Why buy second hand DVDs to clutter your house when piracy exists? Either way the rights holders earn no money.
The only reason I can think of is for the bonus content. When you pirate, you generally just get the movie/show and nothing else. No behind the scenes extras, no deleted scenes, no director’s commentary, etc. Even Blu Ray discs are often lacking in this category. DVDs were peak for special features.

I sorted out my DVD’s Kept the collectors stuff, moved the cheaper but beloved stuff to binders and threw away the chaff i bought for a dollar a disk when blockbuster went under.
I can keep my entire original collection easily on 2 hard drives these days
Cus I like em
Most DVDs produced will be rotted out within 20/30 years at most, only option is ripping what you can and migrate the collection to a new drive every decade, just make sure it’s a secondary drive and is of archival quality.
Burned disks, you’ll probably lose some over 30 years, i’ve lost a few in 20 years, most are still readable.
Poorly pressed disks, you might lose one here or there. I had a two where the aluminum was poorly sealed and flaked off the label side.
I have hundreds of DVD’s in the 20-30 year range and have never had a problem reading any of them that weren’t scratched save the couple that were lacking in top lacquer.
Rotted within 20/30 years? Honest question where did you get that ? I have 40 yo cds that are in pristine condition why would dvds be different?
The density of DVDs makes them less resilient than CDs, but CDs will also suffer the same fate. It’s going to be a very serious conservation problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Exactly, and I imagine blurays and DL dvds will suffer even quicker. However the quality of the plastic is also important, we started cheaping out and it’s noticable, look at VHS or Tapes as we moved forward the quality of them dropped.
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No. No they’re not.
The reason vinyl is vinyl is because the format requires very careful mastering of the source audio since the format is very sensitive to such things. This is why people say vinyl can sound better than a compressor digital file like an mp3 or a mass produced MP3.
Nothing about a DVD precludes any additional mastery of the media. If anything it is simply cheap to buy DVDs from second hand sources or even places like eBay.
With the way the world is now I understand why people want physical media like disks so as to own their movies which could explain a resurgence of dvd sales.
But they’re not the next vinyl. They still make vinyl.
No is putting hd video on dvd disks.
No, vinyl is still the new vinyl. Tons and tons of new vinyl on Bandcamp. And tapes!
Yes but vinyl’s resurgence is like a decade old now. People were actively abandoning DVD while stocking up on vinyl.
rip backups; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
i also very rarely still see Video Games being sold in CD/DVDS.
thats only one franchise i know of though.
but imagine it was more common for video games too.When I bought my dream machine it was the first one without an optical drive… and then I bought an external blu-ray player/DVD burner.
Its Blu-ray not DVD right? DVD was an impossibly low resolution, that really isn’t fun to watch today.
Blu ray works perfectly on today’s hardware
My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable.
I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.
DVD is perfectly fine resolution, not everyone even has a 4K screen or TV. Most people still have 720x1080 or 1080x1920p screens or TVs. Our tv personally is 720x1080 and it looks just fine.
Way too many DVDs are interlaced/telecined though.
Or worse, some hellish combination of both, because the producers edited different sources together. It makes scaled footage, panning, and some motion look really awful or jittery once you notice it.
Blu rays don’t necessarily escape this either, as they butcher the conversion to 24p and then you can’t even fix it.
For all their problems, streaming giants usual do this better. Amazon (and probably Netflix) had employees hanging out in the doom9 A/V forums long ago.
That’s a 15 year old TV at least and of course you don’t see a difference on that. My 4k is at least 6 years old. If I bought one now I would not be able to buy lower res.
DVD is pal or ntsc and if you played that on a monitor the picture is as small as phone. It’s like the lowest SVGA res
Distance and size makes the most difference.
If you’re sitting ~7’ back from a 50" TV it really doesn’t matter if it’s 720, 1080, 4k, or 8k.
You have to be right up on it to tell or have a huge screen.
