Are DVDs now Obsolete?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m guessing that this forum (The Cafe Society) is more about the content of movies and TV shows than it is about the equipment we use to view them.

But I have just recently made what I believe is a fabulous discovery that deals with DVDs and how I used to use them and the fact that I think they are now obsolete and I would really like to share that info with you.

Now, the odds are that some of you have already discovered this big discovery I am about to tell you and I’m sorry if I’m wasting anyone’s time by posting this thread. However, I’m guessing that for those of you who have not yet made this discovery, you may feel like I do. I am extremely happy and excited by this info. Anyway, here it is. If it really belongs in a different forum, I hope the admins and moderators will please feel free to move it.

I recently purchased a Sony Blu-ray player (model BDP-S185) at Walmart for about $70. It plays any and every kind of video file that I have. But the exciting thing is that it support all kinds of USB drives.

Usually I think of DVD players that enable us to plug in a USB Handy drive that is usually 32GB or 64GB as a way we can take video files we have on our PCs and be able to play them on our DVD players. But, this player will support most any external Hard Drive and what that means is that I can take a 3TB external HD and plug it into my player and it will let me play any one of approx 3,000 full length movies. That is the equivalent of maybe 10,000 30 minute TV sitcoms. It’s just mind blowing! I mean it’s almost as if you can store just about all the movies and TV shows ever made on a single HD and then watch any of them using this Blu-ray player. OK. That is an exaggeration, for sure. But it’s not much of an exaggeration. It’s just fantastic.

By the way, an excellent external 3TB hard drive costs somewhere between $150 and $200. The Western Digital seems to be the best of the bunch. At least, it seems to be a real work horse and it just doesn’t ever crap out. At least that has been my experience.

You can also buy Western Digital drives that have a capacity of 2TB or 1TB. The model that I have been buying is called the “My Book Essential” and if you should buy one, be sure to buy a USB 3.0 instead of a USB 2.0. The USB 3.0 is very much faster than the USB 2.0.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, this means that I can now throw away all the hundreds of DVDs that I have recorded over the years and watch any of my favorite TV show without ever being forced to watch any commercials or being forced to ever get up and change DVDs.

There are some other things about this technology that make it very wonderful. I’m afraid I am just too happy and excited to be able to tell you about all about them right now. If I try, I will forget some, I’m sure.

But, I now can save all the costs of buying DVDs. External storage (meaning external HDs) are just so inexpensive, it makes no sense to buy DVDs or USB Handy drives. They are all pretty much obsolete as far as I can tell. It’s a brand new day and it’s just wonderful!

2

Probably not a good idea.

3

The reason I suggest throwing them away is because most every program I recorded have bits and pieces of commercials in them and they were recorded in a sloppy haphazard way. It is a huge improvement to watch video files that were well recorded.

For example, I have one favorite TV sitcom and I recorded most every episode of it. But the recordings are amateurish and sloppy and there is just no doubt in my mind that I would ever use any of those DVDs again, given that I now have all the video files from that show on an external Hard drive.

Actually, I have them on two different drives for backup purposes.

4

Or you could take the next step.

My mother is legally blind, and lives with us. She’s not completely blind – she has macular degeneration, which leaves her with some peripheral vision, so she can see most of what’s going on on a TV screen if she’s got her nose about three inches from the screen.

I set her up with a flat screen computer monitor on a swivel arm and a comfy chair. That computer is connected to our in-home network. In the basement I have a computer with a TV capture card, set to automatically record several shows she watches; it can also stream video live.

Not only can she watch, on demand, any of the recorded episodes that have been caught for her, but so can anyone else: other TVs in the house are Samsung Smart TVs, which have ethernet connectivity and can play DivX formatted files through a DLNA-compatible media server. So the Linux file server that stores those files is both an SMB-type server (Samba, to allow Windows access) and a DLNA server (uShare).

5

I wasn’t aware that it was that common to download that many movies for permanant or semi-permanant storage. I watch some streaming Netflix movies, but I don’t think I’ve ever downloaded one and saved it. But for those people that do store movies on an HD, I guess the OP’s idea is a good one.

