It is fair to say the golden age of DVDs and Blu-rays is over. That sweet spot during the late ’90s and early ’00s where studios put everything out on disc has long passed, and sadly it ain’t coming back.

However, we are currently in a whole new era when it comes to physical media. Sure, streaming is huge right now, and this has greatly impacted the sales of DVDs and the like, but streaming hasn’t killed discs altogether – it’s simply made them a niche product.

And thanks to the rise of boutique labels (Arrow, Second Sight, Criterion, etc), it’s now a great time to be a physical media collector. There are plenty of superb 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD boxsets out there, you simply need to know where to look.

There are also some great bargains to be had on old DVDs and Blu-rays. There are plenty of places where you can pick up pre-owned discs on the cheap, be it online or in charity shops and vintage stores, etc.

If you’re picking up something second hand, it may not be in the best condition. Sometimes the discs are fine, but the boxes are smashed, thrashed, and generally trashed.

Sound familiar? Well, don’t let this stop you from adding a disc or two to your collection.

A broken box isn’t a major problem – you simply need to replace it. I do it quite often, and it’s a great way to spruce up your collection.

Whether it is a pre-owned DVD picked up at a garage sale, or a Blu-ray that has been sat on a shelf for a decade, we’ve all got something in our collection that is damaged or has seen better days. But it doesn’t have to be that way – we merely need to do some maintenance.

And this is something which is really worth your time, if you want to add a little extra sparkle to what you’ve got on your shelf. Too many of us just retain those cracked cases and dog-eared covers, when we really don’t need to.

Replacement cases of all shapes and sizes can be picked up on eBay. Whether it is a single disc DVD or a three-disc Blu-ray, replacement cases are easy to come by and they can quickly transform a once tired piece of physical media.

You don’t even need to replace like for like. For example, let’s say you have an old Spider-Man DVD with a cracked black case, why not swap it for a shiny new red case?

Heck, why not swap all of your Spider-Man DVD cases to red? Keep them uniform on your shelf, while making them eye-catching and on-brand.

Think of this as a bit of creative spring cleaning. Update and regularly refresh your collection, to give it the TLC it needs and make it what YOU want it to be.

You know, many years ago, back during the early ’00s, I worked for a video rental store (or as we call it in the UK, a video shop). As well as renting movies we used to sell VHS tapes and DVDs and one of our biggest sellers was ex-rental cassettes.

For the most part we generally sold excess copies of the latest blockbusters. So, if we had twenty copies of the new Tom Hanks film in at the start of the month, we’d often reduce this down to eight after a while and we’d sell off the other twelve to customers.

But every once in a while, outside of what we had in stock, we would get sent half-a-dozen huge boxes from head office, which would contain old VHS tapes that we could also sell. And when I say old, I’m talking long-forgotten ex-rental tapes from the ’80s which had obviously been sat in the back of a warehouse for a decade.

Some of these films were titles which I doubt ever made it out of the VHS era. Obscure movies of all different genres, and most of them arriving into our shop in dusty, battered cases.

Our job was to pop them on the system, whack a price label on them, and attempt to sell them, despite their dishevelled condition. Of course, the tapes themselves were of interest to customers, but the boxes were not, and they didn’t particularly look appealing on our retail shelves.

So, this is where a bit of maintenance came into play. At our shop we had shelves filled with spare cases, literally sat in our stock room doing nothing, so I would regularly replace the battered cases for new ones.

I was told by my manager to only replace the really bad cases, but that didn’t seem like the best plan. We did nothing with those spare cases, they were already bought and paid for, so it made sense to make use of them to spruce up our retail products.

So I replaced more battered cases than I was supposed to in order to make them more appealing, and do you know what? Those cases looked great on the shelf and sold really quickly, while their battered brethren sat and gathered dust.

No one ever returned any of those ex-rental tapes claiming they were faulty, so I presume they all played fine. And from an aesthetic point of view they all looked good, so I like to think I breathed some life back into old stock.

And this is essentially how I view my physical media collection these days. Sometimes old DVDs need a bit of resuscitation and if it’s a simple thing of replacing a few cases to make them look new, then why the heck not?

Keep it in mind for your own collection. See what DVDs or Blu-rays could do with an updated case and get to work!

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