TV Tuesday: Long Term Preservation

[yourlibrarian]

aurumcalendula reported last month that a set of Wiseguy DVDs had a non-working disc. And apparently Warner Bros DVDs made in 2006-2008 will all stop working. Earlier laser disc recordings also had similar issues.

Do you have a lot of DVDs? How long have you been collecting them? Have you run into problems with them? Is it important for you to preserve particular shows?

Comments

[jo]

We have blu-rays rather than DVDs, but I guess they're not all that different. The top shelf of our one big bookcase is all blu-rays. Mostly films, however, but some TV -- the first 5 seasons of Outlander, a couple seasons of Game of Thrones (I think -- maybe we got rid of those), My So-Called Life, a few David Attenborough series (Planet Earth and the like), the first 2 seasons of Star Trek Strange New Worlds and China Beach (with original soundtrack). I can't tell you if we've any problems with them as we almost never play any of them. The films are mostly all my husband's and he just buys them now from Amazon. Personally, I'd get rid of most of them except for SNW, MSCL and the China Beach box set. Going forward, I think it's easier to just download torrents of any series you really love and save 'em on a USB stick or something.

[yourlibrarian]

Less likely to develop defects it would seem!

We have a relatively small DVD collection. Most all of them belong to my partner but they too are almost all TV series. I could only remember 4 sets of my own but I was mistaken.

We have the box sets of Angel and Buffy and Horatio Hornblower. We have all of Firefly + Serenity. and Dr. Horrible. I also have four seasons of Queer as Folk, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, S1 of Due South, and S2 of Dark Angel.

I also have the film The Incredibles for an amusing reason, which is that at the time we bought one of our older TV sets, I read that it was one of several DVD releases which included software to automatically test and optimize your color, contrast etc. settings. So since we liked the movie anyway, we got that disc.

I'm not sure if we have any Blu Rays. I remember at the time we got our Blu Ray player it was a free addition to the purchase of our television. At the time we thought this was useful because it was possible a lot of titles would move into Blu Ray format so we wanted to be able to play them. We were subscribed at the time to Netflix's DVD service.

However it was only a few years before physical formats really declined in use and, as we know, DVDs did not go away in favor of Blu Rays.

[yourlibrarian]

Very true. There's stuff that came out on VHS that never went over to DVDs either.

[barbaratp]

Por isso acho que o certo seria ter uma cópia física e ao menos um backup digital disso, incluindo talvez uma opção de distribuição vis torrent pra ajudar o coleguinha que não tem a obra.

[alchemicink]

I don't wanna think about my DVDs not working because replacing any would be a hassle 😭 hopefully I don't have any of those mentioned...

I'm a bit of a DVD collector (and now blu-rays too), though I don't think my collection is extremely large. It's been very piecemeal over the years. Just whatever I could get my hands on here and there. I think my first DVD set was season one of Star Trek Voyager because I was devastated the show was ending and I wanted to keep rewatching anytime I wanted. I remember those early season box sets were so expensive! I like having physical copies of Voyager and also Stargate SG-1 because they're some of my favorites from my teenage years, and good for easy rewatches. I never have to worry about streaming accessibility if I have it on DVD.

Most of my DVDs, however, are anime. When I had limited access options as a teen, I tried to buy as much as I could on DVD. It was always fun to get together with friends and marathon through a show. They used to put fun extras and Easter eggs on all these discs! The downside is that whole-series boxsets used to be so pricey. You could buy individual DVDs cheaper, but you only got four or five episodes. These days if I buy DVDs, it's usually some sort of Japanese media (anime, tokusatsu, etc) that might not always be available streaming. I love rewatching things and I hate losing access by relying on the whims of streaming services

[yourlibrarian]

Hopefully not! I was appalled to hear that for 2 years they made defective DVDs 🙀

Yes, they were pricey. Although I remember early VHS sets were incredibly costly (and I wonder how many people still view them). I imagine that a good bit of anime could only be gotten on disc?

[alchemicink]

It's crazy it spanned a whole two years 😬

Oh yes, there wasn't a lot of anime on TV during those days, so you had to rely on physical media if you wanted to check out more things. (Well, there were also options to pirate online, but I only had dial-up in those days so watching videos/downloading was impossible 😅)

[delphi]

I do have a lot of DVDs, and I'm working on getting more because I like having something more reliable than streaming and that also doesn't require the internet. This reminds me that I do need to get my act together and rip backups someday soon.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, sounds like a wise plan.

[china_shop]

Oh no, that's so distressing! I have four shelves piled with DVDs (with some stacks in front of the rows), a mix of TV and movies. I tend to buy the things I'm fannish about, comfort viewing (Big Hero 6!), and things I love that are kind of obscure and don't get a lot of attention.

I would have a lot more Kdramas, except that Kdramas with English subs tend to be expensive editions. I tried a couple of times to buy cheaper versions, but they were all badly transferred pirated knock-offs. I don't know if that's changed in the last five or ten years...

