Blu-ray in 2022

Tea

Storage? I am Storage!
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We picked up a 4-DVD set of something interesting yesterday at the tip shop for the princely sum of $4. It turns out to be Blu-ray discs, not DVDs.

Assuming that we buy something to play them on -

(a) An external USB Blu-ray drive to suit a computer? We mostly watch things via an old, non-Internet-connected Windows 7 laptop plugged into an external monitor. Sometimes we watch things on one of our main computer screens instead. Depends on whether we want to sit on the couch or in our comfy office chairs.

(b) A home-entertainment-style stand-alone Blu-ray player? These seem to come with HDMI outlets suitable to plug into any screen. Many of them offer a variety of other abilities I haven't bothered looking into.

Can you plug (b) into a computer and use it as an ordinary external drive? (Probably.) Can we plug (a) into a screen and use it stand-alone? (Probably not.)

Bear it in mind that we are not a multi-media oriented household. We don't have a TV, we are not interested in streaming subscriptions to Stan, Netfix, etc. R would watch a TV sometimes if we had one. I would much rather not have one in the house - I have far too many other things to do which are much more interesting and they are really annoying distractions. We do watch movies from time to time, mostly on DVD. (We pretty much flat refuse to spend even $1 renting anything. Happy to buy a DVD and own it forever, even if we only watch it one. Damned if I'll pay a single penny for stuff we can't keep and watch in our own sweet time.)

You might think it's a bit weird to contemplate spending $125 to $250 on a player for a documentary thing that cost $4. But we don't care.

Maybe there are other things we would use the thing for. (I have no idea what though Isn't Blu-ray dead in the water these days? Are there any things in its favour?)

PS: we may buy a big screen to go on the wall one day. Or may not, who can say?
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Blu-ray on PC is kind of a mess -- you'd need to use MakeMKV just to maybe decrypt the disc to play it, much less rip it. You can buy commercial software to play it, and I'm thinking some external drives might well come with said software, but think of the worst of the DVD player software that used to get bundled and you get the picture.

To actually play and enjoy the discs, brain turned off and not having to navigate pitfalls, you're probably best off just buying a standalone player unit. They're not all that expensive, anymore, unless you want one that does 4K, and even then I think in the face of physical media kind of dying off in favor of streaming they're trying to sweeten the deal and the prices may well be dropping there too.
 
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