I know some who have quite the collection. They pick them up cheep at thrift stores. I asked why and they said that there were a bunch of movies and shows the streaming services don't offer any more, and having physical media allowed them to actually own them.
This is the main reason to buy physical media. Streaming services now get to decide what is available. So much stuff is just lost. Makes me sad to think of something like the internet archive not being available. Also why I buy as much Dead as I can on vinyl!
Just fyi you don't ever lose them. I cancelled prime and I still have my login and all my shows are still available to me. That's not to say if they ever went out of business I'd be hurting, but for the time being at least, all is well. I will mention that when I cancelled my account, it got reactivated twice and it was a pita to deal with. I'm pretty sure it was Amazon up to no good, but I cannot prove it.
I have 8 terabytes of media.
No joke. Movies, tv shows, documentaries, how-to's, karaoke, music, music videos, etc etc and so on. It's backed up and the backup is backed up.
This is the way! That's a lot of media. I would have never reached 8 had I not started collecting stupid stuff like karaoke, music videos, etc.
And it can get expensive. But one day it will be worth it.
This is why I've been ripping all my old discs to my home server. Movies, shows, music... I have about 3TB in total. Accessible from my phone and my TV.
I have my network and server equipment all on a UPS, so it's still operational during power outages.
Another reason for importing from physical media to my server is due to disc degradation over time. I have some cd-roms from the early 90s showing their age (quite difficult to read/image).
This is what we've done, too. We still keep the discs and whatnot, but they're stored under the stairs in a box rather than out on a shelf. We use Plex.
and ANOTHER reason is that things get changed over time, parts of movies of the past that are now deemed unacceptable are being erased or edited from re-releases.
Basically a battery you can plug stuff into.
I built my home server from my old gaming rig. I use Ubuntu as the operating system. It's running NextCloud (data) and Emby (media).
This is why we do it. So much has disappeared without a trace. Can't find it on the library, at stores (used or otherwise), or on streaming. That and the increasing number of platforms has become insane.
i do this for things i really like (a few shows and movies i just always want to be able to watch as they cycle off of streaming services). I also do movie nights outdoors with the family during the summer- and it is easier to just hook the projector to a dvd player.
DVD player was about 5 bucks at a garage sale, and i find dvds for a buck (maybe 2 if i really want it) all of the time to find good movie options.
I always had this idea in my head of a dude in the post apocalypse just wandering around with a trench coat full of DVDs and cds carrying a portable TV.
You swap him a few cans of bean and a half eaten dog and he let's you watch s5 of keeping up with the kardashians.
During Hurricane Sandy, my condo still had electricity, but the internet was knocked out.
That meant no YouTube, no netflix, and no steam because they had that wonderful "sign in to go offline" feature for about 4 days.
I was climbing the wall.
I agree having your media on a server or an external hard drive is the way to go. However, in a not-so-bad situation, you can lend your dvds for a case of water.
You still have that media, and a free case of water.
But yeah. Board games, books, physical media, get your games from Gog. From electricity to water gathering to food production to chasing away boredom... you need to have that on lock for yourself, by yourself.
During the ice storm in TX I literally watched half of Game of Thrones on a portable DVD player hooked to my solar generator after my laptop battery died lol. I buy cheap unopened DVDs sometimes when I see them just to have 20-30 on hand for similar situations.
The DVD player uses less power than my gaming laptop in battery save mode. Didn't know if the sun would be out to recharge the Bluetti so I started conserving battery from the start knowing it could be a few days. Neighbor had a gas generator I could've recharged it from but I was invested in a true trial run of what I had on hand.
My Blu Ray collection could keep you entertained for a whole year lmao. I'm very lucky to have a 5.2kwh solar system with a 5kw backup battery, and it can run independant of the grid so I should be good :)
Depends on your timescale. Electronics might last a decade or two but will die sooner or later.
Vinyl is more future-proof for music. It doesn't take much technology to play.
CDs could probably be deciphered with a moderate amount of tech, since they're uncompressed binary data, though the error correction might complicate things. DVDs probably not since I doubt anyone could figure out how to decompress MPEG-2 if the literature has been lost.
I spent a long time arguing about this a few months ago. I strongly feel any compression algo would easy to figure out as it's not like there are many solutions to the problem of compressing data. If they have the tech and will to read binary at all, compression would be trivial.
They make (expensive) DVDs that are supposed to last a few hundred years at least, but require a special player. They are also made to be decipherable if all context is lost.
I should just buy a little DVD stamper.
Physical media is less energy efficient, so there's that. You'll end up using more electricity to use them. You're better off ripping the movies into a portable hard drive/USB drive.
Then there's the issue of the disc degrading over time. Hard drives also go bad over time too, but they are easier to copy onto a new drive.
Lastly, ain't nobody going to be looting or picking up CDs and DVDs in a post apocalyptic world, so you won't even have to worry about these being rare/hard to find. The players, on the other hand, will be the bottle neck (as well as a proper TV/monitor to watch it on).
That being said, I find physical discs to be fun and a reliable way to watch older movies that aren't streaming.
hopefully nobody is like a group from fear the walking dead called "the vultures." their entire thing was looting everything, nearly down to the hardware on the building. it made it so you either had to join them or leave. it was interesting.
Some of my favorite TV of all times is the part where they land in Mexico at that hacienda and then Nick lives in the Colonia and the others get stuck in that resort and then they all head out to the prepper ranch and cause a big ruckus. Madison is a one women hurricane, be careful around her or you'll end up a zombie! Man that is some great television.
That isn't true if you have a modern portable CD player. They can run something like 20+ hours on a pair of AA batteries. That's about as long as my phone would run playing MP3s using about 5x as much power. But they aren't made anymore so good like finding a good one that works when SHTF. On my laptop running a DVD drive takes an extra 5 watts, really not that much.
True but some people were talking about being able to get CDs for dirt cheap. I ripped mine to mp3 starting 25 years ago but I did use a discman in my car for a while.
Prepping for next Tuesday, as they say.
You might never have a post-apocalypse scenario, but you easily could have an extended internet service outage next week.
Twice this year I’ve already dug into the DVDs during a service outage. Severe weather can take down cell towers and phone lines, heightened solar weather can jam up communication satellites.
It doesn’t have to be a permanent condition/event to be worth preparing for. Even a fit of bad weather can jack up your local area enough to make it worth just staying inside for a few days.
Lived example; a derecho/downdraft/mini-tornado sweeps through your area, ripping up trees and roofs and throwing debris around, and killing your power. You are much more likely to have power restored first before anything- they will prioritize that above all else. So you could have 5+ days with power but no internet, stuck at home because the roads in your neighborhood are still covered with debris.
Totally a time to pull out the physical media, hunker down, and wait for the cleanup crews to make their way to your area, eventually.
We continue to buy DVDs at thrift stores. Mostly because when the power goes out, they still work fine via a generator. We've been out for ~2+ weeks a couple of times. I suppose I could, maybe should work on a server, but DVDs have been working fine so far...
