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Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy.

I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.

You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.

Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.

You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".

In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.

NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.

(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)

Reference:

- "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I

- "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...

18 comments

Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things.

My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.

So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

> So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name

I understand his frustration : I have a similar issue with video games - Xbox gamepass games sometimes leave the service. So I built an app that takes all my games across the various gaming services ( steam etc ) including the Xbox gamepass ones, and it grabs them from the achievements ( games I have played ) on top of the catalog ( available games )should they have left the catalog

That way games that are gone remain and I have a Netflix like interface to view all my games past and present

It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.

> it's like they were stolen from his personal collection

They were.

> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.

The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.

As a kid I watched Fantasia on VHS so many times that the tape quality started to decay and my parents stored it away for special occasions. The quality decay didn’t bother me at all.

> The image quality on these is also quite bad,

Streaming services are not exactly known for their image and sound quality.

"Own" the movie in quotes is interesting. Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted and can be treated in some ways like a license still. It is possible to obtain a legal copy of physical media and not be legally allowed to view it in certain ways.

Backups are legal (assuming you keep the physical DVD, like youve said, and dont just "make a backup" and then sell the original), but you don't just have carte blanche to the content still (ie, region coding has weird legalities to it, public viewing is still not allowed, because you havent licensed that right.)

That said, I still fully agree with you. I just find the "license" vs "ownership" topic interesting for physical copies. The fact that media companies are so strongly trying to limit your rights just means you need to make sure you keep what rights you do have. I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.

Reference:

https://language-studio.clas.ufl.edu/copyright-law-and-educa...

>Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted

Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.

>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.

I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.

The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using.

A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

Resolution isn't the only problem. SD resolution (particularly PAL) is quite tolerable, if it's well-encoded from a good source.

DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.

DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).

If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.

Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.

Most movies and tv shows are available for similar prices on blue rays, often in 4k versions.

While the resolution may be higher on streaming, the bitrate is often significantly worse. Beyond that Netflix has done upscaling in the past with middling success.

Nevermind the horrendous AI upscaling they tried last year. https://futurism.com/netflix-ai-upscaling-old-shows-horrific

I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!

The problem isn't really resolution, it's bitrate, codec, and effectiveness of the encoder. A sibling says dvds are trash bitrate and an old codec, and it's hard to argue with that... but some DVDs are better than others and many look fine on a large hires screen. When they put ten hours on a single disc, it's almot certainly going to look trashy though.

Would a bluray look better? Probably. Does streaming look better? Often, but not always; streaming likes to measure quality by resolution, but more pixels doesn't help quality unless it comes with more bitrate and/or improved codecs and/or improved encoders... And sometimes streaming has pretty low bitrate.

On paper yes it feels like a downside. Practically if the movie/show is good, you don't really mind.

I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).

I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).

Just say you’re training a multimodal language model and in this weird parallel universe we live in suddenly you’re not breaking copyright. Bonus points if your model reproduces the original 1:1. Definitely not a copy though

Eerily like paying someone for sex... while filming it "for a movie".

Suddenly, not prostitution!

If you buy one that has a VUDU code, and go on moviesanywhere.com you can now link your VUDU account, your Apple iTunes account and your Google Movies account, and whoever else, and the movie unlocks on all those other streaming services. So if you buy a BluRay movie, you can stream it on your favorite streaming service provider thanks to MovisAnywhere (run by the movie industry - the one rare good thing they did).

I buy movies only when its one I really want and there's either an iTunes code or a VUDU code.

It's also worth looking into if your local library offers Kanopy services.

It's good to note that moviesanywhere.com, Kanopy, and VUDU (now Fandango at Home) sell your data and use it for market research (in addition to other things, there's no telling what it will be used for after it's sold). That said, for those of us in California "Kanopy does not sell your information. Kanopy does not share your information with third parties for money or other valuable consideration."

I do the same. Minor correction - it's no longer Vudu, it's now called Fandango at home. You also have to watch out for expiry dates on the codes. US only.

Paramount and Lionsgate are the only studios which don't participate IIRC.

And if the studio supports MoviesAnywhere, if you buy a digital copy on any of those platforms, they show up in your library on the other platforms

> if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy.

Is this actually true? I thought there was inherent illegality to cracking the DRM on DVDs.

Granted, I doubt anyone is going to come after you for making a backup of a legitimate copy, but I think strictly speaking it's still illegal.

I am also not a lawyer.

This was a big issue back in the DVDCSS days. The DMCA explicitly forbids bypassing protective measures. Doesn’t matter who owns the media, the copyright holder owns the content.

