I agree with your point, to an extent. While I like owning physical media, DVD’s and BluRays have been actively made worse by the big media corporations. When I pirate a movie, I get the movie - preferably encoded in x265 2160p in its original language. It’s great quality and not hard to find.
When I buy the BluRay, here in Germany I often only get the 1080p variant of it and the localized German dub with the same handful of speakers we have to listen to in almost every movie. Why would I pay 20€ for a current movie release on a disc that’s worse than a release I can get for free on the internet? When I put it into my PS5, I have to sit through a bunch of unskippable trailers and “You wouldn’t download a car” ads before I can actually start.
And sometimes DVD releases are so lazy that they even mess up the menus, playing the German dub when I select the English dub, for example. So I have to manually switch to another audio track…
I want to own physical media, but I don’t want to own inferior products, just so I can put them on a shelf. It’s not worth it. I’ll rather hoard a few terabytes of MKV files on my NAS.
What I do like are collectors editions of certain TV series or movies. They mostly have the original language variant, bonus material, interviews, trailers etc. on disc. But current disc releases for single movies are often very painful and not worth their money.
Thanks for the insight into the state of a dying format. It’s a bit sad they don’t put more effort into it nowadays. Especially because the only ones buying them are enthusiasts probably.
And yeah like you said… you don’t need to think about size, when you torrent. I can get the best quality and the sub/dub I want without much effort. And if you don’t care about quality, pirate steaming has an even lower threshold. No ads, no bs if you do it right with an adblocker.
