Since the pandemic I’ve been collecting DVDs and Blu-rays, because I started getting into filmmaking and valued the importance of physical media. One of my reasons was the horror stories I’ve read about licenses on DRM-protected purchases being revoked.
After we moved to a much smaller house, my Billy bookshelf containing around 200+ titles has been taking a huge amount of space. And the cases just sit there looking pretty. We never use the discs. There’s no Blu-ray player in our house. We all watch digital content on portable devices. I’ve filled up several hard drives with so many obscure, international films that will never get distribution here. And so, I’ve stopped buying discs. It’s also much more convenient to be able to play MKVs on every device in my house.
I was one of those people who constantly purchased discs to remux and encode them myself for use on a future server, but that’s a waste of time, energy and money as there are dozens of release groups who’ve done the work already for me.
It doesn’t make sense to keep all the clutter around. I also have 500+ DVDs in a binder with the cover art stored in folders, but it seems like a gigantic waste of money to buy a storage system for outdated standard definition media, when most studios have remastered editions readily available.
I’m thinking of selling the Blu-rays that aren’t rare to buy a cheapo Optiplex. The discs are already pretty worthless. I’m just scared that I might regret this decision.
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Kept the discs, tossed the cases. You can fit a lot of discs in a sleeve book and they make convenient backups.
Yep, tossed hundreds of discs. Most of them were “backups” of Netflix discs, but they are long gone.
I tossed vinyl, VHS, cassettes, 8mm, miniDV, CDs, and DVDs. I also tossed all photos negatives and prints.
My physical discs are my ultimate “backup”, also proof of purchase if for some reason in the future sharing my server with a FEW friends and family becomes problematic. I had the same issue with storage and at first went with binders and keeping the cover art but am now at the point of just buying disc spindles and throwing any new discs onto them as even the binders are too bulky for me (I have 4 200 disc binders currently which contains about 500 movie/TV series discs and about 300 CDs.)
I threw away my DVDs years back. With >1200 physical books in my 650sq ft apartment, I’m thinking of getting rid of some genre paperbacks, and replacing them with electronic versions. I’ve got a ton of collectible hardbacks, which I’ll keep forever.
Never throw away physical media. If space is a problem, remove disks from cases and store on spindles (the packages that CD-R blanks come in are ideal).
Most people run a compression pass on media rips (handbrake) to make storage feasible with today’s disks and budgets. The day is rapidly approaching when hard disks will be large enough and cheap enough to store bit exact copies of your media. You’ll want to rerip then, and having the media will make that possible.
Physical media serves as long term stable backup. It should be part of your backup plan, just like multiple physical backup disks sets, offsite storage, cloud storage, etc.
If space is an issue, there are easy solutions. Disks do not have to be in cases, and they’re too useful to part with.
I donated all of my physical copies of things once I had a good system of doing it all digitally. It was one thing when the physical copies were what I used to enjoy the content, but when I realized I was regularly going to the digital copies of things I had physically, all of the shelves full of DVDs, albums, CDs, and books started feeling like little more than weird little trophy cases. In that context, the amount of space I devoted to them seemed silly.
If they have cases I pay .50 on blu ray and .15 on dvd. The binder discs are pretty much garbage but .05 a piece seems reasonable. Prices are in CAD. No one has room for clutter it seems. Good thing I have a warehouse.
Only beta and VHS tapes, except for those that were never released on anything else.
I also have over 300 DVDs here, I’ll rip and then get rid of them. It uses too much p. space too. Will donate what I can too.
Don’t buy books/video/music on physical media unless it’s hard/impossible to get a digital version. But also don’t rely on IP subscription services either. The Cloud is great as part of a backup strategy: but not as an exclusive service that could gate your access to your content.
Digital storage is great because it can hold anything: books, shows, games, whatever. And it can be easily copied, and sent around the world. Have some space you own: redundant and automatically backed-up to a Cloud service… then enjoy it for years. It will feed your ebook readers and media players and homelab devices for a long time, and take up almost no space.
My shelves are full of anime figurines. I don’t have space to store DVDs.
I would never do this, personally. But it depends on the collection - mine consists almost entirely of 3D movies… most are out of print and many are now quite rare. If it’s a bunch of easy-to-find titles then that’s a different story
all of it. about 15 years ago when i started collecting digitally. never looked back.
Used to be the case in some countries that physical media is proof you have purchased legally. Even if you just keep the disks on a spindle (aka the spindles from writable media packs). This is how i keep my original media in the back of the cupboard.