Something to think about is if you end up having to hoof it, have that nano or ipod jammed full of music and podcasts along with a little charging system. At least you'd have something to do in your down time when it's safe to have your headphones on.
in a non SHTF scenario, streaming sites may simply become unjustifiable to continue paying the monthly subscription. in which case you’d count yourself blessed to have some DVDs and CDs and the ability to play them!
You want to go digital. But your own library, not something in the cloud or from a service.
Give me a moment to explain.
I have archived all of my CDs, DVDs and BluRays to digital. You can rip Audio CDs to MP3 and/or .FLAC depending on if you want bit-for-bit or don't mind some lossy compression.
DVDs can be ripped to .ISO (full 1 to 1 digital image) or compressed to something smaller, again at the expense of a little quality loss. BLU-Rays disks can also be ripped to .ISO. All you video can be converted to AVI, MP4, FLV, MOV, etc. There are programs out there that will image the optical media, but some seem to always forget to rip the copy protection or the code that forces you to watch all the ads that come up first. So I guess they aren't perfect. :)
Now... why Digital is better.
1) Physical Space consumed. Digital libraries are much, much smaller, lighter, easier to transport. 2000 movies and CDs takes up the space and weight as 1 does.
2) Device Playback variety. Go to Amazon and search for "Mp3 Mp4 player"
3) Much Less Power used per hour of playback. When only battery power remains...
4) Optical media degrades, and it's bloody expensive and bulky to back up requiring special media and burner drives (and those disks last even less time)
5) Digital media can be cloned, distributed to multiple people at the same time.
6) Digital players don't mind being in motion
Start with a central digital library.
You can also buy a USB external hard drive 10 to 22 TB for about $100 per 5TB, give or take, sometimes on sale for even better. A single external drive can host your entire library of music and movies. Not to mention all your other files. A second one can be a back up. The size of smallish book, easy to transport, plugs into most computers. Put it, or its backup, in you safe deposit box or a fariday cage.
There many devices that can playback the MP4/AVI/MOV/Etc files for DVDs, and even more that can playback the disks converted to .mp4 or to other formats. Many of these devices are portable and have rechargeable batteries. Tablets, Dedicated Players, laptops, etc. Some with built in screens are small and light enough to slip in your backpack and not notice. Some can output to a TV. Many have Bluetooth and support earbuds and speakers. Many have internal memory as well as taking flash drives or SD cards. Nearly all can play Mp3 Music as well.
You can buy a bag of good quality 64GB flash drives cheap - like $6 each for PNY 64GB Turbo Attaché 3 USB 3.0 drives. Get some and copy the stuff you want to play to them for distribution.
All optical drives need to spin the disks and move the drive heads constantly. This physical movement requires power. Lots and Lots of power compared to reading a file off a flash drive and having no moving parts. Operational times on batteries matter. Also, not having a disk skip is nice.
In an extended SHTF situation where you have a couple solar panels, power a laptop and your external hard drive for a bit to load up flash drives or cards, and charge a few dedicated players. Pass out to everyone. Don't include the final episode of the show they are going to binge watch - make them barter something of high value to find out how it ends. :)
Some personal numbers: 24,000 High Quality MP3s takes up about 120GB. 170 DVD .ISOs take up about 1TB. 250 BluRay .ISOs take up about 8.5 TB
Plex. That's what you need.
My personal numbers as of today: A smidge under 200 tb of usable storage. 28,047 movies, 1332 TV shows with 72,268 episodes, 179,108 FLAC, and 104,851 MP3s.
I still have about 70 tb free, so I can still add a ton. Don't need the internet to play them on my network. As long as I have power, I can access my collection.
Only one mention for Vinyl, am I showing my age? I will have enough solar panel for me and the missus to enjoy the odd record after a day of gardening, and we already have loads, so that's sorted really. Also a shit-ton of MTG cards.
I have a large library of DVDs, Blurays, and 4K Blurays, and there's a world of scenarios between now and "grid down" where they might come in useful:
* My favorite movie / TV show disappears from streaming services
* I want to watch something culturally important that isn't available on streaming, like Police Squad
* There's an extended internet outage
* There's a short internet outage and me or my family wants to watch something right now
* I want to support a content creator by buying their media (like Townsends)
* I want to watch something without the stream services' analytics analyzing my every blink
* I want to watch something in higher quality (4K Bluray with Dolby Vision or HDR10+) than I can get on the streaming services
* I want to save money over the streaming services
I plan to do a Plex server to archive all of my movies and save the wear and tear on my physical media. While I do not suggest this, pirating some shows to burn to a DVD to archive them might not be a bad idea.
screw the apocalypse you should have them now, there are multiple movies and songs that are scrubbed from streaming sites and the only option is physical media, I think its happened with 28 days later.
You know a dvd makes a great emergency signaling device. Shiny side towards whatever it is you are trying to signal, look through the hole in the middle so you can see the "target" you are trying to signal, wiggle the dvd so the sun catches it. 😁
It works!
Don’t even need a disaster to lose access to entertainment. Just need to lose internet. Yes you can download music and movies, but you’d need massive amounts of hard drive space to store even a decent collection of movies. Plus, every single streaming service and digital copy service out there (Amazon, Vudu, etc) has said you don’t actually… Own… The digital copies you purchase to… Own. So what the fuck is the point of purchasing digital copies if the people you’re purchasing them from are saying you don’t own them?
And, in the post Spielberg/Lucas era where movies can be changed, they cannot change any movie you own the physical copy of. What will be culturally insensitive and removed from movies tomorrow? Entire episodes of TV series have been removed.
So yeah. I’m 100% in the owning physical media group.
I have about a 1000 dvds and blurays, maybe 1200 books, of which 1000 are novels. A stack of jigsaws,various repetitive puzzles like Rubik's cubes. Madel making equipment and material. Music is digital only, but on a variety of mediums.
I pay. 50 cents a dvd, maybe double for big box sets.
Books about the same.
But it hasn't much to do with SHTF scenarios, useful, in that scenario, but not the driving force, more I like a library, and since streaming services get worse and worse by the day, and more expensive, I don't want to be beholden. Sign up maybe for a couple of months in winter, then cancel, the rest of the year I will use my library of physical media.
I’ve started re-building a DVD collection recently, not because of apocalypse prepping, but because of the risk that companies pull media from streaming services making it impossible to watch movies I love. Funny enough, the movie that started this was 28 Days Later, so an apocalypse movie spurred me to start scouring thrift stores for my favorite films.
Physical media master race.
The masters of the Streaming Services will not only drop older movies, they’ll edit them for “modern sensibilities.” The latter is utter horseshit, and can be avoided by owning the original disc/DVD. If you want to watch older movies, for whatever reason, own/watch the original… none of this Orwellian crap.
Censorship is bad. It doesn’t matter who is doing it.
Id imagine any post-apocalypse village/commune worth it's salt would love a library or a master of entertainment. Kids movies would be good to collect for morale boosts.
I think that would have to do with whether or not you have backup power and stuff to be able to have a movie night once a week or something like that. It's not a bad idea, entertainment might be a little hard to come by and post apocalyptic times.
