External DVD Readers/Burners are also still easy peasy to get online. Picked one up for around $30 about 2 months ago. They're not going away anytime soon!
CHEERS! ![[3stooges]](https://threestooges.net/forums/Smileys/default/stooges.gif "Three Stooges")
That's good to hear -- but how's the quality?
For the major media formats, I skipped laserdiscs and now blu-ray/HD/whatever.
So in my lifetime, to own physical media of a movie, the major formats have been film (I'll combine the different gauges into one for simplicity - Super 8, etc.), video-tape (includes beta and VHS), laserdisc, DVD, blu-ray (including super-duper ultra HD formats!). That's an average of under 12 years per format. Wasn't there a "super VHS" at one point, too? Also 8mm cassette tapes of movies. And RCA Selectavision, which was a disc that used a needle to play a movie! And there was an "HD" format that competed with blu-ray at first, but quickly lost out, to the chagrin of people who bought those players. With those, an average of 6-7 years per format in my lifetime.
Maybe people like us are just of a different ilk? Maybe most people view physical media and players as ephemera and a cheaper (in the long run) alternative to going to the movies. When you could go to a video store to rent a movie for a couple of bucks, it was a lot cheaper than going to the movies with a family of 4 just to see a movie a few months earlier. Now discs are relatively cheap to buy as well. (I remember when most pre-recorded video tapes were as much as $100 a pop -- no one bought them but "the rich" and video stores.)
Now throw in the fact that to just see movies at home (no physical media or ownership) you went from broadcast TV to cable to streaming. It used to be free to watch the Stooges, assuming you owned a TV and had electricity. Ya gotta pay for cable and streaming! To stream, you need electricty, an internet service provider, a cable coming into your home, a cable modem, a wireless router, and a smart TV or a streaming device connect to the TV. That all costs money, and most worthwhile streaming services require a paid subscription. Ka-ching!
I'm still annoyed that although the signal for a streaming service is available via the cable connected to my cable box by my TV, to use streaming, an equivalent cable is connected to a cable modem in another room, that's hooked up to a wireless router, that sends a signal through the air to my Amazon Firestick connected to my TV! It's the equivalent of scratching my right ear with my left foot! My cable service needs to design a single device that I can connect that cable to that will provide both my cable TV and internet. They already provide me with the cable box, modem and router. It seems like the most obvious technology advances are ignored -- combining those 3 devices into 1. I could eliminate the Firestick since my TV is "smart", but the hardware has long outlasted the software on it, even with those auto-updates.
All of the above might be the the biggest con perpetrated on humans in history!
That's why the only physical media I still buy is film -- Super 8, Standard 8, and 16mm. 40+ year old projectors still work, and most are easily repaired by me. (Does a 40+ year old VCR still work?)
You can hold a film up to the light and see images with the naked eye. If some future society finds an old film, it will be relatively easy to figure out how to make a device to view it. If discs are even still readable in a thousand years, will the people even deduce that it holds a movie? And if so, how will they figure out how to translate those 0s and 1s into images? (There are already so many different digital formats of a movie.) How will they even figure out that the disc contains a series of 0s and 1s?
Just sayin'...
