[HN Gopher] DVD sales surpass Blu-ray in 2021: Physical format m...
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DVD sales surpass Blu-ray in 2021: Physical format market
Author : ksec
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-11-21 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| duffyjp wrote:
| We only buy physical movies on DVD because that's what our
| minivan can play and that's the only time we need a physical
| disc. I thing the general reason is just cost though, I'm not
| going to spend $25 on a disc I'm only going to watch once. I'll
| just rent it from Prime etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| Goodwill can be a decent source of DVDs, even if some might not
| work, they're certainly cheap enough.
| mxuribe wrote:
| THIS! Isn't this part of the circular economy? If not, then
| it should be. This right here is what we shold all be doing!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Consider buying DVDs used from Amazon. I haven't had any
| reliability issues, and I don't care if the kids destroy discs
| I paid a few dollars for.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| """USED""" DVDs on ebay are $4 or so a pop, reliably
| available, ship in a couple days, and nobody is going to rob
| your collection of your favorite movie 3 years down the line.
| Thlom wrote:
| We also have a dvd player in our van. It's hell on earth when
| you put on a dvd for the kids and then 20 minutes in it starts
| skipping or just freeze. Been looking into replacing it with a
| more modern player with hdmi input or something so I can just
| hook up an iPad or something instead.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that many DVDs look like utter crap
| when I watch them on a 70" TV. The MPEG compression artifacts are
| very noticeable; unless the DVD is compressed very carefully.
|
| I just decided that, if I think I'm going to watch something a
| few times, I'll seek out the 4k disk.
| rado wrote:
| VHS, you're next
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| D-VHS would be great!
| hajile wrote:
| DVD could have a new lease on life if they'd create an updated
| spec with something like AV1. IIRC, Youtube uses around 2.5GB/hr
| for 4k which would mean almost 3 hours of 4k content on a dual-
| layer DVD at streaming quality. That would be good enough for
| most people.
| chungy wrote:
| AVCHD was basically that concept: it uses the Blu-ray file
| structures, formats, and codecs, but stored on a DVD-R(OM).
|
| It has the problem that it only works in Blu-ray Players, not
| standard DVD players, so the usefulness of it is drastically
| diminished.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The value of DVD is that you can stick a disc into anything
| that says "DVD player" and it'll work. Inventing a new format,
| like AV1 on DVD media, means you need new player hardware -- at
| which point you might as well just use Blu-ray.
| [deleted]
| hajile wrote:
| DVD hardware is way cheaper. Manufacturing DVDs is also way
| cheaper. DVDs patents should have also all expired.
|
| DVD HD or similar player branding could distinguish these
| decently well too.
| woobar wrote:
| They could always ask USB guys about proper naming. "DVD2
| Gen 1.2 (240 Mbit/s)" is my vote.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Calling it DVD would almost make it a non-starter. HD DVD
| lost, DVD is old. Who wants something old? You'd probably
| have to call it something like red disc (Stylized as reDisc
| of course).
| PostOnce wrote:
| too late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD
|
| We'll have to go with DVDPro or QuantumDVD or DVD 2 or
| something ridiculous :)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 1) It's probably not good enough for 4K if you've got a viewing
| set-up on which you can actually tell the difference between 4k
| and 1080p. Which, sure, is only a smallish minority of viewers.
|
| 2) But you can fit a basically-perfect 1080P rip on a dual-
| layer DVD with modern codecs. Easily.
| hajile wrote:
| With an 85" TV, you have to be within 11 feet to notice the
| difference with 1080p. With a 55" TV, that drops down to
| about 7 feet.
|
| A great setup will show a difference, but those people
| probably think nothing of shelling out tons of money for 4k
| and 8k media. They'd hardly be the target market here.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is because your plain can't get a bunch of stuff on Blu-Ray.
| There are new releases coming out which don't come out on Blu-
| Ray.
| scrivna wrote:
| For me at least the ever increasing DPI increases have just not
| been worth the extra expense, I see 4K is better than my 1080 TV
| but i don't care enough about it to spend the money to upgrade. I
| imagine the dirt cheap DVDs are more preferable to people than
| the more expensive Blu-rays, I get the same amount of
| entertainment from both for most movies that aren't really
| focussed on the visuals alone.
| derbOac wrote:
| The thing these discussions invariably miss for awhile until
| someone points it out -- I see this on art cinema forums all
| the time -- is that all of the resolutions are functionally
| bottlenecked by things having nothing to do with the disc.
|
| The size of the screen, for instance, how far you're sitting
| from it, your actual visual acuity, and so forth and so on.
| Because these things tend to be suboptimal more than they are
| optimal, the benefits of higher resolution have diminishing
| returns, because you have to increasingly have everything "just
| right" for it to matter.
|
| There's been studies showing that in actual typical viewing
| conditions for most actual people, higher resolution formats
| are overkill.
|
| My preference is for blu-ray for instance but we have a small
| screen by today's standards, which we really don't have any
| desire to replace in size.
| amalcon wrote:
| Honestly I agree with you, but I was one of those people who
| mostly cared about high definition TV because the sound was
| better. I think we're something of a rare breed.
| iso1631 wrote:
| For someone with 20:20 (6:6) vision SD means your screen should
| fill 20 degrees of your viewing angle, HD 30, and UHD 40.
