I’m not dead! I am alive, I promise! I made this blog with the intention of continuing to post, but unfortunately life, the universe, and everything has gotten in the way of my posts, and this has taken the back-burner. Unfortunately, I am also paying for the domain with which this blog is being hosted, so in essence I’m simply throwing money out the window for no good reason. But no more! Hopefully I can get myself reacquainted with my blog, and can get posts cranking out again. So, here we go! (And hopefully this will be the last post that needs a paragraph like this explaining that I’m not dead…)

Back to the point of this article at hand – “Paper, or plastic?” We’ve all heard this question many times when going through the checkout line (that is, if you’re of the age group when they still regularly used paper bags to bag things up with, and the store actually did the bagging). It’s a simple question: “Do you want your groceries in a paper bag, or in a plastic bag?” Of course, most of us don’t care. As long as we get our groceries, and we get what we want, and can take it home safely and use it, that’s all that matters to us. We take what the popular answer is and run with it. Nowadays, it’s plastic. But, what does all this have to do with the real point of this article – “Physical, vs digital?”

There’s a shift in media paradigm going around in our society today, dividing a strong rift in between people. When it comes to media-oriented purchases, such as movies, music, or video games, should one purchase a physical-media format, or instead opt for the digital-media format? The choice may not be as simple as it seems.

You may be wondering what spurred me on to make a post, comparing physical media to digital media. After all, I haven’t posted for months (at least half a year, I believe!), and then suddenly I post about this. Well, it all began for me with a little concept known as Steam. Yes, yes, let the flogging commence, but I just tried out Steam for the first time a few days ago. Why did I wait so long to try out Steam? Well, first of all, I’m not a huge PC gamer (though I love me my console games!). Secondly, for those PC games that I normally would buy, I usually get them from the big box stores locally, or online through Amazon. Although, that point is fairly irrelevant, since I believe the last physical PC game that I purchased was Prince of Persia, in early 2009. So, I’m pretty inexperienced with PC game purchases. So, this then leads to the question of why I bought a game through Steam. The answer? Price, and convenience.

After purchasing the game (Just Cause 2, for $5.00), I have become hooked. Not to PC games in general, but the ability to have all of your PC games together, under one gaming “umbrella”, and not have to keep track of the discs, or the activation keys of the games themselves. Rather, you simply log in with your Steam account, click the game that you would like to play, download it if it hasn’t yet been downloaded on your PC, and begin playing. Voila! Easy as pie. Sure, there are some minor details of whether you have to be connected to the internet to play, and other details, but I will keep those outside of the context of this blog post. So, right now, as it stands for me, simply being able to have all of my games, in all their full glory, right at my finger tips, is amazing, and definitely a plus in my book.

Now, the question is whether or not the same can be said of movies and music. And it is at this point where I have issues with digital versions, and side with the physical copy of the media. For starters, let’s look simply at music. The obvious physical form of music is the CD. One can walk into their favorite store and pick up a CD, for roughly $0.99 a song, pay it, go home, and listen to it. It’s wonderful. Or, a person can go online to Amazon’s music store, iTunes, etc, and buy the same list of music, again for roughly $0.99 a song, and have them store “in the cloud”, always accessible anywhere and everywhere. In looking at this context initially, it could easily be said that buying a digital copy of a CD is leaps and bounds better than buying a physical copy, both for convenience, safety, and cost (since you don’t need to buy every song if you want only a select few songs from the CD). However, for me, the kicker is the quality of the music downloaded, vs. the quality of the music on a CD.

While a CD may never be as good as being in a live recording session, it is still exponentially better than that of the simple MP3 that you can download off of your favorite online digital distributor. While a fully uncompressed track off of a CD may range in the size of roughly 30MB per song. However, you simple MP3 downloaded may only be roughly 3.5MB in size. Where did all of that extra data go? It was lost in a lossy compression format, never to be heard by your ears ever again. While this may not normally be a problem for some, for those of us who have built higher quality home theaters, and don’t like listen to highly compressed MP3s, the online digital formats don’t work for us.

The same concept can be extended further to that of the digital movie distributions. Obviously the first company that comes to someone’s mind when they think of online movie distribution is Netflix. Second to that is probably the “digital version” that comes alongside a number of Blu-Ray / DVD combo packs one can buy in the store. However, once again these qualities drastically pale in comparison to their Blu-Ray counterparts. Comparing Netflix-quality streaming to a Blu-Ray movie is like comparing cable TV to a Blu-Ray movie, in my opinion. Once again, many people may be satisfied with Netflix-quality movies, or the digital versions that come in the combo packs. Unfortunately for me, I am not.

So here I am, stuck in a quandary. Do I settle for lower quality digital versions of movies and music, and enjoy the ability to play them wherever, and whenever I want to, or do I opt for the physical copies, with better quality, but require the additional restrictions of needing the media every time I want to play / listen to them? The answer, for me, is a hybrid solution of the two.

Let’s go back to the music topic. For me, I would like the ability of the “buy once, play anywhere” concept, but with the high quality I’ve come to expect. My solution is to use a combination of Exact Audio Copy, and the FLAC open-source codec to create a CD-quality rip (of my own CDs, mind you – none of this illegal stuff), but with a compression level that keeps me from having to chew up all of my HDD space, just for my music. Then, by simply downloading a codec that supports FLAC, I can now listen to any of my rips I have made. Coupling that with my Windows Home Server and my HTPC, I can now listen to all of my music whenever, and wherever I want to, without the restriction of the physical media. And furthermore, I maintain full quality that I demand with my music.

As far as movies, I follow in a very similar pattern. Currently, I do not own a Blu-Ray drive, so I am stuck at the moment with requiring physical use of that media. However, with all of my DVDs, I have followed in a similar scheme to that of my music. Using a combination of a few pieces of software, I am able to rip all of my DVDs into a single full-quality rip (full loss-less format, fully burnable in the future if I lose my disc), and can stream them over my network at will, again through my Windows Home Server and my HTPC. Once again, I am able to keep my full quality I need, while still maintaining all of the advantages normally reserved only for the digital copies. Unfortunately, I do need to sacrifice some HDD space to support all of the DVD rips I have. However, in my opinion HDD space is cheap, and so this issue is pretty much non-existent to me.

Winding things down, I suppose I should give my ideal solution in the future that would make me incredibly happy. As stated above, I love the way Steam works, and love the ability to have the fully copy of all PC games I purchase digitally “stored” online, so that I can play them when I want to, without the need for the physical copy, and without the need for the activation key, since they’re all stored online. This route still gives me the ability to enjoy the entire game, without crippling it in any form or fashion (such as lowering the resolution so that it can be downloaded quicker). If the same could be done for movies and music, where I could purchase a movie or a CD / song online, and get the same, full quality that I would expect out of a physical copy, I would be in heaven. But until that point, I will have to be subjected to the requirement of ripping my own copies of stuff, an converting them to a digital format so that I can get the advantages of digital media as well.

Now I leave the floor open to you. What do you prefer? Paper (Physical), or Plastic (Digital)? And why? Do you have issues with lower quality media? What is your setup like to take advantage of your decision to go with physical or digital? I’d love to hear of your setups, your environments, and your situations. Let’s hear it!

– admin