[3] Which has issues with rot, failure, misprints, and inferior encodes compared to some streaming services (particularly where content is available in 4K HDR streaming, but only gets a poorly tonemapped SDR Blu-Ray release)
[4] The site is known to speculate on potential releases of content and is not a definitive source of what is, has been, or will be available for retail purchase.
Just clearing those points up as a preservationist myself. Years ago, the scales tipped very clearly in favor of piracy as preservation, since most streaming content just doesn't get a retail package anymore.
Agreed. The conversation we should be having is, "How do we enable content ownership in a post-physical media era while preserving the rights and freedoms of physical media ownership, i.e. personal backups, content transcoding for personal use, lending to friends and family, etc", not "How do we preserve physical media".
The content and the flexibility of use is the point, not the medium. It's why DRM is antithetical to consumer use, as its function isn't to stop piracy so much as to promote difficulty of use (and therefore drive revenue).
Switching to subjective preferences, I'd much rather be able to buy DRM-free 4K HDR encodes with my customer ID invisibly watermarked into the content to combat piracy, rather than yet another DRM-enabled service. It's how music sales generally work (sans the watermarking), and the industry seems perfectly fine with their post-DRM reality.
Recordable Blu-Ray was always in a bit of a weird spot, though. BR drives in computers never reached the level of market penetration that CD/DVD drives had; as a result, it never became accepted as a standard way of storing or transferring files. Given all the other options on the market, particularly flash drives and cloud storage, it just never found any practical applications.
(Nor did it help that, whereas CD and DVD drives were popular as players for prerecorded media, BR drives weren't. Support for playing BR movies on home computers was heavily limited by DRM, and streaming services cut out a lot of the demand.)
Yeah, that's fair. I have a few blank blu-rays lying around but I've never actually used them.
Playing blu-rays on computers has always been irritating, particularly on Linux. I'm actually not sure that there's a fully legal way to watch a blu-ray on Linux; it's not hard to do it, but I'm not sure that it's legal. I don't think PowerDVD with Blu-ray support is on Linux.
Much less of an issue than with download links for purely digital distribution.
In both cases you should make your own backups.
> inferior encodes compared to some streaming services (particularly where content is available in 4K HDR streaming, but only gets a poorly tonemapped SDR Blu-Ray release)
This is a much bigger problem with earlier shows that have only gotten DVD releases but have non-interlaced masters or professionally de-interlaced streams available for streaming.
I think this is extremely overblown. I have DVDs that are 25 years old that spent 10 of those years in an attic and have no issues whatsoever. I ripped all of them, plus Blu-rays ranging from “new” to 15 years old just a few years ago. Several hundred discs, zero issues.
Yeah, that's a big reason that I wanted to (hypothetically speaking) rip all my blu-rays and DVDs.
Rip them while they're still good, and store them on a RAID hard drive cluster with proper error correction, and I think that as long as I'm a little vigilant with scrubbing and replacing drives when they fail, it should last quite awhile.
