DVDs I would rip and donate personally, purely because if you care about image quality they are just not going to look very good on modern TVs. Maybe if you have any special editions, cool box sets, or stuff with sentimental value then hold onto just those?
I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.
I've seen some games on Steam that use filters to emulate a CRT to try to make pixel games look more like we remember them.
I wonder what a similar endeavor would look like for video. I've been messing with my old Wii this weekend and am kinda shocked at how bad it looks - just stretched to fit with an awful anti-aliasing filter over the top. It's probably not worth the effort at any scale, but there's gotta be a better way to upscale old content than to just blur it. It didn't look blurry in its day.
Hm, I’m curious too now. One could quite easily, though not cheaply, put this to the test with a RetroTink 4K which has excellent CRT emulation options.
I suspect it would look pretty cool, and probably better in some way than a plain upscale that a TV might do.
The big difference is that old games were often designed around the characteristics of a CRT, whereas films were (obviously) targeting film and cinema first and foremost. CRTs were the best those games ever looked, whereas at the time a tube TV was the worst way to watch a movie—albeit it the only one accessible at home.
I think the effect would be quite impressive for old TV shows shot on tape though!
I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.