Is it stupid to own a DVD library?

Should we just stream movies as we want them instead?

If something goes wrong with your internet connection, what the hell are you going to do - stare at the wall?
It's not stupid, OP. I have a library of 5,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. And, what r1 said.
It's an unpopular opinion on DL, but I would consider that a decision best left to the individual.
Yes, it's stupid. Rip and convert them and store them on a hard drive and then sell or give them away.
No, bandwidth costs money.
If you really really love the movie i say own it. Ive got about 100 but rarely watch em anymore. If you dont have cable, netflix or streaming it makes more sense. But i have dvr, cable, and netflix. I used to watch a lot of the same movies over and over but as i get older watching stuff ive never seen before more often. But to each his own.
Y'all are crazy. Go to your local library and check out any DVD series for free.
Is there anyone more pathetic than someone who rents movies from the library?
[quote]If you really really love the movie i say own it. I agree. I have a few dozen DVD movies that I want to watch every year according to the season - Christmas, Spring Break, July 4th, Labor Day, etc.
To each his own r8. How is it any different from checking out a book instead of buying it at a bookstore? No difference.
R8 must use Netflix. Careful now. He's on the cutting edge.
Rolls eyes
It may be stupid to invest in DVD library futures.
Anomynous
Yes.
I'd like to have a Camp DVD Library, stuff that's hard to find. All the early John Waters stuff; Edward D. Wood, Jr.; Susan Slade; Chained Heat, etc.
... and a half-gallon of Haagen-Dazs
R2, How often do you watch those 5,000 DVDs? If you paid $10 each for them you have invested 50K for them. Seems rather silly when for about $250 a year where you can stream and get DVDs from Netflix. You'd have to be a subscriber for 200 years to spend that much. Owning DVDs is a total waste of money these days.
If you are going to make use of them, then it's not stupid. It would only be foolish to have a stash of DVDs if they were just going to be dusty clutter.
No, each DVD costs $20. Each Blu-ray costs $30.
It depends on your taste. I love bad and/or popular contemporary movies - movies that are readily available online. I might want to see specific scenes in older movies if I feel like hooking up my super drive (with its ten inch cord) to my laptop. It's awkward and drains my laptop. Someone with better taste would require a DVD and VHS library to capture less popular material.
You can always donate them to Goodwill or the library and take a tax deduction.
Anomynous
I have a DVD room dedicated to housing my DVD collection. I used to put them on shelves but now I just stack them on the floor.
[quote]It would only be foolish to have a stash of DVDs if they were just going to be dusty clutter. Surfaces, sweetie: surfaces!!!
Edina%20Monsoon%2C%20furiously%20removing%20clutter
Subtitles. Directors' commentaries. Extra features. Want any of these on Netflix? Sorry!
You also have to have a very good and reliable connection to be reliant on streaming.
If you are considering purging your collection, I can highly recommend sending the old disks to www.anysoldier.com Highly appreciated and you get a great feeling. And today is Memorial Day! Do a good deed.
R15...I purchased most of these movies before streaming was available. And, you can't get DTS-HD from streaming.
r22 is right. The extra features really are worthwhile - esp. on The King and I, South Pacific, and The Producers. I get most at low cost by buying used on Amazon - never had a problem with a used DVD. I have an Amazon wish list to check once a week to see if something on the list is $10 or less. Amazon also has some great sales. I got the full first season of The Big Valley for $10.49 - 30 episodes. I'd rather watch that than any of the reality shows that fill the TV today. You can watch one episode a week for 30 weeks. That's worth $10.49.
