Item — HN Reader

Over the past few months I've actually gone back to buying DVDs. Sure their quality isn't amazing, but they're so practical and dependable.

The local charity shops sell movies for €1 each, and boxed-sets of TV-series are typically no more than €5 each. I even managed to pick up a decent DVD player to sit under my TV for €25, used.

Before this I used to stream to a chromecast, with VLC, but it was always a bit of a pain. Now I can pop in a disk, or tell my child to do the same, and hit play and everything just works.

Streaming services are pretty, but you can't rely on them for keeping content available, and it's risky to get sucked into a new show that might get cancelled after one, or two, series. Much better, for me, to watch all those other shows that are complete, or nostalgic.

3 comments

The other benefits of DVD are the extra features and directors commentary. I'm not sure I've ever seen these on streaming services or torrents. They extend the use of a movie to many hours. I'm still working through the extended versions of Lotr and I've just become aware that the commentary on the normal versions were different!

Yes, this. Apple TV has dvd-style extras for some films upon purchase (not rental)

I run into torrents with the featurettes & commentary included fairly often.

My kid is doing the same thing, usually is able to get a handful of used DVDs for 1-2 EUR. He rips them and throws away the covers to save space.

I'm not going back to DVD because of unskippable fear inducing anti-piracy and "FBI" warnings. Every time you launch a movie they violate your brain with this nonsense. If I have to rip and tweak the DVD, it's easier to torrent it.

You should be ripping the DVD anyway, so that you have easier access to it. My collection of movie files have no FBI warnings. The point of the physical DVD is the legal rights it grants me, like being able to rip it, or sell it, or loan it out.

Buy the disc and torrent the file?

You can't just look away from your TV for 5-10 seconds?

Do you use an ad blocker?

You wouldn't block an ambulance from getting to a hospital. You wouldn't block a mother from hugging her child. Why would you block an ad??

I would, and do, actively block all three.

yeah thats wierd, I've only ever run whatever stock browser I've had, and never bothered with ad blockers. but people are really really into ad blocking and thats fine, I'm not going to bother tho, especially now as its becoming a whackamole thing.

the funny thing is most of the time I use firefox on linux with pretty much default settings, I let them give me all the cookies they want and a few sites still think I'm running an ad blocker. hehe whatever, the modern web is getting to be pretty trash anyways.

By whackamole, you mean choosing one of the same two browser extensions that have been around for 2 decades and forgetting about it?

Or one of the DNS blockers that have been pretty consistent too.

It may be a game of whackamole, but it's virtually invisible to end users of these tools.