I recently started buying movies on Vudu. I was struggling for a long time with whether or not I wanted to collect media on physical disks or digitally.
Right now that’s what I’m doing but there’s always the looming fear of anything I buy being taken away if the service gets shut down.
I’m curious how others keep their media collections. Are you a Blu-ray or 4k UHD collector? Do you use a digital service like Vudu or something similar?
Tell me your thoughts!
One of my biggest side projects this spring was setting up my first NAS (Synology, since I’m a beginner) and all the *Arr apps funneling to Plex, with Overseer to manage actually adding movies and tv to the queue.
There’s a lot of ductwork involved up front (set up x many docker containers, get them all to talk to each other, make sure you’ve got auto-updating set up, what about a VPN, and so forth) but I’ve been super pleased with the end result’s ease of use.
There’s a lot more in the self-hosted space I want to explore too, now that I’ve dipped my toes in – mostly around music and photos. I’ve a pretty manually organized music library and would like to be able to store on my NAS and access in a nice way from every device.
We also have a small collection of Blu-ray movies and TV, but 95% of those are my partner’s – much more into physical media than me. It has a precise organization on the shelves that I don’t touch! 😂
Buy stuff to support the creators, but always have a seperate personal storage/library, don’t use services.
There’s recently been some drama on twitter, where media providers have changed the parts of some movies. Movies that were in the libraries of those who purchased them. They replaced them with a different version - some with censors, some with commentary removed, or some with whole different endings.
You never acutally own the media copy if you depend on an external service.
Exactly why I’ve been scrubbing secondhand outlets for all my favorite older movies and TV shows.
I’m on Vudu too and constantly wondering when it’s going to disappear on me, especially when the website crashes. I just can’t get past the convenience though. My external hard drive requires all these extra steps and cords to hook up to my laptop. It won’t hook up to my iPad at all, even wirelessly. None of my tech except the PlayStation even has a disk drive anymore.
It’s just too easy to pull up the app or website and hope it works for another day. Although the sellout from Walmart to Fandango was frustrating, it still wasn’t enough to give up the convenience.