When music albums came out, I had a great collection, with a few cassettes in the mix. Then CDs came out and so I had to start buying CDs. Then digital music came about and now all my albums and music cds are "stuck" on a device that sits in one room and unless I want to pay AGAIN for the same music, I just get new music on digital. It sucks to some degree, I'm not a big fan of constant upgrading. The same principle applies to movies/DVDs, as well as computers/software. Every library eventually becomes obsolete and it's too expensive to keep starting over. Right now your DVDS might work for you, OP, but look 10 years down the road when your DVD player craps out. Will the new versions of the Playstation, Xbox (or whatever other device one uses) still play DVDs or will the industry have decided to make everything be on a cloud because it is more profitable? Then boom, your library is obsolete and nothing more than coasters. It sucks sometimes, I hate the constant need to upgrade. I just wanna find what works for me and keep it forever, but it doesn't work that way.
The truth of the matter is, in a few years, certain DVDs and CDs are going to go for big bucks. Catalog titles are going out of print, and the first stuff to get cut is often the fringe-interest stuff. And that's the stuff that certain people will pay big bucks for. You can already see this happening on Amazon (via Marketplace sellers). Of course, if you have boring, mainstream taste, your pile of CDs/DVDs is never going to be "worth" much of anything.
I have this disc set sitting on a shelf, appreciating like a mother-fucker! I paid $125 for it, and there's one for sale now on amazon.ca for $700.00. Mary!/Eldergay
http://www.amazon.ca/Judy-Garland-Show-Collection/dp/B00000K4YX/ref%3Dsr_1_20%3Fs%3Ddvd%26ie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1338253865%26sr%3D1-20
R27, rip you cds and dvds to a hard drive.
How do you do that? I know Walmart is now offering to do that for $2 a pop. But how they get around the copyright issue, I don't know.
Put your cds into your cd/dvd burner and open iTunes and it'll ask you of you want to extract the album. For Dvds you need different software. I use MacTheRipper and then one of a handful of various conversion softwares like iSquint, etc. it's very simple amd then you have all your media in one location and can just hook it up to the tv.
Do you have to pay for mac the ripper?
No it's free.
I don't like to watch movies or TV on my computer so I haven't jumped on the streaming bandwagon. (Yes I know there are ways to connect your computer to the TV.) And I guess my connection isn't fast enough because I still get that spinning wheel of death while the video tries to load. And my tastes are apparently way outside the mainstream. I have access to my sister's Netflix account and nothing I ever search for is available to stream from them. So I'll just keep my collection of obscure DVDs.
No it is not stupid to own a DVD/Blu Ray library for all the reasons stated above. When every last fucking video release anyone could ever want is available for streaming or download in Blu Ray-quality sound & video, with all the available extra content, and you have access to them via a connection that never, ever craps out, THEN you can tell a person that collecting physical media is a bad idea. I can't tell you how many times my Netflix and Hulu services have been interrupted (which had nothing to do with my ISP). And don't get me started on the quality of blu-ray-ripped downloads... what a joke. I guess you have to ask yourself if you're the kind of person who cares about these things. Even if you're not a connoisseur, surely the frustration of having technology fail you would make you think twice about selling off your collection or not starting one in the first place. P.S. Audio cassettes sound better than 128kbps MP3s.
Blu%20Ray%20%26%20Vinyl%20enthusiast
[quote]Go to your local library and check out any DVD series for free. Because, of course, all local libraries have EVERY dvd series.
Over the past few years I've moved all my CDs (a thousand or so) onto my computer, takes up about 90 Gb of space . . . . building playlist of favorites from various albums as been a suprising pleasure. However, finding that I could play the music (playlists or albums) from the PC to my main music system wirelessly has been an eye opener. I recently upgraded my receiver and it had an ethernet port on the back, so with a wireless adapter I can now connect to my home computer network. Now using Windows Media Player I can choose an album or playlist and use the "play to" function, choosing the receiver as the "play to" device and instead of the music coming out of the computer speakers it plays through the big receiver with the big speakers and subwoofer . . . . true magic to this aging hippie eccentric old fart. (I can slso get the the controls of the receiver from my computer, so I can adjust the volume etc. from the keyboard of my computer)
Steve K
If you have a FYE store near you, they buy back used DVD's and CD's. Amazon is staring to buy back too for Amazon credit. I might be wrong but WalMart doesn't digitalize your personal DVD. You bring in yours to prove you own it, they put a sticker on it so someone else can't claim it and when you want to watch that movie, you're actually streaming it from their Cloud.
