JFF: Last Movies You Bought or Rented

@cinephile​ 

But streams are rented or bought, too. I understand your issue. I'm one who still has vinyl records at home. Just my player is broken at the moment, but vinyl records were the best. They avoid digital clipping and things like that. I had and partly have sorrows about the streaming-platforms. To have a disc in the hand feels like independecy, somehow. If a provider changes a stream, you can't do anything about. De-centralized copies are still incoruptible. I was very sad, too, when our DVD-Rent-and-buy shop around the corner vanished.

Ah, but thus far, streaming services have not surpassed DVD/Blu-ray discs with regard to special features, scene selections, audio track selections, subtitle track selections and extra content, sometimes physical posters. A lot of consumers don't really value that kind of stuff, but those kinds of features are important to a significant degree. That's the roughly exclusive beauty of modern physical home media, for the time being. Perhaps in the future, torrents or at least multi-homed swarm-based distribution will compensate for all that would be lost in the absence of basic themes surrounding DVD/Blu-ray discs. That way, people can incorporate alternate (possibly custom) audio/subtitle tracks at a whim, or maybe much of it would be automated in regards to language translation.

@jeorj_euler​ 

Completely agree. Same for vinyl records.

Another point is that in times of high traffic, the quality vanishes somehow by limiting the bandwith of movie or TV-series stream data. I was totally upset, when in one of the final episodes of Games of Thrones, when passages of dark screens offered digital artefacts which were bigger than a few centimeters. It nearly destroyed the creepy atmosphere. On Bluray that wouldn't have happened.

Amazon streaming service has a bit of an edge with the X-ray feature, thanks to its relationship with IMDb, no doubt. Even so, it would be nice to have an interface likeable to that of an optical disc menu (or a Web page) instead of an interactive TV Guide menu. In the future, we probably will, but seemingly it would be a very distant future.

I should also point out that certain movies, e.g. Dogma (along with some other flicks featuring Jay & Silent Bob), will not be available for streaming for a very long time, due to licenseability being stuck in limbo.

I present "The Lost Art of DVD Menus" by Greg Kon:

@jeorj_euler​ 

"Like all good art form, DVD menus revealed who I am to myself, they helped me see what I wanted out of life."

I never thought of DVD menus that way. It is a stretch to say it is art, it is a branch of advertising. It is very optimistic to say it is "life changing". But, in this "dark times" for physical media, all love to the physical media format is welcomed. 

Some DVD menus are more or less artistic than others. Usually they merely consist of cosmetics synthesized from the featured material, as to augment the utilitarian aspects of the design, but sometimes they are like an interactive poster or a video game even.

@cinephile​ 

There are no more DVD-Blu-ray stores in my city. I must travel 45 min to find a store.

I have now, resigned. I will buy my DVDs/blu-rays online. I have already bought online the Bergman/Rosselini box set, The Man with a Movie Camera, Damnation, Ashes and Diamond, and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. So that is 7 films on 28. But, how long with this makeshift solution last, they will soon stop producing DVD/Blu-ray player so studios will discontinue their DVD/Blu-ray collections, that day even label such as Criterion and Arrow will fall. Without newer releases, the market for classic films has no chance of surviving.

@cinephile​ 

My copy of Les deux anglaises et le continent is Region 2 locked 🤬

I have a compulsive DVD-buying habit. I know will spend 500$ on buying a region free 4k blu-ray player that is why I am mad.

Gnu/Linux is often the answer to these kinds of problems.

Well, you didn't really miss anything, Breumaster​. I mean, it's not a terrible movie, but there is certainly far more interesting material to watch, especially when dealing with a streaming service that has a gigantic library.

@cinephile​ 

no more places in my library. I don't know what I will do, I don't have space to expand. I'm either gonna stack them or hang them from the ceiling with twine.

Wow. Something like fewer than a hundred DVDs, fewer than a hundred LDs and fewer than a hundred VHS tapes are in my home. Probably more books and magazines are present than the movie box sets. I don't even watch or read these things, most of my days. They are almost only treated as reference materials.