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.

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...)

> 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.

"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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

why DVDs why arent people getting blurays

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

* Usenet

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.

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