Do you still buy DVDs/Blu-ray?

[PluMGMK]

Ah yes, I vaguely remember using MakeMKV to rip Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the only Blu-Ray I ever actually bought. So basically, ripping is the way to go, because the DRM makes it so hard to just play. I thought the whole point of DRM was to stop people ripping – well done MPAA, ye really got the result ye wanted there, bravo!

[Rsandee]

I don't really buy dvd's

[Cairnie]

Yeah we don't even have a 4k player in the house or even a 4k TV so that's out of the question for now. So far I've only ripped two blurays, one of which was an American one which I swapped for a British one eventually so hehe still have the not so great quality rip at hand to compare with the much better one.

[PluMGMK]

OK so depending on what region your player is, even rips can end up only getting the SD version of the content?

[Cairnie]

Nah that was a case of a BBC film released by Severin that didn't have as good of a HD transfer in America as it did back in the UK.

[dr_st]

I buy retro-gaming PC DVDs, and (much less frequently) movies on DVD for collecting purposes.

I never bought a single release on BluRay. I don't even have a dedicated BluRay player, although I have BD-RE drives in my PCs, and even have a few things backed up on BD-R/BD-RE discs.

[Reese Riverson]

Ah yes, I vaguely remember using MakeMKV to rip Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the only Blu-Ray I ever actually bought. So basically, ripping is the way to go, because the DRM makes it so hard to just play. I thought the whole point of DRM was to stop people ripping – well done MPAA, ye really got the result ye wanted there, bravo!

All the DRM does is make things harder for the paying customers that just want to use their content, in terms of digital especially.

Then we just know how bad streaming services are with simply removing whatever it is you wanted to watch. This is why I like my physical media.

[PluMGMK]

I never bought a single release on BluRay. I don't even have a dedicated BluRay player, although I have BD-RE drives in my PCs, and even have a few things backed up on BD-R/BD-RE discs.

Wow, I never invested in a BluRay burner! Is backing stuff up to optical media still a thing now, or are they fairly old backups?

[Reese Riverson]

I want to make some backups with the Bluray M-Discs, but those things are expensive... 25 pack of 100GB discs is literally $250 USD.

[PluMGMK]

Yeah, there's a reason I never invested on that side of things!

[Cairnie]

I think my bluray drive on my PC was supposed to write discs but I don't think I got it to work well, either that or never tried it at all. It would be cool to make my own blurays of shows from Netflix like the Cuphead show but oh well.

[dr_st]

Wow, I never invested in a BluRay burner! Is backing stuff up to optical media still a thing now, or are they fairly old backups?

They are fairly old backups. Not that there is anything impossible in using BluRays for backup, even today, but the limited capacity and slow writing speed (even compared to a mechanical drive, never mind SSDs) makes it a chore that I want to go through less and less.

Back in the day I used to get good quality Verbatim BluRay blanks from Japan via eBay, for a reasonable price. Even before that I was using DVD-RAM (yes, DVD-RAM - the one that allows you to write to the disc like it was a floppy, but it's even slower. Supply may have dried up by now, I haven't checked in years.

It's far easier (and eventually even cheaper) to simply buy another 4-5TB hard drive.

[Hunchman801]

I still buy physical copies of my games, although it's more out of habit than anything else. It used to make sense as a safeguard against companies shutting down digital distribution services, in that you could always, for example, fire up your console and play from your CD when downloads are no longer possible, but now that most games are released unfinished and continuously patched, I don't think it really matters anymore.

[dr_st]

This only applies to retro, though. I believe even with consoles, nowadays a disc doesn't actually contain the full games (for PC games it hasn't, in ages).

[Hunchman801]

I thought it did, as it always seemed to install the game offline, and only after that to prompt for an update, which appeared to be required for online features but wouldn't prevent me from playing the rest of the game. But maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

[PluMGMK]

As I pointed out before, the BG&E anniversary edition doesn't even contain a disc. Just a coupon with a code to redeem the game on Uplay (which was useless to me since I had already bought a "digital" copy )

[Steo]

I think I still prefer physical games where possible. Of course, PC is different. It even annoys me that they sell Xbox's and PlayStation's with options to have no disc drive. I don't really know why anyone would want one, it's like half a console. Imagine someone buys a gift for someone and it's a physical game; "oh, my half of a PS5 has no disc drive".

Generally I like to own things physically even if it seems more tedious. Also one of the reasons I'm very against the idea that people might start to push cloud computing onto consumers along with buying all the RAM. I'm never going to a point where I don't actually physically own a computer, that's just dumb.

[Hunchman801]

I finally bought a PS5 earlier this year and got the version with the disk drive. This came in handy, as it allowed me to insert some of my PS4 games and "upgrade" them to their respective PS5 versions.

[PluМGMK]

I'll take floppy disks and 8-tracks please.

[PluΜGМK]

I finally bought a PS5 earlier this year and got the version with the disk drive. This came in handy, as it allowed me to insert some of my PS4 games and "upgrade" them to their respective PS5 versions.

Is it the PS5 Ultra zXK with the all-new 65,536K Super-Duper-Ultra HD rendering capabilities?