Digital vs. Physical: Which do you prefer?

[hunter]

4. My wife and I have several hundred DVDs.

That's not much shelf space compared to the thousands of books we own.

I suppose if the internet ever gets taken down permanently we'll have plenty to watch...

Most of these DVDs I picked up in thrift stores for a dollar or two before covid-19. Others are movies my wife and i enjoyed very much in the theaters so we bought our own copies.

DVD quality isn't great compared to modern formats, only 480 lines, but our television does a pretty good job upscaling them to 1080 lines.

In any case, we only pay the minimum subscription price for Netflix, which is some supposed "standard" quality somewhere between DVDs and BluRay.

One nice thing about DVDs is that they are easily transcoded to other formats. I can put a few movies on my laptop if I'm going someplace without an internet connection.

I use Handbrake for that.

https://handbrake.fr/

These days my wife and I mostly stream movies and television shows and read ebooks. It's a matter of convenience and shelf space. Obviously we are not fussy about quality.