|
| Recommendations for most viewing is 30 degrees, but for the
| fully immersive THX/Theatre style viewing you want 40 degeres.
|
| That means for watching your 70" TV you should be about 8'
| away. If you are watching UHD then that's great, you won't see
| any resolution artifacts, but with HD you will see a
| difference.
|
| However if you're 9' away from your screen you won't get any
| uhd resolution benefits.
|
| (That's setting aside other UHD features, especially HDR)
|
| Of course maybe you have better than 20:20 eyesight.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I find the display technology also has a huge impact on how DPI
| is perceived.
|
| Watching 480p content on an old 65" Panasonic plasma is somehow
| _much_ more tolerable than watching it on my M1 MacBook or
| another LCD-style monitor.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The jump to 1080p from 480p is very, very noticeable-- I own
| Firefly on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and I accidentally watched a
| few minutes of an episode on the DVD version before being
| like.... wait, what? and then realizing what had happened and
| switching discs.
|
| However, IMO the jump from 1080p to 4K is way more marginal.
| It's definitely better, but it's just not that much better than
| what your TV's built in upscaler can do, nevermind some future
| AI-powered DLSS-type upscaler.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| that AI powered DLSS type upscaler exists now, though I'm
| only aware of a few products that have it, particularly the
| NVIDIA Shield devices.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's a problem though when studios mess with the original
| to do the Blu-Ray release. For example, _The Wire_ went from
| 4:3 (DVD) to 16:9 (Blu-Ray) and introduced some problems[1].
| There are worse cases like the infamously bad Buffy Blu Ray
| release[2].
|
| Blu Ray releases would be great if they didn't mess with the
| source material. But this seems to happen all the time. I'll
| take the flaws of 480p over that kind of stuff any day.
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/2014/12/3/7327539/wire-bluray
|
| [2] https://www.themarysue.com/remastered-buffy-is-a-butt/
| [deleted]
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'd say the jump from 480 to 720 is huge, and to 1080 is
| quite nice. 4K is already fairly marginal to my eyes and I
| can't imagine shopping for an 8K TV. Perhaps at a wall size
| TV, but I'm still quite well served by a 42" 1080p Sony TV I
| got in 2009 or 2010 (can't remember exactly).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| At about 8' distance from my 65" 4K TV I don't notice the
| difference between 720p and 1080p. At 5' distance I do
| notice. Even at 5', though, the visible difference between
| 1080p vs. 4k is tiny. And it's practically impossible to
| sit much closer than that and still have room to walk
| between the TV and front row. Maybe if I ever get a
| projector with an 80" diagonal screen or something, it will
| matter.
|
| My screen does HDR but it's not oled so the benefit to hdr
| sources is barely noticeable, and anyway you can get high-
| quality 1080p downsample rips that retain the hdr data.
| bombcar wrote:
| I can notice a 480p when watching vs 1080, but only really
| notice 1080 vs 4k if I pause and happen to wander near the
| screen.
| ugjka wrote:
| 4K kind of loses its sharpness when they add film grain
| and blur on purpose.
|
| On the other hand there are some very stunning 4k nature
| videos on Youtube that blow me away
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| For my money, 720p is more than enough for any movie except
| visually compelling movies. For things like LOTR, Star
| Wars, and some of the super-hero series I really appreciate
| that 1080p. My eyesight isn't good enough to discern 4k.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Definitely fair-- I'm rocking a 60" 1080p panel that was
| left by the previous occupants of the house, and it's
| perfectly adequate to my needs; I expect it is of similar
| vintage, in any case.
|
| I haven't felt any appetite for picking up a 4K unit,
| particularly if it means having to navigate the whole world
| of "smart" TV apps, figuring which stuff I want to use vs
| disable, and how to go about doing that.
| Thlom wrote:
| You don't have to use the smart functions. Just hook up
| the peripherals you are using now and call it a day.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 4K by itself is marginal. But 4K HDR is incredible.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I wish they'd published the graph on an absolute scale and not a
| relative one, because I have no idea if DVD sales have increased
| or decreased. Only that the ratio with blu-ray has changed.
|
| I strongly suspect that the subheadline "DVD sales skyrocket in
| the last year" is simply false.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, and even the relative bump in Q1 2021 was due to
| backlogged sales from 2020 supply interruptions. A more recent
| release of the same periodic data indicates that:
|
| """The total video disc market is still clearly in decline in
| the US (and globally) and does not appear to be recovering
| after the Covid 19 delays of new disc releases due to
| theatrical releases being postponed or moved to streaming. In
| the US, video disc sales fell 25.5% from $3.29 billion in 2019
| to $2.45 billion in 2020 and an additional 20% to $1.97 billion
| in 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, video disc sales
| continued their decline with an additional 19% drop year-over-
| year."""
| substation13 wrote:
| Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators get
| paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and keep
| forever?
| googlryas wrote:
| Do creators get paid more when you buy DVDs vs digital
| versions?
| substation13 wrote:
| Good question - it might even be less due to DVD resale
| market
| yamtaddle wrote:
| That "forever" for the .mkv comes at a pretty high cost in time
| and money, if you really want a decent chance of it actually
| lasting a lifetime. You can reduce one by making the other go
| up, but there's gonna be some cost in both.
|
| Then again you have to store physical disks. And pay for them,
| of course. Pick your poison I guess.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators
| get paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and
| keep forever?
