Do you still buy physical media?

[MagnusVonMagnum]

The solution is simple. Own more than one device (I have ATV 4K, Zidoo X9S and Nvidia Shield). Zidoo can play almost anything in existence, but does have trouble with SMB3. NVidia Shield with KODI can play everything but 3D MVC. Both can handle full TrueHD + Atmos + DTS Master HD + X and Auro-3D passthrough as well (save perhaps the PCM "Red Tails" as KODI clearly doesn't passthrough PCM with meta data correctly; it's actually the only disc I have to play straight off the disc at the moment, although I'm not doing 4K rips as my projector is 2K/3D only. I rip 4K for the Atmos soundtracks and move them over to 3D and/or 2D as needed.

 

[Cave Man]

Ugh. Just dug my turntable out from the shed and played a couple of albums over the weekend. The pops and hisses reminded me why I put in storage 15 years ago.

 

[Tanax]

Yes for sure, absolutely!
Setting aside the quality difference, Netflix and other streaming subscription services don't always have your favorite series. And even if they do, those series might be removed next week due to how the licencing works.

And iTunes don't even have series to buy so that's a no go.

So for my favorite series and favorite movies, I definitely get the bluray version!

 

[steve62388]

Samsung is pulling out of the blu-ray player market.
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-stop-making-4k-blu-ray-players-report-says/

Looks like Apple made the right choice backing Dolby Vision too.

 

[cube]

Samsung is pulling out of the blu-ray player market.
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-stop-making-4k-blu-ray-players-report-says/

If they cannot be unlocked, it's no real loss.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Quality doesn't mean squat to most people. Forget that 72" OLED. Too many people are happy to watch movies on a 5.7" phone...pathetic.

Now someone COULD start a high-end streaming store (i.e. using much better video rates and TrueHD based Atmos sound) that 100+Mbps connections could use, but I'm guessing people wouldn't pay for that either. Apple doesn't even offer lossless music in 2019! It'd take a minute to download a full CD lossless album now (and only slightly more for 24/96). There's just too little demand for quality. It's sad to think we had better music quality in the 1980s than now, though....

 

[jwolf6589]

No.

I ripped my entire DVD collection to a few external hard drives back around 2010-11 and used to plug them into my PS3 and watch movies that way.

Today my setup:
- A pair of 3TB Time Capsules with my legacy movie and tv show collections as well as any other videos I accumulated over the years that are also linked to my iTunes library on my Mac.
- This allows me to access any of them from the Apple TV connected in my living room.
- There’s an app for iOS called FE Explorer that can access all the files and folders on those Time Capsules, giving my iPhone and iPads access to them from anywhere in the house.
- I also use Netflix and a couple other options for streaming any content that I don’t already have.
- A side bonus: My ISP (Spectrum) gave a free tv box with the internet service that I use to watch local channels for live sports.

I think the last blu ray I bought was circa 2011.

You must have a small library. I have literally hundreds of DVDS and CDS. I have to have a DVD AND CD player.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

You must have a small library. I have literally hundreds of DVDS and CDS. I have to have a DVD AND CD player.

Hundreds? Big Deal. I've done thousands. I ripped 400 CDs in two 3 day weekends. I ripped over 300 DVDs over an entire winter clear back in 2008! DVDs? I haven't used those since. I've purchased and ripped 170 3D Blu-Rays alone since August 2017 and over 500 Blu-Rays in the past two years alone. I have over 1000 movies in my video collection and I don't have to watch a single one off the disc anymore. I also normally buy Blu-Ray over streaming copies (although with freebies and some purchases, I have over 330 titles on iTunes now). In other words, NO, you don't have to have a DVD or CD player. I haven't played a CD on my home stereo since 2006! I still buy CDs. I dump them onto a hard drive (I now have 19TB connected in my home theater either locally to the Zidoo or over the network from my Mac server. The Mac server material can be accessed from every TV in the house). I've got a PS4 and LG UHD player. They don't get used much (save games on PS4). Did I mention I scanned and cleaned up 15 photo albums worth of photos? I transferred dozens of VHS and laserdiscs as well using Final Cut Pro and a Pro VCR and time base correctors so I could have my home movies preserved and some movies/tapes that aren't available on any other format (many eventually replaced when titles became available on better formats). How ever did I manage???

