Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Having to stand up and put in a disc when you just want to watch The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition on your toilet is too much work.

You need a player. I have no player. A 1TB HDD is easier to manage than multiple BRs. People buy movies on BR and rip it to store on a HDD.

Going the other way round doesn't make sense to me.

That sounds like a terrible hassle. I used to manage a lot of USB drives, but even those had capacities in dual digit TBs. Voluntarily dealing with GB sized storage sounds like masochism to me.

Blu-ray isn't really rewritable (at least, not in the same way as a hard drive). You can add to it incrementally and erase everything once, after which it becomes a normal disc. So ultimately, it's one-directional writing.

But my biggest problem with CDs (of which Blu-ray is a type), is that they are only as good as both the reader and the physical storage method. Want to watch a movie? Maybe the player's laser has dust on it (or worse, a scratch). Maybe the motor has a short. Maybe your disc has a scratch in just the right place to make it unreadable by the player.

There's just a lot more points of failure, even if you wanted to go that route.

The fun way to watch movies is to have a NAS with a Plex/Jellyfin server and browse them on your TV with a nice UI in the comfort of your living room.

Want to watch this movie in 4K Dolby Vision with atmos? Just browse or search for it and click on the poster art. Want to stop that half way through and watch a tv series instead? Go for it. It’ll take all of 5 seconds to navigate to it and have it playing.

After going through the effort to set that up, I can’t go back to anything else.

If a drive fails or other issue occurs with my NAS, it will send me an email and then shut itself down. Replace a dead drive and off I go again. No data loss due to RAID. (insert obligatory comment that RAID is not a backup solution and that you should have a separate backup for important files)

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you're a super-neat person, perhaps this won't be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

If you use .iso files you will be missing out in quality and availability. If a better version of something you already burned is released, you will miss on that too.

If you use .mkv files, then why bother with discs in the first place? HDD in network and access everything, everywhere at any time.

If you start to scale to TBs, the price per GB of HDDs starts to drop dramatically. Look for refurbished HDDs in eBay.

The only real reason I can think of where physical beats digital is for playing the FEL DV layer on some UHD releases. But even then, there are ways to circumvent that.

I enjoy storing things in blu rays but I splurge and get the rewritable ones, it's definitely more expensive than buying an hdd

I would only use CDs for long term storage, theyre still the best for that. HDD for convenience.

you need one of those jukebox disc auto loaders

Personally I would only use discs for an extra possible backup just in case.