Disadvantages of physical media

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Streaming is a pretty bad deal when you realize that you're stuck continuing to pay month after month whether you use it or not, and that it may well not have any of the most of the stuff that you're personally interested in. $180 a year can buy an awful lot of DVDs, even new ones can be had for under $10 and under $5 on sale. I've personally found that I've been able to buy so many DVDs that I'm not even buying more at the present while I work through my backlog. Plus, there's always used discs from places like the local thriftshop or ebay.

I doubt after several years of purchases most people will find themselves needing that level of spending, and you can generally sell the discs to other people if you truly don't want to watch them again, something that you can't do with streaming services.

The other thing is that physical media players, like all electronics, require electricity, which also costs money (i.e., electric bills). And if the power goes out (as in a blackout), you can't watch physical media either.

If the power goes out, then you won't be able to watch DVDs or stream movies over the internet, so streaming doesn't have an advantage over DVDs in that regard.

Also, as far as I understand it, the amount of electricity a DVD player uses is pretty small, certainly compared to an electric kettle for example.

You know, that is an interesting perspective. I've heard a lot about how physical media is important in an age where companies are moving towards the trend of simply offering things digitally, but also being able to make them unavailable. (Especially video games, where I believe Ubisoft is openly saying you shouldn't expect to "own" the games.) But I didn't even consider that they can be more expensive than a month of a subscription service. I suppose it depends mostly on what someone is willing to invest into owning. I think it'd be silly to try and own everything you like that exists on, say, Netflix. But to have your own personal copy of House or the Simpsons isn't so bad, either.

Also, if you have a computer than can play disks, wouldn't you be able to watch it on your computer during a blackout?

Wow. 700 films? You must be a movie buff. It's also impressive how dirt cheap storage is. I think that's an interesting way to go about the question of physical media in the modern age where CDs are mostly forgotten now. Well, if you're willing to not be fully clean, or have a lot of money.

When I'm watching something on DVD versus on streaming, it feels weird. I keep expecting the DVD to be interrupted by an ad.

Speaking of, as I may have said, the physical media also comes with ads that are not skippable either. Once, I watched a bit of "Race", and you are prohibited from bypassing the ads with the menu button. You have to repeatedly press the "skip" button just to get to the main menu. And there were EIGHT ads in all! At least YouTube doesn't have more than two ads at any one time (not yet anyway). Plus, you would have to sit through the FBI warning and studio logos and ads that come before the movie on physical.

I also have in my collection a set of "Wallace and Gromit" films, which I also watched once (mainly for "The Wrong Trousers"), but you can't quickly skip past all the ads there either. You have to press the tab button repeatedly if you don't want to sit through them. How is that any better than streaming?

Ads on YouTube typically only last not more than 30 seconds and there may be sometimes more than one, but not usually more than two (unless you're watching a long video, which loves to play LOTS of ads). Promos/previews typically cannot be bypassed and they last at least two minutes or more. They take a long time to sit through, and not everyone may have the time or patience for them.

And before anyone suggests (again) that I should just rip the content to my computer, two things: 1) I don't have the technological know-how to do that (let alone for a Blu-Ray), and 2) even if I did, that would be breaking the law. Why do the warnings say, "Duplication in whole or in part of the content is strictly prohibited"?

I live in the United States, where (per Chat AI) the general rule under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is that bypassing encryption or copy protection mechanisms (such as those found on DVDs and Blu-Rays) is illegal, even for personal use. This means that, technically, ripping DVDs or Blu-Rays that are encrypted is against the law, even if your intent is simply to make a personal backup or copy.

It seems you're more or less correct :

"U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices."

https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-co ... t-laws.htm

It's legal in Europe, and even in the USA the law doesn't explicitly deny the right to a personal-use copy, and I very much doubt that the police would bother anybody who was doing that, and as for the owners, I don't see how they would know. My view of the morality of the situation is this: the copyright owner wouldn't give you a replacement DVD if the one you owned stopped working, so a backup copy would seem to be perfectly fair as long as you didn't give or sell it to anybody else. But I can see why many people wouldn't want to take the risk. And if you don't feel up to using the programs that can copy DVDs, that makes it an even less attractive proposition.

In my case I still spend quite a bit of time in the UK, so as long as I do my copying there, I'm breaking no law.

My vote for streaming v. physical media is definitely for physical media. If I was worried about the power going off I'd turn to laptops which have batteries and maybe get my own local electricity supply. If anything, physical media are more likely to remain playable than streaming. I hate streaming. It's not private (so the streamer might well sell info about your viewing habits to the highest bidder), and it's less reliable than a local source (the streamer can remove content any time they like, and if there is a price they can increase it).

One word of caution - if you put tons of videos onto a large hard drive, consider what might happen if it ever dies, and make sure you've backed up everything you want to keep to another drive, preferably in another building in case your home burns down. Paradoxically, backing up cherished videos to the cloud isn't the worst thing you can do, assuming your videos aren't (demonstrably) illegally acquired. So the Web can help you to keep your physical media accident-proof, though if you need a lot of cloud space you might not get it for free.