The "problem" is multi-faceted of course.

When I started collecting films, or going back only another decade or two when any of us starting collecting any entertainment medium, our choices of what to watch/read were what we owned or a relatively small selection at a local library.

Today, even if I owned nothing, I can, in about three seconds, access pretty much:

• every song ever recorded
• every book every written
• every movie ever made
• every TV show...
• every comic book...

I simply don't need to physically own the items I need for entertainment anymore. There are just so many more options today than just a few years ago.

More personal to my conundrum, is that I have always been quite eclectic with my hobbies, having way too many interests to be the completest collector I'd like to be in each area. Plus I'm running out of space, plus I'm finding more satisfaction in life outside of materialism, etc etc

I'll always be a collector/hoarder, and I'll always own a sizable film collection, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly digital someday soon.

I'm assuming you're including illegal methods to access everything ever made in 3 seconds, as there is no way every piece of content out there is available through legitimate online sources.

I don't love movies. I enjoy watching one from time to time.

No Blu-ray remorse for me. I only have about ten of them. I bought too many DVDs and I learned from that. I should have subscribed to Netflix many years before I did instead of buying all those disks that I'll only watch once or twice.

I only ever bought one movie on videotape because the VHS picture quality was so bad. I got into DVDs because it was the first format that was pleasant to watch. Streaming video is back to VHS quality, and I'm not interested.

I still have films I have seen under six times within a few years and even after five years I'm not ready to watch again. There is just too much new content out there to continue to watch something I know that well over and over again. Hitting that saturation point is coming quicker.

I think certain movies only have so much rewatchability, and that is something I learned after I bought many of them on DVD. What I learned is just because its a great movie, doesn't mean it has great replay value.

A movie like Schindlers List or Platoon are great movies, but I honestly don't watch them much cause you really have to be in a certain mood. Then you have a movie like Star Wars or Back to the Future, where I can watch them over and over and over and never get sick of them.

I don't do illegal. That's why I said 'pretty much' every piece of content.

I think I fell into that trap of owning classic movies I felt I should have in my collection rather than titles I really wanted to watch.

Movies like Schindler's List, JFK, 2001: a Space Odyssey, Dances With Wolves, Chinatown are all great movies but I really don't need to rewatch them over and over.

Usually when I'm scanning my collection I go for the tried-and-true classics from my younger years like RoadHouse, The Road Warrior, Jaws, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Animal House, Up In Smoke etc.

The Gong Show Movie? The Day the Clown Cried? Hey, There's Naked Bodies on my TV?

The Starland Vocal Band Hour?

I can still tap into the mindset of what it was like before VCRs and there was ever any concept of being able to own a full running time copy of a film-let alone one that was in color and sound.

I still get giddy as a school kid when I realize the stuff I have access to now and in a presentational form that rivals what would have only been available to a millionaire or studio mogul only a decade or two ago.

The whole idea of remorse just strikes me as the kind of jaded ennui that comes from not appreciating what you have because you've always had it.

Typical dvdtalk thread. Guys feeling remorse because they paid $25 for a Blu-ray they only watch once. No complaints about the $200 they paid for a woman they were only with once.

It's pussy. I'll double that to $500 for a one time shag and you won't hear a peep out of me.


You gotta put it into perspective.

While I don't have the memory of not owning any films, since I grew up in the VHS era, I agree with you. It's fucking amazing the movies we can watch with high quality presentations, most better than if you saw an old print of the same films at a revival theater (if there even is a revival theater in your town).

The trouble comes from buying movies you won't actually watch much, but then that's just regular old buyer's remorse. I don't regret any of the Blu-rays I own, as I like having a solid collection of physical discs, but I don't buy every movie that comes out just because it's on Blu-ray.

