This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it. They can also shut you off if they want to.
This is like digital files instead of DVDs, CDs, Cassette tapes, etc. With DRM they can shut off your access to the files. With the physical media you have unlimited access to the medium.
>This is like digital files instead of ... With the physical media you have unlimited access to the medium.
You don't need physical media: it takes up a lot of space. Digital files are usually better. Digital files with DRM, however, are crap. Don't use it, and don't buy it.
>This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it. They can also shut you off if they want to.
Even worse, since this is crappy inkjet technology, unless things have improved since I last looked at inkjets (I doubt it), the print heads dry up over time if they're not used, requiring replacement of the print cartridges even though there's still ink. This doesn't happen with laser printers; you can leave them for a year, and then print out a page and it works fine.
I keep trying to tell non-technical people I know not to buy into this scam of an industry (inkjet printing), but no one listens to me.
Digital files are usually better, but only in the moment. Moving away from physical objects means you're now doomed to the Sisyphean task of constantly managing a backup & migration strategy and have looming futureproofing issues when the format in question becomes deprecated. Tell me again how much of a drag it is to have a set of shelves with movies on them?
"Bitrot" is not a law of nature. Rather, protection from it is a racket. Media by far outlive the usefulness of the data on them, which is subject to planned obsolescence. They sell you a solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if they themselves hadn't created it.
I own a MacBook from 2010, fully equipped with software that cost me 4 figures back then (Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, various bits of commercial music production software etc. etc.) and came with perpetual licenses and physical media.
...yet somehow they managed to render it worthless so that they could charge me again for what I already owned, namely office software and design software.
On the other hand I own DVDs from 2010 that no longer play because of poor manufacturing quality.
Of course I can play the rips of them, but then it's effort to keep the data rotated through backups. Not a lot of effort, but still effort that most people don't want to do.
You do realize that optical discs degrade over time, right? Usually, they last a long time, but many people have found that old CDs, for instance, weren't manufactured quite right and the metal layer corroded over time.
Writable optical discs are far, far worse, and are completely untrustworthy as a long-term archive solution.
So I don't think you really can avoid the need for constantly managing and migrating your backups.
Finally, "a set of shelves" with movies can take quite a lot of space if you have hundreds or thousands of movies. To me, it's easier with music: I don't listen to that much music, and I listen to a large portion of my library many, many times over. Movie-watching is quite different from this; I don't re-watch movies or TV shows very often, but it's nice to have them available for those times I want to, or when a friend wants to watch something. So it's quite possible to collect far more video than audio, at least in my personal experience.
Nah. I've got 25 year old copies of movies that play perfectly well on optical media. 300 titles take up significantly less space than a bookshelf, and in a pinch you can just stack them all neatly in a tote or similar for long term storage. Observed reality trumps hypothetical reality.
> Moving away from physical objects means you're now doomed to the Sisyphean task of constantly managing a backup & migration strategy and have looming futureproofing issues when the format in question becomes deprecated.
You still get that with physical objects. How are your shelves of VHS tapes and LaserDiscs doing?
In a post-apocalyptic setup I can build a shelter from VHS tapes (LaserDiscs could be used to reflect sunlight on solar panels). Hard drives are inconveniently heavy to make a chainmail out of, but they could be used for light shielding against ionizing radiation.
I can put 2000 DVDs or 400 Blu-rays onto a single hard drive and then either keep the discs as backup (no cases needed, tucked away in a closet) or pay Amazon a few dollars a month. Migration is a matter of clicking copy and paste every handful of years.
I have no idea what you mean by "the format in question becomes deprecated". A physical disc will become deprecated long before the ripped version ever will.
We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore?
Most of my HDD failures hav been preceeded by either errors logged via SMART or outright bad blocks. Generally, immediate full on failures are good because you can just switch over to backups whereas with more gradual failures there is a chance of corrupted data making it into your backups. Less of a concern for write-once data like movie rips though.
> And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years?
Platforms will go away, sure, but formats will be supported for a long time by ffmpeg and players using ffmpeg. Probably longer than any player for your physical discs.
> Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
And other people had optical media fail in much less time. There are always outliers.
Anyway, pretty sure GP is talking about storing rips of optical media (otherwise keeping the discs as backup would make less sense) so you can get the best of both worlds - convenient digital files with the optical media as a disaster recovery in case your files rot first. That's my current stategy anyway.
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning?
No, that's why I talked about backups and copies.
> And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
Those optical media are a digital platform. And I do claim it will be easier to get software in 30 years that can play back an mpeg file than it will be to get hardware that reads an optical disc and... plays back the mpeg data written on the disc.
MPEG-1 turns 30 this year and every media player handles it fine. MPEG-2, which DVDs use, is over 25 and every media player handles it fine. They'll still handle it in 30 more years, I'm certain. Along with the codecs Blu-ray uses.
As for the hard drive itself, USB and NTFS should last but I wasn't suggesting using the same model the entire time. I said to migrate to a new drive every handful of years.
No, not "all of which". That benefit is one part of the story.
I assume you want to use the discs, right? The effort to swap between discs to watch a different one is not very far from the effort to copy your entire digital library. And you have to do the former every viewing, while you have to do the latter once every five years.
And it takes up hundreds of times less physical space.
Also your original argument was two parts. One, that's it's sisyphean. That's somewhat true except the amount of effort is trivial and the original discs will also start to rot if you wait decades. The second original argument made was about formats being deprecated, and that one is flat out wrong. The discs will deprecate before the files will. And the part about shelves not being a problem isn't true for everyone and often isn't true for big collections.
You are ridiculous. Taking a dvd out of a case is absolutely not on the same order as acquiring and maintaining (ongoing as purchases are made) a digital backup strategy. And there's an entire graveyard of file formats from the 90s you'd have to write software from scratch to decode these days so let's dispense with the notion that digital media formats are a settled matter.
It's a drag when you pull out a movie you haven't watched in a while, and the disc is delaminating. Or you're watching something that glitches in a particular spot and you just end up fast forwarding to the next scene to keep watching, forever skipping that part of the movie. And then you remember you paid money for that trash.
Also I don't see mpv/Kodi ever deprecating support for x264. And even if there were some compelling reason to leave the format behind, you can always transcode or just redownload.
>Also I don't see mpv/Kodi ever deprecating support for x264.
Basically, this will never happen (barring some kind of planetary catastrophe). The software for these codecs is ubiquitous and easily downloadable. You can still download software for very, very old codecs that didn't get as much use as x264; this stuff is all built into ffmpeg AFAIK. This is one of the huge benefits of open formats (or at least formats with free software decoders; remember MP3 was patent-encumbered for a long time but there was still a FOSS codec).
Some weird proprietary format/codec doesn't have this benefit, such as DIVX (the DVD competitor, not to be confused with the FOSS codec).
> This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it.
This is how a lot of businesses do their printing/photocopying. And it can make sense if you're printing a lot per month. They don't have to worry about repairs/servicing or upgrading and can pay monthly/quarterly from expenses rather than capital outlay.
Doing it for home use/small printers/small usage seems madness though.
This is like digital files instead of DVDs, CDs, Cassette tapes, etc. With DRM they can shut off your access to the files. With the physical media you have unlimited access to the medium.