Switching to all digital movie collection

[Your Mom]

I feel like I asked this before but I can't remember and it's not like we've never brought topics up again here so here goes. It seems everything is going digital so we are seriously thinking about selling all our DVDs and Blu Rays and moving completely digital. Does anyone here do this?

What's a good service to use? Obviously it needs to be easily accessible and something that isn't likely to disappear. I mean you don't want to buy a whole collection of movies and then not be able to use them anymore.

Right now I think it's between Sony because we use the PS4 a lot and it might be nice to have them all there or Amazon because they have good prices and you don't have to store movies on your hard drive. Plus I mean Amazon isn't going anywhere any time soon. I'm leaning toward Amazon but would be interested what others use..

[Gabriel]

Being paranoid like I am, I refuse to buy digitally because no matter how much reassurance I get, I am 100% positive that one day, everything will go down and all of that non-physical stuff will be lost forever.

I'm more or less expecting a catastrophe on the level of what Y2K was supposed to do, sometime in my lifetime. It probably won't happen, but I can't seem to shake the feeling that it will.... and that's a lot of money invested in something that you don't physically own. There are any number of issues that could prevent your use of digital products that you've purchased.

Like I said though... I'm paranoid.

[Your Mom]

I guess one of the knocks against Amazon would be that I would have to be connected to the net at all times right?

[GA!]

I don't buy digitally as, with the likes of iTunes, you're technically only 'renting' them albeit permanently. I rely on Netflix mainly for my films these days, and just buy physical blu-rays for the films I absolutely love.

Which reminds me, need to buy 'Her'...

EDIT: That was more a response to Gabriel. I agree the whole concept is too capable for loss for me to transfer over.

[Your Mom]

What do you mean only renting them?

[GA!]

What do you mean only renting them?

They're legally non-transferrable to another account. I think Bruce Willis tried to sue Apple over it - you can't hand them down to someone else's account like you would a DVD or such. Plus somewhere in the terms and conditions, it says something to the effect of you are just renting it for an indefinite period of time - they have the right to take it off you (i.e. remove from your account) or alter it as they please.

[IDOL]

Just rip your DVDs to MP4 with DVD Shrink or Handbrake and use a hard drive as a home server. You can set up media sharing with other computers, Roku devices via Plex, and a lot of gaming machines.

[Your Mom]

That sounds hard. Is it as hard as it sounds?

[Colly]

Nope. Bit time consuming if you have a lot, but worth it.

[Your Mom]

Are these programs I have to buy?

[livid]

I don't know about the other one but DVD Shrink is free, IIRC.

[EndOfAnEra]

I did this a few years ago, and now I've just switched to streaming. Much more convenient. But when I did rip my DVD's, I believe I used DVD Shrink.

[Benjamin]

I heard DVD Shrink is what all the pirates use. Is that right? Because if so, then it must be great.

[Paton]

I've always preferred having the physical copy to a DVD or a disc rather than the digital. Only because I feel like I really have it then, rather than just being all "oh yeah, that's on my computer, I'll just watch it on there".

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I'm an old man so I like having physical objects. It probably links to my love of board games and physically playing a game on my table.

I find it easier to search for something I want to watch or listen to by looking at my shelves.