When did people stop using DVD?

[monkfailz]

When did people stop using DVD?

CNBC.COM: The death of the DVD.

I am going to say around 2008-ish.

I know in the 1990s dvds were rampant lol. When did people stop using DVD? Of course, it is 2021 and DVDs are pretty much extinct now like the dinosaurs and VHS Tapes.

I watch alot of Randomfrankp (Tech youtuber and Custom keyboard fanatic) videos and I love his Room Tour Setup series where he shows pictures of people's computers setups kinda like the Post Your Gaming Setup thread here on these fine forums. None of the computers have an optical drive (DVDRW) lol. Optical drives and DVDs are dead now and have been for years probably. As we live in a streaming digital world. We can watch our movies and tv shows on our iphone 11s, android smartphones.

DVDs aren't totally dead though. I still have my rack of DVDs sitting by my dresser drawer.

Of course, it makes sense for DVDs to die. They just take up so much space in your house, in your bedroom having to store. And having to carry all your dvds around with you.

I still miss DVDs.
I miss rummaging thru the Walmart DVD Bins.
And I am currently ripping all those dvds on my rack to my HDD, lol.

[Tuor]

I'm still using DVD's because i love watching movies and i rarely go to a theater. I got a brand new DVD drive for my computer 2 weeks ago because my previous DVD drive was dying. I also got the 3 Hobbit movies recently, i still hadn't watched the last one.

It's annoying how hard is to get DVD movies nowadays, you have to order them online because shops no longer sell them.

[monkfailz]

People weren’t all in on blu ray...

I still don't know what Blu-ray dvd is lol. I think they're just a more advanced regular dvd. With much better quality. I've always stuck with just regular dvd.

[Tuor]

I still don't know what Blu-ray dvd is lol. I think they're just a more advanced regular dvd. With much better quality. I've always stuck with just regular dvd.

DVD's are normally set to a HD resolution, that is, 1080, blue-rays are set for 4k. But offcourse, there are exceptions.

[XDurionX]

DVDs will outlive Blurays by a fair margin.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Not so much DVDs in particular for me but rather the loss of physical media as a whole is kind of sad to me. Don't get me wrong I don't mind not having to store them and I don't mind not having to rebuild libraries every 10-15 years because the format has changed but it was nice to buy something and it actually be in your collection. The new digital age is a lot more shady. Download and streaming services will eventually go out of business, change owners, equipment could fail, or business practices will change and your ability to see these things can be affected by all of that.

[draynay]

DVDs are crummy 480i with low bitrate compressed ugliness. I don't miss them.

On a 4k TV a DVD image has to be blown up to 24 times its original size. The 4k TVs have software to try and de-fugly that process but it can only do so much.

I have just as much space being taken up by discs even though I do make a fair number of digital purchases. The newer discs are just better able to take advantage of what my TV is capable of than a DVD would be.

Edit - as for the OP question, I just checked and the last time I bought a DVD was 2013

[Shadowferal]

If I'm buying a movie or show, then it's a DVD.

[Gaidax]

DVDs aren't totally dead though. I still have my rack of DVDs sitting by my dresser drawer.

Ye man VHS aren't totally dead too, I have some video cassettes lying somewhere in the attic.

[Shadowferal]

Weird choice when Blu-ray isn’t much more expensive and it actually looks decent.

Don't have a player

[Shadowferal]

Should look into that then. It’s not like they’re crazy expensive these days.

I play everything on my pc. Getting a drive is easy enough. Getting a free app/program/software to play it, not so much if you're not internet connected. (Gave up last year after 4 of 5 programs "could not connect"...and the other, well that plays DVDs beautifully...not the success I wanted but...)

[Shadowferal]

Weird. I had zero issues watching blu rays on my pc with the included software. Used it on a plane a while ago with my laptop.

...was me last year.

[draynay]

Weird. I had zero issues watching blu rays on my pc with the included software. Used it on a plane a while ago with my laptop.

Definitely the exception, they intentionally made it very difficult to watch blu ray on PC.

[Shadowferal]

Definitely the exception, they intentionally made it very difficult to watch blu ray on PC.

In my case I think it was a DRM thing since programs were looking for an internet connection. Like when I couldn't play Diablo 2 without connecting first to the net.

[Ayirasi]

Stopped buying VHS after buying a PS2, and stopped buying DVDs a while after picking up a PS3. Still occasionally use them, but not as much as Blu-ray or streaming.

[Gestopft]

2010: buying a bunch of DVDs from liquidating Blockbusters
2020: pulling DVDs out of the attic so our daughter can watch them in the in-laws car on a road trip

[Nihilist74]

I don't watch DVDs at all anymore. I have a lot of them with all my favorite movies. I bought a lot of them. One DVD player, I wore out from using it so often. When I first got a DVD burner, I would make combo DVDs of all my favorite episodes from a DVD set I bought like the X Files and Millennium. I bought a lot of DVD sets like batman the animated series, Superman the animated series, and justice league the animated series from the 90s and early 2000s. I would not mind having a separate DVD burner machine to record stuff off of tv.

I have a lot of VHS tapes too. I would like to go through some of them and record them on my computer like the original star wars trilogy without all that extra crap on them.

Later I bought a blu ray player and three blu ray movies, Fight Club ( which was the first DVD I bought too ), Se7en, and Alien vs Predator. Only blu rays I ever bought. I hardly ever used the blu ray player for blu rays. I mostly used it to watch movies off of a USB thumb drive. It annoyed me that the blu ray player would not play some file formats.

Now I have a 2nd Linux computer with all my movies on it. I watch them all on the vlc media player which I think is pretty great.

I have a lot of VHS tapes too. I would like to go through some of them and record them on my computer like the original star wars trilogy without all that extra crap on them. I liked using the timer on the VCR and recording movies and shows.

I would not mind having a separate DVD burner machine to record stuff off of tv. I got a video capture card that will work well for recording tv.

[Zuben]

Thinking back, I stopped using a legacy format every time I had tried out its successor. Once we had a DVD player my family never bought another VHS, with Blu-ray we lost interest in DVD, then piracy streaming services trumped Blu-ray.

[Cosmic Janitor]

DVD as medium got overshadowed on multiple fronts. When MLC NAND-Flash tech made cheap yet giant USB sticks an item you would find in promotion gifts it died as a relevant storage medium for data. A single sided DVD has usually less than 5gb of storage, which is a wet fart for today's data volumes. Meanwhile in the entertainment industry Blu-ray not quite killed it, but weakened it enough to make it lose relevance before the streaming boom displaced both with the exception of some movies people absolutely want to own. Not to mention the price for Blu-ray is still out of this world for newer releases, which propelled streaming even further.

Anyway, saying when exactly it died is not really possible. It was a gradual process and I'm sure some people will claim it's alive and healthy because they still live in yesteryear and switch their DVDs 4 times per movie or install games from 16 discs.

- - - Updated - - -

Definitely the exception, they intentionally made it very difficult to watch blu ray on PC.

Absolutely. Between the extremely agressive region (b)locking and software certification/format/DRM issues the whole thing is more than just a little bit annoying. The few blu-rays I own never work right away, it's always a fight to get them to run since I haven't owned a normal blu-ray player or TV for over a decade now.

[Rustedsaint]

Plenty of ppl still buy dvds, mostly old ppl thou.
I myself bought afew dvds just afew weeks ago