I was thinking Internet Archive, but either works.

SO DO YOU!

Throw him over the side.

In a way a lot of us end up becoming amateur librarians. When the big megaservers get hit with something nasty, or they decide to purge it all for AI datasets or something. (Idk it's a stupid timeline anything is possible lol)

I like to think our fellow amateur archivists who started collecting such things for personal reasons will be a force for preserving meaningful artifacts of human experience.

Yeah I "archived" all my "dvds"

Where I live the library card costs 5-10 € per year and they carry blu rays, video games and e books. Needless to say I've now renewed this card for the 15th year in a row

Oh shit forgot about the library. Definitely going check out some movies.

Yeah that "depending" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there lol.

Also big depending: At least try not to make it TOO obvious that's what you're doing. Most library people are cool, (Source: know library people) but it's kinda obvious when we see someone racking up the hold shelf with like 30-40 DVDs and CDs a week. LMAO

Unfortunately the mega media interests do occasionally try to pressure libraries to enforce copyright violations or whatever. (Like telling you you can't photocopy textbook pages or something)

I personally try to just archive things I own, primarily, or things that are special and important to me, but that's also because I have maybe 4TB to work with and hardware is insane again.

But there's a point when it starts to look like compulsory hoarding lol. It's kinda an open secret/ gray area, and a few people being stupid will likely catch attention. (Look what happened to archive.org fending off broadsides from the publishing industry.)

I'm going to steal this.

This reminds me of when a couple of lost Doctor Who episodes were found but the owner was nervous to share them with the BBC because he feared confiscation and/or prosecution. I don't know what happened with that story.

My hot take is all abandonware media should legally become file-share friendly after a certain amount of time being out of print, say 15 or 20 years. The original rights holder still maintains copyright, but if they are no longer publishing that work, and therefore no longer making sales, anyone can fileshare it for free in its original form. If the owner then republishes it, it stops being file share friendly. But there have to be caveats, like Nintendo can't publish 2 copies of an old game every 15 years for like $500 a copy and say it's still published. It has to be sold at a reasonable price.

Or the absolutely legendary "No one lives Forever" that is stuck in a Limbo of Legality - iirc it's not clear who has the rights to distribute the game, so it isn't.

I do think I'm going to start a retro game ROM collection in general. I have a sizable physical collection already, but there are just so many that aren't easily available anymore.

xD

I've been using Handbrake to rip DVDs but haven't started using MakeMKV yet. I do have a number of blu-rays that Handbrake can't seem to process on its own.

Automatic ripping machine has also made things so much easier on my end.

In most cases, probably. And then there's Nintendo.

Sorry to tell you this, but that wasn't a rational thought (unless this was in the teens/aughts). I bailed on netflix 8-10 years ago cuz I got sick of having whatever I wanted to watch disappear before I had a chance to watch it. And I'm not paying 100/mo for all the streaming services is need to watch what I want to watch, so archival it was. And it was good.