuff on iTunes that is only 1080p SDR, I don't recall any time I've bought or rented a movie from there and been reminded of the 700MB DVD rips I used to download as a teenager. I'm sure there are some stinkers, but it seems far less prevalent.

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