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.

[starfleetbrat]

I have a few dvds and boxed sets of some favourites, not many, just a small single shelf of them, and even though I no longer have a way to watch them I can't bring myself to get rid of them. They are mostly old obscure non-us tv shows and movies that will never ever make it to streaming.

I do think its important to preserve some media because even today with all the streaming options, its just impossible to access some titles. Physical media is not always an option, and streaming services push out old content in favour of their own produced shows.

Even if you take piracy into account not all titles are available to download.

[yourlibrarian]

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

[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?