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I can’t go back to physical. I stream new content and pay for no ads. I can’t possibly buy everything I watch. Also have no appetite for storing and managing physical.
 
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I’m 43 so grew up with VHS, DVD, blu ray and then I moved to digital purchases and streaming.

Maybe it’s nostalgia but I’ve oddly started thinking about buying blu rays again… I was telling a friend and he oddly was having same thoughts.. I think we both have streaming fatigue where it takes ages to find something to watch..

We both miss the days of blockbuster!

Anyone else ?
I never left physical media at least in terms of video. Occasionally I will watch something online, but if it’s something I really like I will buy the film or television series on Bluray or dvd.

With that said I don’t stream video except off Youtube. In terms of music I don’t stream at all—no Spotify, no Apple Music, nothing. In the past I ripped my CDs, bought off iTunes or got off Limewire and built my audio library that way, so my music is on my devices (iMac, iPad and iPod). Some on my iPhone, but thats largely incidental.
 
Yes, I want to buy my most favorite media that I know I will rewatch, such as The Office, Modern Family. Digital purchases are just licenses that can be taken away.
 
I’m 43 so grew up with VHS, DVD, blu ray and then I moved to digital purchases and streaming.

Maybe it’s nostalgia but I’ve oddly started thinking about buying blu rays again… I was telling a friend and he oddly was having same thoughts.. I think we both have streaming fatigue where it takes ages to find something to watch..

We both miss the days of blockbuster!

Anyone else ?
I don't hate streaming, per se, but if you don't own the media, you don't own crap. I'm not a gamer, but if I were, I'd also have a lot of hate for EA and the other game makers who can just remove a game from practical existence.

I don't really want to comment in detail about my arrangements, but suffice it to say I was glad to leave the days of broadcast only and even VHS for the world of DVD and Blu-ray, and the world of cassettes for CDs, and if I need something as files, I'll produce my own, tyvm.
 
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I’m 43 so grew up with VHS, DVD, blu ray and then I moved to digital purchases and streaming.

Maybe it’s nostalgia but I’ve oddly started thinking about buying blu rays again… I was telling a friend and he oddly was having same thoughts.. I think we both have streaming fatigue where it takes ages to find something to watch..

We both miss the days of blockbuster!

Anyone else ?

Same exact scenario here, lol. I threw away my entire VHS collection, then replaced it with over 1000 DVDs, traded all those into Best Buy for blu-rays, which by the way was an amazing deal they ran for several years. I accumulated almost 1500 blu-rays and then slowly sold all of those on eBay over a two year period. Now have about 1800 movie and tv shows with Apple, about half being digital copies from blu-rays and the other half purchased directly from iTunes/AppleTV. Streaming is convenient, but I remember how much better picture and sound quality were with blu-ray when viewing with a good blu-ray player, tv, and sound system. Lately I've been thinking about buying all my favorite movies on 4k blu-ray. It would be nice to actually own my movies again. Disposable income is tight right now, so I haven't started buying yet.
 
I *usually* use digital copies or streaming, but there are some things I want to listen to that are not available through a streaming service, and I still revert to physical media for - either CD's or vinyl.
 
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Yeah I am the same as you… the last time I had a blu ray was prob about 5 years ago and I found it noisey and a pain to keep changing discs!

It’s just this past month or so I’ve been getting bored of streaming. Plus realising digital purchases aren’t guaranteed ownership.
Yes, this is what I found out the hard way as “buying” on streaming platform is REALLY just your able to rent and watch or listen too UNTIL we decide to not give the media an option anymore OR the streaming service is over with their contract to provide the media instead of a one time view or listen.

Amazon and Apple fall into that category also. We just pay for the convenience, but it is always good to have the media (CD, DVD or Blu-ray) as a backup for the media that you may want to watch or listen to again let’s say 5 years from now. It doesn’t mean you need 100’s of DVD’s or CD’s anymore, but have the one’s that are treasure to you and will listen to for some years.
 
I’m 43 so grew up with VHS, DVD, blu ray and then I moved to digital purchases and streaming.

Maybe it’s nostalgia but I’ve oddly started thinking about buying blu rays again… I was telling a friend and he oddly was having same thoughts.. I think we both have streaming fatigue where it takes ages to find something to watch..

