Physical Media?

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

I’m big into my movie collecting, very rarely buy anything brand new though, I mostly wait for sales or cheap deals on Amazon/in HMV and browse CEX and charity shops

Just last week I used some CEX credit and got second hand copies of 2 of Indicator’s 3 Sinbad movie releases for less than a 3rd of the price of getting the box set of all 3 brand new

I do need to watch my space though, I re did my DVD and Blu Ray movie collection lists in Letterboxd last weekend and including multi feature sets, box sets and the odd double dip, I have over 400 movies on my shelves in one wardrobe 

[Surf Digby]

I'm still a sucker for physical media, and considering I used to pay over the odds for VHS special editions with deleted scenes at the end of the tape, DVDs with additional discs full of extras are a terrible mistress.

I used to have a wall full of shelves that ran the entire length of the room full of VHS, all grouped together by the company that released them, so all the spines looked nicely matched. I did get rid of a load, but I kept all the wrestling videos, and the unusual stuff that was unlikely to get a DVD release (or in some cases, would only be released in a different cut).

These days I do still peruse CEX every now and then, often picking up old Dr Who DVDs now that they aren't asking ridiculous money for them.

[Tommy!]

I'm still very much in favour of physical media for films, TV & wrestling. I understand the convince of streaming but I like the knowledge that I have control of it, it can't be suddenly pulled from a platform for some reason by the owner or lost in copyright hell. 

I still buy CDs and vinyl where I can, not that I'm against downloading music but I've got a CD player and a record player but no ipod anymore, so it's just not convenient. I'll stream music, but again it's normally songs I've got on a shelf and it's just simpler while I'm in the greenhouse. 

I've still got every wrestling VHS & DVD I've ever bought, thousands of the fuckers. I generally watch what's available of them on the network via the network, because again it's simpler, but if something should happen to that I can always fall back on my old tapes. Kept all my tv & film dvds but most VHS went and were replaced on disc, just oop stuff I held onto. 

[Loki]

Good topic.  I was a big vinyl, then CD purchaser and then embraced mp3 in a big way.   Then about 5 years ago I realised that I had a server with 100Gb of mp3s that I never listened to.  That and streaming, for me, don't work as a way to listen to and love music.

So I reversed course, got my decks out again and started buying vinyl.  Every 6 months or so I'll get all my latest purchases and make a 2 hour mix of tunes, make an mp3 of THAT and stick it on my iPhone.  So I listen to mixes when I'm in the car or whatever, but I can put a record on at home.  Laborious but it works, because the old habit of making mixtapes helps you listen more intently to what you buy and select the best bits.

So like most of you, I have a couple of shelves of CDs from the 90s that I rarely listen to,  as well as DVDs from the noughties.

Books are the problem though - I never stopped buying books and now we have them stacked everywhere, floor to ceiling.  About 5 years ago I got drunk on my birthday and ended up signing up to the 200AD Judge Dredd hardback collection and got send about 150 collections over the next few years.  They're amazing quality but take up SO much space.

I've tried to break the habit by now reading mainly books from the library but I think I might have to build a new room just to put all the books in!

 

[Fatty Facesitter]

50 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

I'm still very much in favour of physical media for films, TV & wrestling. I understand the convince of streaming but I like the knowledge that I have control of it, it can't be suddenly pulled from a platform for some reason by the owner or lost in copyright hell. 

Never looked at it that way, that's a great reason to not abandon physical media completely. Especially if you want to retain original and unedited versions of things. 

Someone mentioned books earlier - my other half is a real bookworm and we have a ridiculous amount in the house. She also has multiple copies of the same book, either in special editions, or English and Portuguese language equivalents. I did my back in when we moved into our current residence a couple of years ago trying to lug them up and down the stairs. Never, ever again. I'll burn them before I carry another suitcase of unread fiction. 

[sevendaughters]

Am still a physical media or death kind of guy. Well, not strictly true, I have Spotify Premium because I travel a lot.

I've had to come up with rules though.