I have maybe 300 DVDs. Aside from a few favorite films, most are "imports", TV documentaries and series and films produced in Europe that, if they were ever released in the U.S., took a very long time to appear. With streaming, it's now possible to get more of the TV series in reasonably quick time frame, so I take advantage of that. Still, there are some titles where it's quite inexpensive and very fast to buy DVDs still. But most of the things I buy on DVD are not available via streaming from Netflix or Hulu or Amazon.
r26 has horrible taste. And most normal people have been digitizing their media, movies, tv shows and music, for the last decade. Physical media is dead and a waste of space. It's very easy to digitize even analog media like VHS tapes and LPs; you just need to buy simple, cheap connectors to attach your record player or VHS player to your computer. Hard drives are cheap. Anyone who hasn't digitized their media yet is either lazy as fuck or hopelessly out of touch.
[quote]And most normal people have been digitizing their media, movies, tv shows and music, for the last decade. [quote]Physical media is dead and a waste of space. [quote]Anyone who hasn't digitized their media yet is either lazy as fuck or hopelessly out of touch. And R41 is a bit of a tyrannical cunt. Are people who have not spent the past decade "digitizing their media" lazy and out of touch? (or maybe they had better things to do with their time than to slavishly follow R41.) I have 300 or so DVDs, stored in a cupboard, bothering no one but R41. He'd probably go deep-end apoplectic to see that my house has two libraries, or that I still subscribe to several magazines, or that I haven't given up subscriber TV for torrents, or that my groceries are not ordered and inventoried online.
[quote][R26] has horrible taste. Why because he watched "The Big Valley"? Do you have Aspergers?
[quote]Is there anyone more pathetic than someone who rents movies from the library? A gay Catholic Republican.
R42, the magazines are stupid, but everything else you mentioned is irrelevant. It's idiotic to hang on to physical media like DVDs and CDs and records and VHS tapes when you can easily preserve and consolidate your library. And, yes, it's regressive of you to be desperately clutching onto dead media. You can fit hundreds of movies onto a hard drive which takes up less space than 5 dvds and have everything accessible for viewing and easy browing through your tv or you can have 500 dvds in a cupboard.
R41
I like owning my favorite DVDs -- when I want to watch them, I can, independent of the Internet company. I also like ketchup on hot dogs, with mustard and sweet relish. I also avoid gyms to get exercise, preferring the freedom of the streets. In the past decade or so, so many business and cultural relationships have turned on us, so for things I like to do, I try to minimize outside (possible) interference.
You don't need the internet to watch dvds you've ripped to your hard drive.
Even VHS have made a comeback among collectors. "Hipsters" think it's cool to watch VHS and many out of print movies never issued on DVD command high bucks on EBAY. Collectors also want VHS strictly for the box-art(big box clamshells) or the label a film was released on. Go on EBAY and under DVD/Movies search Big box, Unicorn or Ocean Shores( a label that released very obscure kung fu movies). Some of those VHS go for $40 to $100. I have held on to all my VHS and DVDS and will sell the valuable ones online eventually. I am into cult,film noir, euro horror-stuff that had limited releases on small labels. That kinda stuff is worth money. The boring stuff such as "Top Gun", "Men in Black" etc that are so mainstream you can find them anywhere aren't worth anything really and can be donated to a local thrift store.
No one thinks it's cool to watch VHS tapes. There are films which haven't been officially transferred to DVD, but if you have the tape you can't easily burn a DVD of it or just create an MP4. VHS disintegrates and DVDs only have a 10 to 15 year life span; it makes a lot more sense to store any media you care about in a video file format before it's lost forever.
