Asklemmy

I wanted to buy physical books and movies for myself but I have a small room (in parent's basement) and don't yet got my own place. There's no space for it, really.

Yep, torrented content on hard drives, using media servers like jellyfin, audiobookshelf, calibre, and navidrome. Accessible on any device, anywhere in the world.

Most of my music comes from CDs, but I have ripped them to use on my iPod and in Plexamp. Also have a heap of books and dvds but more digital with these

Yes. Tons of physical music. Tons of physical movies both DVD and vhs.

Games, I sadly have only digital for the most part for pc, but I have ps1 ps2 atari n64 nes genesis snes Xbox physical games still.

To me, there is a huge push to make us own nothing and be a slave to corpos. This upsets me. And I've always loved physical media. Its much more real.

A hard drive full of non drm files is fine too (especially for tv shows, since stacks and stacks of dvds do take up space) but its not quite the same.

Oh ya and i have a small library maybe like 300 books

When I was still playing Nintendo games up to the switch, my games were physical.

On PC I have steam. But I still have various install discs from years gone by.

And I have various CDs, DVDs and blu-rays.

I don't have any streaming subscription services. I canceled all of them a long time ago

I keep it around and don't use subscription services or DLC, but the physical media itself doesn't see everyday use, excluding books. When I had a bit more time during the quarantine, I digitized about half of my physical media library. Now if I need to pull something off the shelf, I'll digitize it individually while I'm at it. After that point, I just run it off a hard drive or whatever portable device it's on.

Most of my media purchases nowadays go to independent artists/developers where producing a physical copy is not always practical. Old stuff that was released on physical media often can be tracked down on archive.org since trawling eBay and thrift stores for those can get unsustainable. Everything else may be found in the high seas.

As for books, I'll take physical copies whenever I can. I can't stand prolonged reading on a backlit screen and I don't do a good enough job keeping my e-ink reader charged.

I have a huge collection of DRM free movies, shows, books, music, etc.

It's physically in my house, but digitally on my hard drives. With quadruple redundancy, including offline backups.

While I do use steaming services for tv/movies and music, I've also got reasonably large collections of DVDs/BluRays, hard copy video games, books (never liked ebooks or even audio books) and most of all, vinyl records (over 1000 in my collection and ever -growing!)

Happy with having a mix of media, and increasingly keen to make sure I own things rather than only having them available through a stream, convenient though that is.

Just books

I think nowadays MP3s are physical media.
(And technically they're stored on a physical medium in your possession).

Only vinyls because I think its fun to collect. Movies/shows are streamed from my server. Games are all on steam. Books I sometimes get but I also read a lot on my eink android tablet. And I get Spotify through my work so I listen to that when I'm out

I prefer paper books when I can afford them as I find it easier to focus when I have a physical book to hold. And it just feels like a nicer experience.

Yuppers, my kids have a huge DVD and VHS collection of various kids movies and nature docs. I believe it promotes agency and choice better than picking through a never ending void of selection of media on streaming services. Plus we live like kings at flea markets, usually a dollar a tape or DVD.

I prefer buying CDs for music & physical games for my consoles when I can (physical games on PC is kind of a distant dream now...). For TV, I think the only option to actually own your media is through BluRay/DVD. The digital stores (like Amazon, Vudu i think?) only let you watch on their platform & don't give you any files.

I do have a small number of vinyls & cassettes, but that's more for novelty than any practicality.

Physical backup media. Hot mount SATA spinning drives and also USB 3 spinning drives. Some times software on flash drives. Flash drives for emegencey boot media. I sometimes transport files on flash drives too.

I read a lot of physical books. Everything else is digital for me at this point. I pirate everything. In a world where media can be endlessly distributed essentially for free, it feels somewhat wasteful to insist on physical copies of that media.

Nope, that ship has sailed years ago.

I have a few physical books left to read and I have a lot of DVDs to watch. I would've liked to have had a few video game consoles and the amount of games I'd want to have per console, but the used video games market has been broken for a while now.

Music remains digital, I just outgrew CDs entirely.

I’ll always prefer physical media over streaming for things I like.

It’s mainly Bluray nowadays, but also some older DVDs.

I'm still resolutely offline when it comes to books. I also have a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays. I sometimes even still buy some. I also still have a box of music CDs in the basement but I only listen to MP3 (no streaming).

The idea of classifying DVDs or videogames carts as "physical media" is twisting my brain. It's physical storage but the data is still digital.

That said, I do prefer to backup my media physically, even if I downloaded it initially, and primarily use my own library instead of streaming.

I do have a small collection of vinyl and a huge collection of books. I still have all my old CDs, too, but most artists seem to sell new albums as vinyl-with-digital-download-code these days and that's what I usually do.

Like actually use?

No, not anymore, though I do prefer to purchase media (movies, albums and the like) on physical media. It then gets ripped to digital and the originals stored against future need.

I've had my trust broken a few too many times.

When or ifever I end up buying music, it's going to be physical where possible because legal download sites are going on delisting sprees now, eg. like 7Digital's been doing for a while now.

At least with physical CDs, I can do my own FLAC rips and not worry about losing the physical copy unlike with legal download sites where if it's delisted, it's completely gone even for downloads you already bought.

Vinyl also technically can be ripped to FLAC, but since you're digitizing an analog format, it's a real-time process so you gotta sit through an entire side of an LP unlike with CDs which can be ripped quickly, plus you'd need to manually split the raw waveform up into individual tracks, and manually input metadata, digitizing analog formats like vinyl, open-reel, or cassette is a very long, drawn-out, and manual process vs. ripping CDs, but it's something I'd still recommend doing especially as vinyl physically wears down every time it's played back as is its nature being a mechanical format read by a stylus, so digitizing an album to FLAC for future playback and then putting the physical album back on the shelf can prolong its life, especially for any particularly valuable albums.

This goes for tape formats too although since they're read by a magnet, they don't wear down every time they're played back in the same way vinyl does, but they still degrade.

Another perk to all this especially for digitizing vinyl in particular, is you'd have a FLAC 'master file' you could then transcode to Opus or some other lossy codec for listening on space-limited devices like a lot of lower-end mobile devices, but that also applies to FLAC rips of CDs or even digitized tape albums too; keep the FLACs at home while putting the Opus rips on your phone if your phone is space-limited (even 510kbit/s Opus rips are smaller than the FLAC input file while having no audible degradation).

Yes, CD's, SACD's, DVD's, Blu-ray's, Ultra HD Blu-Ray's, and vinyl records. Also have some HD-DVD's (I regret getting into it because the discs and hardware are unreliable) and Minidiscs (also regret getting into).

Records and books mostly. But I just moved my CDs out of my storage space.

I've gotten myself setup with a DVD and BD Capable Amplifier, so I've been slowly getting a little DVD and BD Collection!