I updated my PC just a week or so ago. Finally moved away from a case with external drive bays. That case was just not able to keep a 3080 cool.
Honestly, I had a Bluray drive in there that was not used in so long, that on my previous upgrade four years ago, in that case I forgot to reconnect it and only found out last week when I was taking it apart for the re-used parts.
But how do you load the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows 🤓 hehe
I'm in the same boat honestly, I have a lot of stuff on disks still but I just pull out an old optical drive from the box if I need to read them, or an old laptop or tower or whatever that's got an optical drive.
I do wish booting live USB was a little more universally easy though, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse compared to live CDs, these bloody TPMs and weird bios stuff getting in the way are a real pain. But overall, disks have had their day.
I do still use long term Blu-rays for bulk 10-plus-years cold storage backup though! Wouldn't trust flash or HDDs for that.
Honestly yeah, I like having my CDs in their cases on the shelf so if I want to listen to a specific CD I can take it out and play it in a CD player. Sure I have so much music at my fingertips thanks to streaming, but there’s something really personal about taking a disk to listen to it. I guess I understand now what people used to say about vinyls back in the day
I have one that i last updated in 2012 still. I had a nexflix subcription with 3 movies mailed to me that I'd rip in DVDfab and burn to another DVD and mail back the same day i received the movies.
I do, because DVDs can't get pulled from streaming services or be region locked, and it's worked out cheaper to buy discs than subscribe to yet another service
I still buy CDs. Do I listen to them directly? No, I rip them and go with the FLACs, but it's still nice to have something physical, especially if buying directly from the artist (e.g. at a concert).
Yes, but that's hardly something I rely on. I prefer just copying my whole music library across several hard drives, some of them staying outside of my home. If I have to rip everything again, it would be quite a lot of work.
My kids have a music player called Yoto. It takes little cards which tells it which playlist to use. This is easy for kids to understand, and lets them listen to stories and music without adding more screen time. The cards don't actually store the music, just tell the player where to download it from.
My wife recently realized we had quite a few of these cards now. So she bought this:
The future is here, and it looks a lot like the past.
On that one hand, that's kind of cute and cool. But on the other, I find it a bit depressing that the main difference between this and CD wallets of the past is that the CDs actually did store the data.
With the CDs, you literally were holding the information, and you could use it as you wish without reliance or permission from anyone else. Whereas the cards, as you say, they just point to where the data is. You still need to rely on a whole chain of different services to get access to it. Access can be revoked at any time, either deliberately, or by some error, or by some critical service shutting down. It's just like the past, but worse. Isn't it?
Yeah, pretty much. In their defense they're more resilient to greasy kid fingers and being dropped behind the couch, but I still wish the data was actually stored on the card, or on some form of local storage. We had an mp3 player with an SD card before that, but then you can't switch playlist as easily.
I kinda miss the days of pirating a movie, burning it to a disk, and then popping it into a DVD player. Like it's objectively more convenient now, with Jellyfin/Emby/Plex media servers that can stream to any device in your home, but it has lost some of the analogue charm of feeling like a hackerman dressed like Neo when you gave a friend or a family member a DVD with sharpie writing on it, and them thinking you were some tech genius lmao.
I remember some software where you could include like a custom DVD menu, where you could press chapters and subtitles and stuff before starting the film, and thinking I was the coolest person in the world when I showed my friends hahahha. Ah good times. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
Early piracy was just so fun. Like I'm glad that it's more simple, and accessible now, and that you are less likely to use your dial-up internet to download a virus over 3 days... But, it was so exciting lmao. Like it felt like you were stepping into some underground club that no one knew about - even though you were a 12 year old nerd with no prospects of a girlfriend in the near future hahahaha. But it was really fun, and it helped me learn to like problem-solving, and the idea of piracy, and open-source software def also helped me develop some ideas about the world around sharing, and stuff.
Anyway I think that's enough gushing about that hahaha, just wanted to indulge in my nostalgia for a minute.
Someone brought their most loved music to the party and instead of hearing those favorite songs and having future glimmers full of fond memories, they probably woke up with a devastating hangover, drenched in their own vomit, in the bushes of a garden in the front of some strangers house.
Yes, but your audio will sound shit compared to listening to lossless audio with wired headphones. Oh, you also probably don't own that music also, once those servers go down you'll lose everything.
Well... I guess you are talking about legal DVDs, this although maybe people did it as well with originals, pretty sure it was more common for not authorized copies.
Yep, first did my entire cd collection to 256k ogg vorbis files. Then went back and reripped them to flac, used musicbrainz Picard to tag everything and just did conversations to mp3 so my car stereo could play them.
Now I'm about to go back through my dvd/blueray collection and do full rips without transcoding.
Burned Dreamcast games too! It had no copy protection, so you could just download Ikaruga or a bunch of NES or Gameboy ROMs and play them with no modifications.
The DC did have copy protection, it would've made no sense to release a disc-based console in the late 90s without it considering CD burners were becoming ubiquitous (some early CD-based consoles like Sega CD didn't have copy protection because nobody really had the means to write CDs at home). Sega believed their proprietary GD-ROM format would prevent piracy, but ironically it was another format called MIL-CD Sega introduced with the DC that allowed it to be exploited and cracked games to be run without the need to modify the console. Info here.
We have maybe 4 or 5 of these babies loaded with dvds and TV series. We basically lived so rural we couldn't stream for years at our old place. But we did have dvds and used these cases since we could haul them from the bedroom to the living room or basement depending what our plan was.
Now we're lucky enough to have starlink (yes, initiate the Musk circlejerk) and we still sometimes will go through the albums and watch dvds occasionally.