I record movies from TCM and HBO etc. to DVD-R so I have it when I want it. They're in books. Most of them are not your mainstream Netflix shit.
[quote]DVDs only have a 10 to 15 year life span What what WHAT?!?!?
I have a lot of old classic movies on DVD and although I don't watch them very often, I'm glad I have them because TCM doesn't seem to show the kind of classic movies I want to see any longer, it's all British and western films on the channel these days.
DVDS last longer than 10-15 years and I have VHS tapes from the early 80s that still play fine. It's mostly how you care for your stuff (how long it lasts). As I said before, go on EBAY and see how high some of these things go for. I think the major media companies want everyone on "the Cloud" because they can control how, when and who sees their content. I actually have no problem with the cloud but prefer the actual DVD/CD/VHS.
It's all about your preferences, OP. I never had a large DVD collection - I still have several physical DVD's but only a few dozen. I had a much larger CD collection and I did rip those all into iTunes, then as far as the physical CD's either sold them or donated to the library. I'd consider saving a few of the rarer DVD's or box set types of items, and then donate the rest or sell it. As someone who loves libraries and thinks they need our support, I always advocate for donating to them. If they can't actually add it to their collection, they can sell it and make money to keep their doors open.
R53, you're still missing the point that ripping your DVDs to a hard drive has nothing to do with using the cloud or the internet and, yes, DVDs do degrade regardless of how you care for them just as all physical media does.
R41, you've got to be kidding. Digitize vinyl? What the fuck?! Playing a vinyl record is the closest one can get to hearing the original master mix. It is not a means to an end. Digitizing is not necessary, and those of us who haven't been doing it for the past decade aren't lazy or out-of-touch, you twat. You seem to be concerned foremost with your media taking up as little space as possible. That, and keeping up with advances in digital technology. Like a lot of people are. But thank god there are better options for those of us who care about quality.
Collecting DVDs is a hobby of mine. I have quite a few. I much prefer to have physical copies than depend on an internet service to provide them for me. I have no interested in streaming video, or watching movies on a computer.
All of my "hip" friends have been telling me to get rid of my music CDs and DVDs for a couple of years. My internet service is great, but I have trouble accessing movies I like on Netflix. Sometimes I want to watch a movie and there is a "technical error" or if the weather is shitty, I lose my connection, mid-movie. I had my entire CD collection on my computer and was just about to sell my collection. My hard drive died and I lost everything. If I had sold my CDs, I would have had to re-buy everything. Several of my friends who ditched their CDs had the same thing happen and they were up shit creek. I'm keeping my DVDs and CDs for now.
r1, sweetie, we all know you were traumatically toilet-trained at six months, but all the same, try to dial it back a little.
I download for free, but someone has to buy them. Thanks dvd buyers, you make it all possible!
I have maybe 300 DVDs, though I only purchase now what can't be streamed -- so fewer and fewer titles. Most of the DVDs I've bought have been discounted to closer to $5 than $10 each (including shipping), or about $10 each for titles bought abroad from Amazon.co.uk, etc. If I were doing a major downsize, I could easily let go of all but a relatively few obscure titles. I can't see any compelling reason to amass vast numbers, nor any to never acquire any.
[quote] No, each DVD costs $20. Each Blu-ray costs $30 Good lord. Have you never heard of used book/dvd stores? I have very few dvds I've paid full price for. Most of mine I got for $4. Even less. Once got about 30 dvds for $1 a piece - all movies that were fairly recent. Plenty of movies are about $10 if you can wait a few months. I'm lucky enough to have a library system that has an incredible collection of movies including tons of foreign movies (French, Japanese, Spanish, etc) and tons of TV shows and documentaries. You cannot beat the convenience.
Owning anything in this world is stupid. But we are all stupid, aren't we?
DVDs? What are those?
We'll all be dead eventually so why accumulate so much stuff?
[quote]Is there anyone more pathetic than someone who rents movies from the library? Yes! You!
