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[Admiral Wonderboat] Physical Media Forever
(i.imgur.com)
@[email protected] among other places
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Spoiler
Jen is loading DVD's into a donation box. Admiral: Stop!! You can't get rid of our DVD's! What if the streaming sites go down?! - Admiral: What'll we watch if there's an apocalypse? The NEWS?! Jen: You're right! DVD's are essential for survival! - Admiral: We still have a DVD player, right? Jen: I mean... probably
dvd disks degrading
I picked up a season 1 Metalocalypse from a thrift shop and it was dead. It’s such a gamble. Goodwill is getting really precious on their DVDs too - only really good deals if you find a season/box set that they haven’t broken up.
VHS seems more dependable, and VHS is dirt cheap. I got a pre-special edition Star Wars box set for $5, I got a season of MASH and Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy for $1 each. Lots of my local shops have $0.49 VHS bins.
Finding a VHS player can be a challenge. DVD players are super available, but I spent a month or so hunting for my current player. (The rewinders though - everywhere.)
Vinyl can also be found for pennies, but most of the good stuff is picked up quickly. If you are okay with mid jazz, classical music, and “greatest hits” compilations, the vinyl stacks are good to poke through.
I do like that all of my analog media is mine. No worries about it being pulled from streaming or altered or copyright weirdness - I can go back to 1998 and watch my Star Wars.
VHS, like video casettes? You might have forgotten about ghosting due to overwriting from adjacent layers.
Decreased video quality is an improvement over the nothing at all that one gets from failed optical media though.
I do have a ripper device - wanting to get into archiving rare media but Windows 11 in all of its glory has decided that it doesn’t trust me enough to let me choose to install third party drivers 🙄
The ideal is a mix - but also, as a certified broke bitch I’ll take a 49 tape with ghosting issues over a $3.09 shiny thing that isn’t even a good paperweight if it’s dead.
Try Linux then? Setup is a bit of work but i got it running for makemkv and Handbrake.
Warner bros has entered the chat