Anyone find some physical media is ridiculously costly?

[Lemon Zing]

I have nearly every top ten horror movie released in the U.S. since 1922, or what is equal to a top ten chart placement thereof. I took the info from the grosses stated in American tradepapers like Variety and Motion Picture Daily, as well as Box Office Mojo.

There's a lot of other movies I would like to see that ranked in the top 40, but certain movies are either not available commercially or are just hard to come across. So in some cases, I had to buy legal bootlegs, if the film is in the public domain. However, that is only for films that reached between 1 and 10.

Anyway, I noticed on eBay that a lot of Blu-rays sellers advertise like the high quality ones issued by Arrow Video and Eureka Entertainment, well, they end up being really expensive once they go out of print. Some can fetch up to £30 or more, when they may have only been half that price initially. This is just for one film, mind you, but I assume compilation sets will be even more expensive.

It just eats through my welfare too much. Some movies are not worth watching a second time either as a lot of them were flops or only moderately successful. Then when you try to sell your used DVDs in shops, they either refuse them outright or they provide pennies.

I think I would be better off just paying for streaming services now, as there would be films strewn all over my flat. Of course, it's not the same as showing off to people what you collect, but it is just too costly to maintain this kind of hobby.

Even computers are so expensive these days. If all you really do though is surf the web, you are better off just mirroring your phone's screen to a TV using the built-in casting option or using Google Chromecast for non-smart TV sets, or look for similar dongles. That way you can just hook up one of those OTG hubs, get a desktop app or use the Samsung one hidden in the developer options, do a reboot, and you will find it's just like using any other PC.

 

[Judge]

The technology of physical media itself has gone from VHS and Beta to DVD, then HD and Blu-Ray, to 4K. Now it is fixated on streaming media, effectively making all physical media obsolete.

It's all preposterous if you've been around long enough to see the evolution of physical audio and video media, and how vendors use technology to inflate the cost of the media itself. An endless progression of high resolution to justify higher prices.

And to think it all got started when prerecorded VHS tapes first were available for a cost above $100 a piece, until Paramount decided to market their titles for around $26 a piece and the market finally took off.

Then came laser discs and their players, which essentially bombed in the marketplace.

Later we all ended up replacing our low-resolution video tapes with progressive-scan DVDs. Which seemed like a good deal given the proliferation of so many DVD titles. Especially when upconverted DVDs could be played from 480p to 720/1080p producing a much improved picture.

But it didn't end there, they had to come up with Blu-ray players outputting a native resolution of 1080p offering a sightly better picture. And at this point, many of us consumers out there are all thinking, "You've got to be kidding!" Expecting everyone to buy the same titles over and over again just because the media format improved somewhat.

And now there's 4K technology. Think of that saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!" I was willing to replace all my videotapes for DVDs. It was such a jump in quality and technology it seemed the right thing to do. But the industry just keeps inventing newer formats and expecting us to magically replace our media collections just for the next better technology always on the horizon. What's wrong with this picture?

But then I see such greed in other industries as well. Like my car dealer who emails me all the time suggestions to buy a new car, when my existing one is just fine. Not to mention most folks can't buy such a high-ticket item as if it were physical media.

And now since physical media is more or less obsolete, we're now expected to shell out $5 to $10 for dozens of streaming media platforms to have access to more movies and television that a working person can ever have time for. And on top of other costs, such as Internet and communications technologies, mobile or not.

So somewhere in this crazy process we all either got rich through some kind of osmosis, or vendors are just milking consumers like cows with all this superfluous technology.

Or to put it another way at the present, while I use streaming media, I don't pay for any subscription services and don't intend to. And geez, to think this nonsense now extends to Adobe no longer selling their software, but only renting it online at $60 a month. And making it so difficult to cancel that the federal government is now suing Adobe.

Better these days to just roll your eyes and say "NO" to whatever entertainment technology comes about any more. It's all too little for too much these days. No thanks.

Besides, 1080p works and looks just fine by me.

 

[honeytoast]

Don't look at the prices of video games.

