At home I have 2 boxes full of DVD-R Verbatims with TV series and Cartoons downloaded at the beginning of the 2000s. I’m talking about about 800 DVD-R 4.7GB. I would be willing to throw away all the DVDs because my old computer no longer has a working DVD player, so I wouldn’t know how to read the contents. But I have 5-6 sheets of paper on which I have written what each DVD contains. My doubt is: Don’t I waste time and re-download everything in 720p or 1080p format and buy like 4TB HDD or do I get an internal DVD player from the computer and copy all the old DVDs just so as not to waste the time lost at the beginning of the 2000s? Thanks all!
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A dvd drive for a PC costs like $20. Even the usb ones. It would be a hell of a lot easier to just copy what you have down than to try to redownload everything. Assuming a lot of it is even easily available
Even if you want better quality it still likely easier to just point Radarr or Sonarr to the existing media and have it scan for higher quality than putting it in all manually o
I wouldn’t want to load, click, wait, unload 800 DVDs. Scan the doc, play around with OCR and load that into *arr.
My autistic ass thinksbthat sounds like a ln enjoyable evening. Especially if ibget to sort it all out into file trees and make sure the files are all titled properly for media servers to read.
I wouldn’t want to load, click, wait, unload 800 DVDs
To me seems easier than sit, browse, search, get coffee, search again, download magnet link, open, watch, watch, Christ why are there no seeders, delete, browse, search, download link again, watch, yay seeders, get more coffee, watch, huh why have I only got 80%, crap, everyone only has a max of 80%, why didn’t I notice that, go to bed.
And if you are in the UK like me:
Browse, find torrent, view blocked page… (Torrents in the UK are effectively dead, nobody does it).
Scan the doc
Meh, I have a sheet feeder for that sort of reason. You could always just take a photo of them. Much quicker if you are rushing.
play around with OCR
Don’t bother. Tick the OCR box and just let it be.
My solution (and I actually am doing this sort of thing): Copy the loose video files off each disc, burn to fewer Blu-rays. Oh and I never made printed indexes, that was a waste of ink. Text files and grep. Nothing more.
Did you try sonarr/radarr? That will automate the painful part.
For some torrents happens also here, but emule is better for me in Italy, there are release still seeded after more than 10 years. With torrent people just download and delete from sharing
The selfish part of me is saying don’t throw it away without uploading first.
A compromise would be to load it all into radarr and then search for upgrades. Anything that doesn’t find an upgrade over period x (like maybe a month?) Consider uploading those somewhere.
Of course this is a lot of work and a lot of storage, it’s up to you.
You could also mail it all to some release group people.
I’d say you jump that bridge when you get to it. If you need something you just download it. Once you get stuck that you can’t find it, if ever, you might look into getting a reader for your DVDs, or ask some friend or relative for a few minutes on their older computer.
Trying to redo a collection you had from some 20+ years old papers isn’t worth it just to let it sit another 20 years.
Are any of these scene dvdr releases? Those could probably be restored to their original state, and are probably worth hanging on to.
20 year old downloaded videos - that’s like 480p xvid avi? I vote for re-downloading. I have had some stuff like that flying around from back in the day. Whenever I have wanted to watch one, I lasted a few seconds until I decided to dump it and get a better version. I would keep rarities, of course, but otherwise it might even be quicker to re-download than to mess with disks.
A lot of these cartoons from the 20th century don’t and never will have HD versions. If they do, they’re just upscales. Original captures would be more desirable than an edited version.
Most of anime are 1080p because they download raws of bluray rip.
Same. I had 90’s Fox x-men in my collection. I had gotten back in maybe like 2003 at a LanParty.
Shit was super rare at the time cause it was never released to DVD/Streaming services. It was essentially just VCR recordings from on-air tv.
Fast forward to modern day I was like I wanna watch that and when I started playing it I was like…bleh. Opened my torrent client and got a updated version.
It honestly depends on what the data means to you. Is it the show itself, or the specific files that are important to you?
Getting a higher quality version means having a higher quality version to revisit, which is better in terms of preservation.
If thats too much effort, you could just pick up an external DVD drive and keep it with the DVDs. That would be basically zero effort and still let you access the discs whenever you want.
Why would you throw away 800 dvds because your computer doesn’t have a DVD player?
You can buy a portable dvd player for a decent price.Upload the DVDs to the cloud.
At the rate streamers are tossing content away forever I wouldn’t risk it by tossing these.
Don’t delete anything until you find a replacement copy. A lot of media from that time period became lost with no known copies. You might be sitting on a treasure trove.
Yes absolutely, I hope this will be clear for all people in this subreddit
Thank you. There is so much from this time that I can no longer find. Anime which is not considered “profitable” often never gets re-released. Some is never released on home media, and the only copies are recording from TV decades ago.
my old computer no longer has a working DVD player, so I wouldn’t know how to read the contents.
Go onto Amazon and buy a new drive, they are dirt cheap. Heck you could get a usb-c one for future proofing.
Then you can either keep the discs or just copy everything off. Saves all that tedious faffing about with endless searching, downloading, indexing. Unless you enjoy that, which I don’t, you’ll get bored out of your skull and give it up for a while to play Hogwarts Legacy or something, then come back a year later to continue only to find the law got involved and killed the trackers you were relying on and you also have no idea where you got to anyway.
I’d just spend pocket money on a drive ;)
This morning I transcribed the contents of almost all the DVDs into a txt and put it online. If you want to see it, find the paste below:
https://paste.ofcode.org/i62L3dhMyLZut7VTW9LxPiThere is some great stuff here. Devilman is especially exciting as I’m a huge fan, and the DBZ episodes may be “lost” broadcast versions which have never been released on home media.
Get a cheap external USB DVD drive and a bigger HDD (4 TB is not enough, IMHO). Then simply go by your list and look what can be fetched from the net, you don’t have to copy those DVDs. Everything else grab from the discs. Afterwards put all the discs into a dark box and far away into storage. Maybe some day you still need it and with a small chance some of it will still be readable. :)