Physical or Digital Media??

[dicksom55]

I prefer physical. but digital is very very convenient

[Donatello]

Physical media of course! I want to have something in my hands. Really own it, so it won't be away when companies decide to remove it.

[sunnycheeba]

love my wax. but the sheer size and weight can become a problem. I wonder how many crates i can fit onto a 8TB HD?

[ragnawind]

3 hours ago, sunnycheeba said:

love my wax. but the sheer size and weight can become a problem. I wonder how many crates i can fit onto a 8TB HD?

8TB can probably hold about 600 movies worth of video. However, the biggest issue with hard drives for digital, compared to an actual DVD/BD is the DVD/BD will outlive the hard drive by many years, unless you use SSD drives and rarely access them, which would mostly be pointless and expensive. If space and weight is a problem, yo could also just use smaller cases or a paper or plastic sleeve.

[Koby]

7 hours ago, ragnawind said:

8TB can probably hold about 600 movies worth of video. However, the biggest issue with hard drives for digital, compared to an actual DVD/BD is the DVD/BD will outlive the hard drive by many years, unless you use SSD drives and rarely access them, which would mostly be pointless and expensive. If space and weight is a problem, yo could also just use smaller cases or a paper or plastic sleeve.

I don't believe that DVDs will outlive HDDs if both are taken care of (as long as they aren't shitgates/seagates). Back in 2005-2009 I stored shit on DVD-R's in data format, and within a couple years stuff couldn't be copied without "cyclic redundancy errors" because the discs were going bad (all sorts of various brands: memorex, verbatim, etc)... and they hadn't be used, had no scratches, and were stored properly in cases in rooms that never got too hot or too cold. On the other hand, I have some hard drives from as far back as 2000 that still operate fine.

 

As for how many movies fit on this or that, it entirely depends on the type of movie you're keeping. Is it BDMV, DVDISO, DVDRemux, BDRemux, WEB-DL, WEBRip, HDTV, or some kind of encode? Cause shit I have some Amazon 1080p WEBRips at 2.5 GB, and some P2P Blu-ray 1080p encodes as big as 40GB, with some 4KBDRemuxes as big as 70GB... So 8TB can be filled up fairly fast... and in most cases a DVD-R wouldn't even hold a single film. Hell some of these movies would take 3 single-layer Blu-ray discs to hold the movie on... So would you really want to split a movie across multiple discs? Or just get a proper NAS setup with lots of hard drives and put them in some kind of raid so if one hard drive fails, you lose nothing.

[DRX]

Digital by a long shot. If I have BD's/Dvd's I make iso's of them and store them digitally. The point is storing content digitally on an HDD makes it easier to preserve than physical media and It takes up less space even if you have a server running

[PhoenixPress]

I prefer the convenience and versatility of digital, but I by far prefer the quality that comes with purchasing something physically as well as the ability to use it in the future. That said, I usually rip things and put the original into storage. It's difficult enjoying physical goods while also wanting a clutter-free living environment. My position has become more nuanced over the years. I get my comics digitally because it's massively convenient and spilling anything on a real comic would kill me inside, but by the same token the experiences won't really be "even" until full-color eInk readers capable of handling splash pages at proper resolution are available. That said, I still choose to read them on my monitor over physically. With novels I resisted the transition for as long as I could, but my girlfriend gave me a Kindle and it's grown on me. Books were always the most cumbersome addition to my collection, having no uniform dimensions and occupying immense shelfspace. With video games I prefer backups and emulation wherever possible--primarily because I've lost too many old cartridges and discs to wear and tear (and I'm pretty careful). Unlike most other media, games are also usually locked to specific devices that I don't trust to be in working condition decades down the line. That said, I don't like the risk of games distribution platform either going belly up or revoking my ability to play that game. I vastly prefer DRM-free purchases over either option. When it comes to modern games, I buy them on Steam or GOG if they aren't console exclusive. Console games I buy physically. With multiplatform games it seems so many of them are loaded with Day One mandatory patches that I probably don't own the game, disc or not--so I might as well get the version which will survive hardware upgrades instead of being ecosystem locked (although Steam recently deciding to cut out XP and Vista users is making me rethink that). Movies and music I rip and stash the discs away without a second thought. The ability to curate those collections into playlists and channels via PseudoTV is invaluable to me. I will never return to the era of fetching a disc and plunking it in the machine at the moment I choose to watch something.

 

Ultimately all solutions of preservation are equally impractical for a variety of reasons. DRM-free digital seems to me to be the best solution in the long run. Though, I will say that I spend far too much time "organizing" my collection. Oh well. I'm a librarian at heart.

[khudea]

Digital, cause It's easier to get.

[Ryasha]

Physical.

I "share the wealth" so to speak and let my sister and my (trustworthy) friends who can't afford to buy things or lack decent internet borrow things to watch and it's a lot easier to do that with physical than digital.

[loveapples]

I prefer physical because I like to collect things and be able to hold them