Is there any pointing backing up DVDs if you can download them?

June 29, 2008 11:36 AM

Is there any point backing up my DVD collection if I could just download replacements?

This is partially practical and partially ethical. Now that I have a toddler about the place (and an unpredictable computer), I've started backing up my DVDs, using Mark Pilgrim's method. At the rate I'm going, it'll take me months, it's tedious, and I'm filling up my hard disk with .img files which I'm too anal to delete.

Part of me is wondering, what's the point? BecauseI reckon I'd be able to find torrents of pretty near everything I own on DVD. Since I've already bought the DVDs in question, I wouldn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong.

What's the balance of opinion around here? Is it more wrong than I suppose? Am I over-optimistic about being able to find most things for download? (Now and in the future?) Am I even running a legal risk?

posted by snarfois to computers & internet (18 comments total)

Well, torrents are easy enough to find, but for obscure or semi-obscure stuff it may be a hassle. And the quality isn't going to be anywhere close to DVD-level - though you're ripping with handbrake, so you're taking something of a loss as-is. It's your call, but I'd never rely on being able to find any given movie to download, outside of things like LotR, The Matrix, etc.
posted by Tomorrowful at 11:45 AM on June 29

If the torrent's not there, you're out of luck. If the seeders are slow, you're out of luck. If the internet dies, you're out of luck.

If someone catches you downloading it you're out of luck until you convince them that you really do own the movie and are just creating a backup, assuming that they buy that even when you do show them the DVD that you own and the messed up disc that made you download it.

So yes, physically backing up would be a good idea.

If you don't want to use all the hard drive space, you could just create a copy right away and watch the burned one. That way if your 'watching' disc gets messed up you won't be making a copy of a copy.
posted by theichibun at 12:10 PM on June 29

At the rate I'm going, it'll take me months, it's tedious, and I'm filling up my hard disk with .img files which I'm too anal to delete.

I don't know Mark Pilgrim from Adam, but I can backup a non-compressed DVD to my hard drive in about 10 minutes or so using DVDshrink.

Further, hard drives are super cheap. I bought a 750gb Seagate from Newegg the other day for $99.

Figure 6gb per movie (a rough estimate) that's 125 dvds per 750gb drive. 10 minutes per disc = about 20 hours of ripping.

My setup is a little elaborate - I actually have a seperate PC that does all my ripping, so I shove the disc in and forget about it until it spits it out.

Two things are happening with movies right now:

1.) Streaming is becoming mainstream. You're sort of on the right track with your bittorrent idea, but you're stuck in 2003 there buddy. The prevailing service in the near future will be a sort of "movies on demand" type of interface provided by pay services such as Netflix. In a few years every movie in your collection will be available for streaming.

2.) The move toward Blu-ray releases is driving up the size of movies. While it's economical to back DVDs up to a hard drive, it is less so to do the same with HD releases. Some of the HD movies I have take up nearly 30gb of storage!

Both of these advents further call into question the logic of ripping DVDs. I still do it, because I have netflix. The few physical dvds I still own are in a box somewhere in the closet and will be disposed of whenever I get around to it.

So, rip your DVDs for convenience sake, but keep in mind that there will never be any sort of permanent archive because as higher res versions become available you'll likely want to "upgrade" to that...

I reckon I'd be able to find torrents of pretty near everything I own on DVD

If everything you own is Hollywood schlock then I suspect you're right, however a more likely scenario is that in the future you will subscribe to some form of movie-on-demand service.

