This community's stance on physical media ownership?
I might be asking a rhetorical question here but I was curious as to the overall consensus on physical media. Do support it because, unlike streaming, media can't take away what you've payed for? or are you against because it's a waste of money when you can "acquire" it through "alternative means?" I'm also thinking about getting a 4K Blu Ray player for when my wife and I get a new place; preferably one that can also play self hosted media. What do you guys think?
A lot of physical media has DRM. I am for anything that can't be taken away, whether it is a torrented file, a DRM-free stream, or a DRM-free physical copy.
How can I tell if a piece of physical media (Blu Ray in particular) has DRM on it as to avoid purchasing it?
All blueray will. Its built into the spec. You can rip it easily though.
Noted.
If I can't find something I want to pirate, I will sometimes break down and buy it, but always in physical media, which I immediately rip into my collection. I don't use physical media, it's too inconvenient, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay some megacorp so I can rent media and pretend I'm actually buying it.
Keep in mind that the average longevity of laser disks is 10-20 years. After that the data gets corrupted and will become unreadable at some point.
Thats why I don't use cd/dvd/bluray.
Books on the other hand, I love as a physical media.
My mind directly went to Laserdisc before I realized you were talking about the generic category 😅.
cd/dvd/blueray doesn't become bad that fast, properly stored they can easely live to 50+ years (except the writeable variant). they are physically etched which helps with longevity.
VHS or other types of magnetic storage is more of a chore, they often don't survive the passing of time.
I read it's more like 20-200 years. But there are differences. Recorded CD-Rs are worst. Burn DVDs if you can. And bought (pressed(?)) disks perform considerably better. But don't expose them to UV light or scratch them too much.
With books it depends on how people store these. They can mold. But if you take care to store them right... I mean there are books that are hundreds of years old. I think books are usually lost to things like a fire, flooding, or people deliberately getting rid of them. Otherwise, printed information will survive for quite some time. And I too think it's the better collectible. And they are fun to use. I like them better than reading on a screen.
Got plenty of CDs older than that, and they're fine. Might happen some day, but in my experience it isn't that bad.
If you store them properly and create fresh backups on new discs every couple of years, they can last a long time.
If you're going to pay for media, yeah physical disc is the way to go.
Id rip it to digital anyway just for the convenience though.
This is my stance too and what I try to do. I also tend to buy used where I can to save money, but I really like having the physical copy in back up.
I'd disagree when it comes to games. Owning a game on Steam is more valuable than having it on a disk:
You get updates automatically without having to think about it at all.
You get cloud sharing, making it easily to share things across different platforms.
You can play it easily on the Steam deck.
You always have access to it anywhere you have an internet connection, and are unlikely to lose or damage it.
All of these things can be accomplished with enough dedication by a pirate (except cloud sharing, but you can use SyncThing to accomplish something very similar)... but it's a lot more time and effort, enough that buying a game on sale is often worthwhile just from a practical standpoint.
I think that Gabe Newell's statement that "piracy is a service issue" is correct. Steam partially discourages piracy by simply offering a better experience.
Like, yes, in theory, Steam could go out of business tomorrow but in practice the chances of that are much lower than me dropping my disks and breaking them, or losing them, or scratching them, or any of the other risks that come with physical ownership.
I pay for games on gog.com because they are DRM free, but physical media is meh
Yarr! I like when I can touch me booty
I tried buying the BluRay to one of the recent Spider-Man movies. Unfortunately, due to DRM, I could not play it in my BluRay drive on my PC? I might have had to download some proprietary video playback software or something.
I realized that this too was such a hassle compared to the files that I could potentially download. As great as physical media is, the convenience factor plays an impact for me. I want to own my media, but I have to put in work and have a non-ideal setup to watch it.
On top of everything, with all the intros, and piracy warnings, just so many layers of non-comvenience.
I support ownership of stuff i buy.
Whether its physical or digital doesn't matter. I probably prefer digital as computer related activities already produce a ton of physical e-waste.