We both miss the days of blockbuster!

Anyone else ?

Nope. Not in the least. lol. Physical content goes out of date as well. All those vhs and dvds. Blu rays will be next. Can’t ever see going back to having stacks of blu rays. You’d have to be a nut about video quality and audio to justify it. And might’ve been once but not anymore. Not worth it.
 
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All digital, as do not have the ability to play any physical media, plus the convenience of being able to pick what I want from the sofa, without having to look through shelves, find the disc, then put it in a machine, let it spin up etc
 
TL;DR - I'm was happy to go to digital purchases to reduce the clutter of physical media, but wouldn't want to rely on streaming services. And I can't let go of my CD collection!

I also built my digital library with the download codes was a very cheap way to do it.

In 15 years or however long it’s been since I’ve had Apple digital purchases I’ve never lost any movies or shows. Apple claim if you download them then you can’t lose them but I’m unsure as it’s linked to Apple ID to authorise the drm so if you got locked out for whatever reasons you’d lose it all!

Agree about CDs I’ve always kept mine.. my family have Apple Music and I sometimes use it but there too many gaps where certain albums or compilations are missing tracks due to rights issues and those drive me mad..


@cjsuk very good point about printing photographs! We bought a Polaroid camera awhile back and love it…we need to printout normal photos now!
 
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Honestly, no. I actually just finished digitizing my family's most precious DVDs using HandBrake and a SuperDrive from eBay so that I could easily distribute them to everyone and back them up so that damage to a single DVD ≠ permanent loss of irreplaceable memories.

I would much rather store my media in the form of an infinitely portable, easily replicated, automatically backed up (at least in my case) file than have to bother with disks or vinyl records or something because they have Vibes™. That's how I view it, but I get that it's not always that serious. I'm just an archivist at heart, I guess.

I don't watch a lot of TV or movies, but when I come across something I really like, I'll buy it legitimately from whichever digital platform it's available on but also grab a 💜community-sourced version💜 (if you know what I mean). That way I can support the creators while still having my own copy of what I bought (which sounds absurd to even say but... here we are).

Irreplaceable memories need certainly to be handled differently to mass produced media which can be re-purchased (possibly with some inconvenience of course).

I implore people to keep them carefully separated. I just had to unpick 21TB of dead relative's data. Took a year.
 
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me is 60 years old as my first job was in a record shop in the mid 1970s
if I see another album......
I miss the opening of a CD-album reading the liner notes etc.
but everything music albums is digital, FLAC and run through 2 Klipsch speakers.
as for TV/movies I prefer VLC than using an tv mp4 stream.
this format sounds great does not skip and is easier than finding a CD that you lent out the night before.

also theft-borrowing is no more!
I had a friend who always took something a CD from my apartment every visit, not once in a while, EVERY time
from 1995-2005 as then everything was loaded to iTunes, then hidden in downstairs storage!
 
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Still have my cd’s as streaming still doesn’t compare in audio quality. I have them all burned to my music app (Doppler) which means I don’t have to worry about streaming droop outs in the car or any other limitations like Amazon music not having a skip track “feature”. Is simple and suits me better.
 
I bought a 4K blu-ray player two years ago and have been steadily building a collection. It makes me very happy to have a physical representation of my favorite movies and shows and have physical artwork to go with it. Buying media on iTunes just isn’t satisfying. It’s also satisfying to change disks. Best part: full ownership (even digital “ownership” is just a license to watch, not ownership), full quality (no streaming compression and artifacts), and offline viewing.

Biggest downside is the cost and inconvenience. Some discs (i.e. Game of Thrones) don’t have any “resume playback” feature, so you always have to remember where you left off on a show and then find that exact spot again manually. Also, obviously, I’m limited to just watching the discs on my TV and not my beautiful OLED iPad screen. I’ve been considering going down the rip my disks + NAS + jellyfin route so that I can have full quality backups of my disks that I can stream on any of my Apple devices. But it looks like a lot of time and money when this hobby can already be expensive.

I can’t get myself to go down the physical media route for music as I just love the flexibility of being able to listen to pretty much any song at any time for ~$9/month (Apple Music annual plan). But I also never stopped buying CDs for my absolute favorite albums just to support the artist and have the art in my hand. I don’t even have a CD player anymore besides in my car.
 