Since I've already bought the DVDs in question, I wouldn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong

Feelings are not legal protections. With bittorrent in particular, the fact that you help facilitate a movie's distribution means that you're an accessory to illegal activity regardless of if you have any sort of legal claim to the title in question...
posted by wfrgms at 12:54 PM on June 29

That is a question I wrestled with a few months ago. I recently had to downsize my collection due to space constraints. My ruling was that anything that was not a special edition, criterion collection, collectible and/or hard to come by (stuff that was imported, etc), or had really awesome extra features, I would keep and the rest I would dl as necessary. This is practical logic. As for the ethics, I always figured that buying a film or song or album or whatever, allows you to enjoy it forever, no matter the medium in which it was originally delivered to you.
posted by marxfriedrice at 1:01 PM on June 29

With bittorrent in particular, the fact that you help facilitate a movie's distribution means that you're an accessory to illegal activity regardless of if you have any sort of legal claim to the title in question...

To clarify that: when you're running a torrent download, you're also uploading. That's how torrent works. (Most people who do torrent downloads will leave their program running until their upload traffic equals or exceeds their download.) Even if you own the DVD, doing that upload (most likely to someone who does not own the DVD) is copyright violation, or might be considered to be.

Not that you're likely to be called on it, but that's a different question.
posted by Class Goat at 2:25 PM on June 29

As for the ethics, I always figured that buying a film or song or album or whatever, allows you to enjoy it forever, no matter the medium in which it was originally delivered to you.

But that's not the way it works, Marxfriedrice -- purchasing the dvd allows you to watch it ON THAT DVD -- it doesn't mean you can walk into a store and steal the blu-ray version (or an old VHS copy) if you like. The general fuck you the internet has given to copyright has already basically torpedoed the music business, and it's starting to happen to the movie business as well. I've already seen a significant shift in the way that studios and production companies are perceiving their future slates, and my manager and agents have all commented on just this issue over the last six months, and everyone is seeing studios and financiers really pull back, and everyone is talking about the same reasonings -- declining DVD sales, due in part to increased piracy (overseas especially) and the complete bunglefuck that was the shift to bluray, have really hit the studios hard. We were financing movies on the backs of DVD sales for a long time. Now, all those really awesome movies you like? They're going to be releasing fewer and fewer of them, and they're going to just be the really huge blockbusters that cost a lot of money and appeal to the broadest audiences.


BecauseI reckon I'd be able to find torrents of pretty near everything I own on DVD. Since I've already bought the DVDs in question, I wouldn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong.

My answer to you, snarfois, is pleasepleaseplease if you must get rid of them, play by the rules -- rip them onto your computer, don't upload them or download them, and then destroy the physical copies of the DVDs. Don't resell those copies. This is about supporting the films that you most like and most want to see, and if you don't, then more movies won't get made. Just because you have something in one format doesn't mean you own it in another. If you think like this, then the business model for making films will collapse, although it's probably just too damn late to stop it, I suppose.
posted by incessant at 2:37 PM on June 29

Because I reckon I'd be able to find torrents of pretty near everything I own on DVD.

Depends on what you have. I searched for years for a downloadable copy of "Chaplin", starring Robert Downey Jr., and was only able to find one a few weeks ago after "Iron Man" became popular. I've also tried to keep on top of having every movie in the IMDB Top 250, and some of those movies have been impossible to find. I've only been able to find about 85% of the films in the book "1001 Movies You Must See before You Die."

But keep in mind that as connections increase in available bandwidth and digital storage space decreases in cost per gigabyte, it is inevitable that you will eventually be able to simply buy every movie ever made on a storage device the size of your fist, for the price of a decent pair of shoes, or less. A DVD holds 4.7 GB and its content can be compressed down to 1 GB or less while still being watchable. So you can fit about 1,000 movies (about 2,000 hours) on a $150 1 TB hard drive, and that's today. Storage costs, per byte, drop in half about every year, faster than processing power drops. Even if ten million hours of film and television exists (and that's an overestimation), you'll be able to fit it all on a $150 box in a little over ten years. Twelve years if you want it in 720p, fourteen years if you want it in HD. And some guy in Thailand will sell you one of those drives already filled with media and you'll be able to pick it up wherever you can buy knock-off Rolexes and cheap red-and-gold calendars. You'll be able to make a copy of every TV show and movie for your buddy, and so will he. And a few years later, you'll have it all on a chip the size of your thumbnail. And nobody's going to come knocking on your door, sniffing for bootlegs, because there won't be any need to risk exposure by downloading this stuff over a heavily-regulated and sniffed internet.

