3w ago

Physical Media Is Cool Again. Streaming Services Have Themselves to Blame

www.rollingstone.com Physical Media Is Cool Again. Streaming Services Have Themselves to Blame

Collectors tell Rolling Stone an exhaustion with streamers is making owning physical media the next big thing — again.

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Physical media will always be cool IMO, it just makes consuming it a more deliberate activity.
The main thing everyone needs to know is the limitations of a given format in terms of storage and archival:
Vinyl records should be kept stored out of direct sunlight (I'm looking at those wall display things), and ideally try to keep them around 20 degrees in general. Also avoid cheap and 2nd hand turntables without buying a brand new stylus cartridge. If you can't change the cartridge on a given player, it's trash that will ruin your collection.
Tapes, either video or cassette should be backed up immediately (unless they're one of the modern resurgence ones), degradation is already happening to the vast majority that were sold back in the day. Some tapes might need to have the little bit of foam replaced which isn't especially hard, but a bit fiddly.
Commercially manufactured CDs should last at least 50 years or so, but high humidity can apparently diminish this. Anything that might be on a CD-R or similar (think small band merch purchases), get that ripped immediately if you even can. Some CD-Rs have suffered data loss after as little as half a decade.
DVDs sadly have a potentially lower life than CDs at around 30 years before degradation, but otherwise the rules are the same at CDs
Blu rays are same again, but shouldn't be much of a worry yet, but it's worth keeping an eye on them as some pessimistic estimates have them only lasting 20 years minimum.
If you're ripping any digital disks and you've got sufficient storage to do so, take the convenience copy (FLACs, an MKV or a CHD) and also a bit-perfect ISO. Discs sometimes have other stuff going on other than the main event and it's good to be able to reproduce the exact original if you ever need to. This is probably only for people who have a home NAS or similar though.
Those are the formats I'm familiar with, I'm not sure what the rules are for minidisk and laserdisk if anyone wants to chime in there
- Getting the ISO of a DVD is really good advice. One of the downsides of switching from DVDs to digital was the loss of the DVD extras. Most of the time it was just blooper reels or copies of marketing materials. Things that most people don't care about but are really valuable like commentary tracks or alternate cuts were frequently included in deluxe editions. Sometimes you got really good creative stuff like an animated short or a mini game.
  
  That's the main reason I put that bit in, but it's also worth highlighting that it wasn't uncommon for CDs (particularly singles and EPs) between the late 90s and the mid 00s, to have PC CD-ROM content on the disk too
- Also, tapes can mold. Check your tapes for blooms before you put them in your player especially if you live in a humid climate.
  Bonus fact: This is why Video CDs (and laserdiscs to a lesser extent) were preferred in some parts of the world in the 90s.

I started collecting DVD/BR again a year or so ago. Streaming services are no longer worth it for me, and I like the extras that come on discs. Thirft stores are a gold mine of cheap movies anf TV shows.

I have zero streaming services, but 1k videos and 15k music tracks. All of them being shared across my local area network. My mum uses it, I use it, and my guests use it - you can literally copy junk from my HDD into your phone if you're visiting me, as the SMB login is anonymous.
Fuck streaming services. I'd be glad to pay for some if I could trust them, but I don't. Suddenly your plan is more expensive because "reasons", or whatever you bought is unavailable because "ackshyually you don't own it lol", so goes on. If buying is not owning then what I'm doing is not theft anyway.
And, sure, my hard disk could go the way of the dodo. There's always this risk. But compared with the certainty of streaming services becoming arseholes? I'm willing to take the risk, thank you very much.
(I'm also considering to buy a blu-ray external reader, to back all this shit up. So far it isn't a concern because I can redownload it; in the future, however, it can be.)
- You can hedge the risk of hard drive failure with backups, you can't hedge a digital service company turning off your access to certain media. Storage is getting bigger and cheaper and, especially older, media uses relatively small file sizes.
  
  Exactly. Plus in some situations you can reduce the space requirements quite a bit - as long as you're willing to exchange some quality for that.
  And often the quality loss isn't even a huge deal. For example, I always convert my videos to 720p, using H.265 coding; I can see the difference between 720p and 1080p, but it's 1/4 the file size, so IMO worth it.

I never let go of my CD & DVD collection. And now I have all my CDs ripped. It was a ton of work (tagging rare, incomplete or incorrect situations), but it has been worth it. My next project is to embed lyrics in all of my favorite songs, and maybe upgrade the cover art resolutions.
- I haven't used it yet but https://github.com/tranxuanthang/lrcget will download lyrics for all your music. I plan on doing that with my Jellyfin library.
  
  Thanks for that, but my tagger (K3B) has this as well.

11 comments