Any Reason to Collect Blu-rays These Days?

[Jeff V]

I think this might be the place I used. The green looks familiar.

http://www.selldvdsonline.com/

25% of my collection was worth less than $1 and I didn't bother. 14 DVDs didn't appear in their catalog (the entirety of the Sharpe's series, and I still have those. I think I once listed them for $100 for the set on Fleabay but no takers.

It was a little surprising what was worth something, and what was worth nothing. Very popular movies are nearly worthless (just like books) in the secondary market, too much supply. Some, like, IIRC, the two Dune series, went for quite a lot.

[JonathanStrange]

ACTUALLY, I can get behind the idea of a focused collection vs my former buy 'em 'cause they're on sale menagerie.

There are some older series I probably would like to watch without internet reliance - and unlike you big city types with your reliable internet, power, and whatnot, I don't always have internet - like some BBC comedies, like the Young Ones and Are You Being Served?. Stuff I can watch many times 'cause they're amusing to me, albeit no longer laugh out loud funny.

Anyhow, now that I've voted for, against, and no opinion I can rest. Thread killed.

[TiLT]

• A shelf full of Blu-Rays gives guests a much better visual reference when you just want to watch a movie together. "What do you want to watch?" works much better when you can just look at a shelf.

This never happened when I had a shelf full of DVDs.

Well, speak for yourself. Spontaneous outbursts of "let's watch a movie" tend to happen at my place, and I have never gotten an impression that this is anything but common.

[Jeff V]

That happens with sports sometimes. Movies? Never.

Maybe it would happen with movies too if our sports were limited to watching cross country skiing and the like.

[JSHAW]

I'm an avid buyer/collector/watcher of movies, so I gotta side on the team that buys. There are rules to
buying. I only buy what i intend to watch, movies that I want to keep and not sale at a later time.

I have a love of boxed collections.

I have every LOST episode, every Star Trek from every series and all the Trek movies, Band of Brothers, every season of The X-Files, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Invaders, every season released so far of Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, 2 different releases of the Alien franchise on bluray, that's the highlights for me.

This rack here is every bluray. On the left at the top are the movies of Kevin Smith, below are
a bunch of rock stuff dvd/blurays by RUSH, Dream Theater, Queensryche.



Dvd's - alot of comedy stuff, alot of misc. stuff.



I can understand why people in 2015 don't want to spend the money on dvd's & blurays when there are so many choices to pick from to watch a movie. Either way, you pay. You pay to rent, you pay to watch it on netflix, hulu, amazon, etc. One way or another you're gonna pay unless you're doing it illegally, which I choose to not do. I own zero pirated/bootleg'd anything. Everything movie I watch and every piece of music I listen to I paid for it, I own it.

I like my stuff, I like my collections. It's what I do, us kids from the 60's are like that. Some of us
anyway.

[YellowKing]

Very nice, JSHAW!

Yeah, I definitely understand how just seeing something on a shelf - even if you don't watch it that much - can make you happy. Some of my prized DVDs are my Puppet Master boxed set, my Nightmare on Elm Street boxed set, and my limited edition Anchor Bay tins - even though they're not worth anything, and I rarely ever watch them, just seeing them there makes me happy.

Now I just have to figure out how to scrape up some money for these three beauties:

Halloween: The Complete Limited Deluxe Edition

Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection

A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection

[JSHAW]

Sometime this year I want to get the boxed sets for The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Land of the Giants,
and the 70's series U.F.O.

[Jeff V]

One way or another you're gonna pay unless you're doing it illegally, which I choose to not do.

Amazon Prime doesn't charge me any more than what I've been paying for other services that got me to sign up in the first place. For all intents and purposes, it is free to me.

[JSHAW]

One way or another you're gonna pay unless you're doing it illegally, which I choose to not do.

Amazon Prime doesn't charge me any more than what I've been paying for other services that got me to sign up in the first place. For all intents and purposes, it is free to me.

My wife has Amazon Prime. She wanted to get it, and she has so far not used it a single time to watch any video content available to her. She buys stuff, and has it shipped for free, so to her it was a win/win.

Right now I'd say it's a win/lose. And eventually I think it will be a lose/lose.

She won't buy enough stuff so that the $100 fee she paid for Prime will work out to her advantage because they won't have shipped her packages to where it cost them $100 in shipping fees, and she's not watching the content to where she's gone above and beyond watching a shitload of content that would have been $100 worth, so Amazon wins.

If it works for you Jeff V, more power to ya. If you're watching all your content from Amazon and you're getting your $100 worth, good on you too. I just think in the end, however people want to rationalize it, you're still gonna pay for your content. Whether it's a little or alot, you're gonna pay some dollar amount.