What's that, critics? This is a pipe dream? Well, consider this: in advance of the Canadian government possibly cutting off the loophole that allows me to download any piece of music any time I like, for free, many of us are just looking to download every piece of music we could ever want, in advance of the law. There's really only about 7,000,000 tracks out there at, let's say, 5 MB each. That can be distributed among 16 friends each with 2 TB of spare drive space. No need to even bother with unsecured torrents anymore.

This is why incessant is worried over nothing. The traditional entertainment media business model is doomed, and no amount of politicking, DRM, lawmaking or guilt-tripping will change that. It's coming, and it's been coming in increments for years. The idea that "more movies won't get made" is, of course, ludicrous. Nobody has to buy a DVD anymore, right now, today, and the box office still has $100 million weekend after $100 million weekend because no hard drive will replace the big-screen communal experience.

Don't put too much effort into backing up your discs. If a couple of them get trashed, write it off and just rent it should you want to watch it.

So, I guess to sum up: it's not wrong. You're over-optimistic today, but you won't be tomorrow. You are exposed to some legal risk, but tools exist to mitigate this risk (such as PeerGuardian) and you will eventually incur no risk.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 3:31 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]

The movie studios have made somewhat of a rod for their own back; by getting their mouthpieces to compare ripping a DVD you own to be as bad as dowloading it, and that to be as bad as mugging some old lady of her purse, and persuing DRM, prohibitive pricing to the maximum any market will bear, region splitting strategies and huge salaries for movie stars, most people frankly don't care about copyright, and certainly don't care if they're infringing it.

They see the false analogies, and see fat-cat studio execs, and conclude that grabbing a copy of a film that someone else bought, without depriving anyone of anything physical is not very wrong, especially if they saw it in the cinema already.

Bring on the convenient, cheap, easy to use DRM-free distribution systems that allow you to own your product without being nagged to death by splash screens and non-skippable adverts, or massive hoops to jump through, and we'll see how things pan out.

Right now, the pirated version is seen as superior in portability, use, region area, size, adverts, and pretty much guilt free. 'My son scratched my DVD? buy a new one at full price!' is not a reasonable position of customer service for most people, especially when laws are passed on behalf of the film industry making it illegal to bypass the DRM on DVDs or bluray.

A business model based on a monopoly of making copies, when making copies was hard and generally required special equipment and access to sources more or less worked. Now, when everyone has a piece of equipment in their home that lets make near infinite copies for near zero cost, and share them with everyone in the world for virtually no cost? Making it sooper-dooper extra illegal through bribed laws will not make it go away. Nor will assuming that the movie industry deserves massive profits despite what else happens in the economy. Entertainment dollars get cut the same as every other sector when there's a recession. Making movies that don't suck, and aren't cripped when people text reviews to their friends from the theatre itself is also probably a good idea.

Now, back on topic. Make no mistake, in europe and the US backing up an encypted DVD (all of them) you own is as illegal as uploading a copy of it on the internet, though for a different reason. Now, whether you'll be caught is another matter, but the millions of torrent users aren't at much individual risk either, though it is obviously higher.

You can backup DVDs to much smaller than the 5-9 GB it takes up on the DVD; DVD's are stored in MPEG2 format, with DD or DTS audio. The video can be compressed to mpeg4 (xvid etc), or mpeg4-avc (x264) format, and the audio can be compressed too. This can easily compress a film down to a GB or two while being virtual indistinguishable from the DVD in quality. However, you will need a computer or an xvid capable dvd player to watch them in the smaller, more efficient format.

Another option is to burn the now ad-free drm-free slightly-shrunk copies of your DVDs back to a blank DVDR, and store the original someplace safe, and delete the copy on hard-drive. In the event the copy gets scratched, just do another one.