|
| This is exactly the approach I've taken for the HD era and it
| works great.
|
| Back in the DVD era I had a well optimized ripping setup, I put
| hours in to tuning everything so I could pop a new disc in and
| have it ready to play on my Windows Media Center instance as
| quickly as my drive would read it.
|
| At this point though, it's just not worth the trouble.
| Especially for UHD content, ripping that is just a nightmare.
| These days when I buy a new disc I just add it to a list on my
| server and my server goes out, finds whatever quality copy I
| told it to look for, downloads it, extracts it, names it
| according to my standards, and tells Plex to update its
| metadata.
|
| More often than not by the time I get home the content is
| already there on my server waiting for me and I can toss the
| disc on the rack for display purposes. In my last move I had an
| entire box of discs that were still sealed in their original
| plastic.
|
| It's the best of all worlds. The content owners get their
| money, I get a DRM-free copy that I can play on what I want
| when I want. It's not strictly legal but it's morally clean.
| The end result is the same as if I had ripped it myself, just
| with less effort on my part.
| hateful wrote:
| Maybe all the people that never went from DVD to Blu-ray are
| still on DVD now that the others have moved to streaming?
| jmugan wrote:
| Yep, that's what I was thinking. Odd it wasn't mentioned or
| looked at.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Not surprising based on my experience. BR hardware/software is a
| nightmare to maintain. Lots of new multimedia tech really sucks
| in terms of the overall experience.
|
| In the codec realm, I find myself going all the way back to MPEG1
| for a side project. Getting 100% of the patents/royalties out of
| the equation does wonders for compatibility. ISO is still getting
| me on the standards docs, but that's a one-time cost.
|
| Not every application/customer on earth demands the bleeding edge
| in efficiency or quality. Especially in the information theory
| arena - you are always trading something else important. It's
| usually latency, memory & compute, which are very powerful
| dragons when trying to scale real-world applications.
| deergomoo wrote:
| At the risk of sounding like a complete snob, it annoys me that
| DVDs are still sold. Blu Ray has been on the market 6 years
| longer than DVD had when Blu Ray players were first released.
|
| I appreciate that many don't care about visual quality, but the
| baseline of TVs continues to improve with time, and DVD supports
| literally nothing rolled out in the last 15 years.
|
| At 720x480 resolution (rectangular pixels!), they're guaranteed
| to look like crap on any TV produced this decade. I can only
| imagine it's a case of "people keep buying 'em so we keep selling
| 'em", which is doubly annoying because it allows the price of BD
| players and discs to be kept artificially high as an "enthusiast"
| option. A standard player on Amazon today is only about half the
| price of what I paid for a nice Sony player in 2012. And that's
| adjusted for inflation.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| A _lot_ of people are still using old TVs or have a very small
| one they watch far enough away that 480p is barely, if at all,
| worse than 1080p.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| The industry groups only have themselves to blame. The fragile
| and shitty Blu-ray DRM makes it random whether a disc will work
| or not. Who the hell would buy that?
| hulitu wrote:
| > At the risk of sounding like a complete snob, it annoys me
| that DVDs are still sold.
|
| Playing a DVD is easy. Playing a Bluray is difficult, you need
| special SW.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I have no data to back this up, but gut feeling is people who
| watch physical media on a computer are a tiny minority.
|
| For a start barely any of them come with optical drives
| anymore.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The article seems to be confusing relative share of the physical
| media market with absolute sales. Its claim that "DVD sales
| skyrocket in the last year" is simply not true. Both DVD and Blu-
| ray sales have been declining every year - but Blu-ray sales
| declined more rapidly in 2020 than DVD.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| > "In addition, it is possible to read DVD movies on any laptop,
| something that is not the case with Blu-ray"
|
| How many laptops still have any form of optical drive? None of
| the laptops I'm aware of
| fedeb95 wrote:
| In my opinion, the main point is that "quality" is highly
| subjective. High definition may not matter most to some users, at
| least not compared to acting, direction and photography of the
| movie. Also I believe the customers of physicals are more
| interested in those parameters than resolution.
|
| Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that much
| from blue ray.
|
| In conclusion, the higher price of blue rays doesn't justify the
| increase of quality for some users, who may value other
| parameters more.
| chungy wrote:
| > Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that
| much from blue ray.
|
| Disagree :) The oldest movies I own on Blu-ray are Gone With
| the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and both of them are visually
| improved by being in HD compared to the DVD releases. I
| wouldn't really prefer SD for anything regardless of age.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I wouldn't really prefer SD for anything regardless of age.
|
| For movies, sure. But a lot of content produced for TV wasn't
| produced and/or archived in HD formats. Some older shows are
| _occasionally_ remastered in HD if the original film can be
| found and digitized, but that 's a fairly expensive and time-
| consuming process when it's possible at all. Older content
| that's in low demand, like children's shows or soap operas,
| may stay SD forever.
| chungy wrote:
| If the original production isn't possible to master in HD,
| then fine, you don't have a choice but to (hopefully) enjoy
| the show in SD. Same if it is possible but it hasn't been
| done (eg: Star Trek DS9 and Voyager).
