> So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name

It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.

As a kid I watched Fantasia on VHS so many times that the tape quality started to decay and my parents stored it away for special occasions. The quality decay didn’t bother me at all.

>Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted

Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.

>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.

I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.

Most movies and tv shows are available for similar prices on blue rays, often in 4k versions.

While the resolution may be higher on streaming, the bitrate is often significantly worse. Beyond that Netflix has done upscaling in the past with middling success.

Nevermind the horrendous AI upscaling they tried last year. https://futurism.com/netflix-ai-upscaling-old-shows-horrific

Resolution isn't the only problem. SD resolution (particularly PAL) is quite tolerable, if it's well-encoded from a good source.

DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.

DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).

If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.

Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.

On paper yes it feels like a downside. Practically if the movie/show is good, you don't really mind.

I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).

I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).

I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!

It's good to note that moviesanywhere.com, Kanopy, and VUDU (now Fandango at Home) sell your data and use it for market research (in addition to other things, there's no telling what it will be used for after it's sold). That said, for those of us in California "Kanopy does not sell your information. Kanopy does not share your information with third parties for money or other valuable consideration."

It's also worth looking into if your local library offers Kanopy services.

I do the same. Minor correction - it's no longer Vudu, it's now called Fandango at home. You also have to watch out for expiry dates on the codes. US only.

Paramount and Lionsgate are the only studios which don't participate IIRC.

This was a big issue back in the DVDCSS days. The DMCA explicitly forbids bypassing protective measures. Doesn’t matter who owns the media, the copyright holder owns the content.

17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)

Which was the beginning of the end for ownership vs purchasing a license. That thing you paid for isn’t yours.

Possibly in some countries...

But at least in the US, it is a DMCA violation.

DMCA gets a little weird; Basically unless you're distributing it is a civil penalty (which, I could be wrong but would mean you'd get a Jury trial, even assuming it ever came up) and I doubt you would ever run into legal issues so long as you were only backing up for personal use.

It's where you get into distribution that anyone starts to care, and it's when you do distribution on a large scale that criminal penalties come into play.

However there may be countries where possession of an 'illegal number' or 'DRM Breaking software' is considered legal for personal use.

Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.

I am also NAL, but it almost certainly is legal to make backups for personal use. Breaking the encryption is the usual legal hangup, though there is no real enforcement on this front and nobody is stopping you from using Handbrake or MakeMKV.

More importantly however, is the fact that there isn't a meaningful argument that making backups of physical media you own is ethically wrong.

That's ok if you don't care about sound much. Apple prevents local playback apps from playing back Atmos audio. It's fine if you only want 5.1 though.

There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.

I've had some luck with Swiftfin though the UI is no where near as polished as Infuse.