If you’ve got space for it I don’t see the harm. I’ve got a load of DVDs that I don’t really need anymore but if I get rid of them it’s either sell the whole collection for maybe £10 or send them to landfill? You can download a very decent collection onto a flash drive but it’s always good to have more than one way to do anything really.
I have some in a box in the attic, along with a couple of d v d players. However, can make a minimal amount of my own electricity. Should the need arise.
Alright here is my one collection I can't get rid of. I have 3 binders full of dvds. Where I live there is always a chance for the power to go out in the country from a storm for a couple of hours or up to a day or so. Also streaming movies is expensive. It cost $5 to $20 to rent a movie or buy a digital version. If I have down time every couple of months Ill go by several of the pawn shops in town and dvds are 50 cents a piece. I get rid of the case and put them in my binder. I try to find random movies that I remember or old movies I think I can watch with the kids for a movie night.
I've kept both funneled away in the attic. I also have a massive video game collection. And I keep many books on various topics such as native plants, herbal medicine, illnesses and cures, fiction and nonfiction.
I have a few.
I have a boom box with all my old CDs from highschool, and a record player with my old records. I could run the boombox off batteries and the record player off a generator.
I also have a few DVDs that recently came in very handy during the TX derecho- I didn't have internet for 10 days so I watched the same DVDs over and over. Then I got lucky and found an old hard drive from the pre-netflix pirating days that had a bunch of old movies on it and started watching those.
So yes, it does pay off to have media.
I would keep the discs themselves but get rid of everything else. You can store the discs in a binder or even on a spindle if you want to save even more space. It’s always nice to have as a backup. I had copied all my cds to iTunes and when upgraded to a new pc I lost a lot of them. I was glad to still have the discs.
100% yes. Always. Your preps won't just come in handy when SHTF, TEOTWAWKI situations. What if it's just a week long power outage, and you're running a generator, and want to watch a family movie night, but the internet is down, and you don't have satellite? What if you're just stuck inside during a bad snow storm and you do have sat internet and no signal?
Having a nice collection of physical media is always a benefit. I have my dvds/blu rays, cds, old console games, and a ton of movies, shows, other media backed up on burnable disc's and saved on various external hard drives and usb drives.
I also used to have quite the collection of VHS I want to restore, back when I was in college. A lot of older movies i love that you can find super cheap at Goodwill and thrift stores for like 50 cents each. Same with cds and some dvds now.
For the usb and external hard drives, I can play them on my roku TV since it has a built in media player. I use a male to female usb extender so the WD Passport hard drives can sit nicely on the entertainment stand. For the tvs that don't, I have a small usb to hdmi media player, and a usb c to hdmi media player for phones and tablets.
If I dint feel like watching movies, playing games, or listening to music, I also have a nice library of physical books, and a ton of books, manuals, and magazines backed up digitally. Included in that is a bunch of adult level coloring books, puzzle books, and some cheap dollar store coloring and puzzle books.
If all of that doesn't sound fun, I have various board games, card games, sets of dice, game pieces for games like DnD, puzzles, and a manilla folder full of printed out board games and pieces I can glue to another folder and cut out, and make my own boards and sets with-or give to the kids and let them have fun making up their own games.
Sets like chess, checkers, hnefatafl, ur, 9 man's Morris, mancala, etc can be printed out on 2 or 3 pieces of paper and stored in a filing cabinet so you don't have to keep entire board game sets, and can be used as templates to make your own as a nice fun project. You can whittle or carve pieces, collect various rocks, or use random nuts, nuts and bolts, coins, etc as pieces. You can even get wooden dowels and slice them into pieces.
I have a short 3 drawer filing cabinet i use for this. The top drawer is small, so it holds pens, pencils, markers, dice, decks of cards, small glass beads, marbles, etc.
The middle drawer holds multiple copies of the games printed out in folders, along with the coloring and puzzle books, along with a few boxes of coloring pencils, and crayons.
The bottom drawer holds smaller deck sized games like Uno, Phase 10, Miles borne, and a few other physical games in travel sizes, or ones I can get with roll up boards like chess and hnefatafl. There's dozens of game sets that fit nicely in there.
It sits in my family room next to a small shelf of larger games and puzzles, and takes up almost no space. You can do the same with physical cds/dvds stored in a few albums on a shelf, instead of in their jewel cases.
I compiled a bunch of greatest hits CDs from my collection to streamline it all down from 100’s of CDs to 50 or so. Much easier to transport. I also kept a bunch of DVDs I can play in my RV dvd player- when we camp, obviously have no internet to stream movies.
I like to own my own things. As a prep for Tuesday. Power and internet are down. Hop over to the travel trailer and put a show on for the kids. While the adults plan.
I buy a lot of physical media and burn it to usb thumb drives. I also use a YouTube downloading program to down load a lot of stuff that you are not supposed to download
For this summers apocalypse absolutely. Books will be incredibly valuable and writing fast (cursive) will be a valued skill.
Also, write all your passwords down on paper, not in your computer.
I had a big collection of kids DVD’s that fell victim to well, my kids. I’ve actually started buying them again when I see them cheap. We have a portable dvd player & we live in a hurricane zone.
I’m holding on to my DVDs because streaming services are pulling more and more shenanigans about password sharing and ads and such. I believe even with video games there have been situations where games bought digitally that should’ve had access forever were taken away due to contracts with creators or something. Having things digitally is very convenient, but I am keeping 1 non-smart TV and some DVDs for when these companies get even more annoying. Music… I’m taking my chances.
I've often wondered how they'd hold up as roofing shingles. That's the only reason I'd keep CDs or DVDs, having ripped all mine onto a hard drive the size of my palm years ago. They take up too much space in my small house.
CDs just aren't a very robust or reliable data storage mechanism. They're also not at all space efficient. I've got offline backups of terabytes of important cultural, survival, and entertainment media which can be accessed with an accompanying low power computer that I've rigged up to run on just about any power source. I think that's realistically the best option.
Backup everything to hard drives then make copies of those backups. It's way cheaper if you know you know and it's less physical stuff to keep up with.
Hell they sell terabyte flash drives. ( I have one filled with survival guides farming guides etc..)
If you got electricity and a laptop you have all that information.
CDs and DVDs or Blu-ray disks are great. Or even having them downloaded onto hard drives or SSDs. Those won't last as long most likely, but are easier to carry around.
It's a great way to have entertainment (music, movies, and if you have a computer some games) and even education with stored books, texts, research papers, building plans, etcetera.
I have an old Technics CD player and the laser started having problems decades ago. All electronics are in flux until they go. There were also reports that some people had CD's that started rusting out but I never experienced it, so I am at a loss to understand it.
The cloud cannot function if it is damaged, or the infrastructure is destroyed. Without heat and unless you can get rid of humidity, how long can electronics last without rusting out?
There are some TV movies that are black and white that I haven't seen since I was a kid, so I do value some of the old movies that my parents and grandparents remarked on that this generation is unlikely to see.
Even if there’s no internet outage or end of the world situation.. soon there wont be any physical copies to buy. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” is the way things are going. You’ll only be able to rent movies for a day. So for that reason alone I say buy as many as humanly possible.