|
| On thinking about things when I make this post, I remember
| that DragonBall has never had a good HD remaster done,
| there's always DNR applied to it, soundtracks switched out,
| et al. Old VHSes might actually be preferable to the modern
| Blu-rays in that circumstance.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that
| much from blue ray
|
| Very much not the case. The detail in 35mm film can scale to 4K
| and beyond very nicely.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| My favorite 4K movies are the ones on originally recorded on
| 35mm, in fact, as far as looks go.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| As with all media, mastering makes a big difference. If you
| just stick a film into a TC machine and directly encode to DVD
| then film-grain (and other artifacts) will demolish the quality
| of a DVD because so many of the bits end up being spent
| encoding noise. HEVC handles this somewhat better _and_ the
| higher bitrate of Blu-ray gives the codec some breathing-room.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Having a DVD library is tempting. Physical media that you own and
| is easy to rip digitally, etc. However I popped in a disc
| recently and was reminded of how bad the dvd experience was. It
| just stopped playing two scenes in. Took it out, the disk looked
| perfect. Tried again, stopped at the exact same moment. There
| goes that disk I guess, it was probably 20 years old to be fair
| but thats true for most dvds you'd find in the used bin.
| jvm___ wrote:
| I tried watching Terminator 2 with my son the other day, we'd
| had the DVD for ages to eventually watch. The mint looking DVD
| refused to load in the DVD player so we pirated it to watch
| instead.
| smaudet wrote:
| Laptops partially fixed this issue - you can just skip the bad
| parts.
|
| Higher end dvd players used to do the same, but players are a
| vanishing breed and consoles are not much more than dumb
| players usually.
|
| Ofc it would be nice if there were just no skipping - there
| were a number of technologies being employed back when DVD was
| the pretty much the only format in town, I suspect the data
| redundancy may have been traded for cramming more features on a
| disk.
|
| Back when ripping (my own) disks was a thing, you could
| compress a movie to half its size on disk (no coded compression
| just more intensive picture compression) and burn it twice to
| the same disk...
|
| Ofc the problem with that was the consumer burnable disks use a
| degrading chemistry unlike stamped copies, so they would last
| 3-4 years before undergoing significant corruption.
| kurthr wrote:
| It's a good idea to try ripping the DVD anyway... often ripping
| software is more tolerant (better at
| correcting/retrying/skipping) errors than the players. And as I
| think you're implying, once ripped you don't have to worry
| about THAT physical media.
|
| You remind me. I have some DVDs I need to rip (before they go
| bad)!
| triceratops wrote:
| That's never been my experience. I get my DVDs almost
| exclusively from the library - not once has one ever failed to
| play for me.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I get my DVDs almost exclusively from the library - not
| once has one ever failed to play for me.
|
| Over the last few years, the experience with DVDs/Blu-Rays
| from the library has been trending downwards. I would say
| about a quarter of the movies I check out from the library
| have some problem somewhere in the movie where the player
| either gets stuck or skips.
| r00fus wrote:
| DVDs are great entire because I rip them immediately to get rid
| of the menu and governmental mandatory ads. The DVD box gets
| stored in a bin.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| > governmental mandatory ads
|
| Do you mean the annoying FBI Anti-Piracy warning? If so,
| that's actually a voluntary thing the publisher added.[^1]
|
| [1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2012-16506/p-8
| WalterBright wrote:
| I regularly discover that even new DVDs won't play. It's a crap
| shoot.
|
| Then there's the menu system on it. Every DVD has to re-invent
| menus, usually badly. For example, they often do not display
| what options are actually set or not. Sometimes it's even hard
| to find the cursor.
|
| The only good thing about DVDs is you can turn on the Eddie
| Mueller commentary for film noir movies. That man is an
| unending gold mine of snark, wit, and funny/interesting
| comments. He's often more interesting than the movie.
| zbrozek wrote:
| It's been at least 15 years since I've touched a DVD, but I
| recall the menu system to be the worst feature of it. I've
| never once wanted anything but the main feature. Also may the
| product people who decided on "unskippable scenes" go to a
| purgatory where they're surrounded by nothing but copyright
| notices for eternity.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > Also may the product people who decided on "unskippable
| scenes" go to a purgatory where they're surrounded by
| nothing but copyright notices for eternity.
|
| The first time I used Netflix about a decade ago I was
| surprised how fast play worked.
|
| Now that you mention that, I was coming from a world of DVD
| menus and unskippable notices. So the Netflix UX was a
| great improvement.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Purgatory usually has a temporary connotation, eternity
| would imply hell.
| Moru wrote:
| I use VLC for the very few movies I watch so can't say if
| it works on all movies. Most of the time you can just
| select "No disc menus" and it goes directly to the movie.
| Then you can select language and subs as you want in the
| normal windows style menus in VLC.
| ghaff wrote:
| The commentary tracks on DVDs could be quite good at best--
| even if they were also hit or miss. Unfortunately they seem
| to have pretty much vanished. I assume that the volume of
| DVDs these days doesn't justify the cost/effort of recording
| these any longer.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My impression is that a bunch of it has to do with "4K UHD"
| Blu-Ray uses just about all the space for the main feature
| and required languages per region and has very little spare
| room. (As did "3D" Blu-Ray, though those are mostly extinct
| today.) The early solution to that was "4K UHD" releases
| were all expensive "Collector's Editions" that bundled a
| standard Blu-Ray and/or DVD with all the "special features"
| including commentaries (increasing the marginal costs of
| all the packaging by including multiple discs). The late
| solution today seems to be to just ignore all the "special
| features" entirely, planning only for the lowest common
| denominator amount of extra space, and things like
| commentaries are slowly disappearing as an expected bonus
| feature (again; it's not like these features existed in VHS
| or Laserdisc; DVD was its own weird golden age).