[YellowKing]

I wish they'd come out with an on-demand rental service that didn't cost so damn much.

It's kind of ridiculous that it costs me $5.99 to rent a new release from Vudu, Amazon, or some other streaming service, when I can typically buy the DVD on release for $15.

The only cheap rental option is Redbox, and those things SUCK. I have yet to find anything at Redbox I A) wanted to rent that was B) in stock. The new releases tend to stay out of stock for weeks on end.

And yes, I know $6 is nothing compared to actually going to a theater, but it's all relative. To me, shelling out $6 to rent a single movie makes me cringe when I'm using to paying only slightly more than that in a monthly fee to stream everything Netflix Instant has to offer.

[msteelers]

The only cheap rental option is Redbox, and those things SUCK. I have yet to find anything at Redbox I A) wanted to rent that was B) in stock. The new releases tend to stay out of stock for weeks on end.

I completely disagree. There is almost always something at the redbox that the wife and I want to watch, and there are so many kiosks during our daily commute that finding the movie is rarely an issue. Plus they are constantly doing promotions for half off or free movies.

[Odin]

I used to be a collector and enjoyed having shelf after shelf full of discs. Now it's all about convenience for me - I don't want to have to get up, get a disc off a shelf, unbox it, stick it in the player, and then repeat the process in reverse when the movie's over. I want to select the desired movie from a menu and watch it. I'm using a combination of Amazon Prime and Vudu to achieve this - I find that Prime and Netflix both have a shitty selection of movies I actually want to watch, but if I can buy the movies I like at a discount then I will. The tip on the first page about converting existing discs to Vudu digital movies is HUGE and I definitely plan to take advantage of that.

[Isgrimnur]

The only cheap rental option is Redbox, and those things SUCK. I have yet to find anything at Redbox I A) wanted to rent that was B) in stock. The new releases tend to stay out of stock for weeks on end.

I completely disagree. There is almost always something at the redbox that the wife and I want to watch, and there are so many kiosks during our daily commute that finding the movie is rarely an issue. Plus they are constantly doing promotions for half off or free movies.

Not to mention that if you use their website, you can browse from wherever you are, and reserve it for later pickup.

[JonathanStrange]

Sometime this year I want to get the boxed sets for The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Land of the Giants, .
and the 70's series U.F.O.

Just FYI: The Man from UNCLE is free ( yes, nothing's free) on Amazon Prime, Land of the Giants was free (but now it's ppv), the UFO series is ppv too. Boxed sets are probably better for fans and for repeated viewing and convenience, I agree.

[Defiant]

The comment that you can upload your dvds to vudu (for a fee) to get a cloud version of your movie has piqued my interest.

So I have some questions about Vudu. I've mostly used Amazon Instant Video. How does Vudu compare to that?

In particular - Amazon allows me to download the movie to my kindle to watch on the go (but only twice).

How does the video quality compare (between Amazon HD and Vudu's HDX)

How reliable is the service (eg, outages. Is there more chance it might go out of business?) And any other comments.

Also, hepcat stated that newer releases on vudu include extras - that's only if you buy it directly, not if you upload your dvd, right?

(Extras aren't a huge deal to me, but it's nicer to have them).

[stessier]

I've never used it, but I know Vudu is a subsidiary of Walmart (to answer your question of the likelihood it goes out of business).

[YellowKing]

I've used it quite a bit for rentals and for unlocking digital copies that came with BluRays I bought. Service works fine and looks good to my admittedly untrained eye.

It seems to be becoming the primary digital platform. I know some of the hardcore BluRay nerds I follow on Twitter use VUDU for all of their digital collecting.

[hepcat]

The comment that you can upload your dvds to vudu (for a fee) to get a cloud version of your movie has piqued my interest.

So I have some questions about Vudu. I've mostly used Amazon Instant Video. How does Vudu compare to that?

In particular - Amazon allows me to download the movie to my kindle to watch on the go (but only twice).

How does the video quality compare (between Amazon HD and Vudu's HDX)

How reliable is the service (eg, outages. Is there more chance it might go out of business?) And any other comments.

Also, hepcat stated that newer releases on vudu include extras - that's only if you buy it directly, not if you upload your dvd, right?

(Extras aren't a huge deal to me, but it's nicer to have them).

I've been using VUDU (and Ultraviolet) for about 5 years now. I've yet to see their service go down. Even for a second.

The quality is very nice, but it's still streaming. So HDX, while nicer than the HD option they have for both sound and image, is still a bit lower than true blu ray. It's primarily intended for use with screens over 40 inches in size, I've read. My tv is just a shade over that, so I don't see a huge difference between Amazon HD and VUDU HDX. But I do hear a pretty significant difference in the audio.