- Vinyl - only if I really really love the record and have some history with it. Nothing new. At the point where I am going to Discogs a few.
- CD - only if it isn't on streaming. There's still a world of weird 80s/90s/00s releases that never saw streaming or vinyl. Store these in a wallet.
- Books. Am starting to move books on after reading unless they're life-changing. I also buy a lot of books for work, but they sit in my office.
- DVDs. Again, can store a lot of these at work. My tastes are pretty eclectic and often the things I care for don't appear on streaming. But I'm a member of a couple of good torrent sites and libraries with extensive choice, so I don't have too many.

Not against streaming or cloud or digital files. My pal had a system where everything he downloaded could be accessed through his TV and I should sort that out.

[Version1.0]

I have around 1400 physical video games. My study is quite cramped now 🤣

[Jazzy G]

I'll have a look round in the shops for physical copies of games sometimes, particularly fighting games when they get a physical copy. Got an eye out for Tekken 5 on PS2, as it'll mean I can pick up the first 3 as well, in spite of them being the arcade versions. Copies of the first 3 on PlayStation are probably a touch pricy nowadays. 

Like the Baader-Meinhof effect this topic turns up as I was trying to see where to post about something I heard on the CU Podcast yesterday relating to WATA and other collectible companies starting to create a buzz around sealed VHS movies. Apparently Tom F Wilson sold his personal copy of Back To The Future at auction for $75,000, so there's obviously now a market for me to auction of my copy of DC Cab starring Mr T and taking early retirement. 

These headlines bury the lead horrifically, but here's an article. 

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/back-to-the-future-vhs-thousands.html

[wordsfromlee]

Is there any particular reason as to why no streaming service offer the DVD extras/commentaries of movies as well as the movie themselves?

I think that would be a massive turning point for streaming services if they started including them. 

[Guest]

To me, something like Netflix is a replacement for Sky Movies, not for physical media. You get a variety of content to enjoy when you want, but only for as long as you're paying your subscription fee and their contract with the rights holder persists.

That undoubtedly works for some people, but I do wonder if others are just auto-renewing every month because they don't want to lose what they consider to be their collection of favourites on demand, which would be cheaper and more reliable to acquire on disc.

[Lorne Malvo]

4 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

 

That undoubtedly works for some people, but I do wonder if others are just auto-renewing every month because they don't want to lose what they consider to be their collection of favourites on demand, which would be cheaper and more reliable to acquire on disc.

This is pretty much me with my 5 Netflix shows I constantly rewatch. If I'd just bought the boxsets 5 years ago I'd have saved money.

[BomberPat]

I wish I had more.

I mostly gave up on buying DVDs because I never got round to watching half the ones I owned, but I used to spend a pretty significant chunk of my disposable income on CDs - I'd go to HMV ever Friday and pick out every new release that caught my eye, and usually some other stuff too. I worked in a record shop for a while, used to DJ, and used to do some low-level music journalism, so it was pretty steady intake. I had a few thousand at the height of my collection, can't remember exactly how many - I did count them up once, but soon exceeded that number as well. Three house moves later, I've gradually chipped away at it all, and when I moved to London last year I had to restrict myself to only taking a certain number of boxes - I had to get the book collection down from 5+ bookcases to just one, and CDs I made the decision to only keep things that had really significant emotional value, or that aren't on Spotify; as a result, a glimpse through my current CD collection would have you thinking that free jazz and Japanese noise are way more prominent in my tastes than they actually are.

The only thing that made me want a Kindle was lugging six or seven boxes full of books upstairs to my old flat. Again, got rid of the majority last year, but have started building up again, because I tend to go down research rabbit holes and read a lot on the same topic for a month or so. More than any other physical media (bar vinyl maybe), I just really like books as objects too; I'd sooner have a room full of books than ornaments or pictures on the wall or anything, they're a good decoration, and tell you a lot about a person. As a teenager, going to someone's flat, I'd always have a nose at their record collection, but I'd probably pay closer attention to their bookshelves now. 