| ghaff wrote:
| Laserdiscs had extra audio tracks with commentary on some
| discs as I recall. (But the stack of LDs I have is in the
| garage and it's too cold to check :-)) An audio track
| shouldn't take much room. But not sure about actual
| numbers.
| avian wrote:
| > Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly.
|
| My favorite one is the Fifth Element DVD. It has menus
| implemented as options flying towards you in a loop and you
| need to press the OK button on the remote just when the right
| one is passing by. Works great if you have a DVD player with
| a slightly laggy CPU and an IR remote. It always reminds of
| that "the worst volume control UI" website that was doing
| rounds on social media a while back.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Here's a link to a compilation of those "worst volume
| control UIs": https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-
| ui-in-the-world...
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I'd give the first price for worse DVD UX to the original
| Harry Potter 1 DVD menu.
|
| In order to see the deleted scenes you had to race a broom
| through a maze in the forbidden forest selecting the
| correct way each time.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 13 Years later and Jame Rolfe's rant on DVDs still rings true
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE
|
| He makes a great point at then end when comparing VHS to DVD:
| Its like we are moving forward in technology but moving
| backwards in the amount of BS we have to put up with just to
| enjoy what we paid for. The VCR gave you more control
| compared to DVD players.
|
| Things haven't improved with Blue-Ray
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c
|
| Streaming has eliminated many of these pain points in
| exchange for freedom to truly own your media.
|
| The best way to fight back is to buy the Blu-Ray, rip it
| using MakeMKV thereby creating an MKV file that contains the
| ability to jump chapter by chapter, have any audio track you
| want, etc but with none of the junk that you are forced to
| use when you pop the Blue-Ray into the player. The best of
| all worlds.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember reading reviews of DVD players to find the ones
| that "slipped through" testing with things like ad skip and
| "direct to menu" and "direct to feature" options that you
| could enable.
|
| Those players were always the best.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Consider that the player may be at fault.
|
| Almost 2 decades ago, when I was considering getting a DVD+RW
| drive for my PC, I thoroughly researched them and found they
| all had differing error correction algorithms, and it made a
| world of a difference. I got one known for this, and it often
| played DVDs that neither my standalone DVD player nor my
| roommate's DVD player on his PC could play.
|
| I would have thought that by now they'd all be good at this,
| but it seems not.
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| To be fair that seems to happen quite regularly for me on
| Netflix and Prime. The encoder hits a bug and the whole app
| crashes. Fortunately it's usually random and you can just
| restart the app.
|
| Never seems to happen with pirated videos & VLC though.
| [deleted]
| notmyfriend wrote:
| mkozlows wrote:
| This article is old, and the headline misleading. It's talking
| about Q1 2021 sales, which in practice means it's talking about
| 2020 movies, which means that these are weird, pandemic-fucked
| numbers that don't really mean anything at all.
|
| There are more recent numbers available. Here's the end of
| October, the latest week available right now:
| https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week...
| -- at the bottom of the page, you can see a link to the previous
| week, and you can step back week-by-week.
|
| If you do that, you'll see that DVD sales are larger than Blu-ray
| sales, but it's in that 50-something range, which puts it about
| on track with pre-pandemic trends. Also, disc sales in general
| keep falling annually at an incredibly fast rate, so both DVD and
| Blu-ray are tanking.
|
| The obvious cause for this has nothing to do with particular
| weakness in the Blu-ray format, but that the "mainstream" disc
| market is now increasingly streaming, and the disc market is
| bifurcating into:
|
| 1. Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who
| don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same
| DVDs they always bought.
|
| 2. People who want the best possible image/sound quality,
| collectors, and physical media fetishists. This is a niche
| market, and always has been.
|
| The obvious end state is that DVD fades out in the same way that
| CD sales are fading out in the music world, and that 4K UHD Blu-
| ray ends up in the vinyl-style collector niche.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| DVD players themselves seem to have declined markedly in quality
| since they became commodities.
|
| I have a new-ish blu-ray player that baulks at the layer change
| on a DVD, or refuses to play some titles. I also have a high
| quality Sony upscaling player I bought at a thrift shop that will
| play anything. I will be unhappy when that dies. Unfortunately,
| the introduction of HDMI seemed to coincide with the drop in
| quality of DVD players so you may have to buy a chain of chinese
| dongles to get the good quality players to work in your lounge.
|
| Ripping your DVDs is probably a good idea, not because of the
| playability issues to do with the disks themselves, but to do
| with finding a decent, working DVD player at any price.
|
| edit: the main problem I have with commercial streaming media is
| that they are using all the nasty tricks of DVD to compress the
| image below what you can notice on a modern TV. Crushed blacks,
| blockiness when the stream gets compromised by traffic etc. Blu-
| ray held such promise and it can look fantastic with a higher
| average bit stream rate than streaming, but they are getting
| harder to purchase as the retail outlets disappear.
| bawolff wrote:
| I wish dvds used the same scratch resistant coatings bluray does.
| DVDs are insanely fragile.