I still have a vinyl collection. Nothing like cueing up a record that I owned since 1970 (I am 68) and playing it as it is a form of time travel.

If I really like an older one I buy a new pressing of it. I have 300 or 400 old albums.

Movies I do Amazon or Netflix and a lot of other music I do YouTube as I won't make an album collection of 1000 plus records.
 
Biggest downside is the cost and inconvenience. Some discs (i.e. Game of Thrones) don’t have any “resume playback” feature, so you always have to remember where you left off on a show and then find that exact spot again manually.
somehow my computer and VLC skipped the 2nd to last episode of "6 foot under" MP4
as that jumped a large part of the 4 seasons which ruined the show until the last monologue scene
as that was such an important event of the main character.
several times handbrake did not rip the entire movie an some DVD episodes.

o well!
 
I sold off my VHS and upgraded to DVD. Built a collection probably in the 1000s. Sold those off and built a collection of Blu-ray. Sold off the majority of those as convenience was more important than quality.

Now I’m slowly rebuilding a collection of favorites on 4K. Initially I bought full seasons of The Mandalorian, as I wanted to see them in 4K uncompressed. I decided to begin rebuilding a collection as quality has become more important than convenience. I’m hopeful to begin ripping the files for backups.
 
I’m 43 so grew up with VHS, DVD, blu ray and then I moved to digital purchases and streaming.

Maybe it’s nostalgia but I’ve oddly started thinking about buying blu rays again… I was telling a friend and he oddly was having same thoughts.. I think we both have streaming fatigue where it takes ages to find something to watch..

We both miss the days of blockbuster!

Anyone else ?
Never left it. We just downsized the catalog and now pick up physical movies worth having. Mostly Steelbook. We converted everything to iTunes with the digital copy codes over the years, bought a bunch of digital only here and there on sale where we had the physical, but no digital. 20th Century Fox had a nice app for a few years with “deal of the day” with sub $5 deals that was like crack for their digital movies. Apple was kind enough to upgrade them to UHD which was really nice. Paid attention to what we were watching and didn’t replace some DVDs with HD BDs and have done the same with HD to UHD titles that shrunk the physical collection to movies we really like and have watched multiple times. Our last DVD was tossed when “The Abyss” came out in UHD last year. Most of what’s been tossed was Disney BDs from when the kids were still at home except for the films Walt worked on (even a couple of those are missing in UHD - get it together Disney!). Picked up Pirates series and recently Tron. Streaming is convenient around the house, but movie night with a BD (HD or UHD) and the big screen just makes the week. We also rented some digital movies that I felt were worth having in physical and later bought them. DTS audio is also a driver given no DTS streaming on Apple. I use Blu-ray.com to track the collection and build a wish list. There are probably another 60 movies we have digital only that I’d like in physical media when they drop the UHD version. My wishlist is down to a handful of titles. My wife’s list is taking a lot of time as the releases are slow to come. She’s big on romance movies like Sleepless in Seattle and Something’s Gotta Give (still not out in physical UHD).

What’s interesting is the kids. They got mad when they were home over the summer because we got rid of some discs. 🤦🏼‍♂️ They love physical media and have since sent Santa quite a Christmas list of physical media this year. Of course the titles…. a bunch we got rid of.🤨 Christmas is easy this year!😆
 
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I still have a vinyl collection. Nothing like cueing up a record that I owned since 1970 (I am 68) and playing it as it is a form of time travel.

If I really like an older one I buy a new pressing of it. I have 300 or 400 old albums.

Movies I do Amazon or Netflix and a lot of other music I do YouTube as I won't make an album collection of 1000 plus records.
I gave up the vinyl my uncle left me years ago. Stupid in hindsight. About 5 years ago, my wife bought me a turntable for my birthday when it was becoming a little trendy. The collection is small, but I now pick up vinyl when I can having a legit sound system to play with. Seriously loving vinyl again after some 30 years. I love that a lot of new stuff is being released to vinyl for the bands I’ve followed in life. I’m a big 80’s rock fan and although they are close to retirement, they are big on releasing vinyl including the back catalogs.
 
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