And yes, you can download your files to your computer. You can do so with the HD or the HDX version. But be warned that the file size on the HDX is pretty big, approaching true Blu Ray size.

I've converted about 2 dozen dvds over the last year and none of them have included the extras. You only get that if you buy the movie from their store, it seems.

As a side note, they have a very active forum and their customer service is top notch. I bought a film that I thought was the director's cut, but turned out to be the theatrical release. I opened a trouble ticket on their site and within 24 hours they had refunded the purchase so I could buy the version I wanted.

[Defiant]

The quality is very nice, but it's still streaming. So HDX, while nicer than the HD option they have for both sound and image, is still a bit lower than true blu ray. It's primarily intended for use with screens over 40 inches in size, I've read. My tv is just a shade over that, so I don't see a huge difference between Amazon HD and VUDU HDX. But I do hear a pretty significant difference in the audio.

I'm fine with less than perfect quality as long as it's in the cloud. (but obviously I prefer HD over SD when ever possible). With Amazon, the video quality is usually 1080P (once it's been buffered enoguh) for HD, when I've bothered to look (it's visible on the Kindle). But it looks like HDX is the same as that, though I imagine the quality of specific movies might be a bit better on one service or the other at times.

And yes, you can download your files to your computer. You can do so with the HD or the HDX version. But be warned that the file size on the HDX is pretty big, approaching true Blu Ray size.

How many times? And can you do so for portable devices (namely Kindle/Android/IOS)? (I use Kindle for portable watching. I'd only care about downloading to my computer if there's a risk that the service was going to shut down).

I've converted about 2 dozen dvds over the last year and none of them have included the extras. You only get that if you buy the movie from their store, it seems.

OK, good to know. I can at least start by converting those dvds without extras One thing that would be cool is if you could convert SD to HD down the line (would make it cheaper to get a cloud copy, and then upgrade if I decide I want a higher quality version) but it doesnt look like they support that.

As a side note, they have a very active forum and their customer service is top notch. I bought a film that I thought was the director's cut, but turned out to be the theatrical release. I opened a trouble ticket on their site and within 24 hours they had refunded the purchase so I could buy the version I wanted.

Good to hear.

[Skinypupy]

I used to have a large DVD (500) and CD (1,000+) collection, but have essentially stopped buying physical media of any kind over the last few years. While Mrs. Skinypupy still occasionally comes home with a kids DVD from the bargain bin, I don't think I've purchased one in the last three years. The last physical CD I bought was in 2011. While I did keep most of the DVD's (just the discs, not the cases) in a binder, it's very seldom that I watch them (been at least 6 months since that binder was dusted off). I own exactly two Blu-Ray movies: Serenity and the second Batman, both of which were given to me as gifts.

If I want a movie, TV show, or album, I buy it on iTunes. I'll sometimes watch things on Netflix, but the only time I really watch anything is on airplanes or hotels, where Netflix is often not an option. I'd say that around 95% of all my media consumption (TV and movie) is done on my iPad...the only thing I use my TV for is to watch sports. I suppose that if I were an video or audiophile, having Blu-Ray discs would be a greater priority, but I'm really not. Home theater is worthless to me, since I can't turn the TV up past 5 (on a 1-40 scale) once the kids go to bed.

[McNutt]

What's that about only downloading a movie you own on Amazon to your Kindle twice?

[Pyperkub]

I used to have a large DVD (500) and CD (1,000+) collection, but have essentially stopped buying physical media of any kind over the last few years. While Mrs. Skinypupy still occasionally comes home with a kids DVD from the bargain bin, I don't think I've purchased one in the last three years. The last physical CD I bought was in 2011. While I did keep most of the DVD's (just the discs, not the cases) in a binder, it's very seldom that I watch them (been at least 6 months since that binder was dusted off). I own exactly two Blu-Ray movies: Serenity and the second Batman, both of which were given to me as gifts.

If I want a movie, TV show, or album, I buy it on iTunes. I'll sometimes watch things on Netflix, but the only time I really watch anything is on airplanes or hotels, where Netflix is often not an option. I'd say that around 95% of all my media consumption (TV and movie) is done on my iPad...the only thing I use my TV for is to watch sports. I suppose that if I were an video or audiophile, having Blu-Ray discs would be a greater priority, but I'm really not. Home theater is worthless to me, since I can't turn the TV up past 5 (on a 1-40 scale) once the kids go to bed.

I still order CD's from Amazon when they are cheaper as a full CD than the mp3 version. I also go to Amoeba Musica couple of times a year and hunt through the 1000's of used CD racks for gems to fill out my collection. I do use Amazon music for all my music, though I download all my purchases to the Synology NAS as well.