| spansoa wrote:
| I much prefer to own a physical copy of media instead of relying
| on streaming services. I have a large DVD collection and I'm
| proud of it. Streaming doesn't sit well with me and you have to
| re-download the media each time you watch it, which feels wrong
| and a waste of bandwidth too.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Do you rip discs? I prefer rips to shuffling discs.
| [deleted]
| gear54rus wrote:
| Why not simply store a file on a disk though. It's not that
| storage is very expensive or anything
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...instead of relying on streaming services...
|
| I'm getting to the point where i want ther video file so i can
| save it locally. Sure DVDs are fine, because i can rip
| them....I really only want physiucal media until i have ripped
| to my local digital library. I know some movie companies used
| to offer a "digital download" of the move if you bought a
| disc....Not sure if that's still a thing. And who knows if that
| format was even some crap proprietary, locked doen edition
| anyway. But, yeah, i prefer my own offline-available, digital
| copy of media myself.
| mxuribe wrote:
| In addition to some reason cited for the increase around DVD
| format, i would posit some of the following too:
|
| * Parents buy cheaper DVDs for their very young
| children...Children who care less about display quality.
|
| * While travel plummeted during middle of pandemic, there were
| still people who took road trips (e.g. maybe for staying with
| family, etc.)...and during those roadtrips, i'm sure some
| families opted for DVDs and DVD players instead of trying to
| stream stuff while on the road, etc.
|
| * Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop
| being available on their current subscriptionsof streaming
| servicews. I hate this myself. So, my partner bought 3 or 4 of
| their favorite movies, so we can watch them whenever we want -
| even if we lack internet (though we would need power for the dvd
| player of course)
|
| * Vinyl records have their followers who revitaliuzed the
| format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?
|
| I'm sure there are other reasons for why this is happening.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| * The bins of shit-tier movies near checkout lanes at Menards
| and Wal-Mart are mostly or all DVDs--if disc sales in general
| decline, that particular segment might remain steady.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Blu-Ray players can be blacklisted at any time. If you can't
| get it updated it's useless for playing new releases.
| unfocused wrote:
| I have Vinyl records, but my goal is to digitize them. They're
| my Dads from 1940s, 50s, and many are 78s, so I had so search
| Kijiji ads to get a player that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was
| what I settled on.
|
| As for DVDs/Blu Ray, I only buy things like Planet Earth or
| other docs. Sure enough, just yesterday I tried playing Planet
| Earth II on UHD 4K Blu Ray on an Xbox Series X, albeit I still
| have a 1080p TV (bought used) and 1080p Receiver (bought used,
| Sony STR-DN1000 that I paid $50 for) and it was glitching.
| _sigh_ Time to hit up Bit Torrent and download a ripped version
| of the Documentary that I already paid for. Argh.
|
| Both Blu Ray and Vinyl are susceptible to one day not being
| playable. By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep
| the content playable well into the future.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the
| content playable well into the future...
|
| Yep, this is my preferred direction, and of course an
| offline-accessible though digital edition may be less prone
| to issues of wonky players, or warped physical media.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I've been wanting to play my grand mother's vynil collection
| for some time.
|
| Are modern turntables reliable? Or is a vintage one
| preferred?
| ace2358 wrote:
| Why would modern ones not be reliable? They're fantastic!
| Having said that, for your old vinyl collection, you will
| find the quality of the player mostly irrelevant. The age
| of those vinyls will make them sound like a 32kbits/s mp3
| file!
|
| Have fun and good luck!
| trynewideas wrote:
| > many are 78s, so I had so search Kijiji ads to get a player
| that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was what I settled on
|
| Many modern turntables, including cheap ones, support 78 rpm.
| (Quick search finds 11 new 78 rpm-supporting models at Best
| Buy in Canada, starting from $80. An $85 Sylvania that
| supports 78s can also digitize directly to USB storage.[1])
|
| Did you mean 16 2/3 rpm records, which the Dual 1009 supports
| and most modern turntables don't?
|
| [1]: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/sylvania-
| src831-3-speed...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "Vinyl records have their followers who revitalized the
| format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?"
|
| I think it's _possible_ this is happening or will happen,
| perhaps in a similar vein to how vintage gamers /collectors now
| venerate the GameCube and PS2 as the last bastion of consoles
| that weren't designed to be online all the time, and will
| therefore be playable "forever" in a way that everything which
| has come after them will not.
|
| At the same time, I feel like vinyl records are a little
| different from a DVD-- from the analog tactility of them, the
| size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork, the fact
| that they were the dominant format for decades, while DVDs got
| barely fifteen years (the aughts and a bit beyond). It's easy
| to love a record when you put it on and you can immediately
| tell "yes, this is a high quality stereo audio experience that
| I am having with this piece of media and the equipment I have
| invested in for consuming it", and I'd argue there just isn't
| really an equivalent experience for DVDs: they're always going
| to be blurry, with janky menus and unskippable ad reels, blocky
| subtitles, cheap plastic cases. Some of that changes with
| collectors editions in special boxes or whatever, but I don't
| know if it's widespread enough across the format as a whole to
| really enable the kind of culture that exists around vinyl.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It is happening, my parents are proof. They have more DVDs
| than the local library
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Are they doing collectory things like alphabetizing them
| and putting them in special preservation cases, going
| online to seek out mint copies of special editions, etc?
