• godlessworm [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    physical media. digital media. aha. fools. i preserve media by storing it in my brain. i don’t “watch” tv. i remember it. i’m remembering an episode of My Wife & Kids starring the hilarious Daemon Wayans as i type this. this opens up both of my computer screens to monitor the value of my rare beyblade collection in real time while also searching ebay auctions for more.

    • EatPotatoes [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      11 days ago

      I watched laser disc rip of human highway that took weeks to torrent. It’s was one of the most sickening boomer hippie self indulgent anti-comedies that it still makes me mad somebody preserved it.

      Beyond preserving your stories. There is a very dated mentality that letter writing campaigns and buying physical media will shift the powers that be to keep some tv show going. And that such treat activism is more urgent the genocide or destruction of the planet.

  • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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    12 days ago

    I think this is actually a slightly flawed way of doing it. More important than keeping a bought physical copy is controlling the copy you have. You can store downloaded files on a ssd, and do it cheaper, and taking up less space, and still control it.

    All my downloaded music for example is only about 20GB of mp3 files and is almost 1000 songs. Which compare that to the massive record collection i inherited from my grandfather which is like 150 albums, and takes up tons of space. Or getting PDFs of books vs having physical copies. I think a good mix is best.

    Also important to note that with digital copies you download you can make backups, but if a dvd, or something gets ruined its gone.

    So I’d change it from physical being the focus to ownership being the focus. If the data is on a device/storage medium you have physical control over, and it has no DRM, then you own it. If it has DRM, or is hosted on some remote server you don’t own it.

    You could even DIY your own physical library. Like get a CD burner or something, and keep backups on an SSD then use the disks as your library.

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    Rip into acceptable quality digital and maintain offsite backups.

    Physical media rots. Even just a normal DVD sitting in a case will develop holes in the sandwiched metal on which the data is burnes.

    Digital media becomes a “all my eggs in one basket” situation without good backups. Many people get a false sense of security from digitization. Ideally use a 3-2-1 backup strategy and test your backups by periodically stimulating a recovery situation.

    • OrionsMask [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      12 days ago

      Many people get a false sense of security from digitization. Ideally use a 3-2-1 backup strategy and test your backups by periodically stimulating a recovery situation.

      I’m gonna sound whiny but this is so LONG and expensive though. Like not only do I need to shell out for the actual storage, I have to shell out 2 - 3 x that which will have no other purpose than to mirror the first? And then you gotta find more storage to test recovery on? And it’s likely a significant amount of data so it’ll take ages to download. There has to be an easier way.

      • Imnecomrade [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        There has to be an easier way.

        Doing it as a collective society. Seizing the means of production. Seizing control of digital media and working towards long term preservation.

        Thank you pirates, digital presevationists, and data hoarders for doing the honorable work of preserving the media we have, but this is an expensive hobby only available to the few that can afford it, and there’s no way for poor folk to be able to do this besides torrenting what is available or seizing the means of production.

      • Enjoyer_of_Games [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        Everything we have from the past exists either from tireless maintenance or due to exeptionally lucky irrepeatable circumstances.

        This cannot be changed. You can only reframe your thinking to this is the price of keeping media but I can cut costs by two thirds if I’m willing to risk losing it forever.

      • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        11 days ago

        I mean depending on how much data you have you can do 3-2-1 with two external drives, one stored encrypted at a friend’s house. Or buy a cloud storage account for around $5/month for several TBs.

      • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 days ago

        I think storing only what you probably can’t get again helps this. My only mirrored drives are 1TB which I accumulated over the years from mine and other peoples computer upgrades. They’re really cheap otherwise. They mirror stuff like family photos, important documents, etc.

        The encrypted online backup for it is like 5 dollars a month.

        It’s very expensive and a little silly to spend so much to mirror marvel movies or whatever mainstream media that is incredibly easy to find anywhere unless you have actually rare stuff or are a doomsday prepper. I just have a list of what I have downloaded and can also just pull my torrent history or save my .torrent files which are tiny and get all my movies and games back later.

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    A physical disc that stores the same data that could be stored on a small fraction of a microSD card. The people truly preserving copies of media are the people that buy a copy and create an mp4 out of it (obviously difficult to do given DRM). With a disc, you need a BluRay player that can play the disc’s region. BluRay discs do have a lot longer lifespan than flash memory (unless you scratch or break the disc of course), so they do have that going for them.

  • makotech222 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    the number of giant physical media collections i’ve seen melted down in a house fire is soo much higher than I expected. Just do a media server.

  • Keep physical media but also back it up digitally! Consumer DVDs weren’t designed to be long-term storage mediums!!! If your reader gets a fault or you drop it or just with time you can get scratched and other wear can accumulate and introduce errors etc.

    You can always burn them again later!

  • dead [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    A DVD has smaller resolution than 480p. DVD use non square pixels, I’m forgetting if there is a technical word for this. DVD has a different display resolution and stored resolution of the video. The DVD will store the video at 720x480 and then display the video as if it was 854x480. The exact resolution varies by region and DVD. When you watch a DVD you are watching a video that has been smushed and then stretched.

    Also much of the stored DVD resolution is commonly black border bar because many theatrical movies are wider than 16:9. When you consider the black bar and the smush/stretch, you realize that the resolution you are watching is much smaller than 480p. 480p is defined by having a video height of 480 pixels. A common theatrical movie aspect ration is 1.85:1. To be 480p at 1.85:1, you would have a resolution of 888x480 and a common DVD has much less pixels than that.

    Also DVDs commonly use a technology called interlacing which makes the video look like venetian blinds at high motion scenes on a modern television.

    Basically DVDs were designed to be viewed on CRT televisions.

    • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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      12 days ago

      If you buy the right versions you also don’t have to worry about the compression or anything like that, which is nice in and of itself. There are things like baked in ads and the stupid piracy notice (why the hell are you giving these notices to the people who paid for their copies? It’s honestly jarring and it’s obviously not going to stop anyone whose ready to go through the process of ripping a disk), which really kinda make owning disks less nice.