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It's sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales. Per CNBC's calculations, DVD sales fell over 86 percent between 2008 and 2019. Research from the Motion Picture Association in 2021 found that physical media represented 8 percent of the home/mobile entertainment market in the US, falling behind digital (80 percent) and theatrical (12 percent).

But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable. And with the streaming industry becoming more competitive and profit-hungry than ever, you never know if the movie/show that most attracted you to a streaming service will still be available when you finally get a chance to sit down and watch. Even paid-for online libraries that were marketed as available "forever" have been ripped away from customers.

When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they're paying for and for how long they'll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they're getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing's perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).

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[-] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 17 points 1 month ago

Several tech YouTubers have talked about moving entirely to Jellyfin or similar, self-hosting their own movies and TV series from legally owned, ripped copies from their own DVD or Bluray collection.

It takes some work and time to rip, encode, and organize the files. But if you want to go this route, there has probably never been a better time. You can routinely purchase used DVDs and Bluray from thrift stores for a few bucks per disc... sometimes less. If I had a server and hard disk space I'd probably be going this route for media consumption.

Eventually the DVDs will go away entirely and then it will be impossible to create your own legal archival copies.

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 points 1 month ago

Honestly, I'd rip my collection, but at the time it takes to download that quality rip I'd be quicker just typing them all into Radarr and coming back later...

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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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