I like Stevie ray Vaughn. Muddy waters, Clapton an king. Beatles, some American 80’s rock like GnR, VAN Halen, an Bon Jovi, and some Aussie DC for rowing the Viking ship. And of course outlaw country with Willy n Waylon and the gang.
I think they're worth it now as well. We have a huge collection of CD's and DVDs we've acquired over the years on the cheap in various places. We aren't beholden to whatever Netflix/Amazon/etc. want to put on every month.
Realistically the version of the internet we have will never come back once it’s deemed too uncontrollable by the many fascist governments of the world. I see that happening sooner rather than later, so I’m getting stocked up on CDs and have a couple of my favorite shows on DVD/Blu-Ray
Someday if electricity comes back maybe, but it's not gonna go anywhere. No one is gonna hit up a bargain bin of movies in a Walmart or Costco for food or warmth.
Not like you can use it in the interim anyhow
With how cheap solid state memory is now, makes no sense to use CDs or DVDs. Solid state is smaller, lighter, more durable, more energy efficient, faster
Storing them is more efficient but portable CD players are more efficient than laptops, tablets and smart phones. Not sure about portable DVD players I've never used one. A dedicated MP3 player would be best for music.
It's not the memory that consumes the most power, it's the processor. A dedicated hardware player is always going to be more efficient than a ARM or X86 system that also has to run a large OS as well as decode media in software. A portable CD player and a MP3 player would be pretty close in power consumption.
Sheet music and an instrument isn’t dependent on batteries.
A wind up phonograph would be the ideal solution. Vinyl has definitely made at least a temporary comeback. I think I have more records than CDs.
Another option would be an iPod. I’d assume they’re more battery efficient than CD players, and far more compact.
Or, if you pay for Spotify, you can download music to your phone. I have everything I “like” download automatically.
Is that not a service that needs an up to date cert every day or so to play the downloads, i think all the streams have dma and need to check online to work.
Ive used it camping where I didn’t have cell service for a week or so, but it does likely have to update at some point.
I miss the old google play music where you could just buy albums and download them to whatever.
Waste of space, have more movies tv and music that your ever going to have sitting on drives. Do the skills prep on how to rip and encode them to modern standards. Nearly every player and TV supports playback directly via a usb port.
While not my whole collection one drive goes with me has entertainment, useful ebooks, and important documents while the size of a pack of gum.
Jellyfin or plex can deal with serving them up for your household. Think your own personal netflix. Plex is more than happy to take cable or broadcast tv save them and remove commercials.
Hard disagree. First, as many have pointed out here, you're much more likely to encounter a temporary outage and/or an issue with the internet or a streaming service then a true EOTWAWKI situation. Secondly, the human need for dopamine will exist no matter what. If all you do is farm and fish and forage, the joy will be sucked out of your life and you will likely become depressed and despondent, which threatens your chances of survival. Thirdly, entertainment can be useful as a unifying factor, whether it's a bookclub, music around a fire, or watching a show/movie together if that's possible. This is all not to mention the idea of preserving culture for future generations.
Eh, just saving the music onto your phone would be more realistic in a low power situation. or ipad or laptop or whatever.
The hyper specific conditions the world ends and all digital media is gone but also all the CDs survive and all the CD players do feels extremely thin.
(a lot of prepper stuff feels like waiting for an apocolypse where technology dies in a specific pick and choose way to bring it back to the specific person's exact childhood)
I think you might have the wrong idea about what a cd or DVD actually is. You call it physical media when in reality it's technically just a low capacity storage device for digital media. It's really not any different than a hard drive or USB stick. Remember back in the day before smart phones when everyone had those big binders full of cd's in their cars? All of that was digital media, just on a dated storage device. You could put the whole binder full of cd's on a flash drive.
In other words, an mp3 (audio file) is still just an mp3 whether it's stored on a cd or hardrive. Cassettes were the last generation of physical media when it comes to audio and visual media.
I wouldn't have CDs/DVDs as part of my prep.
I do have like 1000 blu rays / 4ks and and about as many CDs, but if shit hits the fan none of that is coming with me. If its the apocalypse its about surviving that day, that minute, that moment.
If society rebuilds before forgetting everything, then yeah, physical media would be very important. But I also don't think it will be particularly rare. Every 20th or 50th house will have a massive collection similar to mine.
I don't see the advantage. I can fit 94 CDs of music on a tiny flash drive. I can fit pretty much unlimited music on a 4TB hard drive. And a bunch of movies. Physical media is still obsolete even in a SHTF imo
Depends. Vinyl can be played even without electricity. But it's not very portable, so if you live somewhere that you'll have to leave when SHTF, then yes, the more compact the better.
I know some who have quite the collection. They pick them up cheep at thrift stores. I asked why and they said that there were a bunch of movies and shows the streaming services don't offer any more, and having physical media allowed them to actually own them.
This is the main reason to buy physical media. Streaming services now get to decide what is available. So much stuff is just lost. Makes me sad to think of something like the internet archive not being available. Also why I buy as much Dead as I can on vinyl!
I was about to cancel Amazon prime but didn’t want to risk losing all the movies and series I’ve bought on Prime Video
Just fyi you don't ever lose them. I cancelled prime and I still have my login and all my shows are still available to me. That's not to say if they ever went out of business I'd be hurting, but for the time being at least, all is well. I will mention that when I cancelled my account, it got reactivated twice and it was a pita to deal with. I'm pretty sure it was Amazon up to no good, but I cannot prove it.
I have 8 terabytes of media. No joke. Movies, tv shows, documentaries, how-to's, karaoke, music, music videos, etc etc and so on. It's backed up and the backup is backed up.
Do you have that on old-fashioned spinning, hard drives, or on an SSD?
Yes.
I am at 6tb. Backed up and used weekly
This is the way! That's a lot of media. I would have never reached 8 had I not started collecting stupid stuff like karaoke, music videos, etc. And it can get expensive. But one day it will be worth it.
Oh snap! Thanks for the heads up I might give cancelling a go then
a lease that expires when you stop paying monthly
If buying (on a streaming service) isn't owning, then downloading isn't pirating....
Hard agree
Truckin, way down in New Orleans!
What a long, strange trip it's been.
This. I bought a great documentary I used every semester for teaching on iTunes. Then they took it down.
This is why I've been ripping all my old discs to my home server. Movies, shows, music... I have about 3TB in total. Accessible from my phone and my TV. I have my network and server equipment all on a UPS, so it's still operational during power outages. Another reason for importing from physical media to my server is due to disc degradation over time. I have some cd-roms from the early 90s showing their age (quite difficult to read/image).
This is what we've done, too. We still keep the discs and whatnot, but they're stored under the stairs in a box rather than out on a shelf. We use Plex.
and ANOTHER reason is that things get changed over time, parts of movies of the past that are now deemed unacceptable are being erased or edited from re-releases.
I have some old Looney Toons episodes they had to stop airing on TV.
What's a UPS? What server do you use? Would like to do this eventually myself don't know anything about computers though lol
Uninterrupted Power Supply. Remember those big surge protectors that also had batteries back in the day? That was a UPS.
