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We all took the DVD boom era for granted

filmstories.co.uk

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Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#11

Post by eimrine »

WalterBright wrote: post #3

What I don't like about DVDs (I have a lot of them) is it's always a crapshoot if they play, or if they play for a while and halfway through the movie it sputters and hangs. The disk is pristine. Sometimes taking it out and putting it back in will get it to work, trying it in a different player will work, arggh. With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.

My computer illiterate friends use to ask me to download this or that movie for them from torrents. I don't use streaming because I dont like proprietary software, but seems that there is not every movie on those services, also some kinds of censourship use to deplatform the content from time to time. From my experience, licensed CD and DVD plays well, music CD plays excellent even if it looks too scratched to be good, but any self-burned disc from 00s is a lottery and typically requires some error-recovery software to be read.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#13

Post by cladopa »

WalterBright wrote: post #3

What I don't like about DVDs (I have a lot of them) is it's always a crapshoot if they play, or if they play for a while and halfway through the movie it sputters and hangs. The disk is pristine. Sometimes taking it out and putting it back in will get it to work, trying it in a different player will work, arggh. With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.

You should have invested in a good quality player. One with lots of buffer memory, and hardware acceleration of formats. People bought the cheapest they could find and then they ranted. At first good players were very expensive but then they became just a little more expensive that bad ones.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#14

Post by guappa »

WalterBright wrote: post #3

What I don't like about DVDs (I have a lot of them) is it's always a crapshoot if they play, or if they play for a while and halfway through the movie it sputters and hangs. The disk is pristine. Sometimes taking it out and putting it back in will get it to work, trying it in a different player will work, arggh. With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.

> With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.

Unless your provider or server is running low on bandwidth, then it stutters or lowers the quality :D

With both disks and internet my method is to copy the entire content locally before watching it. I do it even for youtube videos (also because the browser doesn't prevent screen dimming but the video player does).

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#15

Post by guappa »

cladopa wrote: post #9

I didn't like DVD. Those screens and advertisements that only made you loose time. I used those to "learn" French and German and the subtitles never matched what was said. When you are advanced in the language you don't care, but when you are learning it is a big flaw. The DVD usually only had English (and another one) audio tracks, subtitles in several languages, but not audio. You had to buy another DVD from Amazon…

Eh at least on linux you could skip the ads. On windows or hardware players it was annoying.

Not that VHS didn't have ads. I remember my little mermaid VHS that had a few minutes of promo for disneyland before starting.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#16

Post by guappa »

grahamlee wrote: post #10

It seems to me that the extra features on DVD were originally part of the marketing benefits driving people to adopt the format because the studios preferred it to VHS because of CSS and region-locking. Then they found they had painted themselves into a corner making all these extra features that people came to expect, until finally streaming let them get back to “just the movie”.

VHS were dubbed… no need to do region locking.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#17

Post by p0w3n3d »

I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions.

By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.

When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.

I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#18

Post by p0w3n3d »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #17

I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions. By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol"…

Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#20

Post by soulofmischief »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #18
p0w3n3d wrote: post #17

I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions. By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol"…

Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"

When I was 15 I discovered that my local doctor lost all of my medical records. Poof, all gone. Whoops, next patient please. My last doctor no longer had a copy of my files, either.

I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.

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