I started a thread back at the beginning of the year about stuff disappearing from streaming. My wife and I were about halfway through the final Peter Capaldi season of Doctor Who, and about halfway through season 3 of Justified, when both went poof from Amazon Prime on Jan 1. Well, not gone, but no longer free - you can pay per episode or per season. IIRC both are now available on HBO Max, which means I’d have to add yet another streaming service. Argh!
We do rewatch many shows and movies. Not all 1000+ of course. (Our little secret - we haven’t even watched all of them yet. but “someday”! When you can get a used DVD for $5, it’s worth taking a chance on just buying it. That’s cheaper than going to the theater, so if we get to it “someday” it’s still a good value.)
I don’t understand licensing deals they may have, but would it really be that difficult to come up with something like music licensing? It doesn’t take any space to save all their movies and TV forever, so when someone watches something old and obscure, the studios get a royalty payment. Again, it can be all automated.
I know I know. Everyone holds their territory tight. That’s probably why Memphis Beat will never be available in any format. Music rights. Just like WKRP.
Back in 2002, Cecil did a column about the life expectancy of CDs.
Anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve ever had a DVD or CD go bad just sitting on the shelf, but I don’t deny that it could happen.
MakeMKV (https://www.makemkv.com/). Still free, I think.
After you’ve made an MKV, use Handbrake to change format and compress, if needed. Also free.
Oh I assure you Thunderball did.
I knew something was up when the menu didn’t load, but we were able to force the movie to start. At about the 25 minute mark it locked up and could not be recovered. And you couldn’t skip the damage and start again past it. It wouldn’t load into the computer drive either. It was well and truly, most assuredly, dead.
The problem may simply be dust or fingerprints on the surface. Did you look at the surface? Did you try cleaning it?
For those of us with the minimum cable package ($13/month for essentially full antenna reception, plus a lot of random channels), streaming has been a delight. Yes, things occasionally disappear, but man do we have access to a lot of stuff .
Any one or two streaming services will always have something to watch (even the free services). But if you want to watch a particular show, it’s always on that service you currently don’t subscribe to.
I greatly enjoy the convenience of streaming. If I had to pick the only way–DVD or streaming–I’d pick streaming even if it meant some content was not available. But for situations like this, you might want to see if your library has it. Many library systems have extensive DVD collections. Typically, you can search the catalog online, reserve your choice, and designate which library you want to pick it up at. I’ve had to do this a few times when content has moved to a service that I didn’t have access to.
You may also want to check where the content moved to. Sometimes services only have access to certain seasons at different times. The season you want might still be available on streaming, but just through a different service.
justwatch.com is a useful site that can tell you where a show you want to watch is currently streaming (if it is).
I have used PlayOn in the past, but I found it to be quite a hassle that wasn’t worth just paying for some additional streaming service for a few months to watch some show I want. And the quality is not as good. Sure 720p isn’t bad, but I can watch stuff in 4k for < $20/month.
For those who haven’t cut the cable cord yet, Xfinity has a feature where you can either type or speak the title you’re looking for, and it will show you what service it’s on, or if it’s available to rent, or scheduled to be broadcast soon. No hunting!
Your assumption that harddrives are a long term solution isn’t really true. I personally don’t have many which lasted past 20 years, and some chunks of them (around 300GB to 500GB around 2003-2007) barely lasted two years due to wide range manufacturing problems (I remember flux being a reason, not a hardware engineer).
Also, good quality may not last, the cheapest hard drives are SMR nowadays, which are claimed to be for archive, mainly because they don’t last with continual usage on a NAS. I’d not buy one of those for even archive nowadays, gone are the days I’d buy the cheapest drive of that size.
Long term data storage? I’d store it in many forms. I’m unsure even of burnable vs produced cds, certainly some cds I have from the late 80s play fine at the moment. But will the ones I burn today last 5 years?
An article in slashdot.org concluded that tape is the best for genuine long term archiving but those have their limits too. It’s a blind spot in our world: long term persistence of data, I am sensing a year zero apocalypse will come in the form of data wiping magnetic event.
But simplistically, I don’t rely on just hard drives for archive. Which is a good reason to keep your dvds. Even if you take them out of their boxes and store them in stacks. Perhaps they should be views as comics in that sense, stored in protective packaging which is more than just the box.
That is why I said “a backed-up harddrive”.
Same here. I very rarely watch a movie or TV show twice unless it’s incidental (“Hey, XYZ is on…”). But I use streaming music services to discover new stuff which I then make sure to get my own copy – sometimes uploading it back into Google Music (or Youtube Music these days) for my own streaming on demand.
Yep. Cleaned, inspected. It looked fine. The damage was not visible. (I had one other DVD go bad - you could see the obvious discoloration in the surface. This one still looked good.)
When I want something new, I often google “Best on Netflix Hulu October 2020 [or current month]” and I often click on the “What’s coming to Netflix and what’s leaving in October” articles, which often give a list with specific dates.
I’ve been known to quick binge a show by the Bye Bye Date, and I’m sure I’ll be watching the end of some show on Halloween night…
Yes, I’ve noticed more than one series on the streaming services that is missing an episode or two. I find that really, really annoying.
The show that started this was missing two episodes of seson 1. Since it was made in the 70s, I can’t imagine what was so bad.
OTOH, on L&O Criminal Intent, in one season there is one episode (out of ten years!) removed on the DVD, but it gets shown in syndication. Go figure.
Yes, and those non-US licensing deals (like the Netflix deal in Canada) are invariably inferior to those in the US, with less choice for subscribers. So there’s a thriving industry dedicated to providing US access to those outside the country. It’s a strange situation because it’s technically “illegal” even though you’re paying for the streaming service and not trying to “steal” anything. It’s also strange because Netflix and other providers don’t really give a shit, but they have to make token efforts to try to shut down cross-border access to make their content providers happy. It’s really a situation of too much greed and too many lawyers fucking up what could be perfectly simple royalty deals.
Two things:
For long term storage they make gold CDs that are supposed to last 300 years. They are more expensive ($349 for 100), but they should not go bad on you.
You can often watch things on Netflix in other countries that are not available here. You can use a VPN to change your apparent location.