I love physical media because it’s just much easier to use. If I want to play some album in my car I put the cd in and press play. No fumbling around with search or menus, just put a disc in a slot and done. If I want a friend to listen, read or watch something I hand them a small object and they have it. No need to text them the title so they can search for it later and then forget it.
And what if you want to listen to different songs from different artists?
Physical media is great if you want to be told how to enjoy something. I’ll take the freedom anyday.
Why are you telling me how I enjoy consuming media? Muh freedom!
Nobody was telling you how to do anything. Dude was just disagreeing with the "physical media is easier to use" point of the guy above him and elaborating on why.
There are lots of options, use a CD changer, burn a mix CD, listen to the radio, run a pirate radio station. I'm not saying that physical media is always better in every situation, but neither is streaming. I like having the option depending on the situation.
you my friend .... need a little trip to this rabbithole called /c/selfhosting
Be warned tho ... altho it's a fun and enlightening journey ... it gets pretty expensive
Cries in 3 storage arrays across 2 bare metal hypervisors
Are you running a distributed storage software like ceph? I'm starting to think of how I should manage storage for personal files and containers, wondering if ceph is feasible for small home use and growing from there.
Books. There isn't any real substitute for books portability, smell, touch, ease of use.
Other than that I'm digital all the way.
I partially agree.
Reference books, with high-resolution images and diagrams, or subjects that invite constant page flipping, are great as physical objects. Most other books I prefer to have digitally. I do not need to have an object full of short stories or history lessons taking up space in my home.
I do like the feel of books and the look of a bookcase... But not as much as I like having that space for other things.
Everyone finds their own path in this, there are no wrong answers.
It's funny I have kind of the opposite opinion. I like to keep reference books digitally because I care so little about them and tend to look at them so infrequently. But my hitchhiker's guide series? My one volume collection of annotated Sherlock Holmes? Zoids Chaotic Century? Harry Potter, Redwall, and all the other books I raised children on? Conan by L. Sprague DeCamp? The list goes on and on.
But yes, to each their own.
Couldn't agree more. Nothing replaces the feel of holding a book.
I don't really read many books, but my gf does
And I often print her a book, like making a hard copy of it, at least a fake hard copy
If you want to support the author, why not? DRM may be a performance buster, but you can always get a physical copy to support the further development and keep enjoying DRM-free content from the alternative means. Also for stuff where it's harder to get something in an arrrrr way, physical media is often offered with steep discounts some time after the initial launch: I bought a lot of games for Xbox on disks for $10-15, while digital copies were still $60 a year after launch. BTW, if you have a game console, there is a good chance it has Blu Ray already.
I'll sometimes get the disc for movies I love. These usually come with some kind of digital voucher so I can stream it without having to muk around with physical discs, but I have the disc so can play it when I want. This happens seldom enough the discs fit in my TV stand.
I won't buy anything unless I can actually own it.
I will buy bluray movies if they are good, but I rip them to my server. With a set top player, there may be unskipable crap before the movie starts. Sometimes there are interesting extras on the bluray or DVD that can't be found online. I avoid the 4K blurays since they are a pain to remove the DRM and I'm not a fan of HDR.
I will buy games that I like if the developer isn't on my shitlist, but they must have a DRM free download that I can install offline. I wait for the games to go on sale though. I will not pay a premium just to be a beta tester.
I don't miss the times when my living room had several shelves with movies and CDs and XBox games. Nowadays I have everything stored on a NAS in the basement and a Spoitfy and Netflix subscription.
I find it difficult to compare those concepts, owning vs renting, pirating vs buying. They're all very different and all have their use. I just think I'm not the one who likes to collect movies and music on physical disks. And streaming it to the phone or TV is more convenient anyways.
The biggest disadvantage of physical media is DRM. With the exception of music which isn't usually locked, pretty much all optical discs have some form of region locking. Software/video games also typically have additional DRM schemes. Some are easy to bypass (e.g. nocd cracks). Online activation is the worst because it relies on the game publisher keeping the servers alive.
