In addition to some reason cited for the increase around DVD format, i would posit some of the following too:
* Parents buy cheaper DVDs for their very young children...Children who care less about display quality.
* While travel plummeted during middle of pandemic, there were still people who took road trips (e.g. maybe for staying with family, etc.)...and during those roadtrips, i'm sure some families opted for DVDs and DVD players instead of trying to stream stuff while on the road, etc.
* Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptionsof streaming servicews. I hate this myself. So, my partner bought 3 or 4 of their favorite movies, so we can watch them whenever we want - even if we lack internet (though we would need power for the dvd player of course)
* Vinyl records have their followers who revitaliuzed the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?
I'm sure there are other reasons for why this is happening.
"Vinyl records have their followers who revitalized the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?"
I think it's possible this is happening or will happen, perhaps in a similar vein to how vintage gamers/collectors now venerate the GameCube and PS2 as the last bastion of consoles that weren't designed to be online all the time, and will therefore be playable "forever" in a way that everything which has come after them will not.
At the same time, I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a DVD— from the analog tactility of them, the size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork, the fact that they were the dominant format for decades, while DVDs got barely fifteen years (the aughts and a bit beyond). It's easy to love a record when you put it on and you can immediately tell "yes, this is a high quality stereo audio experience that I am having with this piece of media and the equipment I have invested in for consuming it", and I'd argue there just isn't really an equivalent experience for DVDs: they're always going to be blurry, with janky menus and unskippable ad reels, blocky subtitles, cheap plastic cases. Some of that changes with collectors editions in special boxes or whatever, but I don't know if it's widespread enough across the format as a whole to really enable the kind of culture that exists around vinyl.
Are they doing collectory things like alphabetizing them and putting them in special preservation cases, going online to seek out mint copies of special editions, etc?
Not to discount your observations, but I'm curious to differentiate between an active, intentional, curated collection effort, vs hoarding or just not having gotten around to tossing them all out yet despite that none have been touched in 10 years. Most people I know who still have a shelf or two of physical discs in their media/living rooms look a lot more like the second case than the first one.
I have a pair of IKEA dressers on either side of the TV, with the DVDs placed 2 deep in the drawers. And then a couple of bookcases in the basement for the overflow that doesn't fit the dressers. The current count stands at 1845.
Why not both? The missus and I have both been collecting DVD's for over 20 years. The resulting pile of movies fills a large part of the spare room in the house, and neither of us seem to show indications of stopping to grab cool old movies on DVD when at flea markets etc.
The physical DVD's are rather irrelevant, though. Most are ripped and streamed to the TV rather than watched in a player.
> ...I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a DVD— from the analog tactility of them, the size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork...
Agreed, for many it is an experience - or, as you so rightly said "rituals". It's more than just merely consuming media. It's listening to the warmth of the sound, and yes even the crackles and pops of some tracks. And likely a feeling of nostalgia for some. I bet that's one reason for vinyl's resurgence.
What are you talking about blurry? Upscaled DVD is perfectly fine. For most movies from the 80s and 90s it's not like you're going to notice a difference going to Blu Ray or UHD streaming.
> For most movies from the 80s and 90s it's not like you're going to notice a difference going to Blu Ray or UHD streaming.
Complete crock of shit. Movies from the 80s and 90s were usually shot on 35mm - DVD quality does not begin to extract the detail nor the dynamic range in these films.
It’s not a subtle difference.
And if bitstarving is an issue it’s usually going to be DVD. No amount of encoder magic can overcome MPEG-2 inherent shortcomings.
Speak for yourself. Upscaling a DVD to a 4k large TV looks tremendously bad unless you're doing it with specialized software with some format-aware intelligence in it. So you need a computer hooked to your TV.
There's plenty of bitrate starved streaming content that's available on streaming that's poorly upscaled from a DVD, but that's not the case on studio upscale Blu-Rays with extremely plentiful bitrates and sometimes even film re-scans resulting in a quality that was better than what you could even get in the theater from the original film stock.