No Not stupid at all. Quality from streaming and downloads is generally poor and compressed. The source maybe called HD but by the time it has been compresses to hell and back it is barely above VHS quality.
I am big!!! It is the downloads that got small!!!!
(sorry if this posts twice) For those of you who have 100s of DVDs, how do you display/store them? On shelves? In cabinets? What do you use?
Unfortunately, while the streaming catalogs are growing, they still don't have everything on streaming. Also on some of my DVDS there are a bunch of extras that you don't get with streaming.
My problem is my internet provider says they are specifically not set up to stream movies and so if I try to do more than about one a month they make it so I can barely use the internet.
R69 I store them in banker's boxes A-Z and store the boxes in my closet and upper cupboard. I also keep a catalog of them on Film Aficionado (link below).
http://www.filmaf.com/
I own 5000 DVD's, very proud of my collection.
[quote] The source maybe called HD but by the time it has been compresses to hell and back it is barely above VHS quality. Yes avi rips of an HDTV source are overly compressed and usually look pretty bad. But mkv rips are HD. I have a 42" 1080 tv, that I sit 3 ft away from, but still only download in 720p because you can't tell the difference. With mkv's, the compression just means the files take up less space on external hard drives.
[quote] Owning anything in this world is stupid. But we are all stupid, aren't we? So says the embittered poor.
If you're me, yes. I've never had the impulse to own something I'm only going to use once, then store on a shelf forever. LPs and CDs I play over and over and over. 99% of movies or TV series I watch one time. So for me, owning a DVD library would mean throwing money away.
When you stream a movie, does it come with the extras a DVD has?
I have nearly 1,000 CDs, and I hardly play them anymore because I've uploaded them all onto my computer and an external hard drive. But I'm not getting rid of them. Every so often, I get an error message from iTunes, saying it's refusing to play music for the moment, and I have to do something about it. Even Spotify doesn't work sometimes. And every computer I've ever owned has stopped working at some point. Ultimately, I don't trust the computer as a storage system, and "cloud" will probably only be around until TPTB figure out another new way to make us re-buy our music libraries. I've lived through records, cassettes, CDs, digital before cloud, digital since cloud, so I'm sure someone's sitting in a room somewhere trying to think of the next media "choice." So I'm going to hold on to my CDs. And I still have a couple of hundred LPs, so I will more than likely buy another turntable as well.
I don't rent movies from the library, I borrow them. For free. Same with books. I am also not into owning too many things, they just take up space and I really rarely watch anything repeatedly.
[quote]Is there anyone more pathetic than someone who rents movies from the library? Oh Dear, what low life mouth breather is anti-Library? Who are you, Honey Boo Boo?
I buy stuff to give it away. I could give away things electronically but it is not the same experience of possession for the recipient.
I've always wondered if actors collect the DVDs of the movies and shows they've appeared in. For instance, does Jodie Foster ever sit and watch one of her old movies when she has free time?
My son has a butt load that never get watched. Some of them still in the shrink wap
[quote]Should we just stream movies as we want them instead? Why is it stupid to own a DVD library? They're thin and don't take up much space like VHS tapes did. And once you buy it, it's yours forever to watch whenever you want. What's stupid is to think you can find everything on streaming. Have you seen the shit that's available for streaming on Netflix? When it comes to movies, most of it's ultra-low budget shit that nobody even cares about. Most of the decent movies you actually have to get on DVD. And then sometimes when there is something decent on streaming, the connection will just drop for no fucking reason and then you have to start the whole thing up again. I prefer DVD's.
Well said r84. Although I don't have a DVD library nor do I collect DVDs, I find it absurd that certain posters insist that everything you need could be found by streaming. Nonsense. Moreover, streaming is unreliable. If there's a film that I really love, I'd rather own it than stream it every time I want to watch it again. Every film I love is now on my computer. No hard copies. I hate clutter in my home.