This is sad to me. I prefer to own physical copies of my media. They closed up shop today.
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Hmm…
I prefer my media on hard drives because that takes up less physical space, and I find it more convenient.
Sometimes hard drives fail, so I back up my hard drives frequently, but CDs and DVDs get scratched way too easily for my taste.
I have tons of CDs and DVDs, and I don’t really like them. 
The CDs are my backups essentially. I rip them to my hard drive as lossless FLAC files. The resulting files have a higher bitrate than what is offered by many digital storefronts. The differences in bitrate might not matter on every sound system but the pursuit of maximum resolution makes me happy. I can hear the difference more for some types of music than others.
If something bad happens to my hard drive, I have the CDs which are only opened in case of emergency. I also kinda like having the physical cases 
My wife keeps bugging me to throw away 100s of dvds i have, that i collected/burned over a decade. we have not touched our dvd in probably a decade too. We stream all movies now. but i’m keeping them. I know one day i’ll be glad i kept them.
If I’m paying for something, I want actual tangible physical media, something etched into stone, or at least aluminised polycarbonate, where I don’t need to rely on someone else’s good graces to “allow” me to stream, or even play.
Some players will not let you play unless you have a live internet connection, even if you downloaded the file you ostensibly “own”. Think yootoob and possibly amazon do that.
And some won’t even let you play in the resolution you bought (eg, 4k) unless your player’s hdcp compliant, so no playing it on a computer, laptop, etc., either.
It’s soooooooooo much easier to just sail the high seas and get the f’n thing outright, which you could fold, spindle, and mutilate, to your heart’s content.
Louis Rossman had a good take on it.
Ah, here we go…
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Here’s a list of top reasons to use Blu-rays (4k or 1080p) rather than streaming. I realize that these don’t apply to everyone but I just wanted to lay it all out there:
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Higher video bitrates results in better picture quality and color depth. While technically streaming services hit their resolution targets, they often do it by limiting the bitrates drastically. For example, the average bitrate of a 4k Netflix stream might be 18Mbps wherease the 4K disk would average 60Mbps.
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Higher audio bitrates results in better sound, you also get surround formats which may or may not be supported on a streaming service (i think this is getting a bit better but still with low bitrates)
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You can watch classic films without having to worry about them being censored. Recently Disney gave The Criterion Collection a censored version of The French Connection for their streaming service. This wasn’t the first attempt at erasing the past and won’t be the last.
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You can listen to audio commentaries by cast, crew, or historians about your favorite films on physical media. I realize I am in the miniority listening to these but some are actually fantastic. Google for the good ones
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If your internet is being spotty or your household is overtaxing the connection, the bluray will still play fine and look fantastic
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Your blu-ray will stay on your shelf, but the movie on your streaming service might just disappear if companies can’t reach a licensing agreement. There are some movies that you just can’t stream because nobody has the rights to do so
P.S. I realize that if you use a smaller TV and the built-in speakers that the bitrate points are not a big deal for you. Trust me when I say that the difference can be quite drastic if you have the right equipment.
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Yeh, that’s what I did with all my audio ceedees, 'though my phones/.mp3 players didn’t grok .flac files, so I’d rip to lossless .wavs (CDEx), then encode to 128k and 320k .mp3s, lower rez for crappier players and higher rez for better ones.
Yeah, Popeye Doyle and crew shooting it out with The Frenchman just didn’t have the same punch when they were killing each other with walkie-talkies. 
Arr, matey! 
I prefer Blu-ray rips to actual Blu-rays.
I know that actual Blu-rays contain more data, but if the rip is done right, the video and audio quality can be “good enough” for some. 
Yep pretty much, you’ll probably wont find blazing saddles on stream channels anymore, and if you do it’ll be heavily edited.
It’s more insidious than just removing beloved classics. They edit audio or cut small parts of the film out. EDIT They also don’t tell you when they do it.
For example, in the DVD release of Max Fleischer’s Superman there was a line where Clark Kent says to Lois, “Isn’t that a dangerous job for a woman?” They cut out the “for a woman” part because it doesn’t align with modern values.
But this is a teachable moment waiting to happen IF a kid were watching it. More likely these old shows are being purchased and watched by adults who grew up with them. Presumably their formative years are over and watching how women were treated in the 1940s will just be a reminder of how far we’ve come. It’s not going to magically transform them into misogynists.
With streaming services they can make pointless edits like this at any time. It’s a form of gaslighting imo
I can think of 4 movies right off the top that probably will never be streamed again in mainstream the way they were presented.
Gran Torino
Hoffa
Pulp Fiction
Blazing Saddles
I’m sure there are dozens of others.
Feel free to add to this small list.
Not that all DVD’s were true copies of the Theatre experience.
The Italian Job comes to mind.
Saw at theatre and at the beginning when they chose the Mini cars a mechanic is shown boasting of his improvements to the cars and there was a big pile of exhaust and air pump EGR pollution crap and he said something along the lines of, I pulled 50 lbs of useless crap off these and she runs much stronger. Never made it to the DVD.
So far all are available. But streaming customers will need to keep an eye out and hold companies accountable. Gone with the Wind was removed from streaming but was reinstated (with a trigger warning) after backlash from just about everyone.
I am not interested personally in fighting that battle. I’d rather just buy an unaltered physical copy where I can find it.
I can’t speak to The Italian Job specifically but I know in a lot of cases movies are altered based on region.
It’s possible you might be able to find a region free copy from another country that has an alternate cut of the film.
Also in the case of milder censorship like that, it’s possible that the blu-ray or 4k blu-ray is complete. 4K blu-rays are ALL region free so that’s pretty snazzy
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Did not know about Blu Ray being region free.
Cool!
Thanks for that Info.
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Even on “Angel”, when it was first-run, the episode of the haunted hotel where this demon would make people off themselves, one scene had this guy playing this record over and over and over, blew his brains out, and you hear the record skipping endlessly, probably from the needle jumping at the shot.
I distinctly remember that scene, the repeated-skip of that early-1900s music, thinking, “Gawd, that’d make anyone want to vlow his brains out”.
That scene was cut from the deeveedees, and in the director’s commentary, he said that the scene was filmed, but cut and never aired, but it WAS.
Specifically 4K Bluray, or as the marketing says “Ultra HD” is always region free.
Regular Blurays usually have regions but there are fewer regions than there were for DVDs. You do see region free standard blu-rays sometimes so I always look for that first.
Interestingly, under the blu-ray regions Japan and South America are lumped with North America. So if you can’t find a decent release in the US, sometime one of those countries has it and they would be region A guaranteed. You just have to put up with some funky box art.
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Oh, I didn’t know that regular Blu-rays are not region free.
The PS3 and PS4 are mostly region free when it comes to their games. 
My sister has Blu-ray movies, but I don’t own a single Blu-ray of anything.
(My PS3/PS4 games are all digital.)
Actually, Tubi TV has it free, and unedited right now. Watched it twice in the last month.
Not everyone is obsessed with censorship and political correctness, thankfully. You just have to find them… 
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