You’ll never look at garage sale DVDs the same way again. Photo courtesy of news editor Lauren Weyel.
Vinyl and digital cameras have made a comeback with the students of San Luis Obispo High School, but one other old technology deserves its renaissance as well: the DVD.
CDs have made a partial comeback, with some students buying them so that the CD player in their car is more than a vintage decorative feature, but students are sleeping on the potential of the DVD. No more worrying about whether your favorite movie or TV show is going to be moved to a different streaming service. No more paying exorbitant monthly fees just to watch four movies a month.
“Sometimes it’s easier to just go to streaming services, but it’s nice to have a movie in your hands,” said senior Adamaris Rojas Ortiz.
The only real barrier between you and the blissful DVD lifestyle is the DVD player. DVD players that hook up to a TV are relatively cheap (you can get a Sony DVD player from Best Buy for around $30), but if you don’t have a TV, the portable DVD player option is a bit pricier and has a smaller screen than most laptops. If you’re blessed with a decade old MacBook, it may still have a DVD drive built in, or you could just get an external DVD drive to plug into your newer computer for around the same price as a traditional DVD player (note: the quality of these smaller DVD drives has not been tested by this reporter).
Fortunately, the initial DVD player cost is the only true investment you have to make for the DVD lifestyle. Most movies and TV shows can be borrowed on DVD from the public library. Since most people do not use DVDs anymore, the discs for recent movies and TV shows are in pretty good condition compared to those from the early 2000’s heyday of DVDs, such as the Lizzie McGuire Movie (which still played pretty well with almost no skips despite looking like someone had taken a metal sponge to it). If you want to make sure the movie you desire is at the library when you visit, you can put it on hold to ensure that it will be at the library closest to you and that no one else will take it. The only flaw with the library strategy is that the DVD could possibly be scratched, but again, most recent movies have very few scratches, and often these scratches impact the performance of the DVD less than a poor WiFi connection would impact the performance of a streaming service.
“I like using DVDs and CDs because it doesn’t depend on WiFi, so you can just push a button and watch a whole movie without watching ads or waiting for stuff to load, so it’s fun,” said freshman Amelia Wood.
If you are tired of driving back and forth from your home to the library in order to check out your favorite movies, you can also buy DVDs for fairly cheap at thrift stores or even used book stores like Phoenix Books. There are usually whole bins of cheap CDs and DVDs at the Goodwill Bins that are less crowded than the clothing bins, allowing you to search for your favorite movies relatively unbothered. When buying a used DVD, check to see how scratched it is, because if the first copy you find is really scratched, it may be worth the time to find a nicer copy to pay your coveted $3 for. You can’t do much about a scratched library DVD, which is why it’s usually ok to take that risk for a free movie, but if you’re going to pay for and keep a DVD, you generally want to make sure it’s not going to skip over your favorite scene and drive you insane.
Be warned that new DVDs are quite the rip off. It may be worth the money if you intend to live the DVD lifestyle for a long time and want to watch your favorite movie every week, but in most cases, a used DVD will work just as well and will be a quarter of the price.
A DVD player is a great investment for students. Instead of having to steal passwords for multiple streaming services, you can just visit your local library and pick out all the movies and TV shows you want to watch, cutting out the weird, greedy middlemen. Go buy a DVD player and support your public library, Tigers!
Source: slolibrary.org