[yourlibrarian]

It's possible. There's been such an expansion of Asian entertainment, from music to films and TV. Just this past week I saw some stat of how many viewing hours KDramas have racked up on Netflix. It's a sizable chunk of U.S. viewing.

[china_shop]

I'm not really surprised at those stats. By and large, Kdramas are unironic, fun, playful viewing -- which isn't a genre English-language TV is very interested in. ;-p

(I do have a few fancy boxsets, most inherited from a friend who died. But although it's good to have them, if the show is available on streaming, I generally watch the streaming. It's just so convenient!)

[yourlibrarian]

It definitely can be! We sometimes watch specific show episodes over the holidays, and I remember for the first time in a long time we saw the Buffy Thanksgiving episode.

I had forgotten how long those DVD intros could be when you loaded the disc and started an episode. Plus it's slower to go in and out of one episode to the next.

On the downside with streaming, it seems every time I start the streamer or am going between menus it insists on running clips from some show it's trying to shove on me. Super annoying!

[china_shop]

Haha, yes, the Buffy animated menus take forever. (And the animation is so bad! /o\)

In fact (to get back to the topic of the post), the Buffy DVDs were the first ones I bought. I had a mortgage at the time, and was trying very hard not to spend any money, but things kept being released on DVD and then deleted from the catalogue, so I bought all the Buffy DVDs just to have them, even before I bought a DVD player.

On the downside with streaming, it seems every time I start the streamer or am going between menus it insists on running clips from some show it's trying to shove on me. Super annoying!

I go both ways on this. The random bursts of audio are annoying, and I use the mute button a lot to avoid them, but at the same time, I have one streaming service that doesn't do this, and that's equally annoying. It means the only way to get a taste/sense of the show is to actually start watching it (a lot more button presses), and then it's stuck on my "Continue watching" list until I clean that up...

[yourlibrarian]

Ah yes. I find that the streamers vary in terms of how easy they make removing something from Continue Watching. Some seem to make it impossible if you're using a TV instead of a computer.

And right now, I just started using AMC+, and there isn't even a search function on the Roku app! I had to go to the computer, find a show, and start watching it in hopes of getting it into my watchlist on the TV. Ridiculous!

[china_shop]

and there isn't even a search function on the Roku app!

Whaaaaaat? That is nuts!!

[tinny]

I do the same, I only buy the series and movies I loved. And I have the same regrets about cdramas you have about kdramas. No good way to buy them.

[china_shop]

Do they not realise they have a ready and willing market for reasonably priced, good quality DVD releases?!

[tinny]

I dont know about Korea, but for China, the international market is peanuts at best. I understand why they don't go to the trouble. (Although I think the fact that they offer things for free on youtube shows that they are at least a bit interested, but maybe that's government soft power at play more than financial interest.)

[china_shop]

Belated reply but... I think political soft power is driving the industry at least as much as economics. But if the market for DVDs is perceived as wildly outdated, I guess that's just the way it is... *rueful sigh*

[barbaratp]

Tenho muitos DVDs, infelizmente sem um aparelho para os ver no momento. Eu amo guardar esses conteúdos comigo, não se pode confiar exclusivamente na internet, é preciso ter o físico. O maior problema é guardar eles e continuar usando ou conseguindo fazer eles funcionar depois de tanto tempo. Um vhs antigo tem mais chances de rodar mesmo sujo do que um dvd

[yourlibrarian]

Oh really? I guess I probably knew that. We do still have DVD players and I know my partner has used them in the last year. But I remember our portable CD players did all break down on us.

We do still have two VCRs. I keep telling myself I will use one to digitize some home movies we have but I suspect it's not going to happen for a few more years still.

[barbaratp]

Meu vcr ainda funciona até vejo uns filmes nele, muito mais que meu home teather que queimou o leitor de dvd.

[mllesatine]

I just checked my Amazon account that goes back to 2004 and one of the first things I ordered was the first season of Six Feet Under. I did a rewatch of most of that show last year with those very same DVDs.

I still buy DVDs from time to time.

[yourlibrarian]

My DVD collection starts in that same period, maybe 2006. I remember first seeing Queer as Folk via DVD rentals locally because we didn't get Showtime.

[tinny]

I have quite a few DVDs and a handful of blurays, but I think they're mostly there for nostalgic reasons at this point. I don't rewatch them, I just like them being there in my living room.

I tell myself that I could rewatch them using the streaming services I pay for, but I think that's not actually true, because even the very old ones cost extra to stream. Oh, well.

[yourlibrarian]

I think at some point we probably will do rewatches but especially given our practice of cycling through streaming services, there's always a time pressure to see things quickly. So it doesn't set up rewatches -- we'd likely end up doing what we did the last time, which is watch 5 or 6 episodes and then stall for several years because we got interrupted and then start at the beginning again.