Download services are developing in the US (everyone else is ignored though), just at the time ISPs are starting to get bitchy about how much it costs them to provide the bandwidth, and they'd like a cut of the studio profits thank you very much, or wouldn't it be terrible if your new service was slowed down massively for our users, or we'll just cap their bandwidth per month so they can't afford to download anyway.

It'll probably shake out, but I wouldn't count on legal download services being a viable option over the internet for a while - it'll get worse before it gets better, especially for anything except the latest lowest common denominator blockbuster.

As the law stands, with maximum sentances, it's safer to steal a copy from a shop, hit the assistant on the head on the way out and do a runner than get caught sharing a copy of your own DVD with a friend, though a court is more likely to actually give a harsh sentence for a noggin-cracking, as opposed to a few hundred thousand dollar fine.

Whether you feel the movie industry treats you like a customer, or a resource to have maximum money extracted from by whatever means necessary, including passing laws to surveil you and remove your fair-use rights, may impact upon your opinion on whether you should break the law and decrypt your DVDs, or break the law and download them. Does civil disobedience appeal or appal you?
posted by ArkhanJG at 3:48 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]

You can probably find everything you want out there, but if you've got more than 20 or 30 movies, it'll turn into a hassle sorting through which torrents are good and which are crappy or in a different language or poorly processed or whatever.

I'm not going to get into the larger debate except to say that the digital copy that you can make from your purchased media is really no different from the digital copy you can download, so the source of it at this point shouldn't matter to you.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 7:09 PM on June 29

It's easy enough to back 'em up. DVDShrink is great for this. Or invest in a dual layer recorder and splurge on dual layer disks, and skip the shrinking.

The problem with torrents is they are often not full DVD rips - just the movie portion, often compressed in a way that makes it hard to watch on a big screen TV (lower resolution, or just blocky and blotchy). Also the audio is resampled to stereo so you lose the 5.1 THX or whatever. Even in DVD rips, the extras are sometimes removed so you lose the alternative audio tracks (e.g., director's comments), features, etc.
posted by drmarcj at 7:43 PM on June 29

The assumption that DVDs will always be available in the torrent clouds is like saying "Why should I worry about retirement? The state will always provide for me!" Too much assumption, comrade.

Tomorrow there could be:

1. A ruling that makes ISPs liable for content and no more torrents.

2. Better poilicing of infringers. Yes, even if you own it you are infringing and on top if it with a torrent youre uploading so now youre a distributor.

3. A strict cap put on your net usage. I believe Time Warner is floating 20 or so gigs a month. That's like 2 DVD9s per month.

I think you should look at your DVDs as property that cannot be easily replaced and copy the ones you like onto an external disk. Or just burn them to other DVDs and move the originals off-site. Most likely your big fear should be theft or fire not losing one in the cushions of the couch. For that you need off-site backups.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:05 PM on June 29

This is why incessant is worried over nothing. The traditional entertainment media business model is doomed....The idea that "more movies won't get made" is, of course, ludicrous. Nobody has to buy a DVD anymore, right now, today, and the box office still has $100 million weekend after $100 million weekend because no hard drive will replace the big-screen communal experience.

If you guys are really interested in exploring further whether or not torrenting DVDs in lieu of buying them will have any effect on the movies that get made, I suggest you look closer into how movie studios and distributors make money. Studios haven't made their money off of exhibition for years -- theatre releases are seen as a way to promote a film's DVD release. It's crucial to put a movie in the theatres not so it'll make money there, but so it'll inspire people to buy the DVD when it comes out. DVD sales put productions in the black. You're right, though, that I'm pissing in the wind here, but just know that the current situation in the record industry, the complete shambles the music business is in right now, is exactly where the movie business will be in five years. Don't kid yourselves -- piracy is high on the list of reasons for this collapse.