 

[jwolf6589]

Hundreds? Big Deal. I've done thousands. I ripped 400 CDs in two 3 day weekends. I ripped over 300 DVDs over an entire winter clear back in 2008! DVDs? I haven't used those since. I've purchased and ripped 170 3D Blu-Rays alone since August 2017 and over 500 Blu-Rays in the past two years alone. I have over 1000 movies in my video collection and I don't have to watch a single one off the disc anymore. I also normally buy Blu-Ray over streaming copies (although with freebies and some purchases, I have over 330 titles on iTunes now). In other words, NO, you don't have to have a DVD or CD player. I haven't played a CD on my home stereo since 2006! I still buy CDs. I dump them onto a hard drive (I now have 19TB connected in my home theater either locally to the Zidoo or over the network from my Mac server. The Mac server material can be accessed from every TV in the house). I've got a PS4 and LG UHD player. They don't get used much (save games on PS4). Did I mention I scanned and cleaned up 15 photo albums worth of photos? I transferred dozens of VHS and laserdiscs as well using Final Cut Pro and a Pro VCR and time base correctors so I could have my home movies preserved and some movies/tapes that aren't available on any other format (many eventually replaced when titles became available on better formats). How ever did I manage???

Geesh. Sounds like way too much work. A Blue ray player and CD player would be far cheaper and more convenient.
[doublepost=1551173237][/doublepost]https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-cd-boombox-black/6430022.p?skuId=6430022

For those of you that need a home CD player this is an excellent model.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Geesh. Sounds like way too much work. A Blue ray player and CD player would be far cheaper and more convenient.
[doublepost=1551173237][/doublepost]https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-cd-boombox-black/6430022.p?skuId=6430022

For those of you that need a home CD player this is an excellent model.

I've got a PS4 and LG UHD player (yes, it can play CDs too). Cheaper, yes. More convenient? Hell no. I can view every piece of media I have (including all my photo albums, home videos, movies, TV shows, etc.) from a point and click menu/list interface and I can do it from all around the house. You think it would be more "convenient" to have to go downstairs to retrieve the blu-ray I want to watch in the living room upstairs and then remember to put it back so I can find it again later (with over 1000 discs) or just click it on the search box and hit play from any room? I can watch it from two rooms at once even. I can play music in every room of the house or even sync them all together.

If you have a small collection, it may be simpler to just put a CD in, etc. I did it for decades (that's all there was). A 6-disc changer was great. Now I can skip from album to album at the click of a button, make tracks lists, copy whatever I want to USB sticks for the car, etc. A CD is in no way more convenient. You can scan CDs nowadays at like 50x (less than 2 minutes a disc). It literally takes very little time to scan hundreds of CDs to iTunes (lossless if you like) and you can then move/play them anywhere (you can even drag lists from iTunes to a USB stick and it will copy them over for you).

Blu-Rays are more of a pain because they take much longer to rip (and re-encoding to take up less space takes even more time, but once you start them, you don't have to sit there and wait; it can do it in the background).

 

[JagdTiger]

Very curious to see who still buys dvds and blu-rays and why? Or why did you stop?

I don’t purchase it at all, seems a waste of time and it’s tiresome that others are getting rich/wealthy of it while the purchasers are remaking low income at best and of course the people should be boycotting the entertainment industry.
[doublepost=1551196395][/doublepost]

So true. I'd argue that your Panasonic is the ULTIMATE disc player on the market - even better than Opposite IMO. I worked in a Technics / Panasonic HiFi shop when I was at business school and the quality of the components on ALL of their gear is incredible. Some of the Technics CD players were bullet proof practically. Their quality was outstanding. Not unusual for the products to last 20+ years! I still have my Father's VHS video recorder from 1999 AND it still works as great as it did on day one It's funny when you see a VHS tape and put an iPhone X next to it and realise all of the thousands of things that the iPhone can do - mine holds 35+ 1080p iTunes films along with all of my music, photos and surfing videos
[doublepost=1541110924][/doublepost]

Same with me - I've lived through Betamax, VHS, Video 8, Hi8, DVD, BluRay and now iTunes. As a little 3 year old, I couldn't understand why my Peter Pan Betamax film would no longer play on Papa's new VHS machine. I think I cried for a full year :') One of my favourite films is Flashdance. I've had that on VHS, then I bought it on DVD when released at £20, then I bought the anniversary DVD, that got scratched so I had to buy it again 2 years later, then I bought a BluRay of it on Ebay which turned out to be a pirate version from Mexico as it was never released as a Region 2! After that, I said no more and went with iTunes - I bought the HD version 5 years ago AND... last year, they added iTunes Extras to it which was a lovely surprise

Hi-8 was a good format and then there was digital vhs, I always like film.

 

[jblagden]

I stopped buying physical media in 2008 when I first entered the Apple ecosystem with the purchase of my first iPod. Then I got my first (and last) Apple TV and Airport Extreme in 2010. Then I got my first (and last) Mac in 2011. I got my second (and last) iPod Touch in 2012 - though, I cracked the screen the year later and had to get it swapped out for a new one (same generation & capacity).

