Blu-ray disks hold high definition copies of movies. At 1080p, they have more than 4 times as many pixels as DVD’s 480p. Now there are UHD (or 4K) disks which promise 2160p, but are still expensive and most people can’t see the difference on their TV. I have been buying a lot Blu-rays the last couple of years, hundreds of them now. Many of them come with a digital HD copy that you can get by redeeming a code on a piece of paper in the case. The movie is then available to you to watch and sometimes download through several different services. This is a good deal because you can also buy digital copies of movies, but they often cost more than the Blu-ray. But maybe half of the Blu-rays I have bought did not include a digital copy. Sometimes you can buy a digital copy of a Blu-ray you own through one of the services, Vudu, for $2 (you take a picture of the UPC to prove you have the disk and GPS proves you are at home), which I have done with about 50 movies. But I still have about 100 Blu-rays with no digital and no Vudu copy available.
I decided I could make my own digital copies of my Blu-rays if I got a Blu-ray drive. Now that I have so many titles, it makes a lot of sense since it lowers the cost per movie. Vudu makes it easy to watch movies stored on their site as long as you have internet access plus you can share your account so other people can watch. A Vudu app is built into most smart TVs, including mine and is on my Blu-ray player as well as my Amazon Fire stick. It is harder to play iTunes movies, but iTunes lets you import home-made videos and load them to an iPad which is my main use for digital copies. I could also watch them on my phone or laptop, but the resolution would be wasted on those. At home I can watch homemade digital copies on the Fire stick using Plex. I could change the settings on Plex to allow me to watch movies on the go, but I don’t have a need for that.
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