Whether you feel the movie industry treats you like a customer, or a resource to have maximum money extracted from by whatever means necessary, including passing laws to surveil you and remove your fair-use rights, may impact upon your opinion on whether you should break the law and decrypt your DVDs, or break the law and download them. Does civil disobedience appeal or appal you?

Uh, you're not talking about civil disobedience -- you're talking about piracy. Civil disobedience is when you're protesting the government. This is stealing from content creators. Whether or not they're douchebags (and mostly they are, believe me) doesn't mean that they don't deserve to be compensated for the work they make that you love.
posted by incessant at 11:11 PM on June 29

There was a time when all film profits were made in theatres, so it is not compelling to suggest that the lack of secondary media sales will harm or destroy the industry. The model will adapt to the new market, as it has always adapted to the market.

And the only part of the music business that is "in a shambles" is the corporate music publishing industry, and by extension some retail outlets. Gross sales, when you include independents, concerts, 99-cent MP3s, and so forth, have never been higher; it's just being spread around differently. I find it hard to shed a single salty tear because, say, Sony had to lay off a few hundred administrative assistants, A&R people, and other shills and non-contributors. Or that the local record store that sold mostly corporate pop had to shut down because they couldn't adapt as quickly as the stores that were able to survive. Or that there may never again be a new album that sells ten million copies and enables one songwriter to buy a small country.

One local indie shop sells music that you can't easily get on MP3. They sell concert tickets. They sell t-shirts, buttons, posters, and more. They're opening a second location because their target market isn't Joe Blow and his iPod full of pirated Coldplay.

Anyway, my point is this: even if nobody ever bought entertainment in fixed media ever again, the systems would adapt to the market. How do we know this? Because they always have.

This is stealing from content creators.

I find it easy to dismiss anyone who equates infringement with stealing, and I recommend that the OP should, as well. It's not merely argument from emotion, but as dishonest as equating, say, jaywalking and rape.

So to tie this in specifically to the OP's question: no, it's not more wrong. IMHO, most arguments against it are equally dishonest, making the act of piracy more right than you might suppose.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 12:16 AM on June 30

Civil disobedience is disobeying a law you disagree with, and being prepared to go to court over it. EUCD and DMCA etc are government laws. Call it 'piracy' and 'stealing' all you like, it's still breaking neither law - it's copyright infringement, and breaking copyright law, not the law against robbery on the high seas, or grand larceny, or murder, or any other law.

Nobody deserves to get paid. Plenty of people do work in advance, with no way of knowing if people will want to buy it, and if it doesn't get bought, the market and government don't step in to force people to buy. you have a right to TRY to be compensated for your work, but even copyright law doesn't accept 'sweat of brow' as a valid reason for a copyright - only original, artistic work is protected, regardless of how much effort was put in. Most of us only get paid once for our work too, not a percentage everytime someone enjoys it for the next 150 years.

The state of the music business for indies is largely that business is booming. Making music that people want, at a cheap price, easily accessible from legit sources, with a big cut going to the artist, with little or no DRM, with internet distribution and word of mouth = success. The big label music industry with DRM, restrictions, low convenience, high prices and ripping off the artists? Not so much.

'Piracy' is a convenient scapegoat for loss of sales, but various neutral studies have shown that p2p etc is sales neutral or even positive - the biggest downloaders are the biggest fans, and are generally downloading material that they wouldn't or couldn't buy, even material they never end up listening to.

Yes, sales in the movie and DVD industry are down, but rather than try and work out what they're doing wrong, and how they're alienating their customers - just like the software and big label music businesses - they just point their finger at the internet, and try to buy laws that reverses the technology inventions of the last 20 years, and assume the state of the economy doesn't apply to them. The bottled water industry manages to sell water even though every person in the country has a very cheap pre-paid source of it in their own home. Convenience and customer relations - and a reasonable price - sells product, not treating your remaining customers like thieves. Have you SEEN the anti-copyright-infringements ads lately? I feel guilty every time I go to the cinema for supporting the rip-off douchebags that hate me so much for daring to want to see their output.

