A few years ago – like, maybe 2017, 2018? – I decided that I was done with physical media.  Games, books, movies, music, you name it, it was going to be ephemeral digital downloads from now on.  No more shelves and shelves of STUFF to keep track of and keep the dust off of.

And I’ve (mostly) stuck to this, even at the expense of, well, expense.  Buying digital is often more expensive than physical, though things like iTunes or Kindle sales can help a lot if you don’t mind waiting a few months after the release date.

I did keep exactly two (2) blu-rays.  AnimEigo’s release of “Otaku no Video” and a region B import of “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie”, both of which are foundational to building the person I am today.

I’ve been happy!   Or, well, have I?  For a few months there, twitter was feeding me tweet after tweet from people on the other side of the physical/digital divide, especially around the time Funimation decided to stop their streaming service and basically render inert all of the digital copy codes they had been inserting into their disc packages.

So, faced with the notion that I might have, in fact, been wrong, I decided to buy some discs.  And wow, at first this was looking like a winner.

Boosting my Blu-ray collection from 2 discs to 9 didn’t take that much more space on the shelf.  I wound up with six seasons of anime and a movie, none of which were more than like, 12 bucks.  That’s really cheap!

Also, I don’t think a proper (subtitled) season one of High School DxD was ever released for purchase on any digital service, and there are conflicting reports on whether seasons 2 and 3 on iTunes have the annoying overlays.

So, strong points for physical: cheap, better language options, uncensored.

They even came with these code sheets, which were already just garbo to throw in the recycle bin.

Note: the digital code with “Legion of Super-Heroes” redeemed just fine via MoviesAnywhere, so I have it on iTunes now.  It was cheaper than buying the digital version, though I only got a 1080P version.  Buying directly on iTunes would have given me 4k.

After a few more months, and a trip or two to Japan, I had another stack.

Thanks to the end of year sale at The Company Formerly Known As AD Vision, and a couple very cheap purchases from Book-Off, I now had 14 Blu-rays and a couple DVDs.  Again, not a lot of money spent but a whole lot of hours of entertainment gained.

…but the shelf space was starting to get a little bit tight.  It certainly didn’t help that my other vice was picking up physical copies of Switch games, especially because the Yen exchange rate meant that buying a new-release game from Japan was like $35 compared to $60 for the same game in the US.

I’ll play some of these someday.

Also, the experience of watching a disc wasn’t… great?  Like, if you just want to sit down and watch a movie from start to finish it’s fine, or if you want to binge-watch a show it’s also fine.  But I was watching a couple episodes of Aura Battler Dunbine every day and it was kind of a pain to get the disc, boot the player, sit through the unskippable intros, change the language, blah blah blah.

It also didn’t look appreciably better.  I mean, my eyes are getting old along with the rest of me, but streaming purchased movies look pretty good, and iTunes even lets you download a local copy to play back and those look fine as well.

I mean, they knock the pants off Crunchyroll streams, especially with the way that service likes to mysteriously drop down to SD or sub-SD quality at times.  But comparing them to the quality of a stream from Microsoft Movies & TV or iTunes, not so much.

I recognize here that I am somewhat on the privileged side as I have near-gigabit connectivity and no data cap.

Also, I would have liked to purchase season 4 of DxD… but it was out of print in the US, meaning collector markups.

There are plenty of cheaper copies available on Amazon and eBay, but they’re region-locked and require a region B player.  By contrast, it was available on iTunes with subtitles and without overlays for like 20 bucks.

That isn’t to say that digital is immune to suddenly becoming unavailable.  I keep waiting for a sale on To Love-Ru on iTunes, and it was delisted before it hit my impulse buy point, as an example, and you can no longer buy the original “Love Live!” series even though Sunshine and later remain available.

Fortunately, anything ‘ve already bought – even if delisted – is still available to download and stream, which is one benefit of buying from a major company like Apple.  They really need you to keep buying their media consumption devices, so making sure that you can feel confident in the media you buy from them is in their best interest.

…of course, I would have said the same thing about Sony and they put a figurative bullet through the metaphorical head of THEIR movie service, so who knows.

That’s another plus for physical.  Out-of-print discs remain (generally) available, even if you do have to pay more for them.  Once a company delists a title digitally you have the options of, well, (a) not buying it or (b) not buying it and just finding a torrent.

In the end, I’ve just finished a kind of annoying process of putting all of these BDs through MakeMKV, and then through Handbrake, and they’re up on our NAS now so we can stream them to any TV in the house.  I just need to keep track of the files, and make sure they’re backed up, and the ripping and encoding took ages, and really I’ve added a little more complexity to my life.

It was an interesting experiment, but I probably won’t buy more discs.  Or if I do, it will be with the understanding that I’m only buying them as an intermediate step before making them into folders of m4v files.

I’ll keep the Switch games, though.  The spines are a pleasant bit of uniformity on the shelf, and knowing the Nintendo Faithful I will be able to unload them for (more than) a few bucks in the future.