^
This x 1,000

What I've noticed on other Movie or Blu-Ray sites is that people have lost track of their love of film and just buy anything and everything that comes out. Justifying something being a 'bargain' to buy yet another disc you won't watch or probably weren't even looking for, is a quick way to get towards remorse. Buying $15 worth of $1 Blu-Rays that you probably don't like/want, or buying 1 $15 Blu-Ray that you really do want? It's an OCD/numbers game that seems to make those decisions. It also doesn't help the physical space issue that has been brought up here.

Also I've noticed these same sites have people buying up titles of a certain line, even if they don't care about the film or have heard of it. Criterions, Twilight Time, Scream Factory, and the like are being bought on these sites so that the spines look nice in photos. We all collect to a certain extend in our DVD/BD/VHS love, but when does it interfere with our love of film and not just physical media?

As others, I learned a lot from starting with my DVD collection (which is still healthy) and applied what I learned from that into Blu-Rays. I don't have to upgrade everything to Blu-Ray, I normally wait for titles I want to drop in price, which has been working out pretty well. I also stopped Blind Buying, as there seems no real need to with how fast reviews pop up and the access to forums such as these.

I voted "no". By the time I began buying Blu-rays (Jan. 2008) I already had regrets about my DVD collection and was living through the collapse of HD-DVD, so I was pretty selective from the get-go with buying BDs. That's not to say I haven't bought Blu-rays that I dumped later on, I have, but it's no where near the number of DVDs I've dumped (20 or so BDs vs. at least 200 DVDs).

It helped that I was in college during my first two years with Blu-ray,but even after I finished college and began making money, I just never felt like buying a lot of movies anymore. Whatever allure movie buying had for me before 2008 was gone by 2011. Whether it was me joining Netflix or just not buying anything for a good two years, I'm not sure. I'm thinking it was probably a combination of the two.

That’s pretty much my feeling on film collecting; you can love films without owning a massive collection of them. I think some people have it in their heads that if you don’t have a collection of several hundred, or thousand, films, then you’re not a “real” movie fan.

Yea, I wish I had Netflix 10 years ago. I knew about Netflix in (I think) late ’06, but didn’t join until mid ’09. I’m still kicking myself for that.

I fell into that trap too. There were more than a few movies I bought because, as a film fan, I thought they HAD to be in my collection, not because I wanted them, even if some of them were movies I liked. I agree with you on Schindler’s List and 2001. As great as they are, neither are films that I have a particularly strong desire to revisit anytime soon. Hell, I own 2001 and I think the last time I watched it was New Year’s Eve 2007.

I have some questionable titles I wonder why I bought, but I try and limit it these days. So many Blu's are $5 to $7 nowadays, and I have to really convince myself to buy them. Unless it's something I really wanted to get for awhile, I usually pass.

I used to buy DVD's just because they were $3-$4 in the bargain bins (obviously before Blu's came around) and I'd find that it was typically because I hadn't seen the movie in so long, and wanted to watch it again. Then after watching it, I was like "why did I buy this?"

I sometimes poke fun at people on this site or others for having a backlog of video games, but I am the same way with Blu's. I have over 300 movies (nothing compared to some of you, eh?) and I'd guess at least 100 are still sealed, and of those 100 at least 20-30 are movies I've never seen, and blind bought. Off the top of my head I can name a few:

The Fighter
Monuments Men
The Grey
Argo
The Expendables 1 and 2
GI Joe 1 and 2
Bad Grandpa
Don Jon
etc etc....

Nope. No remorse, and this is coming from a guy who has been auditing his disc library since last year's Academy Awards Challenge. I've gotten rid of about a third of my library throughout the audit (all but one title on DVD, admittedly), and even that hasn't led me to any feelings of remorse. I'm down to just 38 movies left to log before my audit is complete and then my self-imposed ban on buying new discs can be lifted. I've been curating a small wish list and every now and again I find myself getting a bit antsy to finally start indulging myself again.

I attribute my lack of remorse to the same things as others who've already chimed in: being more selective about Blus than DVDs in the first place; only upgrading true favorites and not everything already owned on DVD; shifting from cheap blind buys out of the $5 bins to renting (primarily from the library, where it's free) and streaming.

