> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)
This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.
Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.
it's actually a reasonably cost-effective way to collect music by going to used book stores and buying used CDs, then ripping them and serving them to yourself with something like Navidrome so that you have the convenience of streaming w/ the physical disk on a shelf somewhere
I can't stand the stupid streaming "But not on THIS service" model of movie watching, so this is how I do movies. $5 on ebay gets you pretty much any DVD you want, $100 or so for a box set of some television show, and ripping DVDs is literally one click. I've wanted to switch to BluRays lately, because HD, and they are barely more expensive than DVDs on ebay, but ripping blurays is NOT trivial.
Standard Blu Rays? Are you sure about that? I started ripping my blus at the beginning of the year and don't remember it being more difficult than buying any random Blu ray drive, downloading MakeMKV and clicking the start button.
Now, I'll 100% agree about 4K Blu rays. I got lucky in that I bought one of the handful of drives that supports ripping 4k disks (since its encryption keys were leaked?) but even after that it required finding and flashing custom firmware that was a hassle. But I got it working which is cool.
With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)
I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.
(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)