I recently started buying movies on Vudu. I was struggling for a long time with whether or not I wanted to collect media on physical disks or digitally.
Right now that’s what I’m doing but there’s always the looming fear of anything I buy being taken away if the service gets shut down.
I’m curious how others keep their media collections. Are you a Blu-ray or 4k UHD collector? Do you use a digital service like Vudu or something similar?
Tell me your thoughts!
@Sean_Thomas@beehaw.org Back in the early 2000s, I remember my dad spent 💰 and so much time buying and organizing physical DVDs into one of those huge carousel machines. He then made a printed catalog of all the movies with pictures, details, and disc numbers to browse and select a movie from his collection. So much manual work considering the whole thing needed to be reprinted each time a new movie was added.
Nowadays, I’d recommend a Plex server haha.
Yeah your dad definitely went through a lot of work for that DVD collection! 📀
There’s something really special about that though. A labor of love I guess.
Something else too is that formats are always evolving. I feel like it would hurt a little to build a big DVD collection and then have Blu-ray and 4k come out. 🫤Of course I guess resolution-wise there’s only so far we can go before it doesn’t matter too much.
I have something like 250 DVDs that I never watch that I’ve been lugging around with me for more than a decade. The binder of them is currently in my closet on the office, collecting another tree ring esque layer of dust. IDK why but I refuse to get rid of them. Any time I think of something I want to watch that I have on DVD I just download it and add it to Plex anyway.
Buy stuff to support the creators, but always have a seperate personal storage/library, don’t use services.
There’s recently been some drama on twitter, where media providers have changed the parts of some movies. Movies that were in the libraries of those who purchased them. They replaced them with a different version - some with censors, some with commentary removed, or some with whole different endings.
You never acutally own the media copy if you depend on an external service.
I have a Plex server for film, tv, audiobooks and music and and a Calibre server for ebooks. I have shelves for my physical book collection that now need re-organising, since I have recently moved. Getting the Plex and Calibre server up and running was a lot quicker, I have to say.
At some stage, I expect that I will move to Jellyfin, but Plex is still ok for now.
I started getting into Blu-rays of favourite shows and films a while ago, recently made the switch to 4K UHD discs as well with my external 4K reader. Ever since the fragmentation of streaming services compared to music, I’ve started buying those Blu-rays to keep them in my collection for whenever I wanna watch them.
I tend to make a back-up copy of my discs to watch it through any device for flexibility. Especially as that’s my way of enjoying 4K films on my 4K TV at the moment. HDR colouring definitely wow’d me when trying my first 4K disc. Not regretting it so far. 👍
One of my biggest side projects this spring was setting up my first NAS (Synology, since I’m a beginner) and all the *Arr apps funneling to Plex, with Overseer to manage actually adding movies and tv to the queue.
There’s a lot of ductwork involved up front (set up x many docker containers, get them all to talk to each other, make sure you’ve got auto-updating set up, what about a VPN, and so forth) but I’ve been super pleased with the end result’s ease of use.
There’s a lot more in the self-hosted space I want to explore too, now that I’ve dipped my toes in – mostly around music and photos. I’ve a pretty manually organized music library and would like to be able to store on my NAS and access in a nice way from every device.
We also have a small collection of Blu-ray movies and TV, but 95% of those are my partner’s – much more into physical media than me. It has a precise organization on the shelves that I don’t touch! 😂
