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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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".

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.

> - 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 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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

>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

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