I used to own a laserdisc player. In fact, over the years I think I owned three of them. I had the original Pioneer top-loading player, and later I had a front-loader from someone else. And I had a big collection of laserdiscs, too, an embarassingly large number of which were X-rated.

The DVD made the laserdisc obsolete. And eventually I started buying DVDs in huge quantities. (An embarassingly tiny percentage of which are X-rated. I tell you; it's hard to be a perv when you're old. I think it's been ten years since I last bought any porn on a disc.) I don't have any of my laserdiscs any more; not worth keeping.

And I'm not so sure about my DVDs, either. Yesterday I had an urge to rewatch episode 9 of Kamichu. I was faced with a choice: I could walk over to my shelf and get my copy of the third DVD, or I could pop onto the interwebz and download a rip of the series onto my WHS NAS, and then play it from there.

Guess which I did?

At this point, DVDs are just too inconvenient. I don't even remember the last time I watched one. Fact is, I don't watch BDs either, though I buy a fair number of them. For the last year or so, all my disc purchases have been guilt buys or sequel-encouragement buys, and a lot of them never get unwrapped once they get delivered.

Watching an MKV is more convenient. If the person who encoded it is even halfway competent then the video quality is the same. And it's more convenient to navigate an MKV file, moving backward and forward, because there isn't any disc-head moving around.

It's also more convenient to find the damned things. Searching for a DVD around here means searching the shelf, and if it isn't there then it means searching through plastic crates. But finding something on my NAS is trivial by comparison. I keep directories in alphabetic order by show title, but if I can't find something even so, I can let Windows do a search for a keyword in the title. If I've got it, I can find it within five minutes at the outside without leaving my chair.

And if I don't have it on my NAS, I can probably find and download it in pretty short order. It only took about 20 minutes for me to download Kamichu last night.

Quality and convenience... the marketplace recognized a need, and no commercial company was willing (or at least was permitted) to fill it. So amateurs stepped in. Now the structure that's in place -- all, I might mention, volunteer -- is huge and well-organized and efficient. It's no wonder that the content producers are terrified of it.

But they've got no one to blame but themselves. When the tide is coming in, you can't make it stop by ignoring it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:10 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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