I love DVDs.
When I was an early teenager in the early 2010s, there was this chain store called the "free record shop" in a village nearby. Contrary to its name there were no free records, but it was a shop and it did have DVDs. You could buy 3 DVDs for 15 euro's if I remember correctly.
I'd sometimes drop by, look at the covers and titles, and buy three. Maybe I'd recognize a name, or see which had a lot of rewards, or just seemed interesting for whatever reason and buy them. I wouldn't look anything up about them(I don't think that occurred to me at the time).
Sometimes you'd have crappy B-movies which were still fun to watch. Or medicré Dutch ones such as TBS or Doodslag. Other times classics. Most films were american. I remember being really disappointed with Taxi Driver (1976), how could this have so many awards? This puzzled me as an 11 year old, who clearly did not understood the concepts of this movie.
The picture quality of DVDs is great(except for that one copy of Der Untergang with a vague black bar on the side) but the resolution is really low by modern standards, being roughly 480p. It is a shame that blu-ray never really took off, at least not if it is judged by the thrift stores I visit.
Because yeah, I still sometimes go to a thrift store and buy a movie on DVD for 1 euro. Doing the same, not knowing what it'll be, if it will be any good. To me, even now, there is something deeply satisfying to coming home and putting a DVD in your drive and start watching a movie, knowing that all the information is on the disk and you have little clue what it is going to be.
I also really like the extra's, such as commentary or deleted scenes.
I feel like the medium aged the most on the resolution. I think a CRT might actually be the best way to view DVDs. I don't have a CRT, it doesn't fit in my small room, which is a second downside of DVDs is that they take up a lot of real estate if you have a small apartment.
If I'd want to see a new movie, I'd not watch it on DVD. But if I am in a thrift store, and I happen to see a movie I for example recognize from a midwest emo track, I'd buy it and see what it is like and it turns out to be an quite alright movie.
I know that this might feel alien to a newer generation, and that I might I be old fashioned in this regard. I never had netflix and I still rock my PC from 2013 as we speak. But that's alright. To each their own.
Bonus: dvdread - *nix software to create ISOs of your favorite DVDs