A lot of my friends are big into physical media; one of my buddies has thousands of Blu-rays that he’s running out of space for. While I can appreciate collecting, it’s just not for me. I live in an apartment that’s packed to the brim with possessions, and buying DVDs and Blu-rays gets awfully expensive. All that said, though, October 2026 will go down in history as one of my favorite spooky seasons of all time. It was the year that I took a good look at all the physical media at the bottom of my entertainment center. Just because I don’t buy discs anymore doesn’t mean I never did.
Before streaming, a DVD or Blu-ray was the end-all, be-all option for home video. I was surprised at how many horror movies I’d stockpiled over the years, many of which were first or second-edition pressings. I can’t recall the exact moment the idea dawned on me, but it ended up being a good one: I was going to pull out all my old discs and play one every day as part of my lead-up to Halloween. I did just that, and the juxtaposition between physical media and streaming was hard to ignore. Fast-forward to mid-November, and now I’m thinking about ditching the majority of my streaming subscriptions. Here’s why.
Leaving it to the hardware
Respect the disc drive
I enjoy the mechanical parts of disc-reading tech. My player of choice is a base PlayStation 5, and one of the best parts of my month-long marathon was the ritual of managing discs. There was something tactile and irreplaceable about pressing the eject button, watching the last DVD slide out, inserting a new disc, and pushing it in. There was also something exciting about the hum of the console as the disc drive fired up; the audible prelude to a movie you’re about to experience for the first or hundredth time. The most I’ll get out of my Roku streaming devices is a little “bloop” sound when I select a title (plus a bunch of interface lag).
This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the convenience that streaming affords. Before my October experiment, I really wasn’t much of a physical media devotee. But after getting used to the repeated actions required to get a DVD playing, it almost felt comforting to anticipate the physicality. There’s something quite deliberate about watching a DVD or Blu-ray, especially compared to how mindless it can feel to scroll through page after page of Netflix titles. Nothing feels special about the latter anymore, even if I planned on watching a particular movie or show (and didn’t just randomly stumble upon it).
Streaming catalogs are also riddled with ads and on-again-off-again reminders to upgrade your membership. The only advertisement featured on my “The Shining” DVD was the slip sleeve inside the case. Digital is great, but paper is nostalgic — or maybe I’m just getting more sensitive as I age.
Celebrating imperfections
Compression artifacts and all
Let’s talk about macroblocking: This is a type of compression artifact you’ll find on both physical media formats and streamable uploads. As the name implies, macro blocking can cause portions of an image to devolve into pixelated, square or rectangular blocks. The encoding tech of today is far better at utilizing bitrate, so a streaming platform like Netflix is able to hang onto more visual details — which can all but eliminate macro blocking. That’s great for a modern film or TV show freshly uploaded to a server, but not so much for an older title that hasn’t been re-encoded in over a decade and hasn’t been re-uploaded.
The same goes for physical media that’s been on a shelf for a minute. Macroblocking can be especially prevalent during darker scenes, and I saw a good amount of it when watching my older horror films. My ancient “A Nightmare on Elm Street” DVD was one of the leading culprits. Call me crazy, but I actually found there to be something endearing about the macroblocking on this dated disc. With MPEG-2 compression, DVDs have less data to work with than Blu-rays and modern streams, which can result in increased macroblocking.
And this isn’t the kind of malady that a 4K-upscaling player is going to remove either. But when this disc was in production, the encoding team did the best they could at the time to preserve detail. I can look past that kind of technological limitation, but I can’t turn a blind eye to fuzzy resolution introduced by network bottlenecking.
- Brand
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Sony (UBPX700U)
- Ports
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Ethernet, Wi-Fi, HDMI, Coaxial
- Connectivity
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Dolby Atmos, Dolby TrueHD, DTS:X
The Sony UPB-X700U is an excellent 4K Blu-ray player with multiple audio and video outputs, HDR, and more.
Special features and commentaries
I remember being frightened as a child by the DVD menu for “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” more so than the film itself. After about five seconds of inactivity, Leatherface suddenly emerges and lunges toward the screen. It’s not a great menu by today’s standards, though; the on-screen elements look particularly chunky on a 4K OLED TV, and the creepy soundscape’s loop is too short. I could say the same thing about the look and feel of my “House of 1000 Corpses” DVD menu, but that would be sacrilege — mainly because the late, great Sid Haig, who plays the infamous Captain Spaulding, filmed over 10 minutes of footage for the disc dashboard.
You, as the viewer, are literally required to “ring” (select) an on-screen desk bell before the option to play the movie or chapter selection appears. (The bell is also what causes Captain Spaulding to appear in the first place.) I could see how some folks might find this annoying, but now that we live in a streaming age where ancillary content is hard to come by, it was even easier for me to appreciate the presentation. Platforms like Plex do a nice job at aggregating reviews, cast info, trailers, and other media, but it’s just not the same.
I also get a kick out of old-looking interfaces. My “Nightmare” DVD had text-based menu items that were barely legible, and Shout Factory’s “Halloween” Blu-ray box set used a low-res, pixelated banner image on the DVD menu for “Halloween: Resurrection.”
My DVDs weren’t done and dusted, just dusty
The feeling of media ownership is one big ruse, at least if you ask an AV curmudgeon like me. At the end of the day, a DVD or Blu-ray is still just a license to watch a movie or show, not ownership. Technically, you own nothing, other than the hardware required to play the media you want to consume.
But quality preservation and overall experience are important factors that one shouldn’t negate when choosing between physical media and streaming. I’m glad I didn’t, and my October lab-ratting was well worth the dust and disc-based visual compressions.