Did people really watch movies/shows on DVDs that forced them to watch ads before even starting? Like you go to the store and pay for a movie disc and when you go home you have to sit through like 10 minutes of ads. Did people really have to watch ads before they could even watch the movie they paid for a copy of?!
𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙣𝙚𝙮 𝘿𝙑𝘿 𝙞𝙨 𝙚𝙣𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙙 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙣𝙚𝙮’𝙨 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮. 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙢𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖 𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙗𝙤𝙣𝙪𝙨 𝙛𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮. 𝙏𝙤 𝙗𝙮𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙨 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮, 𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙈𝙚𝙣𝙪 𝙗𝙪𝙩𝙩𝙤𝙣 𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚. 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙢𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩…
Even on VHS there were ads (you could fast-forward through them though), and Blu-Ray also has ads despite being a "more modern" standard (it's not it's just HD-DVD with a different branding). Also you can't even use the disc without paying for a special disc reader that reads that shit for you (tbf a lot of devices came with a disc reader, but it still persisted despite the fact that USB storage was far cheaper and more efficient). You'd also have to navigate the terribly slow menus just to get to the part you were at.
Also if you buy a DVD/Blu-Ray whatever the fuck they call it nowadays in one part of the world and you travel to another, say you have family that lives in one country and you live in another, you can't play that disc because it's "region-locked."
Ok maybe it's region locked because different countries probably use different displays/standards or whatnot. NO! It's region locked for NO MATERIAL REASON besides "ensuring copyright distribution of the holder". This is even more mind-boggling for "blu-ray" the supposedly new format.
Also most Blu-Rays don't even come with all the goodies that normal DVDs had like behind the scenes/deleted scenes etc, so it's not like Blu-Rays have any other advantage besides being incompatible with your dvd player. "Just buy a PS3" yes I will buy the SONY product to play movies on a disc also created by SONY.
How is it considered physical media when the devices to play it are not being sold anymore? I'm sure there are a lot of Sony walkmans being sold nowadays. I can totally pick up a VHS player right now at the store and enjoy my treasure trove of vhs tapes that haven't already withered to dust.
People older than me (I was born after Al Gore lost the election) are having nostalgia for the "age of physical media" when really it was an age of physical bullshit compared to streaming bullshit. It's always capitalism, capitalism will burn down all art if it means that someone didn't get to skip paying for it. Here's what I say, just pay a couple a dollars a month for a VPN with port-forwarding and just torrent all your media. Your torrented file has done more for media preservation and archival then any DVD bullshit ever did. The only use for physical media is to digitize it and share it.
The bootlegged Cinderella movie sold in the Global South has done more for media preservation than Disney ever has. A seedbox in Russia is more of a art library compared to any video store.
Don't get me started on video games. Where every generation of devices there's a new standard and new way to do things. Nothing says media preservation like buying a disc from a store and then waiting an hour for your device to download updates online.
The broad strokes of your rant I agree with, but you can a) buy region free DVD and blu-ray players very easily these days that totally bypass all of the bullshit copyright region locking shit, b) you can just press the menu button on your remote to skip all the ads (if the discs even have them). Most blu-rays these days don't have any ads at all though, especially for any movies more niche than like Hollywood stuff. And c) digital hoarding is great, but large hard drives especially fail quite randomly, and then you're shit out of luck. A blu-ray will last for decades with no issues; after a decade of uptime an HDD or SSD is probably toast with no prospect of recovery. And that's all to say that Blu-ray quality for films is genuinely really good. Sure, you can get that in a hard drive but for the full blu-ray quality you're talking 20GBs+ for a single film. 4k gets even crazier. I have a 12TB hard drive filled with movies, but I make sure to have backups of it as well and often really obscure shit is hard to find online, much easier to just buy the blu-ray.
That's true, but there also exists the problem of no one besides SONY/Blu-ray can actually produce their own blu-ray discs (afaik, there's probably a reverse-engineering project i don't know about), with digital storage you can always use backups remotely or other techniques (+ always you can use torrent trackers).
It's just such a farce that this is an issue in the first place. I certainly didn't know about any of these strategies growing up since my family just bought discs from the store near us and we played them on our PS2.
Media encoding has gotten really optimized nowadays (NVENC, VA-API, etc) so the space issue isn't a done deal.
I'm not sure what you mean about producing blu-ray discs - do you mean pressing the same kinds of discs movies come on? Sony isn't the only one, there are many, though the number is constantly shrinking. Blu-ray IS digital storage. It's easy to back up discs to hard disks. Going the other way, anyone can burn a BD-R, but of course that isn't quite the same as replication. But I don't think it really matters. In most cases keeping copies on hard disks and doing digital distribution is the better solution.
Encoding has improved massively, but just because it's possible to compress a movie to shit so that it's a 3GB file doesn't mean you should. Film is an art form, after all. Maybe a film is better on VHS, maybe it's better in 80GB 4K so you can still see the film grain - either way the presentation quality matters.