|
| Not to discount your observations, but I'm curious to
| differentiate between an active, intentional, curated
| collection effort, vs hoarding or just not having gotten
| around to tossing them all out yet despite that none have
| been touched in 10 years. Most people I know who still have
| a shelf or two of physical discs in their media/living
| rooms look a lot more like the second case than the first
| one.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It doesn't matter, they are in possession of literally
| thousands of DVDs; the money is spent and the sale is
| recorded.
|
| There used to be a healthy market for DVD-specific
| shelving; I have seen multiple bookcase-sized shelves
| packed completely in one house.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a
| DVD-- from the analog tactility of them, the size of the
| packaging leading to beautiful artwork...
|
| Yeah, I can see what you mean.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| If a movie isn't enjoyable at 720p (upscaled for a 4k tv), it
| isn't going to be enjoyable at 4k either.
|
| Blu-ray/4k isn't the crutch the studios were hoping for. Make
| better movies.
| mistersquid wrote:
| I prefer DVD to Blu-ray because - Ripping DVDs I
| own is simple and reliable. - Ripping my Blu-rays is
| complicated, error-prone, and expensive (custom software, custom
| hardware) - I'm macOS-based and there is no first-
| party Blu-ray player for macOS. - Third-party Blu-ray
| apps are awful and unreliable and they jank through ripped Blu-
| rays.
|
| As a result, I stopped buying Blu-rays because ripped DVDs
| provide the security/longevity of physical media with the
| convenience of digital accessibility.
| chungy wrote:
| "Custom hardware" just amounts to having a Blu-ray Drive, and
| they're not really expensive (or do you think $20 is
| expensive?). You have a point on software, but MakeMKV can be
| used for free for as long as it's called beta, which appears to
| be forever at this point.
|
| For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge
| and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that. Lately I've been
| buying 2160p discs when they're available (and if I don't have
| a 1080p already... unlike the other jump, 1080p-2160p is not
| significant), and for a couple years now, ripping them in
| MakeMKV has been equally as trivial as 1080p discs.
|
| Maybe your concession could be that most 1080p disc releases
| bundle a DVD with them. ;)
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Still worse than using the dvd reader inside a laptop
| dymk wrote:
| I haven't had a laptop (or desktop) with a built in DVD
| reader since 2015.
| chungy wrote:
| I just use a SATA Blu-ray Drive in my desktop. Works great.
| [deleted]
| ubercow13 wrote:
| If I understand correctly for UHD discs it amounts to having
| not just any drive, but having a supported drive flashed to a
| supported, sometime old, firmware version such that MakeMKV
| is able to dynamically overwrite the drive firmware (ie, root
| the drive) before ripping the disc. The whole process also
| depends on downloading encryption keys from a server that are
| per-disc, so if that goes down or stops being updated that
| could prevent you ripping your discs again in future.
|
| MakeMKV is incredible but the whole process seems fragile and
| very complex.
| smaudet wrote:
| In addition macOS probably means macbook, where they either
| don't have drive bays or only dvd drive bays.
| post_break wrote:
| Pioneer drives work out of the box with no firmware update.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| FHD Blu-rays rips really easily and the media are far more
| durable/reliable. About 5% of my DVD collection fails to rip in
| the simple manner, 1% doesn't rip at all[1], 100% of my Blu-ray
| collection rips cleanly on the first try with makemkv.
|
| 1: ddrescue on two different DVD drives can rip most DVDs (make
| sure you authorized the drive first by opening it with a player
| first), but I have 2 (out of nearly 200) that do not.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I legitimately don't understand how you can care enough about
| movies and TV to buy physical media, but little enough that
| standard definition is not a deal breaker. This is not a
| criticism, it just makes absolutely no sense to me.
| daveidol wrote:
| Seriously - 480i is pretty awful these days. I don't even
| watch YouTube videos at that resolution on my phone. I can't
| imagine watching full movies at that resolution in 2022.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Nothing a basic BD-ROM and a AnyDVD HD license (and a PC I
| guess) can't fix
| skunkworker wrote:
| I haven't seen this be a problem on MacOS with MakeMKV and a
| good external bluray drive (one a slim bluray and another a LG
| drive in a usb3 enclosure). I've had maybe 1 bad bluray disk
| that I backed up out of the hundreds of blu-ray disks that I
| own, and in that case it was the physical material separating
| on the disk itself.
|
| Edit: I have one of the good LG drives that works well with
| Libredrive and as far as I've tested it can back up everything
| I've thrown at it.
| mistersquid wrote:
| What software do you use to play ripped Blu-rays?
|
| I've tried both Macgo Blu-ray Player [1] and Anymp4 Blu-ray
| Player [2] and both have their playback issues. (Just a note
| that Anymp4 may look sketchy, but they are a legit company
| who do provide refunds if necessary.)
