I assume you want to use the discs, right? The effort to swap between discs to watch a different one is not very far from the effort to copy your entire digital library. And you have to do the former every viewing, while you have to do the latter once every five years.
And it takes up hundreds of times less physical space.
Also your original argument was two parts. One, that's it's sisyphean. That's somewhat true except the amount of effort is trivial and the original discs will also start to rot if you wait decades. The second original argument made was about formats being deprecated, and that one is flat out wrong. The discs will deprecate before the files will. And the part about shelves not being a problem isn't true for everyone and often isn't true for big collections.
No, that's why I talked about backups and copies.
> And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
Those optical media are a digital platform. And I do claim it will be easier to get software in 30 years that can play back an mpeg file than it will be to get hardware that reads an optical disc and... plays back the mpeg data written on the disc.
And guess what? MPEG-1 turns 30 this year and every media player handles it fine. MPEG-2, which DVDs use, is over 25 and every media player handles it fine. They'll still handle it in 30 more years, I'm certain. Along with the codecs Blu-ray uses.
As for the hard drive itself, USB and NTFS should last but I wasn't suggesting using the same model the entire time. I said to migrate to a new drive every handful of years.