What do you use to buy digital content?

  • Thread starter Thread starter LiE
  • Start date Start date
I've been all digital for a few years now, music for a while longer. I don't own a DVD, CD or Blu-Ray player, unless you count the one in my car. Perhaps it is age - mid-40s - but I don't repeat watch much at all these days, as there's just no time. So a £4 rental compared to a £20 purchase is great.

I don't see DVDs or other discs as items of value to be passed on when I die in 30 - 40 years or whenever. That just seems a bit silly. My descendants will want to watch the 300 x 60+ year old films I used to own on a format that probably won't be supported in a few decades time? I don't think so. More likely they'll look at 300 DVDs and wonder why they need 5 metres of shelving in their house to store a minuscule amount of data.
 
The_Abyss said:
as there's just no time.
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seemed a bid morbid in the context of your discourse ;)

most of the blue-rays I have bought (not 4k drive yet) are to experience the film in best quality possible ... especially if the cinematography is top,
I rarely visit the cinema, and especially for those (not me >55") would have though the 15Mb/s netflix might be wanting .
examples Leon, Grand bleu, bladerunner, paris texas, days of heaven ........ so - thats a dilema
 
Ripping blurays eats disk space. I went mad a few years ago and had 300-400 bluray rips I'd done myself. They average 25gb-35gb.
4K rips are even bigger, some 50...I've even seen a 70gb one.

Not only do you need the disk space, you also need raid so you'll be paying for disks purely for redundancy and not space.

It's not just the expense, but the time involved. Ripping blurays takes time, even on my bd drive with special firmware to remove certain copyright checks.
 
Desbo said:
What ripping software are you using? I've tried a few for ripping my DVD collection, and the picture quality has been pretty terrible so far...
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A basic guide, but:

Put the dvd in your drive and use MakeMKV to extract all the files.

For handbrake: Pick one of the HQ (Slow) presets and use a CRF between 18 (bigger file) and 20 (smaller file). Unless you've noticed pixelation in fast-panning video sequences on your encoded movies, I wouldn't worry about a CRF 19 or 20 setting, but don't go higher than that. Either way you are going to save significant amounts of disk space. Choose x264 over 265. If your DVD source has DTS audio, I would pick the Matroska container over MP4 (and yep, always use audio passthrough). The only reason to pick MP4 is if you're messing with Apple equipment or older standalone players.
 
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