Best Buy to end DVD & Blu-ray disc sales

Technology@lemmy.world – 315 points – 9 months ago

Best Buy to end DVD & Blu-ray disc sales::Best Buy plans to phase out sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs both in-store and online by early 2024, the company said.

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I haven't used a DVD in 10-15 years and never used a BluRay but this is still a little surprising to me. Old non-tech-savvy people need movies too.

Physical media is still the best quality for those of us that care. I rip it to watch digitally, but I like having the physical backup and option to watch with minimal compression.

Just a reminder that anything digitally bought you don't own. The company you bought it from. Can do whatever they want with it. But you do sure as hell ownon a Blu-ray

There is actually DRM baked into BluRay that can prevent playback under certain circumstances. BD+ is one of those.

Some players require updates from the Internet to work with newer discs as the cryptography keys can rotate or be revoked. And then there are updates like where they can remove playback features.

I actually had an issue where a disc wouldn’t play in any of my players and I had to crack and rip it just to watch the content I purchased. I recommend people backup their blurays because newer players or internet updated ones can revoke access to playback.

Also, you may not be able to play BluRays on non-HDCP compliant TVs.

At this point, piracy is just easier.

There is software that can rip blurays and strip out the DRM. 4k only works with certain drives that have custom firmware available though.

MakeMKV for those wondering. I have yet to be unable to rip a disk with it due to DRM.

Right, which is why I recommend people back up their blurays. If you don’t, you may still loose access to your content on a normal player.

Just a reminder that anything digitally bought you don’t own.

I wish people would stop saying this. There's a middle ground for digital media people should be reminded of: DRM-free digital media. In that situation it's much like a physical DVD/blu-ray or the like, you own a copy of it, you can back it up, share it (though the terms & conditions will often discourage this), and so on.

This all or nothing talk of digital media only encourages people to give up and give in to restricted digital media via streaming or limited downloads/installs, both of which do better enable them to diminish your ownership.

Where can I buy DRM free digital media please? Because as far as I know, there's not many large or easily accessible companies that most people are familiar with that offer that.

For music:
Bandcamp, mainly indie.
7digital, a decent mix of popular and indie.
Qobuz, like 7digital, a mix of popular and indie.

iTunes and Amazon also sell their music DRM-free to an extent, but I'm always skeptical of whether what I'm getting from them is or not because they don't make it a selling point.

For books:
Smashwords
Weightless Books

For games:
GOG
Humble Bundle Store, albeit you'll have to filter by DRM-free to ensure you're finding games sold that way.
Itch.io this is like the Bandcamp of games, meaning that most of the titles distributed here are indie and experimental.

I'm still on the lookout for digital tv/movies, so unfortunately I don't have any pointers for those, but hopefully the rest of these help if they're available in your region!

Same. I love my Plex server - I rip all of my physical media audio and video to it and can watch/listen on all of my devices. Music is especially fun on Plex, as it pulls in great bio info for most of the artists, which makes organizing my decent sized music library a fun bit of zen..

Blu Ray is still the best quality you can get. Streaming services will compress the shit out of everything (even when they pretend you give you "4k") and pirate rips are all over the place. Buying a Blu Ray (and ripping out yourself if you do please) is a great investment because you own it, the quality is great, the discs have been designed to last 100 years or more, and they have capacity that will be able to deal with 8k and probably what comes after that too.

100% this. People jizz themselves over resolution and dynamic range all while having no idea that their image quality is shit due to compression destroying the bitrate of the video they are viewing.

With tools like radarr the quality is usually what you want now a days but it takes up a lot of space so you have to pick and choose what's worth it

So if it’s going to take up space I’ll just rip the 4k disc directly and keep the menus, extras and know that I’m not transcoding it to keep the original quality.

Yeah I have no problem finding 1:1 Bluray rips but they're 30GB-100GB files, which adds up quick if you're starting a collection.