Where to buy DVDs and Blu-rays?

It is a good thing to know where to buy DVDs and Blu-rays, when you want to watch movies at home, and want to find what you are looking for, in good quality, maybe get them delivered at home, and for the best prices.

I will give here some ideas of where I bought most of the disks in my collection that contains now more than a thousand.

First, you might want to check the quality of the DVD or (more importantly) Blu-ray edition you want to buy. For this I like the website High-Def Digest, that provides not so much reviews of the movies themselves but of the quality of the disk (Sound and Image, special features, interactivity...). It does it for the American editions, but often the European ones are the same (be mindful at the release date and maybe distributor).
For the french disks, a good website is excessif.com (formerly DVDrama). There you can find movie critics by journalists and spectators, and details on different DVD and Blu-ray releases.

 

Now, my main supplier is definitely Amazon. It is true that in this online shop you can find almost everything, especially in the recent releases, although they don't have all the old DVDs you could be looking for.

Living in Germany for 10 years now, my main supplier is Amazon.de. It has supplanted Amazon.fr that I was using before. DVDs were and are always much cheaper in Germany (average 5 euros for a > 1 year old movie vs. ~ 10 euros in France). Blu-rays also became quickly cheaper in Germany, to cost now about 10 euros vs. 20 in France. Those cost estimates are approximatives, and don't account for special offers that are more attractive in France than in Germany.

The one problem with German disks is censorship. I gave up buying horror or thriller movies here because of incredible cuts in the movies, as soon as there is a bit of a long bloody fight, horror, or psychological stress, even in disks that are restricted to 18 years old or more! I have noticed such cuts in Universal Soldiers (15 minutes cut!), Hitcher, Scream, The Last House on the Left, Above the Law, Saw 2 (about 15 minutes as well)...

I find this unacceptable, so now I order most of my movies to Amazon.co.uk. The additional taxes and packaging costs for delivery from England are actually not so high, and are worth paying since the DVDs and Blu-rays there are even cheaper (respectively about 4 and 9 euros). The only time I noticed censorship in a UK disk was on the Blu-ray of the original Conan the Barbarian, and it was not even a bloody scene but a horsefall one!

Something else I didn't mention yet is that I always watch my movies in original version with sub-titles I understand (French, English, or maybe even German). Some disks, especially the oldest DVDs, sometimes only provide a dubbed soundtrack, so one has to be careful. Blu-rays in general aways provide the original language, and sub-titles at least in the language from the country where you buy them. So for this reason buying on Amazon.co.uk is also good for me.

I rarely bought on Amazon.com, especially since the zone for the disks is not the same, and it is not possible to de-zone Blu-ray players by software.

An alternative to Amazon is the french Fnac.com. They seem to have a larger choice, especially in the old or rare items, but you will pay the price for them!

Somtimes I also buy disks at a Saturn shop, but it is usually more on an impulse because the choise there is limited, not easy to search and often expensive. But they have a shelf with special offers and Blu-rays at 10 euros.

I used to buy a lot of second-hand DVDs (and VHS before that!), but now I do it less since I select more what I watch. There are 2 nice shops that I can advice in Munich. The first one is Dock's CD Boerse (Aventinstrasse 8) that I have known for 10 years. Their main business is with CDs, thousands of them, but they started with DVDs and they have now quite many, well ordered and for good prices (< 5 euros). Since recently they also propose Blu-rays but they are few and not so cheap (10-12 euros), I mean the same price as new ones on Amazon.de.

The second one is called Film Oldies (Muellerstrasse 46, formerly Movie Poster Galaxy). Their core business is movie posters and booklets, but since a few years the surface of this nice little shop is shared by DVDs and a few Blu-rays. The organization is even better than in Dock's, with not only classification by category (Drama, Western...) but also by topics (Clint Eastwood, 60's, 70's ...). You can find more old and rare movies there, for an superior cost (6-9 euros for a DVD).

A few times I went to a DVD/Blu-ray/Figurines/Comics fair that is organised every 2 months in Munich in medium-size halls like Tonhalle. You can enter the regular area for 3 euros, but you need to add 2 more euros for accessing also the FSK-18 area (not below 18 years old). Most of the good stuff is there, not only porn but all the thriller, horror, action... In fact the regular area has only a few tables with figurines and comics for teenagers. In the FSK-18 area most of the sellers have the same stuff, but there are some specialised: one in asian movies, the other in rare imports (quite expensive), the other in horror, or in porn. There I bought a box of 3 Italian post-apocalyptic movies, the Blu-ray of The Savage Planet, or the Blu-ray of Pelts from Dario Argento.

Enjoy your shopping!