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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

#21

Post by Ekaros »

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"…

It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#22

Post by lukan »

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"

They could offer you a download link, that is valid for 10 days. Or since storage is cheap, stays valid.

But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#24

Post by gadders »

aspenmayer wrote: post #23

Memories of dumping, patching, and reflashing my DVD drive firmware to make it region free thanks to resources such as Doom9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom9

Or on some home DVD players, making them region free by typing a sequence of buttons on the remote control.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#25

Post by maccard »

zeta0134 wrote: post #5
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.

Unless anyone else in the house is doing anything at all on the internet. Then the stream has weird hitches and pauses, it buffers occasionally, and it'll "seamlessly" switch between glorious 4k and half-baked potato quality at random. Sorry did I suggest other people in the house were a requirement? Nah, it just does that anyway. Too many points of failure between the endpoint and the provider, and way too much dist…

Bearing in mind I only live with one person, and I'm lucky enough to live in a place with ample internet options, but this just isn't a problem for me.

I've got gigabit fiber now, but in my last place I had 76mbps (but in practice it was more like 60 or so). We were able to watch two streams, with my wife's instagram and my reddit scrolling comfortably. The only reason we upgraded was when we moved 1) fiber was cheaper, and 2) I changed jobs and all of a sudden needed to download far more build files (hundreds of gigabytes a week)

If we had 4 people streaming different things we might have struggled.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#26

Post by eru »

Ekaros wrote: post #21
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"…

It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.

You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#27

Post by eru »

guappa wrote: post #16
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.

Some VHS were dubbed.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#29

Post by Ekaros »

eru wrote: post #26
Ekaros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.

You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs.

Well yes, on other hand there is also hardware acceleration case which make lot of sense when you are manufacturing devices at scale.

And with codec. What code it is in? For what architecture or operating system? What is system constraints it has to operate in? Do you have some specification? Do you need to due something beyond it for new codec.

And from security viewpoint running some arbitrary code from disk sounds like questionable idea. Specially for say pc or console...

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#30

Post by no92 »

lukan wrote: post #22
p0w3n3d wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

They could offer you a download link, that is valid for 10 days. Or since storage is cheap, stays valid. But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).

Depending on the jurisdiction, the minimum required storage time for medical data varies - but it needs to be kept around usually. Patients can, within that time frame, request that data to be provided, but may be required to pay some fee to cover the material costs. In my jurisdiction, this time frame is 10 years, and radiology data is usually provided as a paper slip with a link and password, valid for 1-2 years, or DVDs on request.

Keeping that data around and managing requests for it is a part of why older physicians are so keen to sell their practices to younger doctors here - they can pass on the duty of keeping up with storing the data that way.

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