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macgo-blu-ray-player-
| pro/id140...
|
| [2] https://www.anymp4.com/blu-ray-player/
| skunkworker wrote:
| VLC can play them just fine and anything that supports
| H.264/H.265 mkvs.
| caycep wrote:
| VLC basically. Or Plex if you have an apple TV.
|
| I usually transcode using Don Melton's other-video-
| transcoding ruby gem, albeit I think doing it on my PC w/
| nvidia card seems to yield more consistent quality vs. the
| Apple Silicon built-in HEVC encoder.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I buy physical media and rip them into a digital library.
| Subscription based digital media is great, but they can yank the
| rights at any moment.
| hashmymustache wrote:
| Including if you're in another country. I owned a movie on Vudu
| that I wasn't able to stream in Canada due to licensing rights.
| imiric wrote:
| Judging by how the gaming industry is going, I'm afraid the
| subscription model will only expand more in the movie industry
| as well, until all physical media is considered a legacy
| format. There will likely never be a successor to current
| Bluray media.
|
| Studios will love this as they can cut costs on manufacturing
| and distribution, while forcing consumers into their
| subscription service.
|
| At that point piracy will be the only way to consume content
| without any restrictions.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I think you've just defined the balance of freedom with fair
| capitlaism...The artist(s) presumably gains revenue from your
| purchase, but you gain vastly more flexibility to consume
| however, whenver, and as many times as you wish the art
| produced. Kudos!
| steviedotboston wrote:
| technology is cyclical
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Digital _Versatile_ Disc indeed.
| liampulles wrote:
| The increase in fidelity over the last two decades is not the
| biggest visual improvement in home entertainment. Color is.
|
| I have an OLED 4k TV, maybe 10 Blu Rays, and well over 1000 DVDs.
| I can definitely see the difference between a DVD and even 720p
| content, but that's a difference you see when you are looking for
| it. The pitch blacks are what grab you when you are not paying
| attention, and you can get that regardless of the resolution.
|
| (Also, ripping DVDs is a fun hobby, and much quicker to
| experiment with than BR :) )
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Buying physical media is so weird to me other than for young
| children.
|
| Once you've watched a movie or show once, why watch it again?
| arh68 wrote:
| I used to buy more Blu-Rays but some TV series have stopped disc
| releases, presumably to drive streaming, or just aren't worth
| buying.
|
| Expanse: Season Five, specifically: why must I get Prime when
| I've got Seasons 1 - 4 on disc? And who's gonna buy GoT S5-8?
| Westworld S4?
|
| I've got no comment on any _increase_ in DVD sales, though. That
| 's not my market. I only rip CDs (which skip like crazy, while
| I've literally never had a disc issue with DVD/Blu).
| gtm1260 wrote:
| Blu-ray 4k is an amazing media format for true enthusiasts.
| Nothing beats the 100% complete compression artifact free viewing
| experience. Good streaming services like apple tv get close, but
| nothing beats Blu-ray UHD disks.
|
| Would 99% of people on 99% of tvs not be able to tell any
| difference? Probably.
| chungy wrote:
| > 100% complete compression artifact free viewing experience
|
| That doesn't exist on 4K Blu-ray. 2160p titles use the HEVC
| codec in combination with discs up to 125GB in capacity to
| minimize the artifacts as much as possible, but they are never
| gone.
|
| That's video, anyway. Both 1080p and 2160p discs usually
| include lossless audio tracks of at least one language. If your
| box uses terms like "PCM", "DTS-HD MA"/"DTS-HD Master Audio",
| "Dolby TrueHD", that audio track is lossless.
| elihu wrote:
| Something I've noticed: when DVD players came out, they quickly
| dropped in price so after a few years you could buy one for $40
| or so. Blu-ray players were the same, initially expensive, but
| after awhile they were fairly cheap.
|
| UHD Blu-ray players though have been out since 2016, and
| average prices are still hovering around $200. Sometimes you
| see one now around $150, so maybe prices are starting to drop.
|
| You could blame inflation for part of that, but is it also just
| that far fewer of them are being sold because people aren't
| buying physical disks anymore? I.e. they've turned into a niche
| luxury item.
| pavlov wrote:
| It really is a revelation to watch an older movie on UHD Blu-
| ray after being subjected to the mush that streaming services
| put up.
|
| Services like Apple TV+ do pretty well on 4K when it's their
| own flagship content, but none of them care about movies that
| were shot before digital. They'll serve a terrible automatic
| encoding that loses all the detail from the original film.
|
| I just bought Lynch's "Lost Highway" on UHD Blu-ray from the
| Criterion Collection, and this 1997 movie has probably never
| looked this good in any format. Even the original film prints
| shown in theatres were second-generation compared to this 4K.
| It's mastered from the negative and perfectly encoded to
| preserve the massive film grain in the indoor scenes.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Honestly I'd take a 1080 Blu-ray over a 4K stream in most
| instances. It's not universal, but streaming services are often
| incredibly stingy with the bitrate. Mr Robot on Amazon Prime
| was like watching a watercolour painting in dark scenes.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Even 4-6GB h.265 1080p pirated rips are usually better-
| looking than streaming "4K", let alone how much better an
| actual 1080p blu ray looks. Especially netflix, god their
| streams look like dogshit.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > nothing beats Blu-ray UHD disks
|
| Uncompressed 10 bit YUV444 UHD at 3840x2160 and 60fps runs at
| 15gbit a second, so you aren't getting a complete compression
| artifact free viewing experience. The largest UHD blueray will
| only deliver at 1% of that speed, and if you could cache it
| you'd get less than a minute's worth on the disk.
|
| Now you might think that the compression you choose is
| suitable, and perhaps you'd be right, but it's not 100%
| compression artifact free, and realistically you aren't going
| to be seeing uncompressed UHD outside of a broadcast facility.
| When I stream UHD from say a music festival, I'm compressing it
| for the WAN section to around 120mbits of h265 at 2160p50
| (europe). Even with that level of compression (15:1) it's
| likely better than your UHD disk.
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