Ways to Save Good Movies of Today for My Kids to Watch in the Future

Philippines
July 5, 2012 4:21am CST
I remembered having a really hard time looking for a copy of a nice kiddie movie I watched when I was in grade school, and I wanted to show it to my toddler. However, I can't find a copy of it locally. I have to order it from amazon, and its expensive. Now, we have a good collection of movies in DVD, and I wanted to save copies of it so my kids could watch them when they're old enough. Movies like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. Im not sure if DVDs will still be the way to go 10 years from now, but perhaps, computers would still exist. So, I'm planning to save a copy of the movie files on my laptop and on a USB stick for safekeeping. DVDs may get scratches in the long run and DVD players may no longer be the in thing in the future. Do you know of other ways how I could preserve a copy of good movies for my kids to watch in the future?
1 person likes this
4 responses
@ShyBear88 (59293)
• Sterling, Virginia
6 Jul 12
I know where me and my husband live there is used stores so we go there and buy all of the kid movies we want to get our daughter. We also have family that buys her movies or movies that they think she will like. We kept a lot of our movies from when we where little but things like a collection we didn't keep we got ride of them because they take up to much room and we can get them all online for free or through the netflix that we have.
• Philippines
6 Jul 12
I only intend to keep those we want the kids to watch when they're older. Of course, we can't all of those we bought because its going to just take up some room in the cabinet. That's why it may be better to just keep a digital copy on the computer or on a storage device. By the way, what's netflix?
@ShyBear88 (59293)
• Sterling, Virginia
8 Jul 12
Netflix its a company that has pretty much every movie old or new avaible to rent a phycial dvd, or blueray sent to your house, or you can download the software through your computer or even certain game systems to watch movies at your home with out having to go and rent a movie. You can even get shows right there on your tv. We do streaming which is through our xbox 360 so we have pretty much every movie at our finger tips. But we have physcial copies of those we like and are okay with our daughter and son having to watch as they get older. A lot of movies that me and my husband like we aren't sure our kids are going to like so we don't keep them we go and sell them to a used store and if we want them again to own we can just go back to the used store and see if they have it. A lot of our family members buy movies for our daughter any ways so if we want to keep them we do if not we just sell them. We don't want to us up our computer space with movies downloaded to your computer that is also how some virus make it on to a persons computer.
• Philippines
10 Jul 12
That sounds cool. I don't know if we have something similar here in our place. If there is, perhaps, its way too expensive. Honestly, pirated movies are very popular here and its easy to get a copy of every new movie - but not those from years back.
@smacksman (6053)
5 Jul 12
I have been using PC's for 14 years now and have gone from 360kb floppies to terabyte hard drives. As each technology becomes obsolete there is a changeover point where there is the ability to transfer data from old to new. If you miss that changeover stage then it becomes very difficult. How many people do you know that has a 360kb floppy drive on their PC for instance? Or even a 1.44Mb floppy drive for that matter! To answer your question there is an honest way and a dishonest way for a solution. Play any DVD and there is a dire warning at the beginning against copying the DVD. So copying, or ripping as it is called in computer-speak is illegal. However there is a strong argument saying that as you have purchased the DVD you should be allowed to protect your investment by making a copy in case the original is damaged. A grey area much loved by lawyers! So if you wish to backup your DVD's then the best way is to make an ISO file to save on your drive. This can later be translated onto some future format beyond BlueRay or whatever follows. A good forum to guide you is here - http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/224714-I-can-t-rip-with-DVD-Shrink-or-DVD-Decrypter
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
Well, I won't be reproducing to resell it or use it for commercial purpose. So, perhaps, noone would go after me. That gray area can come handy. Ill check out that link.
@smacksman (6053)
5 Jul 12
Just another small point. DVD's are big files. Most films today are on dual layer DVDs at over 8GB. They can be compressed to 4.7Gb to fit on a single layer DVD with DVD-Shrink but they are still very big files and a bit too big for USB flash drives to be much use. An external hard drive would be the answer so long as the later flavours of future USB will still be backwards compatible. We are up to USB v3.0 already and so far they can read old 1.0 versions but for how long?
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
Whoah...all those GBs makes me light headed.. Sounds like its not as easy as I thought, afterall. Well, I'll see if I can get a more techy friend to help me with the magic. My computer science has gotten rusty over the years.
@laydee (12798)
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
We tried doing that for the 'future' kids but it just goes to waste each and every time. As one of the responders here said, it just becomes obsolete. I have a friend who used to buy original VHS of movies for her daughter (well she didn't have a daughter then) but when she did, before she was old enough, there were nothing that would play them. Unless you'd store the players as well, there's no way for you to store the movies. But they do come out with copies, but as you say, they're expensive. Perhaps things are just meant to be in the past. Don't worry, you'll soon find something or some way to share the experience with the kids. Have a great MyLot experience ahead!
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
That's what Im talking about. My parents had a collection of VHS tapes, but the popularity of these tapes lasted only till the 90's. Then came the VCDs, and now the DVDs. I think computer files are the only ones that existed longer. So, perhaps, thats the better way to save copies of movies.
@lady1993 (27225)
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
I think the best way would be to put them in an external drive or something like a flash drive and put it in a safe place.. i don't trust dvds much too, since some of my old ones do not play anymore.
• Philippines
5 Jul 12
Someone else here mentioned, though, that flash drives wont be enough to save a dvd movie file to. I may hav to research further on how I can do that. There are a lot of movies I wanted to keep a copy of.