 

[Mary Terry]

I buy Blu-ray DVDs of classic movies from around the world and British crime shows (the good ones I like) because I then own them forever and someone somewhere will always be available to repair a DVD player. It's like collecting vinyl records for the superior sound quality even though they technically are "obsolete".

 

[AspieChris]

It’s supply and demand. You’re having trouble finding it because there’s not much available, so the prices naturally go up.

Not to sound insensitive (because I agree that the industry is gouging us), but owning a copy of a movie is a luxury. And the movies you already own are valuable to you, so would you sell them for cheap?

 

[Seladon]

It is.

Used to have tons of DVDs & CDs that I sold up for space/logistical reasons a decade ago, thinking I could just buy back the ones I needed or wanted or remembered most later for pennies

 

[Judge]

Not to sound insensitive (because I agree that the industry is gouging us), but owning a copy of a movie is a luxury. And the movies you already own are valuable to you, so would you sell them for cheap?

I expect to be buried with my 400 some DVDs, thankyouverymuch.

 

[Mary Terry]

I have nearly every top ten horror movie released in the U.S. since 1922, or what is equal to a top ten chart placement thereof. I took the info from the grosses stated in American tradepapers like Variety and Motion Picture Daily, as well as Box Office Mojo.

There's a lot of other movies I would like to see that ranked in the top 40, but certain movies are either not available commercially or are just hard to come across. So in some cases, I had to buy legal bootlegs, if the film is in the public domain. However, that is only for films that reached between 1 and 10.

Anyway, I noticed on eBay that a lot of Blu-rays sellers advertise like the high quality ones issued by Arrow Video and Eureka Entertainment, well, they end up being really expensive once they go out of print. Some can fetch up to £30 or more, when they may have only been half that price initially. This is just for one film, mind you, but I assume compilation sets will be even more expensive.

It just eats through my welfare too much. Some movies are not worth watching a second time either as a lot of them were flops or only moderately successful. Then when you try to sell your used DVDs in shops, they either refuse them outright or they provide pennies.

I think I would be better off just paying for streaming services now, as there would be films strewn all over my flat. Of course, it's not the same as showing off to people what you collect, but it is just too costly to maintain this kind of hobby.

Even computers are so expensive these days. If all you really do though is surf the web, you are better off just mirroring your phone's screen to a TV using the built-in casting option or using Google Chromecast for non-smart TV sets, or look for similar dongles. That way you can just hook up one of those OTG hubs, get a desktop app or use the Samsung one hidden in the developer options, do a reboot, and you will find it's just like using any other PC.

Your local public library may have movies and other media that you can check out with a library card membership. It's worth investigating.

 

[Judge]

I have nearly every top ten horror movie released in the U.S. since 1922

1922? That's a very specific date relative to the genre.

Was the original German film "Nosferatu" released in the US in that year ?

 

[AspieChris]

I have never paid for music. ITunes is a rip-off.

I use Audacity. It’s software for Windows that records whatever is coming out of your sound card as an MP3 file. I just find the video on YouTube, and run Audacity while I’m watching the video. It’s all digital, so the copy is basically perfect.

 

[Misery]

Depends on exactly what you're after, and in what form.

Like, if you really must have physical copies of whatever, yeah, that can get tough. A lot of things simply are out of print, and people can get weird about that. Like right now the retro game market... as in, actual physical copies... has gone berserk very recently for reasons I've not figured out yet. The prices shot up and there's a lot of weird trading happening.

But of course there's always other ways. I for one am more than happy to sail the seven seas, yo ho ho...


Not to mention that a lot of things cant necessarily even be found through normal means anymore. Like, any fan of golden age arcade games? Almost all of them are unplayable unless you go to a seriously incredible amount of trouble to buy huge, super expensive machines that take up a ton of space and need constant maintenance. And that's for the ones you can actually find in a functional condition. The more obscure the arcade game, the harder it is to find. Some are pretty much impossible.

Though that's where I get to emulation. I literally have *all* of them on this thing, in my enormous archive.