I'll probably get around to (illegally - thanks you idiot librarian of congress) ripping my DVD's/BluRays as well. It's not as important however, as music, as you don't really shuffle video media like you do songs.

[Defiant]

What's that about only downloading a movie you own on Amazon to your Kindle twice?

For any movie or show you buy on Amazon, you can only download it twice to up to two devices like kindle or other supported devices (IIRAUC), although you can rewatch it via streaming as many times as you want. For prime movies and shows, you can redownload it multiple times (I think) without a problem. I'm actually not sure if the number ever gets reset (eg, after a certain amount of time or something).

[hepcat]

And yes, you can download your files to your computer. You can do so with the HD or the HDX version. But be warned that the file size on the HDX is pretty big, approaching true Blu Ray size.

How many times? And can you do so for portable devices (namely Kindle/Android/IOS)? (I use Kindle for portable watching. I'd only care about downloading to my computer if there's a risk that the service was going to shut down).

That I do not know as I never download more than once in a blue moon. Most of my viewing is streaming. However, from what a quick look at the forums can tell me, I don't believe there's a limit. Or if there is, it's pretty high.

If you want to download to your mobile devices, you'll need to use the apps they have for iOS and Kindle. That's the only way to download to those devices. However, you can watch your movies through any web browser as well as through the apps.

By the way, if you're going to convert DVDs, try to do 10 at a time as you get half off by doing so. 10 conversions from DVD to HDX would be 25 bucks instead of 50 then.

Update: I just noticed that you apparently can only download the HDX version from their website. I wasn't aware of that. You can download the HD and SD versions if you use the Vudu to Go app. So no biggie.

[Defiant]

So I've now used Vudu, and here are my thoughts:

For the most part the quality of the HDX video I looked at is comparable to Amazon Instant Video, although I think Amazon Instant Video might be a little better (at least in my judgement - and I wasnt watching the same movies so take that with a grain of salt).

Some movies, while being HDX, are only viewable in SD on the computer (whats up with that?). I've since seen that there's a statement on the page where you buy it, but not where you import DVDs. Not a big deal, and the SD looks good....

Except for The Late Show, which looks pretty bad. yowsa. I havent compared it with the dvd, but... ouch. but for a buck... whatever.

So far, the player is a little glitchy (sometimes, when I do it full screen, it goes blank, but other times it works fine... maybe its my computer or something..)

[Defiant]

That I do not know as I never download more than once in a blue moon. Most of my viewing is streaming. However, from what a quick look at the forums can tell me, I don't believe there's a limit. Or if there is, it's pretty high.

Cool. I'd only download to watch on the go.

If you want to download to your mobile devices, you'll need to use the apps they have for iOS and Kindle. That's the only way to download to those devices. However, you can watch your movies through any web browser as well as through the apps.

Yeah, that's fine. I guess I need to explore this some.

By the way, if you're going to convert DVDs, try to do 10 at a time as you get half off by doing so. 10 conversions from DVD to HDX would be 25 bucks instead of 50 then.

Yep, that's what I've done.

[YellowKing]

Just as a little update to this thread, I did wind up buying a dozen or so horror Blu-rays and have since branched out into some non-horror movies that I really loved that were on sale. For instance, I picked up Ghostbusters 1&2, the Ghostbusters collection, and Young Frankenstein.

I do like having them on the shelf, and unlike a lot of folks I really like the special features so I listen to all the commentary tracks. For now my collecting is slow and steady - I'm trying to fully finish the discs I have before buying more, though I will pick up a title here and there if it hits for under $10.

[Defiant]

*bump*

I've been growing my Vudu streaming collection steadily the last few years. I like it because they're also tied to my Ultraviolet account (well, the majority of them, at least). Plus, the Vudu interface is just easy to use and seems to never be down.

They also have a conversion service that I've been using lately. You simply download their conversion software, insert a dvd (or blu ray) and it finds the corresponding version in its catalog. Then you pay 2 bucks to convert to a dvd to a standard definition, or 5 bucks to an HDX version (a bit better than HD). If you do 10 at a time, you get 50 percent off.

I'll probably keep doing this and then unload my old DVDs. The only downside is that you often lose all the extras that come with the dvd or blu ray editions. However, more and more of the newer releases on Vudu are including all the extras when you buy them through their service.

FYI, Vudu just added a process for disc 2 digital by scanning in the UPC symbol see here) (assuming you kept the artwork) - useful on those discs where the conversion software failed to identify the dvd. Unfortunately, they've removed the 50% off discount, too.