Laughs in jellyfin
It’s 2026 and people are still falsely conflating digital with suspect and physical with safe. We live in a world where plenty of commercial software that comes “on a disk” is unuseable without constant approval from the publisher, and plenty of “digital download” software can be downloaded once and then used and reinstalled forever without needing to ask for anyone’s permission.
I understand the confusion. For a long time, you got an item on physical media, and no-one could take it away from you. Then downloads and cloud services became popular, and at the same time this crap started happening. But not everyone’s trying to screw us with downloads, and the people who are, are doing their damndest to screw us via physical media as well.
The issue isn’t digital vs. physical, it’s own vs. lease.
I haven’t seen Sony make one goddamn good decision in the past month or more. This company is so fucked. When was the last time it stocks actually went up in value?
I think Sony noticed that Microsoft is winning the race to the bottom, and didn’t want lose (or win?) without a fight.
Ha! No doubt!
This is not the first time and it will not be the last time. You have to hold Sony accountable (as consumers), and you have to hold the license holders accountable because they are just as liable. This will keep happening on pretty much every platform that doesn’t allow a DRM free downloadable copy of the media. It will happen again.
Plenty will take this as an excuse to pirate, and I understand completely. I think it sends a stronger signal to spend your money where you actually get to own stuff. In this case, in a world where there is no DRM-free movie/TV show store, that means buying the discs. And for what it’s worth, having recently gone back to Blu Rays, it’s been a nice reminder of how much better the quality is off of the disc compared to the compressed image they send you.
I’ve been collecting CDs, DVDs, and BRs for 30 years. They fill a closet. Thank fuck for rippers, though, so I can play them all from one HD with a little sort through menu and a click.
It’s hard to keep up with all the new hotness on disks, though. If you want to know what the guys at work are talking about with Ted Lasso, or The Boys, then it’s streaming or high seas.
Drive-by spoilers haven’t been a struggle for me to avoid for about a decade now. There’s just too much to watch, and hardly anything gets that groundswell of people I know all watching the same thing. The last time it happened was probably Game of Thrones.
I had one friend recommend Ted Lasso to the rest of us; most didn’t bother checking it out, but it does in fact rule. I’m still waiting on season 5 of The Boys. The Boys, btw, was one of the starkest differences in quality between streaming and disc. I’m not even on HDR or anything, but the blacks are so much deeper than whatever Amazon is doing to wash out the image. They did kind of half-ass the subtitles though, so the defaults aren’t set properly when Kimiko starts doing sign language.
And it’s nice that I can rip my discs, but whose idea was it to make ripping them this much of a pain in the ass? MakeMKV feels like a hack, probably because it is. It’s only Blu Rays made in the past few years that even bother to put labels on the tracks so that you know what each file is, and even then, it’s probably only because it fits some standard with LCD readouts on modern 4K players meant for the living room.
Stocking up on Blu-rays can’t happen soon enough - once sales drop too low for too long, they’ll never come back. Studios will move on, manufacturing will dry up and what’s left become more expensive, the customer base will get used to them not being available, and every factor in this sentence will accelerate the other factors.
Nothing on a digital service.
Digital copies are a great way to have backups. Just don’t store your media with a third party.
Hopefully they get hit with a massive lawsuit and lose 😊
Just another reason I don’t want another console. Fuck these assholes.
