Back in the time of the cave man, a few millionaires started the movie collecting hobby with LP-sized Laser Disks. Then, around the start of the dark ages, we all had a collection of a few movies on VHS cassettes, and we also had our blank 6 hour VHS cassettes with 2 or 3 movies taped from TV or cable if you could afford such things. Then DVDs replaced VHS. The "used" bin at Blockbuster was a major source of great movies in the 90s. After the battle of HD DVD and Blueray, a few holdouts transferred their collection once again. My last attempt to accumulate movies was a hard drive with ripped DVDs and whatever downloads I could find. Now, realizing that those files are the equivalent of 1970s-era antenna broadcasts, I just watch whatever I can find on Netflix and Prime. The VHS cassettes are long gone, the DVDs are packed away in the attic, and viewing hard drive based movies on TV is too much work compared to surfing the streaming services for something comparable to what I really want to watch. Does it really matter which Will Ferrell movie you watch?

TLDR: How do you collect movies these days?

Bruce Almighty said:

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About 10 years ago, by DVD player stopped working and I felt no need to purchase a new one. Every movie I now own is digital.

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Are they on a hard drive, your own cloud service, or kept with Apple/Amazon?

I keep all my digital files on my hard drive - stream it to other devices in the house through Plex.

Philo B 93 said:

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Bruce Almighty said:

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About 10 years ago, by DVD player stopped working and I felt no need to purchase a new one. Every movie I now own is digital.

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Are they on a hard drive, your own cloud service, or kept with Apple/Amazon?

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Amazon

SJEAg said:

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I keep all my digital files on my hard drive - stream it to other devices in the house through Plex.

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This.

On a similar subject, I've been listening to a lot more vinyl records (I know, I know…hipster), and now whenever I stream music over Bluetooth, I feel like it sounds bad, or muffled. I don't know if it's just my brain trying validate my vinyl purchase, or if there is that much of a difference. Even using Apple CarPlay while I drive sounds worse now.

I have copies of Robocop and The Hobbit (the Rankin/Bass animated version) on Blu-Ray. That's really all I need.

I still have a ton of my old DVDs and Blu-rays, and even some HD-DVDs and a player for them. Right now all of that is in storage, but I plan to rip them all to a hard drive someday when we build our house.

Otherwise, I have bought some recent movies with a digital copy stored on Fandango at Home (formerly Vudu) and Movies Anywhere.

as someone who is moving this weekend... I can tell you i suffer nothing but rage at how many boxes of CDs (thousands), DVDs (maybe a thousand), blu rays (500), and a thousand books.

but most of my stuff has been digitized at this point. except the books, of course.

Streaming is still iffy because a lot of movies aren't available or you need to subscribe to many different platforms to get a good selection. Still easier to rip my DVDs to my NAS and stream it to my TV. Even quicker to pull up a movie that way than through Netflix.

The laptop I bought a year ago doesn't have a dvd drive. I can get my 2012 Macbook out and use it to rip dvds, but I've just given up. After years of cataloging and organizing dvds, VHS, and digital files, I've given in to the streaming services. If I can't find Top Gun Maverick somewhere to stream, I'll either stream something comparable or buy the damn download for $19.99.

My low point was ebaying a used copy of "Josie and the *****cats" (2001, Rachel Lee Cook, Tara Reid) to rip. WTF?! Just watch whatever is on.

Philo B 93 said:

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The laptop I bought a year ago doesn't have a dvd drive. I can get my 2012 Macbook out and use it to rip dvds, but I've just given up. After years of cataloging and organizing dvds, VHS, and digital files, I've given in to the streaming services. If I can't find Top Gun Maverick somewhere to stream, I'll either stream something comparable or buy the damn download for $19.99.

My low point was ebaying a used copy of "Josie and the *****cats" (2001, Rachel Lee Cook, Tara Reid) to rip. WTF?! Just watch whatever is on.

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I have this issue with my HD-DVDs. I have bought a couple of HD-DVD drives off of Ebay in the past, and I couldn't get them to work. Finding drivers for them is a challenge these days.

Most of my movies are digital, although I have held on to DVD (original DVD and BluRay) copies of a lot of them - all of the Star Wars and MCU movies (up to Endgame), most of the Disney animated movies, and my boxed sets of series like Star Trek, Rocky, The Godfather, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific. I also have the old series, The World at War, on DVD. I rarely if ever watch any of these disks as I have digital copies of most of these titles.

I still own a collection of laser discs (that were not transferred from DVD). Wish I had a flux capacitor so I could go back in time and kick younger me in the ass so that I would not have spent roughly $6000 on all those worthless laser discs. Probably going to try to sell most of them (although I'm keeping the original Star Wars movies before Lucas altered them), but don't expect to get much if anything for them.

We have a set of Disney animated movies on VHS. Not sure why we've held on to them, not even sure where they are in the house, but I am 99.99% sure we don't currently own a working VHS player. And I am 100% certain I no longer own a working Beta player, but I still have 3-4 Beta tapes bought in the early 80s.

John Matrix said:

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I know I sound like an old man, but I still buy physical media when I can. I still have pretty much all of the relevant streaming services as well, but I find them too precarious in terms of keeping up their catalogs. If I wanna watch a movie, I shouldn't have to do a complex Internet search to figure out where it's streaming. Plus, they just look and sound better on my 4K player. The weird thing is that I do not do that with music.

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Same.

Rarely buy dvds anymore and got rid of quite a few when moving a few years ago. Still have some and watch them occasionally if we really want to watch a specific movie that isn't streaming currently. Most new purchases though are all through Amazon.

Synology NAS running as a Plex server. Can stream my entire movie/TV show catalogue from anywhere.

Buy a blu-ray read/write device that just connects to your PC via USB. Download MakeMKV, and start ripping your movies.

Easy, peasy.

We still have a lot of our DVD/ blue ray collection- probably about 130-150 DVDs between kids' movies, Disney, and adult favorites and still watch them sometimes. We actually still have some VHS too, but haven't watched those in years. We can play DVDs on any TVs as we have an old Wii that will play them as well as two small working players still. I could still play the VHS too if I wanted because we have an old VHS to DVD player/ recorder that still works. We stream a lot of stuff, but many times we can't find an old movie we want to watch/ share with the kids so we break out the DVD. It's also come in handy during multi day internet outages which has happened to us twice in the last few years when companies were laying fiber lines. The kid DVDs are in a DVD wallet type thing and the rest are in one area of a cabinet in our den. I still occasionally pick one up at the library sale (where they sell donated items to raise money) for 50 cents each when I see a hard to find movie or old favorite. I like having options. Like the poster above, sometimes it's nice to just throw in a movie without having to search it out and often not find it currently available.

Claude! said:

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I have copies of Robocop and The Hobbit (the Rankin/Bass animated version) on Blu-Ray. That's really all I need.

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Did we just become best friends?

Mostly 1080p blu ray at the moment. I have a few 4K blu rays. A few DVDs. About 75 digital movies.

I've recently started collecting VHS tapes again.

ETA: I dabble with HD DVD as well.

I don't really buy movies anymore. I just don't see the need because aside from Star Wars, LOTR, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Thing, I almost never watch movies more than once or twice. We still own ~100 movies across DVD (all 20-50 year old movies) and around 25 blu-rays which are all big blockbuster type movies that I bought several years ago.

I will probably buy the Dune series when it finally comes out in IMAX 4K blu-ray. And I need to buy Blazing Saddles and Airplane before they are banned or edited. Completely shocked Blazing Saddles hasn't already been at least edited.