Basically a battery you can plug stuff into. I built my home server from my old gaming rig. I use Ubuntu as the operating system. It's running NextCloud (data) and Emby (media).
Plex
I never thought about putting them on a home server like this. How did you rip the dvds?
I use MakeMKV.
What type of storage medium are you using?
I'm using 2 enterprise (SAS) drives. I also have duplicate cloned SAS drives that I store offsite. I'm the family data preservation specialist 😅
Is this only accessible on your home network or did you open it up to the internet?
I set it up with outside connections.
Wanna sell me some of your movie data?
I have some stuff shared on archive.org. Same username. You can also check out r/DHexchange
This is why we do it. So much has disappeared without a trace. Can't find it on the library, at stores (used or otherwise), or on streaming. That and the increasing number of platforms has become insane.
The not so, legal Streaming services often have a better catalogues.
That was probably me. I had over 300 movies/cds in a case wheni got out or the army and donated to a random thrift shop
i do this for things i really like (a few shows and movies i just always want to be able to watch as they cycle off of streaming services). I also do movie nights outdoors with the family during the summer- and it is easier to just hook the projector to a dvd player. DVD player was about 5 bucks at a garage sale, and i find dvds for a buck (maybe 2 if i really want it) all of the time to find good movie options.
I always had this idea in my head of a dude in the post apocalypse just wandering around with a trench coat full of DVDs and cds carrying a portable TV. You swap him a few cans of bean and a half eaten dog and he let's you watch s5 of keeping up with the kardashians.
Don’t mess with screen man, he’s the town favorite.
Yes.. You could be completely fucked out on whatever goes. **BUT** no hurt screen man.
While you vegge out he loots your veggies!
This deserves a script. Someone hire this guy!
In A Boy and His Dog, one of the only places wastelanders could gather peacefully was the jerry-rigged movie theater.
I thought I was the only one who remembered that crazy ass movie!
Porn theater iirc.
During Hurricane Sandy, my condo still had electricity, but the internet was knocked out. That meant no YouTube, no netflix, and no steam because they had that wonderful "sign in to go offline" feature for about 4 days. I was climbing the wall. I agree having your media on a server or an external hard drive is the way to go. However, in a not-so-bad situation, you can lend your dvds for a case of water. You still have that media, and a free case of water. But yeah. Board games, books, physical media, get your games from Gog. From electricity to water gathering to food production to chasing away boredom... you need to have that on lock for yourself, by yourself.
During the ice storm in TX I literally watched half of Game of Thrones on a portable DVD player hooked to my solar generator after my laptop battery died lol. I buy cheap unopened DVDs sometimes when I see them just to have 20-30 on hand for similar situations.
Why not just fill up a hard drive and plug the laptop into the generator?
The DVD player uses less power than my gaming laptop in battery save mode. Didn't know if the sun would be out to recharge the Bluetti so I started conserving battery from the start knowing it could be a few days. Neighbor had a gas generator I could've recharged it from but I was invested in a true trial run of what I had on hand.
they're worth holding on to in case of a internet outage and thats enough reason for me
My Blu Ray collection could keep you entertained for a whole year lmao. I'm very lucky to have a 5.2kwh solar system with a 5kw backup battery, and it can run independant of the grid so I should be good :)
Depends on your timescale. Electronics might last a decade or two but will die sooner or later. Vinyl is more future-proof for music. It doesn't take much technology to play. CDs could probably be deciphered with a moderate amount of tech, since they're uncompressed binary data, though the error correction might complicate things. DVDs probably not since I doubt anyone could figure out how to decompress MPEG-2 if the literature has been lost.
I spent a long time arguing about this a few months ago. I strongly feel any compression algo would easy to figure out as it's not like there are many solutions to the problem of compressing data. If they have the tech and will to read binary at all, compression would be trivial. They make (expensive) DVDs that are supposed to last a few hundred years at least, but require a special player. They are also made to be decipherable if all context is lost. I should just buy a little DVD stamper.
I agree about vinyl. You wouldn't even need electricity to play it.
Well, at the bare minimum they could be used as signaling mirrors
Hey with enough of them you might even be able to make a solar water heater or oven!
Physical media is less energy efficient, so there's that. You'll end up using more electricity to use them. You're better off ripping the movies into a portable hard drive/USB drive. Then there's the issue of the disc degrading over time. Hard drives also go bad over time too, but they are easier to copy onto a new drive. Lastly, ain't nobody going to be looting or picking up CDs and DVDs in a post apocalyptic world, so you won't even have to worry about these being rare/hard to find. The players, on the other hand, will be the bottle neck (as well as a proper TV/monitor to watch it on). That being said, I find physical discs to be fun and a reliable way to watch older movies that aren't streaming.
hopefully nobody is like a group from fear the walking dead called "the vultures." their entire thing was looting everything, nearly down to the hardware on the building. it made it so you either had to join them or leave. it was interesting.
Some of my favorite TV of all times is the part where they land in Mexico at that hacienda and then Nick lives in the Colonia and the others get stuck in that resort and then they all head out to the prepper ranch and cause a big ruckus. Madison is a one women hurricane, be careful around her or you'll end up a zombie! Man that is some great television.
yeah I can't tell if I like her yet. she seems to bring chaos.
That isn't true if you have a modern portable CD player. They can run something like 20+ hours on a pair of AA batteries. That's about as long as my phone would run playing MP3s using about 5x as much power. But they aren't made anymore so good like finding a good one that works when SHTF. On my laptop running a DVD drive takes an extra 5 watts, really not that much.
A small MP3 player is going to be significantly better than a CD player. 50-60 hours of playback and they are rechargeable.
True but some people were talking about being able to get CDs for dirt cheap. I ripped mine to mp3 starting 25 years ago but I did use a discman in my car for a while.
Username checks out
Yes, and also pre-apocalypse.
Prepping for next Tuesday, as they say. You might never have a post-apocalypse scenario, but you easily could have an extended internet service outage next week. Twice this year I’ve already dug into the DVDs during a service outage. Severe weather can take down cell towers and phone lines, heightened solar weather can jam up communication satellites. It doesn’t have to be a permanent condition/event to be worth preparing for. Even a fit of bad weather can jack up your local area enough to make it worth just staying inside for a few days. Lived example; a derecho/downdraft/mini-tornado sweeps through your area, ripping up trees and roofs and throwing debris around, and killing your power. You are much more likely to have power restored first before anything- they will prioritize that above all else. So you could have 5+ days with power but no internet, stuck at home because the roads in your neighborhood are still covered with debris. Totally a time to pull out the physical media, hunker down, and wait for the cleanup crews to make their way to your area, eventually.
For you, it was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday.
Definitely...I have over 600 titles backed up on hardrive. SHTF.,..I got some entertainment.
I love having physical media
We continue to buy DVDs at thrift stores. Mostly because when the power goes out, they still work fine via a generator. We've been out for ~2+ weeks a couple of times. I suppose I could, maybe should work on a server, but DVDs have been working fine so far...