I don't own much vinyl, but pick up the odd special edition or reissue of artists I especially like, and enjoy hunting for a bargain in small town record shops and carboot sales - I don't have much of a collection because, again, got rid of most of it, but a collection with some Bowie, Sparks, Tom Waits, Scott Walker, Martin Carthy and the first Slade record in it will do me fine.

Games are something I don't own as much of, but I keep an eye out in CEX every few weeks, and sometimes pick stuff up when I go over to Jersey; there's no VAT on games there, so it can tend to work out cheaper to buy a physical copy of a game there than it does to get a digital copy on the PS Store. The game industry has kind of pushed me out of buying physical games, though; I don't play many big AAA titles, so a lot of the sort of game I like rarely gets a physical release, and there's basically no such thing as a physical PC game any more (shame, I have major nostalgia for big cardboard boxy PC releases), so the days of stumbling across a weird little gem, like the time I bought Bishi Bashi Special for the PS1 because it was cheap in WH Smiths, are long gone.

 

Games and books are the main two I would love to have a more substantial collection of, though. Books because my dream home would have either a library or a dedicated study/writing room piled floor to ceiling with books, and games because I just regret so many that I got rid of. Again, if we're talking ideal homes, I'd have a decent set-up with every console I'd ever owned set up and ready to go. Every now and then I see some old consoles and games in CEX and get really tempted, but I can't really justify it at the moment.

[air_raid]

I wish I'd kept tapes of the original versions of the Star Wars trilogy, which have never made it to DVD and presumably will never make it to streaming unless they're painstakingly restored/un-"improved" as per that fan project.

That, and keeping my "taped off Sky" version of One Night Stand so I can hear Sandman come down to Enter Sandman, are the two best arguments I could make about being careful about junking your physical media. I'll never bin my VHS of WWF 1992 Year In Review either.

[BomberPat]

In terms of arguments against junking physical media; my Dad used to make a small fortune buying up CDs and DVDs from carboot sales and charity shops, then selling them on eBay. It pretty much consumed his weekends, and got to the point where he was good enough at spotting what sold that he'd always make a profit - not often a lot, but it all added up, and then every once in a while you'd find a genuine rarity and make a lot off of it. He'd rope me in when it came to stuff like wrestling DVDs, to help him figure out what might be worth something.

When streaming media was just starting to become the norm, it stopped being worth his while and he stopped doing it, but I'm convinced we're heading towards a point where it'll be really worthwhile again.

I went to a few charity shops and a carboot sale with him, and he was commenting on how everyone seems to be getting rid of all of their DVDs because they've got Netflix now. But half the DVDs I used to own aren't on Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or anywhere else. And then there's stuff that I got rid of because it was on Netflix and now it wasn't - and that last point has been my objection to digital/streaming/cloud-based media for years, as it means you never really have control over what you own. @Uncle Zeb is right in saying we should see streaming services as a replacement for something like Sky Movies rather than as a replacement for your video collection; you probably wouldn't get rid of your copy of Raiders Of The Lost Ark just because it's on telly quite often, nor should you get rid of it because it's on a streaming service, because one day it might not be.

[Factotum]

Books. Lots and lots of books. I'm incapable of giving any away, and I buy a lot of them. Second hand bookshops might be a fetish I have!

Blu-Rays/DVDs - I'll buy DVDs from charity shops if its of a title I liked or an obscure film i haven't heard of. Blu-Ray's, I still buy Criterion. As @BomberPat said, streaming services are all well and good but a lot of stuff just isn't on there. Blu-Rays also come full of extra features which are a great way to spend a Sunday.

CD/VINYL - I used to work in the music industry so I have a huge amount of both which I got for free/stole from the office. The free Boxsets are what I miss about working in it (nothing else, most are cunts in it) I don't buy any music now. Again if i'm in a charity shop or car boot I'll pick up a few records if its something that looks good (always judge an album by its cover) but I'm just not into music as much as I was as a teenager/early 20s.

Basically I fucking love physical media. Something about actually owning something will always be great.