17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)

Which was the beginning of the end for ownership vs purchasing a license. That thing you paid for isn’t yours.

I am also NAL, but it almost certainly is legal to make backups for personal use. Breaking the encryption is the usual legal hangup, though there is no real enforcement on this front and nobody is stopping you from using Handbrake or MakeMKV.

More importantly however, is the fact that there isn't a meaningful argument that making backups of physical media you own is ethically wrong.

Possibly in some countries...

But at least in the US, it is a DMCA violation.

DMCA gets a little weird; Basically unless you're distributing it is a civil penalty (which, I could be wrong but would mean you'd get a Jury trial, even assuming it ever came up) and I doubt you would ever run into legal issues so long as you were only backing up for personal use.

It's where you get into distribution that anyone starts to care, and it's when you do distribution on a large scale that criminal penalties come into play.

However there may be countries where possession of an 'illegal number' or 'DRM Breaking software' is considered legal for personal use.

Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.

Over here only "strong protection" cannot be circumvented for this purpose.

DeCSS proved that CSS is not strong at all. A Pentium III could bruteforce it in 18 seconds. It was also impossible to contain the source code because it was so short, you could print it on a T-shirt or write it into a haiku.

Sharing stuff is still illegal, so if you rip a DVD and upload it for others, that's technically breaking the law.

But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place?

Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?

Or even go out and proactively build your library for you. Then let you download the missing ones (or if that flouts distribution laws, roundtrip mail them to you).

Since you're unlikely to need to view all of your titles at once, maybe they could do a loaner program where customers pool their entitlements and "check out" movies to watch.

Wait, have I just reinvented OG Netflix?

Move the storage to the cloud and now you have something like contemporary Netflix.

The difference being instead of going out and negotiating bulk streaming contracts, there's a physical DVD backing every single ownership title.

(For my next trick we'll tokenize them to a cryptocurrency...)

> But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place?

I buy Blu-Rays at charity shops, strip them from the case and once ripped slide them in to a CD wallet with the inner leaflet. A horror show if you were collecting with cases but works for if you desire to own movie to NAS legally.

> Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?

Someone did, got sued and the business took the shock and closed down. They used to let you buy old stocked DVD's they owned. When you cancelled your subcription they sent you back the DVD's.

I run jellyfin and on iOS infuse is the only player that seems to work with all codecs

I've had some luck with Swiftfin though the UI is no where near as polished as Infuse.

TrueNAS + AppleTV + Infuse + Tailscale is my setup.

Also iTunes has Movies for $5, but it has DRM, which bit me since I always remembered their mp3s being DRM-free back in the day being a big deal.

That's ok if you don't care about sound much. Apple prevents local playback apps from playing back Atmos audio. It's fine if you only want 5.1 though.

There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.

The EFF doesn't decide what is legal. Unauthorized copies of commercial videos are still a copyright violation in the US. The DMCA anti-circumvention provisions aren't relevant. The AHRA permits private copies of audio recordings with the proviso that SCMS (or equivalent) must be implemented to prevent multi-generational copying. That last requirement has never been enforced and is now unworkable but it's still in effect.

I've been doing this since 2009. Regular 1080p blu-rays still usually provide better image quality than streaming services. It's not even a contest between streaming and 4k discs.

I've bought and watched hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc, but can count the number of times I've used an actual disc player to do so on one hand.

I'll just continue to take the DVDs out of my neighbor's trash and play those instead and disregard licensing entirely.*

* Usenet

> You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".

You do not "own" the movie. You still only have the right to view your personal copies. You cannot broadcast it. You cannot charge others to watch it.

What about Blu-ray? I don’t want DVD quality and last time I checked you can’t exactly legally backup Blu Rays because you break DRM.

Most 4k kids movies on eBay were from the bargain bin at Walmart. The DVDs are as cheap as 4k blu rays.

It's also fairly trivial these days to backup 4k blurays. You can also buy them very cheap second hand. The quality difference between streaming and 4k BR is nuts.

What workflow do you use to backup Blu-rays? I was looking into this before, and I couldn't find anything convenient...

It is, but it is illegal to break the copy protection.

So if you have the license, download a legal fair use back via “alternate distribution channels”.

why DVDs why arent people getting blurays

Maybe because they are significantly more finicky than DVDs to set up for playing in VLC for example. You need to download a key list of all released bluray movies from a slightly sketchy website, put it on a folder in the system somewhere and only then does it work.

I'm not sure if it's easier using jellyfin etc.