DVD Player instead of Streaming Apps?

vacheron

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82134939#Comment_82134939

How big are your hard drives?

24TB in total (2x12TB drives), plus 1TB for the SSD boot drive, all bought well before the ridiculous recent hardware price explosion! But the Movies (600ish), TV Shows (100ish Full Series) and Music (600-700 Albums) take up less than half of that.

It must take you a long time to rip?

It takes about 1.5 hours to rip and encode a Blu-Ray to around a 4-5GB 1080p file using GPU hardware encoding. Our TV is 4K but we can't really notice the difference for most movies to warrant a 20-30GB file.

And doesn’t it use a lot of energy running these servers?

It's just one server, but it's running on standard PC hardware, so it only draws about 30-35 watts at idle, about 70 watts while streaming, so about 20p per day. However it is also acting as a fileserver and runs our home automation, so it would be running anyway.

EmJHall97

My husband and I have decided to start buying blue rays again. We do still have streaming apps but this culture of never owning anything is really quite frustrating! We wanted to watch all the Daniel Craig bond films but they were all on a different streaming platform. We got all the films in a blue ray pack for probably £15 and we will use the PlayStation to play them for now - but will upgrade to a UHD Blueray player if the PlayStation goes kaput.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82135667#Comment_82135667

UHD player will do nothing for Bluray disks but obviously opens up the possibility of playing UHD Blurays but they are vastly more expensive and much rarer secondhand. Currently the Craig Bond Series on UHD are £73

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82158177#Comment_82158177

Which film out of curiosity?

Would argue it can go both ways, your DVD is a fixed version but the streaming service may show a later "directors cut" or similar and your choice as a DVD only person is either to buy it again or never see the additional scenes.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82158897#Comment_82158897

Are you going to say which film it is?

I suspect with a free service they are showing the broadcast version which are often cut either to be more watered down or to fit the scheduling slots/ad breaks. Amazon and Netflix are well known for buying broadcast versions from distributors as they are materially cheaper

There are a fair few famous mess ups, Max and Disney+ have both said a "technical issue" resulted in them streaming the broadcast version rather than the intended full cut but they were both reversed. Disney+ has also cut scenes deemed "dangerous" to kids or to reduce a rating (like adding hair to Splash so her butt wasnt seen)

ididgetwhereiamtoday

ITV are awful with their James Bond films with whole chunks being cut out making them incoherent sometimes.

oldernonethewiser

DVDs used to come with adverts and trailers which were often unskippable which I found annoying but I can appreciate for actual content of a movie they can be a lot better than what some streaming sites offer.

jumire939

Physical media makes more sense now than it did five years ago. One thing to keep in mind: DVD players are getting harder to find new, so if you go this route, grab a decent Blu-ray player while they're still being made.