Fellow movie fans, we find ourselves in a time of great transition. We have one foot in the world of recorded movies — a time of fantastic selection, but also a time of tapes and discs. Our descendants will laugh their little holographic heads off when they hear about our ridiculous trips driving back and forth to the video store.

Yet we have another foot in the glorious future — movies that stream from the Internet, on demand, to our televisions, laptops and phones. That’s convenient, but missing so much of the DVD experience. We can’t turn on subtitles that help in times of mumbled dialogue, viewer deafness or sleepers in the next room. We can’t choose a different language for the dialogue. We miss out on the director’s commentary.

Furthermore, the lawyers have viciously clipped the wings of the streaming-movie era. You have to start watching a movie within 30 days of renting it and finish it within 24 hours. Not all movies are available for streaming, and once they’ve appeared in the catalog, they may disappear for six to nine months during the HBO window, as the moguls call it.

Above all, fellow cinephiles, we can’t have both $1 movies (like those you rent at Redbox kiosks) and instant access to the newest releases. You can pay $4 to Apple or Vudu the day the DVD comes out, or you can get it for $1 from a Redbox machine a couple of months later. And let’s not even mention Netflix’s streaming-movie collection, most of which seems to date back to the Carter administration.