6

That is correct. Threads about equipment go in IMHO, so I’ll move this thither for you.

7

Both my Blu Ray player and TV do this. The Blu Ray player handles most video formats. I’ve slowly been ripping my DVD collection (and a handful of Video CDs) to cheap 3 TB external drives and moving the discs to storage. I haven’t been compressing them, but leaving them as region-free .isos – many are single layer and less than the max capacity – and am getting ~750 full length films on each drive. Why no compression? Two reasons: DVD is already heavily compressed with the artifacts introduced showing up glaringly on a big 55" screen, and compression takes a lot of time on my set-up… and I have several thousand DVDs to archive. Stripping region protection allowed me to put the region-free DVD player in storage.

I also have 2.5 TB of storage for Internet downloads (lots of PD from Internet Archive, lots of downloads from subscription sites of a specific… umm… genres). I do have to convert the video on some of these to work with the player’s set of codecs, unfortunately.

Eventually, my goal is to do networking like Bricker does (need to upgrade computers, as I’m chugging along slowly with a 6-year-old laptop), which will obviate the need to do any video conversion, and will allow my home theater/media set up to be even more austere. A faster computer will also allow me to archive my next pile o’ discs… several hundred laserdiscs and a few dozen CEDs. And if it turns out 3D Blu Ray .isos can be streamed properly, I’ll be able to move everything to storage.

8

It could probably also use a more descriptive thread title.

9

I started a thread in this forum with a rather poor title. It was titled:

“I want to tell you of a recent exciting discovery I made.”

I want to thank “Student Driver” for pointing out that thread needed a more descriptive title.

But since I cannot edit the thread at this point, I will just put a link to it here and I will say that I apologize for this inconvenience.

I hope you will enjoy the information in that thread.

Thank you.

10

Then just click the little red triangle next to the post number and tell the mods you’d like your title changed.

11

So you want the other thread to be titled Are DVDs now Obsolete? How 'bout I just merge the two threads?

12

OK we’re all fixed up now. Threads merged, more descriptive title…profit!

13

This Sony Blu-Ray player, will it rip the DVDs to a USB hard drive plugged into it, or do you have to rip them some other way?

14

Since ripping DVDs is technically “illegal,” I’m guessing Mr. Lazlo is talking about illegal video downloads.

15

Good question.

I’m sorry but I just don’t know the answer.

I didn’t see anything about it in the User’s Guide. But then again, for some very strange reason, the User’s Guide makes no mention of the fact that you can plug external hard drives into it’s USB slot either.

Most all DVD players I have ever used will allow you to plug a small USB Handy drive into that slot and will play from DVDs or from the Handy Drive.

I would think that Sony would sell a lot more of these units if they promoted the fact that it will support a huge external HD. I don’t know the limit but I do know that it has no problem with a 3TB drive.

Unfortunately, none of that helps answer your question. I hope that perhaps someone else will know and will post here about that.

In thinking further about it, I would doubt that it would do that since it would add considerably to the cost of the unit to be able to rip DVDs and if it would do that, they would almost certainly promote that fact. Wouldn’t they?

16

I have read the reviews on Amazon and no one says it will rip DVDs. That was really too much to hope for.

I have an old Oppo DVD player that will play video files burned onto a data DVD disc, so the idea is not new but having the capacity of a hard drive would be very nice.

17

USB is only for input.

18

The advantage to keeping DVDs is that when your hard drive fails (which it *will *do, someday), you’ll lose all your movies. (Unless you have a good backup. You have a good backup, right?) The DVDs will probably still be readable, though.

19

DVDs are incorruptible. I don’t know if they last longer than HDDs, but I like that you can hardly unintentionally write to them. Just connect your HDD to look at photos? Are you sure? Did you drag one folder into another? Does your computer have a virus now? Will the program you use to open photos make destructive edits? Google’s Picasa says it won’t, but IT DOES. Photos on a DVD: whatever, bring it on!

20

I agree. DVDs have advantages for archival storage at the very least.
I wonder how long DVD data is recoverable. 50 years? 100?
Obviously, we don’t have a long enough time track to determine the effective life of a DVD, but I’d say it is considerably longer than that of a hard drive.