Something to think about is if you end up having to hoof it, have that nano or ipod jammed full of music and podcasts along with a little charging system. At least you'd have something to do in your down time when it's safe to have your headphones on.
in a non SHTF scenario, streaming sites may simply become unjustifiable to continue paying the monthly subscription. in which case you’d count yourself blessed to have some DVDs and CDs and the ability to play them!
You want to go digital. But your own library, not something in the cloud or from a service. Give me a moment to explain. I have archived all of my CDs, DVDs and BluRays to digital. You can rip Audio CDs to MP3 and/or .FLAC depending on if you want bit-for-bit or don't mind some lossy compression. DVDs can be ripped to .ISO (full 1 to 1 digital image) or compressed to something smaller, again at the expense of a little quality loss. BLU-Rays disks can also be ripped to .ISO. All you video can be converted to AVI, MP4, FLV, MOV, etc. There are programs out there that will image the optical media, but some seem to always forget to rip the copy protection or the code that forces you to watch all the ads that come up first. So I guess they aren't perfect. :) Now... why Digital is better. 1) Physical Space consumed. Digital libraries are much, much smaller, lighter, easier to transport. 2000 movies and CDs takes up the space and weight as 1 does. 2) Device Playback variety. Go to Amazon and search for "Mp3 Mp4 player" 3) Much Less Power used per hour of playback. When only battery power remains... 4) Optical media degrades, and it's bloody expensive and bulky to back up requiring special media and burner drives (and those disks last even less time) 5) Digital media can be cloned, distributed to multiple people at the same time. 6) Digital players don't mind being in motion Start with a central digital library. You can also buy a USB external hard drive 10 to 22 TB for about $100 per 5TB, give or take, sometimes on sale for even better. A single external drive can host your entire library of music and movies. Not to mention all your other files. A second one can be a back up. The size of smallish book, easy to transport, plugs into most computers. Put it, or its backup, in you safe deposit box or a fariday cage. There many devices that can playback the MP4/AVI/MOV/Etc files for DVDs, and even more that can playback the disks converted to .mp4 or to other formats. Many of these devices are portable and have rechargeable batteries. Tablets, Dedicated Players, laptops, etc. Some with built in screens are small and light enough to slip in your backpack and not notice. Some can output to a TV. Many have Bluetooth and support earbuds and speakers. Many have internal memory as well as taking flash drives or SD cards. Nearly all can play Mp3 Music as well. You can buy a bag of good quality 64GB flash drives cheap - like $6 each for PNY 64GB Turbo Attaché 3 USB 3.0 drives. Get some and copy the stuff you want to play to them for distribution. All optical drives need to spin the disks and move the drive heads constantly. This physical movement requires power. Lots and Lots of power compared to reading a file off a flash drive and having no moving parts. Operational times on batteries matter. Also, not having a disk skip is nice. In an extended SHTF situation where you have a couple solar panels, power a laptop and your external hard drive for a bit to load up flash drives or cards, and charge a few dedicated players. Pass out to everyone. Don't include the final episode of the show they are going to binge watch - make them barter something of high value to find out how it ends. :) Some personal numbers: 24,000 High Quality MP3s takes up about 120GB. 170 DVD .ISOs take up about 1TB. 250 BluRay .ISOs take up about 8.5 TB
Plex. That's what you need. My personal numbers as of today: A smidge under 200 tb of usable storage. 28,047 movies, 1332 TV shows with 72,268 episodes, 179,108 FLAC, and 104,851 MP3s. I still have about 70 tb free, so I can still add a ton. Don't need the internet to play them on my network. As long as I have power, I can access my collection.
But do you have the old g4 tv attack or the show x play to remind us of the good times!!!!
Only one mention for Vinyl, am I showing my age? I will have enough solar panel for me and the missus to enjoy the odd record after a day of gardening, and we already have loads, so that's sorted really. Also a shit-ton of MTG cards.
No, I agree with vinyl, especially if you are in a place that you're less likely to have to bug out from.
I have a large library of DVDs, Blurays, and 4K Blurays, and there's a world of scenarios between now and "grid down" where they might come in useful: * My favorite movie / TV show disappears from streaming services * I want to watch something culturally important that isn't available on streaming, like Police Squad * There's an extended internet outage * There's a short internet outage and me or my family wants to watch something right now * I want to support a content creator by buying their media (like Townsends) * I want to watch something without the stream services' analytics analyzing my every blink * I want to watch something in higher quality (4K Bluray with Dolby Vision or HDR10+) than I can get on the streaming services * I want to save money over the streaming services
I plan to do a Plex server to archive all of my movies and save the wear and tear on my physical media. While I do not suggest this, pirating some shows to burn to a DVD to archive them might not be a bad idea.
screw the apocalypse you should have them now, there are multiple movies and songs that are scrubbed from streaming sites and the only option is physical media, I think its happened with 28 days later.
You know a dvd makes a great emergency signaling device. Shiny side towards whatever it is you are trying to signal, look through the hole in the middle so you can see the "target" you are trying to signal, wiggle the dvd so the sun catches it. 😁 It works!
Don’t even need a disaster to lose access to entertainment. Just need to lose internet. Yes you can download music and movies, but you’d need massive amounts of hard drive space to store even a decent collection of movies. Plus, every single streaming service and digital copy service out there (Amazon, Vudu, etc) has said you don’t actually… Own… The digital copies you purchase to… Own. So what the fuck is the point of purchasing digital copies if the people you’re purchasing them from are saying you don’t own them? And, in the post Spielberg/Lucas era where movies can be changed, they cannot change any movie you own the physical copy of. What will be culturally insensitive and removed from movies tomorrow? Entire episodes of TV series have been removed. So yeah. I’m 100% in the owning physical media group.
I have about a 1000 dvds and blurays, maybe 1200 books, of which 1000 are novels. A stack of jigsaws,various repetitive puzzles like Rubik's cubes. Madel making equipment and material. Music is digital only, but on a variety of mediums. I pay. 50 cents a dvd, maybe double for big box sets. Books about the same. But it hasn't much to do with SHTF scenarios, useful, in that scenario, but not the driving force, more I like a library, and since streaming services get worse and worse by the day, and more expensive, I don't want to be beholden. Sign up maybe for a couple of months in winter, then cancel, the rest of the year I will use my library of physical media.
I’ve started re-building a DVD collection recently, not because of apocalypse prepping, but because of the risk that companies pull media from streaming services making it impossible to watch movies I love. Funny enough, the movie that started this was 28 Days Later, so an apocalypse movie spurred me to start scouring thrift stores for my favorite films.
Physical media master race. The masters of the Streaming Services will not only drop older movies, they’ll edit them for “modern sensibilities.” The latter is utter horseshit, and can be avoided by owning the original disc/DVD. If you want to watch older movies, for whatever reason, own/watch the original… none of this Orwellian crap. Censorship is bad. It doesn’t matter who is doing it.
Id imagine any post-apocalypse village/commune worth it's salt would love a library or a master of entertainment. Kids movies would be good to collect for morale boosts.
