Comment by lrvick
2 months ago
Do not give netflix -too- much credit for this. Netflix permanently closes distribution of most content they touch and kills the very physical media ownership options for content that they built their empire on.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
Why buy Japanese bootlegs when webrips are on popular torrent sites?
I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
There are piles of obscure things for which physical (sometimes bootleg) media exists but no seeders.
For example the mexican hacking drama Control Z, I found 0 complete rips even on private trackers, but I did find some nice blu ray bootlegs with cases and cover art.
Even with blu-ray rips in hand, burning a disk myself and putting it into a nice recognizable case that fits in my blu ray wall cases is a pain in the ass and I would rather pay someone else for this service.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
Warm storage with checksums and redundancy is the only long-term safe option. I would recommend making a pair of HFS boxes, that storage will last far longer than pressed cold media.
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I absolutely torrent as a way to discover new content, but I want favorites on a shelf on very long shelf life media where it does not require internet access and is never going to get altered or deleted as streaming services often do, or end up unavailable in the future with no seeders.
You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?
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Blu-ray regions are different from DVD regions. US and Japan in Blu-ray regions belong to the same group.
Exactly this is why Japanese blu ray releases of streaming shows that lack physical US releases are a great backup option.