Well I thought about using them instead of buying a hdd, I looked for some comparisons and found a 50 pack of 25gb blu ray drives and a 2tb harddrive for 60, it can store 35 movies more (thinking the movie is 24 GB) than the pack of drives, and that isn’t accounting the disk drive to read the disks (Keep in mind these are just the first results on Google for me)
In my opinion the blu ray drives are more fun to use than clicking a file on a computer, but the storage payoff is huge
What is your opinion on this?
PS: I’m definitely buying the hdd instead
You need a player. I have no player. A 1TB HDD is easier to manage than multiple BRs. People buy movies on BR and rip it to store on a HDD.
Going the other way round doesn’t make sense to me.
Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?
The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).
Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.
Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.
The fun way to watch movies is to have a NAS with a Plex/Jellyfin server and browse them on your TV with a nice UI in the comfort of your living room.
Want to watch this movie in 4K Dolby Vision with atmos? Just browse or search for it and click on the poster art. Want to stop that half way through and watch a tv series instead? Go for it. It’ll take all of 5 seconds to navigate to it and have it playing.
After going through the effort to set that up, I can’t go back to anything else.
If a drive fails or other issue occurs with my NAS, it will send me an email and then shut itself down. Replace a dead drive and off I go again. No data loss due to RAID. (insert obligatory comment that RAID is not a backup solution and that you should have a separate backup for important files)
If you use .iso files you will be missing out in quality and availability. If a better version of something you already burned is released, you will miss on that too.
If you use .mkv files, then why bother with discs in the first place? HDD in network and access everything, everywhere at any time.
If you start to scale to TBs, the price per GB of HDDs starts to drop dramatically. Look for refurbished HDDs in eBay.
The only real reason I can think of where physical beats digital is for playing the FEL DV layer on some UHD releases. But even then, there are ways to circumvent that.
Personally I would only use discs for an extra possible backup just in case.
