Bluray, DVD or Digital File?

[Pepe_Java]

What is the best one?

[bobzilla]

It depends on who you are and what you want. Plenty of people on this board still like to have things on physical media and watch on their TV, so for them, Bluray or DVD is the way to go.

Personally, I like mkv files with chapters.

[Lord Reith]

MKV (Matroska) file every time. Accept no substitutes!

[Kusaywa]

MKV (Matroska) file every time. Accept no substitutes!

My feelings exactly...
But make sure you have a backup. I've had 2 Seagate 5tb drives die on me. One under warranty and replaced, one not. Luckily I had it backed up on another drive.

[harrylime]

It depends on who you are and what you want. Plenty of people on this board still like to have things on physical media and watch on their TV, so for them, Bluray or DVD is the way to go.

I do too, but even my 2009 Samsung HD television plays back mkv and mp4 files on an USB-stick plugged into it (it even has 4 ports). I often wonder what kind of tv people are using that wouldn't be able to playback from a flash drive and they have to resort to a bulky device placed next to it.

[mojofilter]

After sitting in a box for years not being played, the DVDs I made years ago won't load. I've never seen a Blu-Ray disc, nor have anything that will play one. So it's digital files for me, backed up on other drives. I'm not a purist or trader, so mp4 is fine.

[Lennons Ghost]

MKV (Matroska) file every time. Accept no substitutes!

Absolutely. 1 Video file with multiple audio and subtitles wrapped up in a neat container, it should be the standard these days. Running a Plex media server It's a no brainer to ditch the DVD and Blu-rays and rip straight to MKV with MakeMKV.

[beatlesaint]

I had a policy of burning a DVD and also saving the files on a hard disk so if one fails i have the other medium.
Got to the stage now where i only do that for discs i really want and everything else just gets saved to a hard disk.

[Kusaywa]

by mojofilter » Fri Jun 09, 2023 7:02 am

After sitting in a box for years not being played, the DVDs I made years ago won't load. I've never seen a Blu-Ray disc, nor have anything that will play one. So it's digital files for me, backed up on other drives. I'm not a purist or trader, so mp4 is fine.

MP4, MKV, they are both just "containers".
I don't think there's a difference between either.
And while MKV seems to be the most popular, I have some MP4 and can't notice any difference.

And yes, physical media does degrade.

[Lord Reith]

MP4, MKV, they are both just "containers".
I don't think there's a difference between either.
And while MKV seems to be the most popular, I have some MP4 and can't notice any difference.

They are both containers but mkv is much more versatile. You can wrap any stream at all in matroska whereas mp4 is much more picky. You can convert DVD content to MKV with no encoding required and it keeps the chapters. It also has a provision for manually setting the aspect ratio which has saved my arse many times when I have a file (usually an mp4) which looks stretched or compressed horizontally. You can convert losslessly to mkv and then just manually set the picture width you desire and there is no need to re-encode and degrade the picture. Also MKV can store information as well, so you can add all that to your video file (it won't display on the tv, but can be accessed on a computer). It's just the best and most versatile format there is, hands down.

And yes, physical media does degrade.

You're right about that! Optical recordable discs are infamous for turning into coasters, but I've also had a few silver dvds become unplayable as well. Any time I buy a dvd I immediately back it up, and I stopped burning dvdrs years ago because they are a waste of money and unreliable. Hard drives are also prone to sudden failure, but less so than discs in my experience. It's much less hassle to safety clone a HD than clone a pile of disks.