I guess it just depends on what you're willing to do to get it.

 

[Lemon Zing]

@Judge You can check the Variety pages on archive.org if you know the month and year, but sometimes international films have different release dates to where they originate from.

 

[Seladon]

If you really must have physical copies of whatever, yeah, that can get tough. A lot of things simply are out of print, and people can get weird about that.

*screams in opera and Takarazuka Revue fan*

 

[Judge]

@Judge You can check the Variety pages on archive.org if you know the month and year, but sometimes international films have different release dates to where they originate from.

Actually it was just my way of asking you if "Nosferatu" was the earliest film in your collection.

Pondering the significance of your "1922" benchmark.

 

[Forest Cat]

Yeah I have a small collection of sitcoms, most of them from the 80s and 90s and most of them were very expensive for some reason.

Like this one: Titus

I would like to buy it, it's very good, very funny, but one season costs 190 dollars!!

 

[Peter Morrison]

Keep what you have and be very selective about what you purchase for your collection. I am from the pew-internet era. Aside from what a printed catalogue might offer, you had to go to a specific store to buy "specific" items. The Internet is conditioning people to impulsive shopping and instant gratification. If you are willing to pay the price being offered, this is your own decision. Slow your roll a little bit. Anything worth having is also worth waiting for. You are collecting items from a very narrow niche market. Stay wise. Collections are usually a life-long activity.

 

[Judge]

I have never paid for music. ITunes is a rip-off.

I use Audacity. It’s software for Windows that records whatever is coming out of your sound card as an MP3 file. I just find the video on YouTube, and run Audacity while I’m watching the video. It’s all digital, so the copy is basically perfect.

I must say, when it comes to digital media, I've pretty much been able to build back my audio collection in its entirety. And tweaking to optimize each file in Audacity.

Something I never fully achieved in vinyl records, cassette tapes or CDs.

 

[Lemon Zing]

@Judge Nosferatu is not included in the box office chart book published by Leonidas Fragias, who I think may be the same guy who runs the boxofficestory.com blog that is typed up in French, apart from the charts he compiles. Those are in English. But if it is the same person, he uses a different alias.

So, no. I do not own it, just because I only buy films where, if you collate the grosses for each key city listed, they may have earned enough money in ticket sales to equal a top ten placing if you were to author an actual national chart. I may rent it one day, however.

You see, old pages wrote it up more like a summary than a chart. So if you want an idea of what could chart, you have to add up the gross for every city a film is listed in, to work out how to do it as a chart format like the editions from April 1969 onwards used to provide.

What is kind of silly though, is that in the 50s, some films could not chart on the survey that got published, merely because of the number of screenings. So a film shown in only one city could actually be way more successful than a film shown in at least three areas. But because it was only featured in the one place, the magazine considered it not eligible to rank as a top ten film, when it should have been if it made enough money.

This means less popular films were essentially brought forward.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Fortunately I do not watch movies multiple times.

 

[Jumpinbare]

I have never paid for music. ITunes is a rip-off.

I use Audacity. It’s software for Windows that records whatever is coming out of your sound card as an MP3 file. I just find the video on YouTube, and run Audacity while I’m watching the video. It’s all digital, so the copy is basically perfect.

Audacity is not just for windows. I have been using it in Ubuntu Linux since about Ubuntu 8 (when I started using Ubuntu)

I buy Blu-ray DVDs of classic movies from around the world and British crime shows (the good ones I like) because I then own them forever and someone somewhere will always be available to repair a DVD player. It's like collecting vinyl records for the superior sound quality even though they technically are "obsolete".

Even if you can't find someone to fix your DVD player, you can always use the DVD drive in your Desktop or Laptop computer.

Another aspect of owning older media vs streaming/renting, is retroactive censoring. I have run across a couple of older movies that have been censored in newer releases because they have become "offensive", when they may have been quite mainstream when they were released. That would be like taking an old classic book and censoring it. (Oh wait, that's been done too.)

But "they" (fill in governmental or social entity) can't censor or otherwise change my physical media.