UHD streaming, even if it is bit-starved, should be far ahead of a DVD. HD content that is bit-starved is more of a tossup, but I rarely see egregious behavior even from youtube's bad bitrates. I only see that on overcompressed television stations.
The lack of good content from Hollywood lately has been pushing me towards cancelling streaming services and buying used old favorites from a local store (going as low as £0.50 a pop) and buying blu-rays of the new ones I'm interested in.
I know they will always available for a rewatch and I don't have to finance the whole bunch of canned crap they have been putting out.
While i can find all manner of esoteric, oddball things to watch on the streaming services - which admittedly are not major studio movies - my partner feels the same as you. They lament that many of the services lack "big budget films" (as they put it)! :-)
>Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptions of streaming services.
This is it for me, except I’ve never bothered with the subscription services because they never seem to have what I want to watch at that moment.
I can “rent” a digital viewing for $4, or go on eBay and buy a new or gingerly used copy for at most $6.50 - even 4K Blu-Rays. eBay every time. RIP it, add it to media library, and the disc lives in a binder as the ultimate backup. Watch it whenever, on whatever, forever.
I have Vinyl records, but my goal is to digitize them. They're my Dads from 1940s, 50s, and many are 78s, so I had so search Kijiji ads to get a player that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was what I settled on.
As for DVDs/Blu Ray, I only buy things like Planet Earth or other docs. Sure enough, just yesterday I tried playing Planet Earth II on UHD 4K Blu Ray on an Xbox Series X, albeit I still have a 1080p TV (bought used) and 1080p Receiver (bought used, Sony STR-DN1000 that I paid $50 for) and it was glitching. sigh Time to hit up Bit Torrent and download a ripped version of the Documentary that I already paid for. Argh.
Both Blu Ray and Vinyl are susceptible to one day not being playable. By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the content playable well into the future.
> many are 78s, so I had so search Kijiji ads to get a player that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was what I settled on
Many modern turntables, including cheap ones, support 78 rpm. (Quick search finds 11 new 78 rpm-supporting models at Best Buy in Canada, starting from $80. An $85 Sylvania that supports 78s can also digitize directly to USB storage.[1])
Did you mean 16 2/3 rpm records, which the Dual 1009 supports and most modern turntables don't?
No, they are 78s, but the quality was so-so. I was able to buy this one for about $120! For the price difference, I didn't want to get an average one, and I can easily resell the Dual 1009 and get some money back as I didn't want to keep it forever.
I thought about that, but I didn't want to fiddle too much with various tweaks as I'm not an expert in this area. In fact, I'm actually thinking of buying a Tascam DR-05X, https://tascam.com/us/product/dr-05x/top and just connecting that to the amplifier, and having it produce the digital files for me. No software, no computer. Just record player to amp to Tascam.
I can then repurpose it as a microphone for Zoom/MS Teams or whatever is used.
I have a NAD C715 that can record any input, and record it straight to MP3 at 160kbps, but I'd rather record at a higher bitrate. I've yet to find ANY receiver that can do that. It's still cool that they had that, where the FM signal is converted via ADC and straight to the CODEC for mp3 on the chip.
If it gets the project done, then it sounds like a great tool!
While you're doing the analog-to digital-conversion, I would suggest sticking with 24-bit 96Khz wav, and focus purely on maximizing the quality of the analog signal. i.e. dialing in levels and stuff. Each time you play a record it degrades a little bit, and it needs to be done at 1x speed, so you don't want to be futzing with compression settings.
Once you have the uncompressed wav files, you can experiment with different codecs and bitrates until you're happy. Figuring out the software to do that isn't difficult.
You could then also keep the uncompressed wav files around on the SD card in your drawer (or losslessly compress with something like flac). If a year later you realize you made poor compression choices, you can easily fix it. Maybe you eventually become an "expert" and decide you want to do some frequency filtering or something. If the SD card dies or gets lost, oh well! :-)
Thanks for the tips! I'll keep that in mind and do 24-bit 96Khz wav. I think converting digital to digital, i.e. WAV to FLAC or mp3/aac will be straight forward, but given that I may not have that many records to convert, I'll try and keep them lossless.
