<story><title>A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates</title><url>https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>screamingninja</author><text>Do you watch those movies &amp;#x2F; series more than once? I have always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media companies would want, but purchasing media&amp;#x2F;books and not using them more than once just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never &lt;i&gt;watch&lt;/i&gt; blu-rays directly, because I don&amp;#x27;t want to muck with physical discs.  Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server.&lt;p&gt;I know it&amp;#x27;s (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I&amp;#x27;m ethically in the clear; I&amp;#x27;m not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any &lt;i&gt;damages&lt;/i&gt; from my habits.&lt;p&gt;Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it&amp;#x27;s also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media.  With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it&amp;#x27;s more failure-proof.&lt;p&gt;That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it&amp;#x27;s something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten &lt;i&gt;only worse&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Blu-rays really aren&amp;#x27;t being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tombert</author><text>My rule of thumb has generally been &amp;quot;if there&amp;#x27;s any chance I&amp;#x27;ll want to watch the movie more than once, I&amp;#x27;ll buy the blu-ray.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Until about two years ago, I was happy enough to pay for two streaming services (HBO Max and Hulu), along with Amazon Prime, and I treated that like my &amp;quot;rental store&amp;quot;.  The first viewing would be to see if I like the movie, and if I did then I would immediately order the blu-ray.&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;ve canceled all my streaming services because I don&amp;#x27;t want to pay for a million of them.&lt;p&gt;Just a note, I will very frequently put a movie or TV series on in the background while I work on other things, probably even more frequently than I turn on music.  I just like having noise from a movie or show that&amp;#x27;s familiar for me.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates</title><url>https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>screamingninja</author><text>Do you watch those movies &amp;#x2F; series more than once? I have always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media companies would want, but purchasing media&amp;#x2F;books and not using them more than once just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>tombert</author><text>I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never &lt;i&gt;watch&lt;/i&gt; blu-rays directly, because I don&amp;#x27;t want to muck with physical discs.  Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server.&lt;p&gt;I know it&amp;#x27;s (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I&amp;#x27;m ethically in the clear; I&amp;#x27;m not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any &lt;i&gt;damages&lt;/i&gt; from my habits.&lt;p&gt;Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it&amp;#x27;s also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media.  With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it&amp;#x27;s more failure-proof.&lt;p&gt;That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it&amp;#x27;s something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten &lt;i&gt;only worse&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Blu-rays really aren&amp;#x27;t being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nox101</author><text>I am slightly embarrassed to say that yes, I watch movies over and over. All of them off of a shared hard drive using Kodi on an Apple TV to watch.&lt;p&gt;I recently through away all my CDs, DVDs, and BluRay after carrying them from apartment to apartment for years (in notebooks) and never once opening them during those years.&lt;p&gt;As for the embarrassment. I get from some POV it&amp;#x27;s a waste of time but I easily have a list of ~400 movies all of which I&amp;#x27;ve watched 3-20 times each. Examples might be a movie like The Matrix I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;ve watch 10+ times. A movie like Harvey, 2 or 3.</text></comment>