DVD's / Optical media - time to call "Time" on them

Hi folks

I've been digitising my old collection of DVD's -- I really do like to watch again some of the old stuff

It's amazing though in re-ripping that quite often on old DVD's I need to re-clean and "coax" the DVD reader to read the disc properly -- I've probably got about 7 in-readable DVD's -- so if you are still using old fashioned commercial DVD's - rip them to HDD fairly quickly otherwise they might not be readable in future !!!

As for home produced ones on things like DVD+R or DVD+RW media - chances are these might also become unreadable too - probably quicker than commercial DVD's.

It's about time now instead of DVD's etc being sold in physical formats why not allow people to download the ISO and then if they want they can create a physical disc if they want one. The Region coding these days is 100% irrelevant as you can play with VLC and it ignores the region thing totally anyway.

Also you can back up off line etc and it's a lot more portable having DVD's on a small WD portable HDD than carrying a load of DVD's around plus a player -- most modern computers don't even have DVD playes / writers any more.

Incidently to those who use things like NAS etc -- if your remote TV / amazon / Roku box can install KODI - it plays DVD's from iso images with all menus / subtitles etc anyway.

Also production of DVD's uses toxic heavy metals - bad for environment - so allowing download of iso is a win-win for everybody. I'd love to see this type of optical media phased out with say the next couple of years.

Cheers
jimbo

I don't recall the last time I bought a DVD.

It's all BluRay and UHD BluRay for me at the moment. At 50-66gB each, ripping them to local storage isn't attractive.

I'd guess that the future is streaming, but I have the impression that the technology isn't really there yet. In the USA, 25 Mbps is still considered broadband.

bobkn said:

I don't recall the last time I bought a DVD.

It's all BluRay and UHD BluRay for me at the moment. At 50-66gB each, ripping them to local storage isn't attractive.

I'd guess that the future is streaming, but I have the impression that the technology isn't really there yet. In the USA, 25 Mbps is still considered broadband.

Hi there

cheap 4TB passport size self powered USB HDD's -- 50 GB say per blu ray approx. 100 blu DVD's so not hideously expensive to rip them -- for classical DVD 's (around 6 - 8 GB) well you do the maths. Those small pocket size self powered 4TB usb HDD's are brilliant. Small enough also to carry around in a pocket too --no power needed to use these -just plug into USB3 port on PC. Work also in USB2 --fine for streaming but obviously lower speed than USB3.

BTW Netflix works fine even if you have slowish speeds of 3 - 5 Mb/s -- of course here we're lucky probably having some of the fastest broad band on the planet ( currently advertised at 1.2 Gb/s).

My only problem with the streaming services is that you don't always know how long anything will remain available on line as these companies can't have infinite sized libraries so if something takes your fancy it's often a good idea to grab it to local storage for future viewing. Especially if it's something you might want to watch again long into the future.

Cheers
jimbo

There's also the practical consideration: if I own the physical disk, I'm probably not going to re-watch it all that often. Ripping it to a drive seems a little pointless.

I also have zero interest in making a portable movie drive (60-80 movies on a 4TB drive) to carry around with me.

I've never had a Netflix subscription. (Even back in the old days, with the physical DVDs.) I understand that they don't require a tremendous bandwidth for 4k, but I presume there must be an image quality tradeoff in that. Probably OK; current UHD BDs must have an effective compression over 100:1, so what's a little more?

I'm not included in the 18% of the US population with access to gigabit Internet. It's still a fairly urban thing. (I live in a city of about 85k people, about 100km from Manhattan, NY city.) My ISP choices are TV cable, DSL, and satellite. (I have no idea how well the satellite thing works. It's supposed to be based on geosynchronous satellites; the latency must be at least 240 ms.)