Today I received a Blu-ray drive from Amazon that I’m going to flash the firmware of to give it the ability to read and rip 4K Blu-rays. Why am I doing this? Well I’m jumping through all of these hoops because there’s no straightforward way to do what I want, but also, I’m all about physical media. I have most of my favorite movies on disc, preferably Blu-ray, preferably on 4K if available. I also almost never pull those discs out of their cases to watch their contents. I stream it from whichever service my show or movie is on, or, more commonly, just stream it from my Plex server. All of this is to say, I want to backup my physical media to my media server.<\/p>\n
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Digital content is more convenient. You don’t have to change discs to swap between movies or games. You don’t have to carry around anything extra to access it. You typically don’t need more storage space for them either. The problem is that digital content is never yours to own. You buy a license that’s only good for the length of time that our entertainment overlords deign you to own it. After that then too bad for you. Well, that’s not good enough for me.<\/p>\n
I make sure to pick up a hard copy of everything I like enough to want to own. I do not trust the people who hold the rights to something that I am spending my money on to care about my rights. Hell I don’t even feel comfortable buying games on Steam. Valve has proven to be far more stable and customer focused so far, but who knows what the future holds? The problem on the PC space is that you’re stuck now. You have Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, GOG, and a handful of other companies that you have no choice but to trust if you want to play AAA games. And if you want an example of the failure to continue to provide the support of purchases you’ve made, look no further than Nintendo. There’s 2 generations of consoles that have internet services that no longer exist and by extension a myriad of games that people spent money on that are gone forever if they ever get deleted off of their Wii for good. Even exclusive eShop titles.<\/p>\n
Thank god for the pirates. Companies insist that piracy destroys their given industry. Be it music, movies, TV shows, or video games, everyone wants to point the finger at piracy for ruining their industry. But here’s the deal, it isn’t. Piracy means that games get preserved and protected. At times that protection comes despite the wishes of the IP holders. How many Nintendo and Playstation games are out there that have no legitimate way to purchase them? Piracy also means that we can take our owned media and move it onto another platform to keep it safe. My Blu-rays may eventually disc rot but my rips of them will last as long as I upkeep my server. After all, I bought it. I own the license. I should be able to do what I want with it as long as I’m not profiting from it. And I frankly don’t care if modern rights holders want me to be confined to the chunk of plastic they sold me.<\/p>\n
Don’t pirate indie media, though. Have a soul.<\/p>\n
This brings me back to my weekend project. I’m backing up every DVD and Blu-ray I own to my server. I have now purchased the vast majority of shows and movies I actually care about including a few web series I love like Red vs. Blue. I want to actually own what I own. I want a physical piece of media I can pick up and use if the uploaded files fail or the company goes under that made the product and most people stopped caring.<\/p>\n
I don’t pirate modern games. I collect them. If I want to play them, I pay for them. If the game is available for purchase I go out of my way to find it and pay for it. However when a game is made inaccessible because of bad management or complacency, that’s not going to stop me from playing it and it shouldn’t stop anyone else. So games from 2 or further generations in the past without rereleases for modern hardware are going to be classified as abandonware in my book and I’m going to find them and play them where I can. And because of the lessons these companies have taught me, I’m going to vie for the physical disc of each game I buy on PlayStation and avoid digital if I can. That also means that if the next generation of PlayStations is going to be digital only, I’ll officially be making the full hop to PC gaming. If I can’t own my stuff the way I prefer, then I’m going to own my stuff the way that has proven over recent history to be far, far more reliable.<\/p>\n
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If anyone wants to play a somewhat obscure PS1 game that I can only access on the seven seas, there’s a game I love called Top Shop. It’s basically a slightly more complicated and far more entertaining version of Monopoly. Every couple years I boot up an emulator on my phone and play a ton of it before depleting the serotonin and stepping away from it for a while. It was shovelware so it’s never getting a modern release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I received a Blu-ray drive from Amazon that I’m going to flash the firmware of to give it the ability to read and rip 4K Blu-rays. Why am I doing this? Well I’m jumping through all of these hoops because there’s no straightforward way to do what I want, but also, I’m all about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[640],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethanirl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60663"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60666,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60663\/revisions\/60666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}