I've also managed to get a working Sony STR-6800SD receiver for $200 CAD. That should help in getting a good analog phono signal.
> ...By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the content playable well into the future...
Yep, this is my preferred direction, and of course an offline-accessible though digital edition may be less prone to issues of wonky players, or warped physical media.
Why would modern ones not be reliable? They’re fantastic! Having said that, for your old vinyl collection, you will find the quality of the player mostly irrelevant. The age of those vinyls will make them sound like a 32kbits/s mp3 file!
Modern ones are reliable. However, I only went with an older "vintage" one as it came up on Kjiji for a good price, and I could resell it once I was done. I don't plan on listening to Vinyl forever. We are now so used to digital music and asking Alexa to play playlists and songs and radio stations is soooo convenient.
Btw, the Dual 1009, which is from 1964-66, maintains the speed REALLY well. I also have an Onkyo CP-1200A (got for free, someone put in the garbage), and the Dual was actually better at maintaining the speed!
You can download an app on your phone to measure the accuracy of your record player.
Oh yeah, those are all good reasons, and there's a bunch more too. It's legacy tech that is cheap, reliable, and independent, it works well anywhere that has limited scale and cares more about cost than video quality. For example :
* Some hospitals, for instance, still have entire wards using DVDs. Downtime in a room is many tens-of-thousands-of-dollars lost per hour. Outpatient medical settings often use them as well (pediatricians offices, dialysis clinics, etc)
* Some schools are still tied to the format, for multimedia installations / video carts / pre-purchased equipment / etc.
* Tens-of-thousands of minivans are sold with infotainment that's always 10 years behind modern tech. (For almost 10 years, you had to have a binder-full-of-DVDs to use any Chrysler Minivan's video player system, the only other option was the analog RCA ports next to a kids seat). My 2016 Minivan, for example, only supports DVDs and nothing else (even though both BluRay and HDMI had been common standards for 10+ years by that point)
* And of course, there's millions of homes that aren't bothering to upgrade. (Netflix still has something like 2+ million unique DVD-only subscribers each month)
The number of DVD subscribers that netflix has is definitely less than 2 million. That number is three years old, and in 2019, they lost 500,000 subscribers.
This service will not exist in less than six years.
Maybe, but the point still stands about legacy formats living a long life. I forgot about that side of Netflix's business but it's still alive and kicking!
* The bins of shit-tier movies near checkout lanes at Menards and Wal-Mart are mostly or all DVDs—if disc sales in general decline, that particular segment might remain steady.
DVDs are the main way I watch movies these days. Not because I'm a techophobe or backward, as some comments here speculate, but because I've soured on streaming, and the quality increase of Blu-ray isn't important to me.
This was a concern in the mid-to-late aughts very early into the format's debut, but not so much anymore, if at all. I have Pioneer Elite Blu-ray players running pre-2010 firmware that have never had any playback issues with new releases for 13 some years now.
AFAIU ripping software providers have switched to distributing the per-release AACS processing keys instead of the per-device keys so there is nothing to revoke unless they somehow find out which devices or device keys are being used to decrypt those processing keys - and even that would only delay new leaks until another device/player is cracked.
* Parents buy cheaper DVDs for their very young children...Children who care less about display quality.
* While travel plummeted during middle of pandemic, there were still people who took road trips (e.g. maybe for staying with family, etc.)...and during those roadtrips, i'm sure some families opted for DVDs and DVD players instead of trying to stream stuff while on the road, etc.
* Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptionsof streaming servicews. I hate this myself. So, my partner bought 3 or 4 of their favorite movies, so we can watch them whenever we want - even if we lack internet (though we would need power for the dvd player of course)
* Vinyl records have their followers who revitaliuzed the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?
I'm sure there are other reasons for why this is happening.