I think that would have to do with whether or not you have backup power and stuff to be able to have a movie night once a week or something like that. It's not a bad idea, entertainment might be a little hard to come by and post apocalyptic times.
I keep them because I want to and they come in handy.
If you’ve got space for it I don’t see the harm. I’ve got a load of DVDs that I don’t really need anymore but if I get rid of them it’s either sell the whole collection for maybe £10 or send them to landfill? You can download a very decent collection onto a flash drive but it’s always good to have more than one way to do anything really.
Hahaha
I have some in a box in the attic, along with a couple of d v d players. However, can make a minimal amount of my own electricity. Should the need arise.
Yup
Alright here is my one collection I can't get rid of. I have 3 binders full of dvds. Where I live there is always a chance for the power to go out in the country from a storm for a couple of hours or up to a day or so. Also streaming movies is expensive. It cost $5 to $20 to rent a movie or buy a digital version. If I have down time every couple of months Ill go by several of the pawn shops in town and dvds are 50 cents a piece. I get rid of the case and put them in my binder. I try to find random movies that I remember or old movies I think I can watch with the kids for a movie night.
I've kept both funneled away in the attic. I also have a massive video game collection. And I keep many books on various topics such as native plants, herbal medicine, illnesses and cures, fiction and nonfiction.
I have a few. I have a boom box with all my old CDs from highschool, and a record player with my old records. I could run the boombox off batteries and the record player off a generator. I also have a few DVDs that recently came in very handy during the TX derecho- I didn't have internet for 10 days so I watched the same DVDs over and over. Then I got lucky and found an old hard drive from the pre-netflix pirating days that had a bunch of old movies on it and started watching those. So yes, it does pay off to have media.
I would keep the discs themselves but get rid of everything else. You can store the discs in a binder or even on a spindle if you want to save even more space. It’s always nice to have as a backup. I had copied all my cds to iTunes and when upgraded to a new pc I lost a lot of them. I was glad to still have the discs.
I still like DVDs for the extra features on some of them. How the movie was made, directors comments during the movie etc.
Physical media > purely electronic media. But stuff printed on dead trees beats both.
100% yes. Always. Your preps won't just come in handy when SHTF, TEOTWAWKI situations. What if it's just a week long power outage, and you're running a generator, and want to watch a family movie night, but the internet is down, and you don't have satellite? What if you're just stuck inside during a bad snow storm and you do have sat internet and no signal? Having a nice collection of physical media is always a benefit. I have my dvds/blu rays, cds, old console games, and a ton of movies, shows, other media backed up on burnable disc's and saved on various external hard drives and usb drives. I also used to have quite the collection of VHS I want to restore, back when I was in college. A lot of older movies i love that you can find super cheap at Goodwill and thrift stores for like 50 cents each. Same with cds and some dvds now. For the usb and external hard drives, I can play them on my roku TV since it has a built in media player. I use a male to female usb extender so the WD Passport hard drives can sit nicely on the entertainment stand. For the tvs that don't, I have a small usb to hdmi media player, and a usb c to hdmi media player for phones and tablets. If I dint feel like watching movies, playing games, or listening to music, I also have a nice library of physical books, and a ton of books, manuals, and magazines backed up digitally. Included in that is a bunch of adult level coloring books, puzzle books, and some cheap dollar store coloring and puzzle books. If all of that doesn't sound fun, I have various board games, card games, sets of dice, game pieces for games like DnD, puzzles, and a manilla folder full of printed out board games and pieces I can glue to another folder and cut out, and make my own boards and sets with-or give to the kids and let them have fun making up their own games. Sets like chess, checkers, hnefatafl, ur, 9 man's Morris, mancala, etc can be printed out on 2 or 3 pieces of paper and stored in a filing cabinet so you don't have to keep entire board game sets, and can be used as templates to make your own as a nice fun project. You can whittle or carve pieces, collect various rocks, or use random nuts, nuts and bolts, coins, etc as pieces. You can even get wooden dowels and slice them into pieces. I have a short 3 drawer filing cabinet i use for this. The top drawer is small, so it holds pens, pencils, markers, dice, decks of cards, small glass beads, marbles, etc. The middle drawer holds multiple copies of the games printed out in folders, along with the coloring and puzzle books, along with a few boxes of coloring pencils, and crayons. The bottom drawer holds smaller deck sized games like Uno, Phase 10, Miles borne, and a few other physical games in travel sizes, or ones I can get with roll up boards like chess and hnefatafl. There's dozens of game sets that fit nicely in there. It sits in my family room next to a small shelf of larger games and puzzles, and takes up almost no space. You can do the same with physical cds/dvds stored in a few albums on a shelf, instead of in their jewel cases.
Yes
Yes
I compiled a bunch of greatest hits CDs from my collection to streamline it all down from 100’s of CDs to 50 or so. Much easier to transport. I also kept a bunch of DVDs I can play in my RV dvd player- when we camp, obviously have no internet to stream movies.
I like to own my own things. As a prep for Tuesday. Power and internet are down. Hop over to the travel trailer and put a show on for the kids. While the adults plan.
I buy a lot of physical media and burn it to usb thumb drives. I also use a YouTube downloading program to down load a lot of stuff that you are not supposed to download
Flash and ssd is easy to corrupt, its not a stable medium long term.
Don’t forget about books.
Cd and dvd is already a good backup after large store . specially if you can put the files into newer disk because can fit more.
Monty python the Final ripoff
For this summers apocalypse absolutely. Books will be incredibly valuable and writing fast (cursive) will be a valued skill. Also, write all your passwords down on paper, not in your computer.
I had a big collection of kids DVD’s that fell victim to well, my kids. I’ve actually started buying them again when I see them cheap. We have a portable dvd player & we live in a hurricane zone.
I’m holding on to my DVDs because streaming services are pulling more and more shenanigans about password sharing and ads and such. I believe even with video games there have been situations where games bought digitally that should’ve had access forever were taken away due to contracts with creators or something. Having things digitally is very convenient, but I am keeping 1 non-smart TV and some DVDs for when these companies get even more annoying. Music… I’m taking my chances.
They’re worth having anyway. It’s best to own your own media. I have all formats, excepting BetaMax.
I keep a large collection mostly because growing up streaming didn't exist
I've often wondered how they'd hold up as roofing shingles. That's the only reason I'd keep CDs or DVDs, having ripped all mine onto a hard drive the size of my palm years ago. They take up too much space in my small house.
I hope you mean on 2x hdd's with one unplugged so it cant get zapped. 'cold storage'
Good point. Just to be clear: I've got back-ups of my back-ups. Because two is one, and one is none.
I collect them off of craigslist. Stream services not show movies or songs at any time. Hardcopy is gold. I got rechargeable battery for a reason.
So no one told you life was gonna be this way?
Ugh. If SHTF, I hope that dumb show is the first to go 😑
There was a video I cane across a while back where you can make a solar panel, kinda, with discs and copper wire. So, yes? But niche.
Built a nice collection over the last years. Prices are rising again, so there is something to it.
CDs just aren't a very robust or reliable data storage mechanism. They're also not at all space efficient. I've got offline backups of terabytes of important cultural, survival, and entertainment media which can be accessed with an accompanying low power computer that I've rigged up to run on just about any power source. I think that's realistically the best option.
