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Physical Media?


TheSurgeon

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4 hours ago, wordsfromlee said:

There were a few weeks last year where I spent ages looking at lazerdiscs on eBay. Luckily I never actually went down that rabbit hole.

Laserdisc was a dead format by the time in started buying stuff. Was it actually successful I anyway, or is it the film equivalent of music-snobs thinking that everything’s better on vinyl ?

Edited by WyattSheepMask
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I'd somehow completely blanked out that HD-DVD was a thing. Sure, it died, but for awhile it wasn't as niche as some of the really niche formats over the years. If I think back to the first year or two of the PS3 and 360's lifecycles you'd have a shelf for HD-DVD and a shelf next to it for the Blu Rays in stores. So stupid. 

I was certain Blu Ray would be the one to go the way of the dodo. It just seemed like a massive Sony vanity project to me whereas HD-DVD seemed like a more natural successor. This was back in the day when Ken Kutaragi was coming out at E3 going on about how you'd have to remortgage your house and work two jobs to afford a PS3. 

Edited by Gay as FOOK
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17 hours ago, air_raid said:

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.

 

About 15 years ago they released 2 disc versions of  each of the original trilogy with disc 1 being the at the time latest versions of special editions and disc 2 being the Theatrical Cuts, i think they've been deleted but about 2 years about in CEX they had them for £1.50 each.  

that's a link to one of them on ebay, i'm sure if you try a few CEX's you'll get them cheaper.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/223199112093?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338365712&toolid=20006&customid=EB54992449&

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16 hours ago, wordsfromlee said:

There were a few weeks last year where I spent ages looking at lazerdiscs on eBay. Luckily I never actually went down that rabbit hole.

I never owned a laserdisc player, but I owned one film on laserdisc - Street Fighter: The Movie, because when I worked in a record shop, it was in amongst a collection of records we inherited from another shop after they closed. I just thought it was an absurd thing to own, and took it home with me. 

A charity shop I volunteered in had a mint condition Under Siege, Under Siege 2, and a big collector's edition Indiana Jones set on laserdisc that looked great. Came very close to buying all of them before I was talked out of it.

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20 hours ago, air_raid said:

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.

Seems they still have them on CEX as @Harry Wiseau mentioned

New Hope (£1.50) - Star Wars Ep. IV (U) 1977 2DVD - CeX (UK): - Buy, Sell, Donate (webuy.com)

Empire Strikes Back (£1.50) - Star Wars Ep. V (U) 1980 2DVD - CeX (UK): - Buy, Sell, Donate (webuy.com)

Return of the Jedi (£2) - Star Wars Ep. VI (U) 1983 2DVD - CeX (UK): - Buy, Sell, Donate (webuy.com)

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Weirldy the pictures in the links that @WyattSheepMask found are of the single disc versions however the reviews all point to them being the double disc versions so who can but say? Might be safest to try instore because i think they might have both versions listed under the same number / whatever system they have. I know when i bought my spare copy of Empire I had to tell them they were putting the wrong disc in because they only put one disc in. The way you can tell is the two discer has the lettering and band at the top in gold, the single disc version is silver.

 

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I don't think i'll ever get rid of my DVD collection. I had about 15 years of buying up  and watching as much as I can and good collectors editions are worth keeping, because streaming doesn't seem to have (or want) an answer for what to do with decent bonus material. Almost every great DVD release has a mini documentary that isn't available anywhere else, some are works of brilliance in their own right. I know Disney+ has half heartedly added commentaries and a few deleted scenes / extras on their platform but I love those sets that throw literally everything they can find onto the bonus discs. 

John Carpenter and Kurt Russell getting pissed recording the commentary for The Thing

Arnie doing the literal bare minimum of just turning up for the commentary of Total Recall 

I can watch Lord of the rings on at least 2 streaming services but there's not a whiff of the hundreds of extras anywhere online.

Blade Runner having a 3 1/2 hour documentary on it

Spinal Taps in character commentary 

The original Alien Xenomorph / quadrilogy collection with its behind the scenes and workprint cut of Finchers version of Alien3....Tap them straight into my veins.

 

Sadly the bubble has burst on creating these extras and we'll probably never get that investment and passion projects again, despite living in a time where it is easier to capture behind the scenes than ever before.

 

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2 hours ago, Harry Wiseau said:

Weirldy the pictures in the links that @WyattSheepMask found are of the single disc versions however the reviews all point to them being the double disc versions so who can but say? Might be safest to try instore because i think they might have both versions listed under the same number / whatever system they have. I know when i bought my spare copy of Empire I had to tell them they were putting the wrong disc in because they only put one disc in. The way you can tell is the two discer has the lettering and band at the top in gold, the single disc version is silver.

 

It’s not unusual for their website to just use whatever image they can find and bang it on the website (they’ve also been known to reprint covers in the past, but that’s another story), I’ve bought things from there before that have arrived with entirely different packing to the one shown.

For the sake of £5 for all three of them (plus a couple of pound postage) it might be a risk worth taking. 
There is also the same sets in a single box set, but that was £28.

Edited by WyattSheepMask
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I couldn’t find a physical copy of Pi that wasn’t paying nearly twenty quid for it so I bought it from Apple Store. A few years later I got an email saying it wasn’t available anymore so here’s a voucher you can spend. I was pissed off to say the least. I think @Chest Rockwellonce said on here how thing like that shows you don’t own the product and that’s why having a physical copy is still important. 
 

Regarding DVD commentary tracks. They pretty much stopped because they knew it peaked with the film “Outlaw”

 

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As I've been live in far away lands for so long I ridded myself of physical media although when I first came out to Asia the pirate dvd superstores were great for getting movies for a quid. 

Still buy interesting books especially coffee table books with photography when something catches my eye.

 

In the UK my parents have a loft full of wrestling VHS, DVDs, Magazines and a fair bit of non wrestling stuff too. I'm under orders in December to spend time chucking it all away. Most of the DVDs will be passed on hopefully but the VHS is going to be painful to destroy having original versions of many WCW and WWF shows from the 90s and 00s. The WB WCW tapes took me ages to complete and it's going to crush me to bin them. I'm considering keeping all the sleeves but if someone made me an offer for the tapes I'd let them go. 

The big thing I find myself missing is actually magazines. When I had a long journey or a rainy Sunday grabbing a magazine from Borders or Smith's used to be a real treat but even if I was in the UK I can buy Kindle books now for so cheap it makes the process redundant.

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