But this past year, I started buying physical media again because I'd like to replace my iTunes video library with physical media so I'm not held hostage in the Apple ecosystem by my media purchases. Thanks to software like Handbrake and MakeMKV, I can "digitize" these discs so I can have DRM-free copies of them for all of my devices. Apple used to make great stuff, but now it's declining, so I'm leaving their ecosystem. That means converting my iWork documents to MS Office, moving my photos out of Photos, copying my notes over to separate documents from the Notes app, and replacing my iTunes videos with optical discs. It's a lot of extra work to free myself from Apple's ecosystem, but it'll be worth the flexibility in the end. At least at the end of this laborious process, I'll be able to use any phone, tablet, desktop OS or streaming box instead of being forever and increasingly tethered to Apple.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I don’t purchase it at all, seems a waste of time and it’s tiresome that others are getting rich/wealthy of it while the purchasers are remaking low income at best and of course the people should be boycotting the entertainment industry.

People get rich/wealthy in every area of life while others make 'low' income. Why is the entertainment industry any worse than gasoline, suits, furniture, gun makers, insurance companies, restaurants, etc. etc. etc. ??? At least you're getting entertained. With insurance and property taxes (where low income people vote for every flipping tax because they get the benefits but pay little or nothing compared to those with property ownership yet for some crazy reason still get an equal vote), I'm generally just getting screwed. And if you think only the poor buy blu-rays, think again. I buy movies because it's cheaper than going to the movie theater for two and you keep the movie.

But I'm going to just take an educated guess that by "don't purchase it at all" you in no way mean you don't have any movies and/or WATCH any at all....

 

[BODYBUILDERPAUL]

People get rich/wealthy in every area of life while others make 'low' income. Why is the entertainment industry any worse than gasoline, suits, furniture, gun makers, insurance companies, restaurants, etc. etc. etc. ??? At least you're getting entertained. With insurance and property taxes (where low income people vote for every flipping tax because they get the benefits but pay little or nothing compared to those with property ownership yet for some crazy reason still get an equal vote), I'm generally just getting screwed. And if you think only the poor buy blu-rays, think again. I buy movies because it's cheaper than going to the movie theater for two and you keep the movie.

But I'm going to just take an educated guess that by "don't purchase it at all" you in no way mean you don't have any movies and/or WATCH any at all....

Maybe he means that he simply watches film on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Websites like this are a minority. The majority of friends or people that I know do not buy film. They simply watch Netflix.
Look at my trends. Before I started buying film from iTunes in 2010/12 on wards, I bought one DVD between 2007 to 2010! And that was it. I never sat down to watch a film in those years - i'd be at work or university during the day, then writing assignments, the gym with friends on an evening or out to dinner and weekends were spent travelling to see friends or playing sports - sailing, running, gym, mountain biking, road biking, surfing. Watching a film just did not mean anything to me at the time. I was too busy making my own passions And I still feel that way 10 years later, it's just that now, I can watch a film on a 12 hour flight or sat on the Eurostar every other weekend visiting my pals in Paris

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Maybe, but the boycott thing throws a red flag beyond just thinking streaming is better/easier/cheaper, IMO. Some hate Hollywood for yet other reasons entirely (what they view as a left lean?)

 

[jetjaguar]

Quality doesn't mean squat to most people. Forget that 72" OLED. Too many people are happy to watch movies on a 5.7" phone...pathetic.

Now someone COULD start a high-end streaming store (i.e. using much better video rates and TrueHD based Atmos sound) that 100+Mbps connections could use, but I'm guessing people wouldn't pay for that either. Apple doesn't even offer lossless music in 2019! It'd take a minute to download a full CD lossless album now (and only slightly more for 24/96). There's just too little demand for quality. It's sad to think we had better music quality in the 1980s than now, though....

https://www.kaleidescape.com/

too bad the equipment is beyond expensive but it basically streams the full disc quality audio and video.
[doublepost=1551901518][/doublepost]

Samsung is pulling out of the blu-ray player market.
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-stop-making-4k-blu-ray-players-report-says/

Looks like Apple made the right choice backing Dolby Vision too.

Good. Samsung bluray players were trash. And not supporting dolby vision was a huge mistake.

 

[jblagden]

Maybe, but the boycott thing throws a red flag beyond just thinking streaming is better/easier/cheaper, IMO. Some hate Hollywood for yet other reasons entirely (what they view as a left lean?)

