Praise for MakeMKV
I mentioned a little while ago that I have been ripping my collection of ancient DVDs that I've been lugging from place to place since high school. MakeMKV has made this a pretty brainless process for me. I ended up buying the $60 USD permanent license after reading about it in this post and testing it out. It feels worth it to me!
I do own a lot of my favorite movies on physical media, but I don't watch them much anymore because my PS5 is constantly blasting me with a bunch of buttons that lead directly to other shit I could be watching immediately. We have been building a NAS to host our personal documents and media, and I figured getting the DVDs on the NAS would make it easier for me to find a reason to watch them.
MakeMKV turns this into basically a two-click process. You open the disc; it reads it (and breaks some copy protection); you get a big button to Make the goddamn MKV; you click that and then you got da MKV. It takes a while to read the disc but it's something you can do while working on other things.
I do agree that you should own physical versions of the media you care the most about - it's the ultimate protection against streaming service fuckery - but it's also nice to have the digital version, too. I have a couple friends who are currently in the process of archiving a bunch of their old media. I have a friend who is dumping old ROMs and collecting their family members' old saves from their childhood games so they can play them again on an emulator. I suppose we have entered the period in the Millennial lifecycle where we all started looking at our physical media and thinking, "Yes, that's nice, but why can't I have both??" Why can't we have all those weird personal or marginal things you don't get when you stream or pirate something?
And I can tell you - I've been looking at a lot more of these old special features on these DVDs lately. Each of them has sometimes like a dozen little featurettes or weird interviews on them that I'd totally forgotten about. I have watched more strange featurettes from old DVDs in the past three weeks I've been doing this than I have in the last 20 years. They are, actually, a very Youtube-y kind of video - a featurette is something you watch to fill, like 20-40 minutes of time. It's a lot easier to dig into them when you've extracted them from your DVD cabinet and got them all in a media server.