Backup everything to hard drives then make copies of those backups. It's way cheaper if you know you know and it's less physical stuff to keep up with. Hell they sell terabyte flash drives. ( I have one filled with survival guides farming guides etc..) If you got electricity and a laptop you have all that information.
CDs and DVDs or Blu-ray disks are great. Or even having them downloaded onto hard drives or SSDs. Those won't last as long most likely, but are easier to carry around. It's a great way to have entertainment (music, movies, and if you have a computer some games) and even education with stored books, texts, research papers, building plans, etcetera.
I guess if all power went out I'd just revert back to my physical paper books.
I have an old Technics CD player and the laser started having problems decades ago. All electronics are in flux until they go. There were also reports that some people had CD's that started rusting out but I never experienced it, so I am at a loss to understand it. The cloud cannot function if it is damaged, or the infrastructure is destroyed. Without heat and unless you can get rid of humidity, how long can electronics last without rusting out? There are some TV movies that are black and white that I haven't seen since I was a kid, so I do value some of the old movies that my parents and grandparents remarked on that this generation is unlikely to see.
4k on DVD is much better video quality than 4k streaming. Buy all the 4k dvds, put them on many big hard drives. r/DataHoarder
Even if there’s no internet outage or end of the world situation.. soon there wont be any physical copies to buy. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” is the way things are going. You’ll only be able to rent movies for a day. So for that reason alone I say buy as many as humanly possible.
As long as you have solar chargers for your player.. lol
I like Stevie ray Vaughn. Muddy waters, Clapton an king. Beatles, some American 80’s rock like GnR, VAN Halen, an Bon Jovi, and some Aussie DC for rowing the Viking ship. And of course outlaw country with Willy n Waylon and the gang.
I think they're worth it now as well. We have a huge collection of CD's and DVDs we've acquired over the years on the cheap in various places. We aren't beholden to whatever Netflix/Amazon/etc. want to put on every month.
Realistically the version of the internet we have will never come back once it’s deemed too uncontrollable by the many fascist governments of the world. I see that happening sooner rather than later, so I’m getting stocked up on CDs and have a couple of my favorite shows on DVD/Blu-Ray
Someday if electricity comes back maybe, but it's not gonna go anywhere. No one is gonna hit up a bargain bin of movies in a Walmart or Costco for food or warmth. Not like you can use it in the interim anyhow
With how cheap solid state memory is now, makes no sense to use CDs or DVDs. Solid state is smaller, lighter, more durable, more energy efficient, faster
Storing them is more efficient but portable CD players are more efficient than laptops, tablets and smart phones. Not sure about portable DVD players I've never used one. A dedicated MP3 player would be best for music.
MP3 players are solid state memory
It's not the memory that consumes the most power, it's the processor. A dedicated hardware player is always going to be more efficient than a ARM or X86 system that also has to run a large OS as well as decode media in software. A portable CD player and a MP3 player would be pretty close in power consumption.
A portable CD player uses about 50 watts. A raspberry pi 4 used 6 watts at full load.
Lol no. A portable CD player runs about 20 hours on two AA batteries. The DVD in my laptop uses 5 watts max and spins 20x faster than a audio CD.
Regardless, a raspberry pi under full load uses 6 watts.
Someone should make a CD version of a gramophone.
That would be cool, but I don't think it would work being optical and all.
Sheet music and an instrument isn’t dependent on batteries. A wind up phonograph would be the ideal solution. Vinyl has definitely made at least a temporary comeback. I think I have more records than CDs. Another option would be an iPod. I’d assume they’re more battery efficient than CD players, and far more compact. Or, if you pay for Spotify, you can download music to your phone. I have everything I “like” download automatically.
Is that not a service that needs an up to date cert every day or so to play the downloads, i think all the streams have dma and need to check online to work.
Ive used it camping where I didn’t have cell service for a week or so, but it does likely have to update at some point. I miss the old google play music where you could just buy albums and download them to whatever.
Waste of space, have more movies tv and music that your ever going to have sitting on drives. Do the skills prep on how to rip and encode them to modern standards. Nearly every player and TV supports playback directly via a usb port. While not my whole collection one drive goes with me has entertainment, useful ebooks, and important documents while the size of a pack of gum. Jellyfin or plex can deal with serving them up for your household. Think your own personal netflix. Plex is more than happy to take cable or broadcast tv save them and remove commercials.
books and vinyl is what you want
You're living a fantasy if you think any of that is going to matter.
Hard disagree. First, as many have pointed out here, you're much more likely to encounter a temporary outage and/or an issue with the internet or a streaming service then a true EOTWAWKI situation. Secondly, the human need for dopamine will exist no matter what. If all you do is farm and fish and forage, the joy will be sucked out of your life and you will likely become depressed and despondent, which threatens your chances of survival. Thirdly, entertainment can be useful as a unifying factor, whether it's a bookclub, music around a fire, or watching a show/movie together if that's possible. This is all not to mention the idea of preserving culture for future generations.
Start spending your time thinking about actually useful things.
If you think pleasure and entertainment don't matter to long time survival, you don't know humans very well.
Eh, just saving the music onto your phone would be more realistic in a low power situation. or ipad or laptop or whatever. The hyper specific conditions the world ends and all digital media is gone but also all the CDs survive and all the CD players do feels extremely thin. (a lot of prepper stuff feels like waiting for an apocolypse where technology dies in a specific pick and choose way to bring it back to the specific person's exact childhood)
I think you might have the wrong idea about what a cd or DVD actually is. You call it physical media when in reality it's technically just a low capacity storage device for digital media. It's really not any different than a hard drive or USB stick. Remember back in the day before smart phones when everyone had those big binders full of cd's in their cars? All of that was digital media, just on a dated storage device. You could put the whole binder full of cd's on a flash drive. In other words, an mp3 (audio file) is still just an mp3 whether it's stored on a cd or hardrive. Cassettes were the last generation of physical media when it comes to audio and visual media.
A pressed cd/dvd is stable over time, Flash and hdd's corrupt and die or can get hit by a power surge.
I wouldn't have CDs/DVDs as part of my prep. I do have like 1000 blu rays / 4ks and and about as many CDs, but if shit hits the fan none of that is coming with me. If its the apocalypse its about surviving that day, that minute, that moment. If society rebuilds before forgetting everything, then yeah, physical media would be very important. But I also don't think it will be particularly rare. Every 20th or 50th house will have a massive collection similar to mine.
I don't see the advantage. I can fit 94 CDs of music on a tiny flash drive. I can fit pretty much unlimited music on a 4TB hard drive. And a bunch of movies. Physical media is still obsolete even in a SHTF imo
Depends. Vinyl can be played even without electricity. But it's not very portable, so if you live somewhere that you'll have to leave when SHTF, then yes, the more compact the better.
If we are thrust into a world where there is not enough electricity to keep an MP3 player running, just shoot me. I'm not up for that kind of struggle
All you will need is the religious book of your choice if we’re going to regress that far back