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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine content owners wanting the physical media to continue any longer than they can get away with. The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful. At least as long as everyone continues to buy into their DRM systems.

I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort

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I do this. I'll buy used disks and rip them to a personal media server. It works great. A friend actually created an eBay bot which monitors listings of disks he wants and will automatically buys them.

The ripping part is a bit annoying and time-consuming though. Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

I've been doing this as well. Occasionally I'll have a disc that fails to rip for some reason (maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme), and then I'll torrent it. Torrenting is always easier and faster, though it's hard to find special features this way.

> maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme

FYI for UHD disks in particular common ripping software does not include "player" keys (because they are hard to come by and would be blocked by future releases) but only the disc-specific decryption keys. This means that new releases can't be ripped until someone submits a dump of the copy protection data, which can sometimes take a while if you don't do it yourself.

> Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

This is basically what mp3.com tried to do: treat the physical (music) disc as a license key that gives you access to a digital copy online. Sadly, the courts did not agree with their interpretation of copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....

> The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful.

I hope they continue to feel this way. WEBDL can come faster.

I'd much rather get releases that are NOT bit-starved crap optimized for streaming company profits.

That's part of what I was thinking. The idea of digital-only must be very attractive for content owners, so I don't think they will put much effort into preventing that outcome.

Why not just get everything on the high seas for free, instead of paying for used-bin stuff which is cheap but still costs something? I’m a huge cinephile with a collection on my hard drives of ripped Blu-ray and DVD images, a number running now into the four figures, and I have almost never paid for a physical disc; I own something like 6 that are in a box somewhere.

Because within my job/industry, getting caught pirating would end my career.

It's interesting how attitudes towards this are so different across industries. Jeff Gerstmann is a fairly well known and well connected video game journalist and he straight up does streams where he plays emulators using romsets clearly downloaded from the internet.

When an industry works directly for those rights holders, it's not that interesting of a difference compared to those to do not.

For fair amount of time Giant Bomb was owned by CBS and during that time I saw plenty of emulators getting used.

In NZ 4K Blu-rays are too expensive, at least by my standard (there's about one store chain, JB Hi-Fi). Never seen a single one at a second hand shop. (Though I guess a used bin is a place for 2nd hand goods at an otherwise first-hand shop? Which we don't really have.)

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