Zillenials are building DVD & VHS Collections

This has been going on for awhile. The prices of used VCRs at estate sales and online have quadrupled in the last five years.

I get wanting to own physical media, but buying VHS tapes is pure idiocy (and yes, I have VHS tapes).

Almost all movies on VHS are 4:3 and look terrible on modern televisions. If you have a CRT TV to match (and a VHS player - I have a DVD/VHS player that still works), knock yourself out.

OP, everyone is doing it regardless of age.

They really should start making VCRs again. They brought back cassette players and audio cassettes. Cassettes are now outselling CDs.

I still have DVDs and CDs, and on new shows/movies I'll buy those if available.

I do have some VHS tapes for shows that never were issued on DVD. Kinda hope new VHS and DVD machines come out as mine aren't trustworthy.

R7 you can find good ones on ebay

R7 they still make new ones just google shopping search or Amazon

There really is something to be said for owning your favorite movies and knowing that nobody can take it offline or edit it. I continue to build my physical media movie collection too, and when I upgrade my DVDs and blu-rays to 4K UHD, I’m amazed at what I can get for them on eBay. Recently, I’ve purchased a few CDs as well, just to support my favorite artists and get the bonus tracks that are frequently only on the physical disc. It’s fun and takes me back to the era of listening to albums, and not just singles. But, I ditched VHS long ago: resolution is crap, many films are cropped, and they degrade over time. We’re not talking about a joys of vinyl situation here.

How much do used dvds and cds sell for? I’ve got a bunch I’d love to unload. $.50 a cd? $2 a dvd? Should I have a yard sale? Do the youth go to yard sales?

I actually enjoy watching old youtube videos on my TV. I miss video and film.

Digitial is too pristine and perfect, something's just missing from it. The lushness and warmness just isn't there. It's very sterile and cold.

I have an external hard drive with about 700 movies on it and 40 complete TV series. It would take up a vast amount of space if I wanted all of that in DVD form. No thanks.

R13 that’s a lot of porn

I own hundreds of DVDs. The benefit of DVDs is that they include extras - cast commentary, director cuts, etc. - not available on streaming services.

i cant accept this argument about “warmth” and “richness” produced by magnetic tape - audio or visual. vinyl and celluloid - of course yes

when fox revealed that future streaming versions of The French Connection will delete or redub Gene Hackman uttering the N word....

that is plenty motivation for collectors to collect DVD/VHS copies

The sound quality of CDs and vinyl is night and day compared to streaming

They should bring back quaaludes, too.

Uh, CDs never went anywhere. Cassette tapes are all the rage and 99% of new releases come with cassette editions.

R16, the warmth thing was always attached to vinyl, not tape.

I’ve been buying DVDs and gave a few VHS tapes.

I also have one of those VHS and DVD player combos. It’s old AF as I got it when VHS tapes were on the outs and everyone was switching to DVD.

It plays both.

DVDs I can understand, but VHS is an absolutely miserable format.

Lately I have contemplated buying a multiregion DVD player and rebuilding some small part of a collection I once had of perhaps 200 titles. There's a relative handful of titles that are favorites or that I'm curious to see for the first time that are simply elusive/unavailable on streaming platforms.

I should look into the availability of DVDs of those titles and proceed from there.

Using the VHS is tactile and nostalgic, not sterile like pressing a button on remote

Sometimes we like to enjoy things the way we did as we originally encountered them

VHS tapes degrade and wear out. DVD is the way to go.

At least the tape will still run when you put it in the player after years and years, unlike a disc

The whole tactile nostalgia is something I definitely understand.

There's also the tyranny of choice we have to deal with now that everything is streamed. I know that my brain gets overwhelmed by how much stuff is there at my fingertips, and I browse and browse and browse until I sometimes just go watch something dumb on YouTube instead!

There was something about Blockbuster days (and all video/DVD stores) that whittled that down nicely. You took home 2-3 movies, and those were the ones you watched. It made us stick with a movie, too, most of the time and there wasn't the "FOMO" (as the kids say) that you could/should be watching something better.

VHS sucks. It was a technology that became outmoded long ago.

R28 is right. I have big collection of VHS tapes which I recorded from TV, which I have been gradually digitizing and putting on DVD. But the quality is awful by comparison with DVDs (always was, even before they deteriorated). Every time you copy them it gets worse, unlike digital media.

I am definitely still adding to my purchased DVD collection whenever there is something I love AND that goes to DVD. A lot of streaming shows don't. But stuff is disappearing from streaming services all the time, and a lot of movies still can't be found there. If you want to be able to access the movie or show you want whenever you want, you'd better have tactile storage.

One warning: if you want to record from TV and store the result on a DVD, that's getting really hard. PVRs will record to their hard drive, but last time I researched this there was no way to transfer the contents to another hard drive or any other form of storage, meaning that when the machine dies so does your library. It's difficult to buy a DVR. They will record to their hard drive and then transfer to a DVD disc for storage with minimal quality loss.

What are we, chopped liver?

[quote]Using the VHS is tactile and nostalgic, not sterile like pressing a button on remote

How nostalgically ridiculous.

It's not the worst idea to keep physical copies of media you like. The streaming sites have gotten into the habit of removing entire shows without warning, and/or making it impossible to find them anywhere.

[quote]What are we, chopped liver?

[quote]—8-tracks and CDs

Yes.

I talk about this with people younger than me: the idea that Gen X and above (and maybe Millennials, too) remember when there was no streaming (music or movies) and so the idea of having the item itself is still important. We don't trust that these services will always have everything there available to us.

Gen Z doesn't seem to have that "fear" as much as generations who [italic]didn't[/italic] grow up with the internet as a given do.

Anyone have Betamax tapes?

[quote] Pete Davidson is trying to get rich selling old VHS tapes

Smart move considering he has zero talent as a performer.

The only VHS tapes I'm holding on to are films that were never issued on DVD. Except I did buy an old Star Wars VHS because I don't like how Lucas went back in and CGId everything. I wanted something closer to what I saw in the theater when it came out.

All the stuff I recorded to disc years ago doesn’t work anymore. The stuff on VHS is all still there - crappy picture quality but there

[quote]Gen Z doesn't seem to have that "fear" as much as generations who didn't grow up with the internet as a given do.

They didn't live through multiple generations of new media technology, each cancelling out the previous format. It's unlikely that they have the tech anxiety that can be witnessed on DL, with posters fretting about the archival standards and permanence of their Dynasty box set (1981-), or Magnum, P.I. tapes from 1980, or their home recordings of I, Claudius from 1976. They are less likely to have first-hand nostalgia for something from when they were young because they are still young