Nicer TVs do have better color and contrast that you can tell from any distance. But generally you have to have something to compare it to for it to really matter. Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
But many times they’re encoded dreadfully anyway, and DVDs tend to be better in this respect.
Interlacing is awful though.
I found out the hard way that 4k Blu-ray need a special player. That it won’t work on Ps2/PS3/PS4 I already have. Only "regular blue-ray play on those.
Yeah, you need a PS5 to play ultras. But what’s even dumber is neither 4 nor 5 can play regular old music CDs
UHD blu-rays didn’t even come out until 2016 which is years after any of the devices you listed. Also the discs themselves hold twice as much data as a regular blu-ray so it makes sense that playstations released before it even existed don’t have drives capable of reading the discs.
Dvd video on a cell phone looks great
Heck CRTs were standard at 480p and nobody had any problems
People did have problems, there just wasn’t an (affordable) alternative. If you would go back to the 70/80’s and offered anyone the choice between 480p and 1080p, all else being equal. Would anyone pick 480? I know I wouldn’t
It’s not because we learned to live with it or didn’t know better, that it was the best option.
I lived through the 70s and 80s. Didn’t know what 480p even was til the 90s, so I have direct experience with CRT usage. Bonus: we didn’t even have a color TV til the mid 80s at my house
Because you didn’t know it was called 480p or knew of better options doesn’t mean you can’t see that it wasn’t great or improvable. You knew colour existed before getting a colour, TV so you knew it could be better…
People had 56k modems and no one had any problems, my Gameboy was monochrome and you saw nothing in the sun, no problems there either…
It’s a bit trickier last time I did it to be confident I can rip a Blu-Ray.
I actually don’t want to juggle discs to watch stuff, I like the general concept of streaming, but I don’t like paying eternally for it, for shows to jump between providers and for my access to cut out part way through and/or even if I have the new service, my progress being forgotten so I have to try to look for where I left off.
So I want to rip content. DVDs are always dead simple. As I rip blu-rays, MakeMKV is kind of a hassle, it wants to expire itself all the time, and like right this second the place to update from seems down. Maybe someone will comment with some easy way to rip blu ray that internet search doesn’t make obvious.
If folks sway me, might go buy a 4k friendly Blu Ray drive and hop to it.
MakeMKV is the easiest way. The license key is always in the forum.
I thought a BD duplicator. Multiple drives, just put the professional disc in the top and a blank in one or more of the others. Obviously blanks are less resilient than pressed discs but it’s a backup and I didn’t need to have specialized skills to do it.
Eh, I’m not really interested in disc based copies, really the disc is there for ripping and then stored, jellyfin to stream it to watch as I please. Once ripped then I can handle the resultant file nice and easy.
The issue with blurays are the unskippable intros before the menu hits
What? DVD is perfectly fine. I dont even have a 4K TV
It’s a little fuzzy, but that’s OK on a lot of older movies (especially lower budget ones) because they were always a little fuzzy to start with.
You can have all the pixels you want, but you’re not going to get a lot of extra detail out of Critters or Masters of the Universe.
Many old movies that are restored perfectly. Yes it’s a lot of film grain but you can also see a lot in the background etc. Also id rather have the film grain.
The movies where shot for cinema on 16mm or so and that is pretty high res.
Oh boy, they weren’t fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.
Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won’t notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.
¹: BTW, it doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.
What? VHS is perfectly fine. I don’t even have a color TV
This is how you sound BTW. 4k or even 1080p is objectively better than DVDs’ 480p. There is no reason to still use them other than cost or being a contrarian.
a few years ago I ripped all my cds/dvds to mp3/mp4 for easier uses. google music used to let you download everything as mp3. apple never did. for a while just uploading one song could get you the whole album. loaded on thumbdrives and distributed as gifts, backups for legal purposes.
We started buying BR and CDs for our daughter because we found the physical selection more rewarding to her and interactive. With the exception of the PBS app, no way that could all be a collection.
The future is self-hosted digital media. I’ve got no qualms with pirating media. But I am an advocate for buying digital media from artists directly.
