It’s depressing knowing you own a license to access the digital file you purchased but that contract can be withdrawn at any time.
Besides you cannot replicate the same authenticity by showing your film library to friends and family when you sit down and scroll through your digital purchases.
No one ever exclaims “by the power of greyskull!” when I show them my plex library. So sad.
Physical media isn’t the ultimate format people like to make it out to be. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with digital media as long as it’s files on a hard drive. Honestly, it’s probably a better format for preservation than a disc that’s locked into whatever video format it was published in. In 1000 years, it’s pretty unlikely anyone will be able to read files from a DVD or Blu-Ray. But a file that’s been reformatted to keep up with modern technology? That’ll be useful.
CDs themselves only last 100 years at most. Hard drives also fail. There really isn’t a great solution for something permanent unless you are changing its form/format every so often
Hard drives fail more often than another computer component, at least the old-timey spinning hard drives. SSDs are better by far but I wouldn’t trust important files to any single hard drive for long term storage.
Optical discs don’t have that problem at all. They will be good as long as you keep them in a non-hot place out of bright lights. Heat and UV light and scratching are the enemies of optical discs, but they can all be avoided for as long as you care to keep them safe.
I think DRM free digital media is viable as well. A hard drive doesn’t have the lifespan of a blu-ray, but modern drives are good about warning of catastrophic failure, and I suspect most people that have digital media libraries migrate them to new storage as wanted/needed.
There’s something satisfying about physical media that digital lacks. I get that appeal. But I don’t think it’s superior for media preservation.
Well, maybe not DVD given the shelf life, but certainly Blu-ray and Ultra HD.
Blu-ray has about the same storage life as a DVD.
Millennium discs are a thing, though, where the data is burned into plastic rather than a film.
Actually, Blu-ray should have an obscenely long shelf life. If I understand correctly, it doesn’t use an organic layer for holding data and is a lot like an M-Disc in terms of lifespan.
Both of you are using very confusing terms. Physical disks are stamped plastic. The 0’s and 1’s are physically in the plastic as pits and lands.
The problems with earlier disks and bad production run disks are that reflective backing oxidizes. But the physical data is still stamped into the disk.
Bluray changed out the aluminium reflective layer for a silver alloy so it’s more resistive there.
I don’t know where you got organic from or the other guy, film?
In a Fahrenheit 451 sense, Holy Grail might be the most well preserved film for the future generations, given the level of storage redundancy.
Crazy times we live in.
I’ve purchased a few DVDs / Blu Rays of some of my favorite stuff. But I’m also trying to get my hands on as many “good” CDs as I can. I’m not really trying to be a curator or librarian, I just see the shitshow on the horizon (and already here, honestly) as physical media and ownership of media in general ends and streaming becomes the only option.
And owning media will get more and more difficult unless one format shifts the media (rips it) before there is no more hardware to do this.
