TJPC
Senior HTF Member
I had a friend return a treasured LP once with the words “sorry, Billy (their 4 year old) took this record and played it on his record player! I told him to keep it, and bought another one.
I'd bet it's far fewer than you think and counter that the "DVD looks good enough to me so why do I need BR?" crowd is much larger.
Not nearly as large as the crowd who sees no need for discs at all.I'd bet it's far fewer than you think and counter that the "DVD looks good enough to me so why do I need BR?" crowd is much larger...
Exactly.Not nearly as large as the crowd who sees no need for discs at all.
I'd bet it's far fewer than you think and counter that the "DVD looks good enough to me so why do I need BR?" crowd is much larger.
One big reason which turned me off immediately on 4Kbluray, is that there is an optional AACS2 provision where the encryption keys are not on the actual 4Kbluray discs, but are stored on a remote server online. Effectively such 4Kbluray discs are "coasters" if that remote key server is taken offline (whether temporarily or permanently).
I, too, waited for the format war to end but it still took me a while to upgrade to BR. Mine was sometime in 2015.
Another big thing which seems to be going against discs, is the rise of digital video-on-demand on cable services during the 2000s decade...
FWIW - my first player was given to me by a friend. I had a CRT with composite inputs but not HDMI. He purchased a new player and game me his old one which had those composite outputs I needed. By that time the manufacturers no longer made BR players with composite outputs so it was get an old one or an HDMI-composite adapter. He solved my problem. A year or two later I got an HDTV and then upgraded to a BR player for which a region free hack was available (I also had some BRs that wouldn't play on that old player). That one's since died and was replaced by one that *doesn't* have a code (a 4K/3D model at the bargain price of $50 on clearance) so I purchased a region free DVD player for my region free DVD collection (it was less expensive to do that then purchase a BR player with region free DVD capability - and I don't have any region locked BRs so I wasn't worried about that being region free).The only reason I ever bought a bluray player, was when I first saw tons of dump bin $5 (or less) blurays of movies which I liked.
If dump bin blurays were still over $10 a pop, I probably would have never purchased a bluray player.
Probably the things that are safest are the titles where I have the disc, have the movie ripped to my HTPC, and then also have a digital copy thanks to an included code - three different version stored in different formats in different locations, I feel confident I don’t have to worry as much about those.
Multiple backups... when I finally ripped my huge CD collection, due to getting a car with no CD player, I backed up the files on 3 different drives and have thought about several flash drives as well (it's ~350GB of FLAC files). Surprisingly, I had only 3 or 4 discs out of over 1400 that gave me trouble (wouldn't rip properly although they'd play without issue), and they were newer purchases. I have CDs that were purchased in 1985 that still play perfectly. I've found 3 or 4 DVDs (out of ~3000) that've failed. All the failures are dual layer. I suspect there are more but it could be some time before those are discovered. I have several hundred TVonDVD seasons as well as a few hundred movies still waiting to be watched so the things that actually get rewatched are almost exclusively favorites.You raise a good point. In the HT world we do tend to think of physical media as permanent but we shouldn't. With all data, a backup is recommended for the very reasons you mentioned.
I speak from experience. I just lost about a years worth of my own data because I lazily failed to back it up on a regular basis. I'm talking PC data here but the concept is the same for any physical media. "If it's important then make sure it's backed up.