Remember, 'home-taping is killing music'? Well, it didn't, and online copyright infringement won't either. It might kill a few monolothic big companies that make a living from inserting themselves between artist and public to extract as much money as possible for executives, and it might mean that movies don't have half their production costs spent on the lead actors and the marketing, and yes the big CGI movies might be more rare. I can live with less Iron Mans, if it means less 1000 BCs. Yay, the invisible hand of the market has spoken, and it says 'dont piss off your customers when they have an alternative'.
posted by ArkhanJG at 12:24 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Of course, I mean 10,000 BC. 1000 BC might have been an interesting film.
posted by ArkhanJG at 12:27 AM on June 30

incessant,

Perhaps you don't understand copyright history very well. There was a time when copyright lasted a reasonable amount of time, after which the content fell into the public domain and belonged to everyone rather than belonging just to the creator. Due to Mickey Mouse legislation (quite literally) the content that should belong "to the public" has been stolen from the public by large media companies convincing legislators to make laws extending the copyright protection period, laws that benefit the media companies at the detriment of the public.

Today, the public is striking back. They say "enough already!" - these laws have gone too far.

Most musicians don't make anything off of the copyright protection from their works - all that money goes to the recording studio and the musician gets nada, nothing, zilch. Read all about it in Courtney Love Does The Math. James Garner sued Universal for his share of the profits from Rockford Files and Universal claimed that this highly rated show that they renewed year after year didn't "make any money" so he wasn't entitled to his share of the "net profits". Now they are doing the same with Jack Klugman. They hid the profits from Rockford Files in Quincy's books when they sold the two shows as a package. Oops.

We are going to see a major upheaval in the way copyrights are granted, and the way creative people are compensated for later use of their content (music, movies, photos, art, etc.) in the upcoming years. No amount of whining that the way it is now is "right" will allow it to continue. Technology has made the old way obsolete. Period. DRM doesn't/can't work - if you can hear or see it, you can record it and then play the recording over and over. Period. The industry (the music industry, the movie industry) needs to find a new business model because their current model which assumes essentially unlimited copyright protection is not going to last much longer.

I'm someone who makes my living producing and selling copyright protected works (photography), so I'm VERY sensitive to this issue. But I'm not playing ostrich and sticking my head in the sand and demanding that the world cave to my "rights". My rights aren't right, and "the public" knows this. The backlash has started, and laws WILL be changed.
posted by jcdill at 7:47 AM on July 1

What a train wreck this thread is. Way to piss all over snarfois' question, guys.

My advice, snarf, is to back up anything the toddler can get hir hands on and anything you can't buy on Amazon or that seems obscure. Everything else - if this backing up is a pain for you - just take your chances on.

A far more likely solution - and less likely to get you legal trouble - would be to sign up for NetFlix and rent the DVDs that have been damaged when/if it happens. At $12 a month for a 2 disc subscription you could turn around a LOT of discs, far more than you'll likely be able to find & acquire safely online through more public methods.

If you want to keep backing stuff up I'd suggest you turn your method on its head. You're making backups in case you damage the original during use. Stop using the original. Make a copy onto a cheap DVD-5 and put the original away in a paper sleeve in a drawer. If there's an issue with the copy (or it's one of the rare discs where you can actually tell the difference) then go back to the original.

You might want to invest in a copy of Parallels or use Boot Camp so you can rip with Windows software (I'm assuming you're a Mac dude since that's what Pilgrim's method uses) like DVDShrink or DVDFab Gold (what I think is easier for one-operation copies).
posted by phearlez at 8:16 AM on July 1

Way to piss all over snarfois' question, guys.

He asked if it was wrong. Every post in this thread (except for this one) has either answered one or more of his questions or, by debating the issue, helped him to find an answer to one or more of his questions.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 11:38 AM on July 1