Disc Media

Mark1989

Mark1989

Mark1989

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So I'm just curious it was a few years ago now but I sold up all my blu ray, dvd etc. Simply because they just collected dust for the most part

Does any one still hang onto physical media weather that be blu ray, dvd, 4k uhd etc?

In past week or so there has been few moments where I've wanted to watch some older films and there just not on any streaming services I'm subscribed to or on virgins on demand, it made me considering buying a physical product again
 
yes, I hang onto physical media. You just never know when movies might get taken down or lose license or whatever.

As well as the fact that at the moment, the sound and picture quality (especially the sound) is better.
 
I’ve kept all my old stuff (used to buy quite a few DVDs back in the day) bonus is with the cancel culture we’ve found ourselves in I have stuff that’ll probably be removed from supply
 
Mark1989 said:
So I'm just curious it was a few years ago now but I sold up all my blu ray, dvd etc. Simply because they just collected dust for the most part

Does any one still hang onto physical media weather that be blu ray, dvd, 4k uhd etc?

In past week or so there has been few moments where I've wanted to watch some older films and there just not on any streaming services I'm subscribed to or on virgins on demand, it made me considering buying a physical product again
Click to expand...
*points at sig*

I still buy discs of things I want to watch either because I'm very aware of how often things I want to watch aren't available streaming when I want to watch them, or because I don't like to be limited to relying on streaming (IE when the internet is down it's nice to just throw a disc in), or because the discs are simply better for what I want, for example they often have better/more complete subtitles, are easier to rewind a few seconds if I'm having trouble catching a word, and are a consistent quality - I've noticed with streaming there is often a bit of a low quality stream for anything up to 30 seconds (I was watching netflix the other day and every time it started a new episode of something it was dipping to sub SD then building to HD over the space of a minute).

I am however, having said that using Netflix, Prime video and an anime streaming service on a regular basis.

With me there is also an element of I'll pick things up when they're cheap and sit on them, but also a lot of titles that I bought before streaming was a thing.
 
melmac said:
yes, I hang onto physical media. You just never know when movies might get taken down or lose license or whatever.

As well as the fact that at the moment, the sound and picture quality (especially the sound) is better.
Click to expand...

Indeed.

I buy Blu-rays of TV shows and movies that I really enjoyed (or I'm highly likely to) and likely to watch again.
Though I only buy the UHD version if I deem it worth the extra expense.
 
I still use DVDs. I have a lot of rare foreign/arthouse films, a lot of which will likely never make it to streaming.
 
I feel its picture time.

I still have my little collection of DVD/Bluray/4K's. I tend to buy the films I really like or are curious about as I want the best quality PQ and you dont get that on streaming. Currently rewatching Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition 4k before I watch JL Snyder Cut. You can not really watch such classics as the original Robocop in any other format but disc.

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There is a certain element of theatre to it but the ultimate ‘get it out of the packaging to play it’ experience is music on vinyl. I’m pretty indifferent to video disks.

I’m a digital convert.
 
I prefer physical disks, but I rip them to my PC and stream via Plex on an Nvidia Shield. You get the same image and audio quality with the convenience of streaming.

I can store around 130 blurays on a 4Tb hard drive, UHD disks take up approximately double the space.

That's ripping just the film and English audio tracks, although in most cases the extras would only take up a few Gb more

I generally buy second hand to keep costs down, especially when most blurays only cost a couple of quid on eBay.

I still use streaming services as well, especially when some bluray transfers can be just the same as streaming.
 
barmyllama said:
I prefer physical disks, but I rip them to my PC and stream via Plex on an Nvidia Shield. You get the same image and audio quality with the convenience of streaming.

I can store around 130 blurays on a 4Tb hard drive, UHD disks take up approximately double the space.

That's ripping just the film and English audio tracks, although in most cases the extras would only take up a few Gb more

I generally buy second hand to keep costs down, especially when most blurays only cost a couple of quid on eBay.

I still use streaming services as well, especially when some bluray transfers can be just the same as streaming.
Click to expand...
Looking back I should have probably done that with some of mine as I had some older films that haven't been any on streaming service.

Is ripping them easy enough these days?
 
Mark1989 said:
Looking back I should have probably done that with some of mine as I had some older films that haven't been any on streaming service.

Is ripping them easy enough these days?
Click to expand...

Ripping standard Blu-ray's can be done with any Blu-ray drive and I use MakeMKV software to rip the disks. The software is free while it's in beta, which it has been for the last couple of years I've been using it.

For UHD Blu-ray disks you'll need one of a few specific Blu-ray drives with the original firmware installed. There's information on which drives will work is in the MakeMKV forums.