AI music has entered the chat
The sneakernet and hard drives are the future. We never needed the Internet to share.
Reminds me of this PS4 ad:
I miss walking the aisles and running across some film I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in ages. Having heavily curated list of films recommended for me makes me uninterested in even looking. Of course I’d enjoy this film, I’ve watched 6 times over the last 10 years, thank you algorithm.
Yeah because i want to own when i buy things
Yeah revolutionary concept
I’m happy to just pirate this shit.
I don’t buy band media anymore but I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Record company middlemen and forever streaming can take a hike.
I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.
Who doesn’t love a cool band t-shirt?
- My wife, just before she stole my band shirt
In fairness, she looks better in it
In fairness, I only bought the shirt in my size so that it would be comfortable for her to sleep in. I never actually planned to wear it. Shame that it’s a fucking Disturbed shirt and that I wanna set fire to it.
at least she didn’t grab the limp bizkit shirt that your older sister gave you in '02

Blu Ray is where it’s at. Give me some actual quality bitrate baby.

And decent resolution: DVD is forever stuck at SD (480p MPEG). While Blu-ray can be UHD (4K HEVC).
It’s not even 480p, it’s 480i with a resolution of 720x480 regardless of whether the content is 4:3 or 16:9, the pixels get stretched one way or the other. That’s for NTSC discs, PAL discs have a higher 576i (720x576) resolution but the movie is sped up 4% cause it forces 25fps when it should be 24.
This is a good point. Even worse! Weird anamorphic? pixel aspect ratios (or maybe pan-and-scan crops? or hopefully that’s just VHS). With a bonus of interlacing! “The horror!” I haven’t ripped a DVD in ages due to video quality issues.
Oh all those full screen DVDs are in fact pan and scan just like VHS.
I’ve always kinda thought about implementing a software and standard for 1080p av1 on DVD. Would be neat as a project, obviously no commercial use would exist.
Either way you can get some really impressive encodes out of av1, really neat tech.
Unless you get new DVD players to support AV1, just put the AV1 files on a data DVD…
No that’s the idea, it would be to make a piece of software which if thrown on a sbc with a DVD drive becomes a player.
Which really isn’t too far off of DVD and most bluray players.
Though I wouldn’t be shocked if the super cheap DVD players have some sorta all-in-one integrated asic for most of the job.
Would mostly be used by hobbiest making their own burned discs and small artists releasing stuff.
I mean if you control the software on the “player” you don’t really need a dedicated dvd format. Think about mp3 CDs, it never became a real format with specs and everything yet most CD players after a certain date supported them.
Yeah but if you make it an open format other hobbyists could make their own hardware/software about it.
Mostly a fantasy medium, but if people start using it for art, then hey neat.
That sounds interesting! I’ve been using AV1 more and more (thanks to SVT-AV1-PSY/-HDR and devs pushing improvements to main). Also enjoying FHD animated AVIF (vs ancient GIF, although gif.ski helps). AV1 video is not as soft as it once was (esp at high bitrates with synthetic film grain), and combined with OPUS audio, it’s all wonderful.
If you ever wanna play 4K BDs on PC, you’ll need a 4K-compatible drive that’s been hacked with LibreDrive though, otherwise you’re stuck using a dedicated set-top player for those.
1080p discs can at least be handled by libaacs and libbdplus /w the necessary files, and don’t necessarily need a hacked drive to play back.
It’s both for me. Some things are either not on BluRay, too rare and expensive, or the transfer on BluRay is actually worse. And besides, any BluRay player is a dvd player too.
Anyway, any physical collecting or pirating needs to encouraged because streaming is such a stupid model now.
We are forever fucked over lots of TV shows/movies that are caged within the stream services realm :/
I think part of it might be that DVDs are easier to find used or just cheaper new. GenZ isn’t really rolling in cash and in my area for example used stores rarely if ever carry Blu-ray.














