A very important issue, particularly around Christmastime

And odds are your DVD/Blu-Ray player will get fried anyways.

Does anybody have any Star Trek episodes on tape from the 80's or 90's with hilarious period commercials they'd want to sell me?

If you can support the hardware format indefinitely, the license travels through the legal ethereal realm with you.

If you want to back up the media or format shift things you enter areas of technical constraints, technical practicalities, legal constraints, legal freedoms and practical concerns of just how do you want to store you licenses (e.g. perhaps you want to track everything through some itunes account) and how do you want to store the media (other disk, hard drive or just torrent it).

I work with cloud computing professionally, so I don't bash it. But media and software are licensed, not sold. That disc you think you own, you don't own, it's a piece of metal and a license.

This is the kind of thing I try not to think too much about as it pisses me off too much.

The only kind of issue that's even remotely important around Christmas time:

I don't have those, but I have a number of MST3K episodes on DVD that were dubbed from a friend's Betamax copies of the early 90s airchecks. It's even better for me because there are local breaks put in by the cable company.

I've got about a half dozen tapes of TNG, recorded off Fox13 in seattle in the late 80's, early 90's. The commercials are hilarious.

As long as the cloud is there and accessible, and the licenses to use the cloud and the music are valid.

Oh, disk and hard drive for me. It may be less portable in certain cases, but I don't mind.

I also don't own the infrastructure that maintains the cloud, and I'm not ready to just assume it'll be automagically there whenever, however, as fast as I need it. And not there when snoopers go looking for it.

While I appriciate the advantages of cloud and digital formats, I see the benefits of a hard copy. Compters and hard drives get fucked up, and most cloud drives I've seen hold a relatively small amount of media. With a disc, I can always copy that as many times as I want.

....going on a tangent, I've noticed when copying DVD files that the actual movies seem to look of better quality than my TV series....as in, they have no noticable action lines whenever the camera moves quickly and looks pretty close to the DVD. But all my TV shows look like hot ass using the exact same settings. Is it because TV shows are compressed more in quality?

If you're dealing with licence management as well as storage what you have is a licence management service that may be backed up by cloud storage. Hence in my book (which is highly specialised and few agree with its definitions) it's not cloud computing.

Well it is there for the snoopers. I don't trust the law to protect my data, I trust encryption a bit though

I deal with stuff like backup every day, so I would of course agree it's essential. And for many people the physical media as backup is more reliable than the process of running digital backups.

The free ones, yep. That's free for you.

Not always legally

It'll depend on your copy techniques. A lot of 'one click copy' solutions abstract you from the ripping, encoding settings and processing and try and use smart defaults. By hiding the complexity from you they limit the quality/size ratio you can get.

Back in the day I became an expert at DVD ripping, knew all about codecs, different parse rates, resolutions, processing time and file sizes. Then I realised that there were people better than me at this and they would release files over torrents and P2P at quality and file size much better than I could ever be bothered to do.

So I stopped ripping DVDs and started downloading stuff instead of which I used to burn to DVD.

Several years ago I stopped burning to DVD and last year I threw out of my disc collection. For me, knowing what I can download and watch in a few minutes is a skill that surpasses physical and digital media management, skills that are already obsolete IMO.