Comment by zoogeny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoogeny | Hacker News Reader

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I do not own a DVD or Blu-ray player! I'm sure I could buy the DVD/Blu-ray on ebay (I saw it on Amazon for over $40!) and then buy a DVD/Blu-ray player. Or maybe it's on VHS or Laserdisc and I could obtain a physical copy of one of those and the necessary machines. That seems like a lot of work for a 2 hour movie. Probably faster to pay for a VPN and then stream from a region where it is available.

Of course, none of that has anything to do whatsoever with the point. As we transition as a society away from physical goods and towards digital goods, we are placing ourselves at risk of companies erasing those digital goods. For now we have backups (like DVDs) and workarounds (like VPNs). Reasonably soon that won't be the case. It is possible that the favorite content of toddlers today (e.g. on Disney+) might just be totally inaccessible to them one day.

Goodwill (or similar) is your friend here. Physical media players are likely to get purged when someone's de-cluttering their home.

Secondhand stores are also great for picking up CDs and DVDs for cheap.

If I understand correctly, the point is this won't be possible in the future with where things are headed. There won't be any physical media to play on it. It's not about what you can find at Goodwill or the library today. This is forward looking.

You can also buy USB DVD-ROM drives for $15 or so, then rip. I'm in the middle of doing that to my DVD collection.

Why won’t you just buy a $100 USB hdd with whatever TB (3? 4?) it is these days, and store your movies there? Is it some legal issue here? Is the optical disk somehow different?

Not really a direct comparison. Yes they can store it on a hard drive, but where are they going to acquire the actual bytes? A cheap optical drive and a secondhand disc is a pretty good strategy and carries zero risk of legal issues because it leaves no trace outside your own PC, as opposed to say, BitTorrent. It’s just possibly much less convenient if the disc is hard to come by.

Also (IANAL) but if you acquire the disc, back it up and then keep or destroy the original, it’s even fully legally sound.

Yes, I use the DVD-ROM to rip, and store them on a cheap HD.

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