Even on my modest 32" HDTV, I can often see a difference in video quality, but generally I find streaming more than adequate for my introduction to a movie. Sure, I appreciate and prefer the full HD treatment - that's why I do still buy favorite movies on Blu-ray. But I'm from a generation that grew up with VHS tapes of recorded pan & scan network TV edits of movies. Streaming feels a lot nearer to the Blu-ray end of the spectrum than what I grew up with, you know?

I also don't find myself prone to the "I might want to watch this again later" compulsion that I once had. In the last few years, I've discovered it's pretty easy for me to discern which movies I legitimately love enough that I'm going to revisit and which ones will take me years - even an entire decade! - to actually re-watch, because DVD Profiler has shoved those Purchase and Last Watched dates in my face. I can sometimes even hear it muttering, "Tsk, tsk!" at me.

There was a time when my wife and I would go see a movie at the theater and as long as either of us generally liked it, we'd compulsively buy it when it came out on DVD. We started to get out of that habit several years ago as our financial situation changed. Now that it's just me again, I feel pretty much entirely cured of all that. Last year, for instance, I saw and loved Iron Man 3. To date, it's easily my favorite movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (yes, even over The Avengers). But I've made no effort to add it to my library and I have no plans to do so, and I'm entirely okay with that.

I only buy what I like. No blind buys but sometimes I look at my collection and say, if I never watch that again, why the heck did I buy that, no matter how cheap it is.

(Rant mode on).

I only started buying a lot of dvds/blurays in 2011. Prior to 2011, I had very little to no interest in dvds and blurays.

Frankly I'll admit outright that buying a lot of dvds/blurays is largely an easy way to indulge in my ocd compulsive collecting/hoarding habits. The fact that I enjoy watching the movies/shows, is largely a tertiary (or quaternary) concern to me.

(I don't want to discuss my secondary reason for buying a lot of dvds/blurays. But MY PRIMARY reason for buying a lot dvds/blurays is to feed my ocd compulsive collecting/hoarding habit).

Recently I've come to the conclusion that I was largely fooling myself into thinking that I was buying dvds/blurays for other reasons like: better picture quality, ownership of a physical object, immunity to studio/internet "kill switches", midlife crisis, etc ... I now know these reasons are self-serving semi-rationalizations and/or I was lying to myself.


(Rant mode off).

Well now you gotta tell us what the secondary reason is. Do you fuck the discs? It's okay, Solid Snake does that with his.

Touche.

Without being too specific, I'll say that I find the activity of extracting the isos from dvd/bluray discs using the computer, is more exciting than watching the actual movies/shows themselves.

The dirty secret is that Blu-ray will be the last mass market home video format. Sure, Hollywood will attempt to mount a 4K format on the public. Once people see how little difference there is between Blu-ray's 1080P and true 4K, it won't penetrate far beyond a very select few. If you think Blu-ray is niche, 4K will end up smaller than Laserdisc.

As someone that has been on the bleeding edge of video since the VHS era, no one should feel remorse about owning quality BDs. They are basically going to end up being the final word for many, many films.

Nudge nudge wink wink say no more say no more

I agree. 4k is going to be relegated to some very high profile titles, with likely very few special features. And that's if there even is a physical format.

(As an aside).

I only got into laserdiscs for about a six month period in the early 1990's.

The first two laserdiscs I got were Terminator 2 widescreen, and the Criterion version of Blade Runner. Later I picked up Akira. At the time, I thought they were spectacular.

What turned me off from laserdiscs was when I picked up Wayne's World 1. I came to the realization it wasn't much better than the vhs version.

i don't know now if i would cry for joy or sadness if Blu-ray were to go away...

I tend to agree. Sony has already pointed out that the under-performance of Blu-ray has helped lead to their current financial woes. At this stage, what company would want to launch a new physical disc format?

If 4K arrives in a physical format, I predict the level of market penetration to land somewhere between S-VHS and D-VHS.