And then there are groups like the FSF who recommend a boycott of Netflix - a ludicrous propositions and an exercise in futility. Sure, Netflix uses DRM and tracks users, but that's kind of par for the course. Hollywood insists on DRM, so boycotting Netflix will likely have no effect. Besides, it's kinda strange to expect rented content to be free of DRM, since you don't own it. And tracking is to be expected of any paid service, especially one that's supposed to make it easier to find content that you like, there just aren't enough people willing to go without Netflix for a boycott to make a difference. As long as Netflix is making enough money, it's highly unlikely that they'll sell that data, unlike Google - whose entire business model relies on the selling of user information.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

https://www.kaleidescape.com/

too bad the equipment is beyond expensive but it basically streams the full disc quality audio and video.

Wow. The player alone is priced just outside of the stratosphere. You could get a fairly decent mid-range home theater system for the price of that alone (let alone movies for it). I've got over 11TB of movies already and those are recompressed to be less than the disc level itself (otherwise, I'd need about 30-40TB for all my movies) save my 3D ones which are uncompressed, but that takes up over 6TB already for only 165 3D movies.

The point is it'd be cheaper to just rip your own to a hard drive and stream it locally to an Nvidia Shield or Zidoo at full quality. Just a bit more work. I suppose the top 1% don't worry about trivial things like that. This product exists to soak them specifically, but apparently there aren't enough to go around as they already almost went out of business once already. What happens to your movie collection, then? The hard drive dies and no more movies since you can't re-download them from a place that's out of business.

Movie prices....mostly $20-25 (not many discount $10-15 titles there). Aquaman 4K...$37. Wow. Bend me over and call me Susan. That's getting up there with the Japanese 4K+3D+2D+Digitial Copy of Ralph Breaks the Internet (the ONLY way to get that movie in 3D since Disney basically told all their other distributors to go screw themselves; no more 3D animation!), but at $64 (after conversion from Yen), it at least includes the 3D version as well as the 4K version.

I think the most I've ever paid for a movie set (outside of my laserdisc days when I once paid $115 for the TRON Archive Edition) was $32 for Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle but that was a 4K + 3D + 2D + Digital Copy combo from France with both Auro-3D (2D BD) and Dolby Atmos (4K UHD BD) so I could mix and match at home to create a 3D file with Auro-3D and Dolby Atmos in one file for my Zidoo to play back in 11.1.6. Fun!

 

[Tech198]

Quality doesn't mean squat to most people. Forget that 72" OLED. Too many people are happy to watch movies on a 5.7" phone...pathetic.

Now someone COULD start a high-end streaming store (i.e. using much better video rates and TrueHD based Atmos sound) that 100+Mbps connections could use, but I'm guessing people wouldn't pay for that either. Apple doesn't even offer lossless music in 2019! It'd take a minute to download a full CD lossless album now (and only slightly more for 24/96). There's just too little demand for quality. It's sad to think we had better music quality in the 1980s than now, though....

"Convenience" seems to always come first.

 

[mrex]

Geesh. Sounds like way too much work. A Blue ray player and CD player would be far cheaper and more convenient.

it is not. i have a player on the shelf and im only using it for blurays, because i havent ripped my blurays yet and it is not convinient to use it at all once you have played your movies from the library you have made.

i have hundreds of dvd:s and they all are ripped and placed on the nas (mkv). vlc on atv/iphone/ipad/laptop plays them - so it doesnt matter where i am, i can always watch them.

 

[jwolf6589]

it is not. i have a player on the shelf and im only using it for blurays, because i havent ripped my blurays yet and it is not convinient to use it at all once you have played your movies from the library you have made.

i have hundreds of dvd:s and they all are ripped and placed on the nas (mkv). vlc on atv/iphone/ipad/laptop plays them - so it doesnt matter where i am, i can always watch them.

To each his own. As for me I prefer not to spend all that time and besides I do not want all my CDS AND DVDS on my computer.

 

[mrex]

To each his own. As for me I prefer not to spend all that time and besides I do not want all my CDS AND DVDS on my computer.

that is the reason the nas exist. i dont have any movie or songs on my computer either...

 

[JagdTiger]

People get rich/wealthy in every area of life while others make 'low' income. Why is the entertainment industry any worse than gasoline, suits, furniture, gun makers, insurance companies, restaurants, etc. etc. etc. ??? At least you're getting entertained. With insurance and property taxes (where low income people vote for every flipping tax because they get the benefits but pay little or nothing compared to those with property ownership yet for some crazy reason still get an equal vote), I'm generally just getting screwed. And if you think only the poor buy blu-rays, think again. I buy movies because it's cheaper than going to the movie theater for two and you keep the movie.

But I'm going to just take an educated guess that by "don't purchase it at all" you in no way mean you don't have any movies and/or WATCH any at all....

I watch absolutely none.

 

[jwolf6589]

that is the reason the nas exist. i dont have any movie or songs on my computer either...

Whats a NAS?

 

[JagdTiger]

Whats a NAS?

Just another take your money association.