I just bought one from eBay that's already been flashed with the origianl firmware. Just search for UHD friendly Blu-ray drive. New drives have newer firmware which makes them useless for ripping UHD disks.

The Nvidia Shield is really the only way to playback UHD Blu-ray rips directly including Dolby Vision/HDR and Atmos/DTS X lossless audio.

Plus you need a PC with a Plex server store all the film's on.

There may be other software solutions out there and other devices for playback. But Plex and the Nvidia Shield just work and require the least amount of hassle to get working.

PC requirements are very low, as the Nvidia Shield plays all current video and audio codecs directly, so there's no transcoding required by your PC.

Obviously all of the above comes in at a cost, even if you already have a PC.

The Shield is £200, the UHD drive is around £120 on eBay. Then there's the cost of storage if you don't have it already.
 
Lol I had a clean out yesterday and binned to packs of 50 dvd-r was a touch of nostalgia there.
I do still have a large collection of DVD's but they were put into the cupboard not long after I moved in here (2005) because the neighbour would come in a help herself, They have not come out since and I've not had a DVD/Bluray player in about as long.
Never converted to Bluray and became a digital convert with a samsung tv and dlna
 
I kept my blu-rays (standard 1080p) because I noticed that they're still better quality than the streamed version of the film. I tested this out by taking screenshots from both versions.

For music however, I ditched my CD collection years ago as Spotify streams in FLAC format for paid members.
 
I've got around 1000 blu-rays & DVD's in the old CD-wallet folders back in Stoke plus digital copies of them that I keep stored on a portable HD I carry around out here in Saudi.

I prefer having physical media of films as they are always available and I also like having a digital copy incase something happens to the physical copy plus the portability.

For music, like pawnless endgame above, I've ditched physical media and use purely digital whether it's streaming or downloads but, TBF, I haven't had any new music in probably a decade or more so not buying physical media isn't something I'm too worried about.
 
barmyllama said:
There may be other software solutions out there and other devices for playback. But Plex and the Nvidia Shield just work and require the least amount of hassle to get working.

PC requirements are very low, as the Nvidia Shield plays all current video and audio codecs directly, so there's no transcoding required by your PC.

Obviously all of the above comes in at a cost, even if you already have a PC.

The Shield is £200, the UHD drive is around £120 on eBay. Then there's the cost of storage if you don't have it already.
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With the Shield are you playing back 4k(full dump) with the Plex app? The last time I tried it over gigabit it would stutter often enough to make it unwatchable. I even tried it PC to Xbox One S (plex) as apparently the One S has gigabit ethernet. Same result. Also tried Emby that was no better either.

My Samsung KS8000 only have 100MB so no chance with that!

Is the solution 2.5Gigabit network switch/file server? That is what I was thinking
 
seanyc5 said:
With the Shield are you playing back 4k(full dump) with the Plex app? The last time I tried it over gigabit it would stutter often enough to make it unwatchable. I even tried it PC to Xbox One S (plex) as apparently the One S has gigabit ethernet. Same result. Also tried Emby that was no better either.

My Samsung KS8000 only have 100MB so no chance with that!

Is the solution 2.5Gigabit network switch/file server? That is what I was thinking
Click to expand...
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I would have thought a gigabit network link would have been fine, that's ~110MB and IIRC BD 1080 is about 40MB max, but 4k can go to 120MB or so, in which case a 1gbit network switch should either be fine, or not and swapping to 2.5gb wouldn't make a difference because the weak link would be the port on the One S as that's still only 1gb.
 
seanyc5 said:
With the Shield are you playing back 4k(full dump) with the Plex app? The last time I tried it over gigabit it would stutter often enough to make it unwatchable. I even tried it PC to Xbox One S (plex) as apparently the One S has gigabit ethernet. Same result. Also tried Emby that was no better either.

My Samsung KS8000 only have 100MB so no chance with that!

Is the solution 2.5Gigabit network switch/file server? That is what I was thinking
Click to expand...

Yes, the film plays back at the full bit rate of whatever it would've been on the original disk.

My Shield is connected to my router directly and so is the PC that the server runs on. Both on gigabit LAN.

In the Plex app settings on the Shield, playback for audio and video is set to original. This stops the PC doing any transcoding, which could be a potential bottleneck to playback.

The other potential bottleneck is writing to the drive with the Blu-ray rip on at the same time you are reading from it.

In my experience these are the only two things that cause buffering during playback on an Nvidia Shield.

Are you using a USB hard drive to store the film's? That may also limit the read speed, because of write cache. This allows the drive to be disconnected without loosing data. I found that disabling this increased the transfer speeds from around 40mbs to over 100.
 
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