Vanishing of Physical Media - Digitalization of Everything.

Wingz

Being Poor Sucks.
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Didn't know where else to put this

I've been buying movies, games, and other things over the last couple of years that I want to keep for various reasons with physical media if I can. They can't "Sanitize" older movies with physical media unlike digital versions. Cutting out scenes, removing problematic / hurty words etc. I've seen movies etc just removed from platforms after you pay for them because you don't own them. You just own the right to rent them basically.

You have online streams, electronic game downloads.

I saw the below video just a bit ago about various stores stopping the selling of physical media. Didn't see a thread for it so I thought I would make one for discussion.



Am I the only one out here doing this or am I just buying the equivalent of betamax for no reason?
 
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mewkus

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windows moving to a subscription model is going to be rage inducing
 
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slippery

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Didn't know where else to put this

I've been buying movies, games, and other things over the last couple of years that I want to keep for various reasons with physical media if I can. They can't "Sanitize" older movies with physical media unlike digital versions. Cutting out scenes, removing problematic / hurty words etc. I've seen movies etc just removed from platforms after you pay for them because you don't own them. You just own the right to rent them basically.

You have online streams, electronic game downloads.

I saw the below video just a bit ago about various stores stopping the selling of physical media. Didn't see a thread for it so I thought I would make one for discussion.



Am I the only one out here doing this or am I just buying the equivalent of betamax for no reason?
I have also been buying more physical movies/tv shows lately. Mostly for reasons of getting tired of not being able to find things on services, better quality than streaming, and the physical can't just disappear.
 
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Palum

what Suineg set it to
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windows moving to a subscription model is going to be rage inducing
Kinda not unexpected. I expect it to be bundled with O365. I think the low hanging fruit is just getting control of the uncontrollable level of piracy in Asia.
 

Koushirou

Log Wizard
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I still try to buy physical whenever I can. Same reasons, basically: want to own it, don't want it tampered with, don't want it taken away, and can trade it later on if I'd like to. Definitely feels like this will eventually not be possible anymore, though.
 

GuardianX

Perpetually Pessimistic
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windows moving to a subscription model is going to be rage inducing

100% going to move to linux full time if it ever comes to a sub model.

Windows 10 already has enough headaches that I get routinely annoyed with them changing things just to add their retarded "Ad Experience" to it.

"Oh HAY, you wanna read your email like you did before? Well we changed your email so the top 2 "Emails" are just advertisements! You are welcome!!"
 
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Control

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You know what's amazing? Buying a physical copy of a console game that forces a multi-gig update before you can start it.
 
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Captain Suave

Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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Am I the only one out here doing this or am I just buying the equivalent of betamax for no reason?

In my experience the digitization of everything means that I can find every incremental release of whatever I want since the beginning of time, as long as I'm .... resourceful about where I source it.

I can't be arsed to keep physical media, but I have a 30+ TB digital hoarding problem. Roll my own media server and get exactly what I want, when I want.
 
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Control

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In my experience the digitization of everything means that I can find every incremental release of whatever I want since the beginning of time, as long as I'm .... resourceful about where I source it.

I can't be arsed to keep physical media, but I have a 30+ TB digital hoarding problem. Roll my own media server and get exactly what I want, when I want.
There are definitely upsides. The annoying part is the downsides are almost all intentional and often borderline (or just fucking outright) malicious.
 

Sythrak

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Storage has become so cheap to the point you can host your own streaming service. I tried the physical media at one point but you collect so much junk that takes up space when you can just put a room full of movie discs on one ssd.
 

slippery

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Storage has become so cheap to the point you can host your own streaming service. I tried the physical media at one point but you collect so much junk that takes up space when you can just put a room full of movie discs on one ssd.
I've been thinking about doing exactly this. I'm more and more leaning towards creating a server/nas and getting back into just saving everything I might potentially want to watch/rewatch.
 

Sythrak

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I think what puts most people off is setting it up and worrying about backups, but at least for me it's worth the trouble.
 

Lanx

<Prior Amod>
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You know what's amazing? Buying a physical copy of a console game that forces a multi-gig update before you can start it.
i buy switch games for myself physical (unless it's d/l only), i buy the giftcodes for friends kids cuz apparently they can't wait for fucking shipping, and they...

find it a hassle to switch out games
 
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Cad

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I think what puts most people off is setting it up and worrying about backups, but at least for me it's worth the trouble.
It is a valid concern, but where are the backups for physical media? They go bad, can be lost, etc. The downside for a NAS is if you lose everything, it is a LOT to lose.
 

Sythrak

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It is a valid concern, but where are the backups for physical media? They go bad, can be lost, etc. The downside for a NAS is if you lose everything, it is a LOT to lose.
You can mitigate alot of this with redundancy and which NAS software you use. I use Unraid primarily because if you lose a disk and can't rebuild the array, you at least have all the data on the good disks that you can still recover.

There's always that risk of catastophic failure, and most of the super anal have a second NAS as a redundancy backup. For me at least I have alot of friends with Plex/Jellyfin servers so in the event of a total failure, I can rebuild alot of what is lost from their servers. Organizing it so you have certain media on certain disks makes it easy to decipher what you lost (ie lost movie disk, you only have to worry about movies lost etc) and what you need to recover.

That said I've never actually had a failure and I've been running a server for years 24/7. I'm pretty pro-active about replacing disks as they get past their warranty even if they haven't gone bad yet though.
 
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Cad

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You can mitigate alot of this with redundancy and which NAS software you use. I use Unraid primarily because if you lose a disk and can't rebuild the array, you at least have all the data on the good disks that you can still recover.

There's always that risk of catastophic failure, and most of the super anal have a second NAS as a redundancy backup. For me at least I have alot of friends with Plex/Jellyfin servers so in the event of a total failure, I can rebuild alot of what is lost from their servers. Organizing it so you have certain media on certain disks makes it easy to decipher what you lost (ie lost movie disk, you only have to worry about movies lost etc) and what you need to recover.

That said I've never actually had a failure and I've been running a server for years 24/7. I'm pretty pro-active about replacing disks as they get past their warranty even if they haven't gone bad yet though.
I have a 20TB NAS with 5 4TB drives... haven't lost one yet. If you really want to be anal just put another identical NAS at your parents house or something and have them mirror so a house fire can't take out your box and you're probably good to go.