I like me some music CDs. Cassettes, too
For many years I would buy physical media, to the point where storage was a huge problem. Initially I ripped them to digital copies but honestly I did a terrible job ands most of them were too low of a quality to make it worth while. Pirates know how to rip stuff while keeping sizes under control and the quality top notch.
Now I can watch Blu-ray quality movies without have to deal with disks. So while I am not opposed to physical media, in most cases I still prefer digital.
I haven't bought new media in years. Last time I bougth new they were LP records, new pressings. For movies I just download or buy used, for music I almost always buy used and from time to time new when I really want to support the artist.
Yhe problem with limiting yourself to either pirate or just 1 type of medium is that you miss out on good stuff. At this moment I have music from every decade between 1890 and 2020 on LP, of which most will never be available digitally.
Physical media in the sense that you actually own the hardware where it's stored? That's an absolute must!
But personally I wouldn't want to deal with CDs and other outdated mediums.
I own every outdated medium (alas, need to repair the 8-tracks) and the devices to use them. They hold music that's most of the times not available via any other method.
The content is more valuable to me then the type of medium.
So copy it off the old mediums?
Yep, so you still need the old mediums. Also, analog sounds different from digital unless you take a very high sampling rate. (Some hear the diffeeence, same like some see the differense between HD and 4K and some don't)
I'd challenge anyone to A/B a 16bit 44kHz sampled digitization with the original and tell the difference consistently. This is one of the reasons I love pbthal vinyl rips, his rig is awesome, I could never afford it, and it captures the sound I'm looking for. The 24 bit 192kHz vinyl rips on torrent sites are chasing ratio IMO.
Depends on the setup. On my stereo it's sometimes close, but always recognizable to me. (And yes, sometimes digital sounds more pleasing) On an average stereo, most just won't hear the difference.
The biggest factors to tell analog from digital are
I collect dvds and blu-rays, I haven't really made the move to 4k because it's harder to rip
If I purchase music, it'll be in the form of a CD which I'll create a torrent out of and seed to at least 10 people have it. That takes a while though
I try to support physical media when I can because it's more consumer friendly than streaming exclusive shows. there are a lot of shows I just pirate. these days though my physical collecting is pretty much just manga.
I will happily buy anything that I can own. I pirate as a last resort, and often pay for streaming services for anything I pirate to ensure that artists get their money. Ownership and quality are important though. For example, I pay for 4k on netflix. I am lucky to get 720p even though I have a 400mbs internet connection. So I torrent to get the quality that I already paid for. I also pay Tidal every month for music, but it wont work half the time where there is no signal or where my connection isnt perfect, so I keep a local copy of everything as well.
I am in no way averse to paying for something even if it isnt physical so long as I get value from it. I'm averse to being lied to about what I am paying for and not recieving what I paid for. Furthermore, if I pay to own something, it is an absolute must that I have a physical copy that cannot be tampered with or disabled by an external entity. Anything else is not ownership. If a company says own this through our servers, I consider that false marketing and a direct lie to scam me.
As others have noted.. it is a balancing act between having the room for it and what you value enough to spend that space on.
For me, I don't buy a whole lot of music, but when I do I insist on CD's or vinyl and then I rip them. All the ease of digital along with a built in hard backup.
I download things like good movies, video games, and music.
I stream things like TV shows on free streaming sites.
A lot of people here don't understand that having something saved on a storage device is the exact same as owning it physically.
They believe that having a box for a disc with cover art on it matters, or something.
Right, I got my movies, music on my storage so I own it. Of course it wasn't free, I'd to pay with electricity, internet service provider costs. I don't have space to keep set of dvd/bluray/cd's wherein a single hdd/ssd can hold all of that data. Most of the new content is mostly crap nowadays. I won't pay a dime for it. So yeah will sail the high seas and get my content as long as the options are available to me.
So don't watch it if it's crap? Or stop trying to justify piracy to yourself, we're all here for similar reasons.