It’s a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD’s for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It’s cheaper and doesn’t clutter up my house. It’s a shame that there’s nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so its trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
I’ve seen some niche bands release (free) official torrents of their music on a certain piracy website. It’s kind of surreal. Just goes to show that piracy is and always has been about sharing culture
Why not? They’re cheap as fuck now, and if you have a xbox one or ps4 or newer (one that still has a disc drive), you already have a fucking blu ray player.
My last console was a N64. I still play those old games on occasion. My PC gaming experience isn’t equalled by consoles. I’d actually buy a Blu-ray player for my PC, it’s connected to my TV and sound system - but I hate most of the movies made today. Maybe I still will, just to preserve some old classics in my library.
Do you have a tower PC? I have a stack of DVD read/write drives +/- that I need to get rid of pretty soon, I won’t have a place to store them after the next couple of months. I’d offer to ship you one, but I have to put an asterisk in there. The last time I offered to ship a guy some RAM it turned out there was a lot of international barriers and it was going to cost me about 10 times what the RAM was worth to ship it to him, with no guarantee he’d actually receive it. So… ?
I have a tower pc or two, but I gotta go pick it from the attic, hose it down, and then see if the cd tray still works
But I appreciate your reply, even if I took my time to reply
Farewell, friend 🙏
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It’s worth noting disk video is usually uncompressed much less compressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.
Buy Blu-rays. Highly underrated.
It’s a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD’s for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It’s cheaper and doesn’t clutter up my house. It’s a shame that there’s nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so its trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
Some people probably sell torrents of their movies, but I haven’t seen it yet
I’ve seen some niche bands release (free) official torrents of their music on a certain piracy website. It’s kind of surreal. Just goes to show that piracy is and always has been about sharing culture
Don’t start buying records off band camp, it addictive
Found a movie I couldn’t buy digitally, but could buy the bluray.
It’s a forgotten art form. There were hidden things in the menus and fun little menu transitions.
And it was trivially easy to make my own digital copy. I fully support this post.
Thing is, nobody owns a Blu-ray player.
Why not? They’re cheap as fuck now, and if you have a xbox one or ps4 or newer (one that still has a disc drive), you already have a fucking blu ray player.
My last console was a N64. I still play those old games on occasion. My PC gaming experience isn’t equalled by consoles. I’d actually buy a Blu-ray player for my PC, it’s connected to my TV and sound system - but I hate most of the movies made today. Maybe I still will, just to preserve some old classics in my library.
I think basically that’s it. I don’t even have a CD player to rip my own CDs
Edit: guess that’s on me, though
Do you have a tower PC? I have a stack of DVD read/write drives +/- that I need to get rid of pretty soon, I won’t have a place to store them after the next couple of months. I’d offer to ship you one, but I have to put an asterisk in there. The last time I offered to ship a guy some RAM it turned out there was a lot of international barriers and it was going to cost me about 10 times what the RAM was worth to ship it to him, with no guarantee he’d actually receive it. So… ?
I have a tower pc or two, but I gotta go pick it from the attic, hose it down, and then see if the cd tray still works
But I appreciate your reply, even if I took my time to reply Farewell, friend 🙏
How high res is bluray?
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It’s worth noting disk video is usually
uncompressedmuch less compressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.Different compression, not “no-compression”.
A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 4 minutes of uncompressed 24fps 4k video.
Up to 100MBit/s video. Audio bitrate is usually lossless and has a higher bitrate than the entire video + audio stream of most streaming services.
Usually 4k.
The 4K UHD Blu-Rays are in 4K HDR. But the average Blu-Ray is 1080p.
Turns out some things the damn Gen Z guys were using are actually bussin fr no cap