Not only am I still buying physical media, I'm also ripping them in full-quality to a home Plex server for safety. I just got a new much-overdue external hard drive, so I'm going through my backlog, starting with my Babylon 5 DVDs; I've upgraded to the Blu-Ray, but it doesn't include any of the special features from the DVD release, and I prefer the widescreen presentation aesthetically, so I'd like to have both available.
I had old lossy rips of the DVDs, but I want to make sure I've got them in top quality, along with the extras, since I'd heard stories about the DVDs suffering from disc-rot. So far, it looks like mine have held up perfectly, so that's good, but I've found some other old DVDs that have gone bad after years on the shelf. [ETA: And having made it to the end of the line, ironically, it was the newest Babylon 5 DVD, The Lost Tales, five years younger than the rest, which is the only one that's gone bad. Cost-cutting in action!]
I do wish there was a good "video jukebox" solution that let me keep the menus and non-video features from the discs like image galleries, though it's a little academic since I only know of software that rips playable "virtual discs" of DVDs, and not the newer formats. Though, on the other hand, thanks to streaming, disc producers gave up on life and blu-rays and 4K discs don't tend to have elaborate menus and disc-only features like image-galleries or multi-angle scene breakdowns anymore, so DVDs might be the only thing worth saving fully-playable copies of.
Remember the Star Wars DVD releases, where
each movie had three randomly-selected, fully-animated suites of menus? We used to be a society, dammit!
On the bright side, 4K catalog releases are picking up.
Galaxy Quest is coming out in a few weeks, and rumor is that 2025 is finally going to be the year of Master & Commander in 4k, while we're on the subject of the secret Star Trek movies from the turn of the millennium.
