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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

#131

Post by jasode »

jhbadger wrote: post #122
alt227 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before you just needed a DVD player However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.

Or rent a movie for a couple of bucks. Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.

>Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.

Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming.

So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues:

1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.

2) then checked out a British tv series with 10 seasons. The 10th season had 3 discs and the middle disc was so scratched up by a previous borrower that it was unplayable. (The library doesn't have a bunch of duplicate DVDs like Blockbuster Video rentals.)

3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.

On top of those problems, the library has a very small selection in comparison to streaming. She estimates she'll exhaust the DVDs sitting on the library's shelves in a few months and have nothing to watch.

Another huge negative to DVDs is that she can't play them (directly) on her iPad. Her exercise bike had a mount for an iPad and she used it to watch video streams from Amazon Prime.

She was spoiled by the conveniences of streaming and does not look back on DVDs with any romantic nostalgia at all. The only reason she doesn't just subscribe to Netflix or HBO streaming to get back that convenience was she didn't think she could afford it on her Social Security income. On the other hand, the Amazon Prime Video streaming (without ads) was already part of her Amazon subscription.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#133

Post by prmoustache »

pro14 wrote: post #87

have you noticed that the quality of movies has been progressively declining? i think it's because the pirated movie boom ended. there was a theory that DVD movie piracy increases the box office revenue. bring back movie piracy?

I think with the success of streaming series have become more interesting to streaming platforms as their addictive nature can lock people more easily into a platform for a specific period of time.

For this reason budget and revenues of series have increased dramatically and series are more and more produced like movies. This probably created an artistic and talent shift from movies to series.

There were a lot of shitty movies too back in the days but some never even reached the theaters and were only sold on VHS and DVDs.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#134

Post by cubefox »

mkesper wrote: post #46
cubefox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure DVDs didn't have any DRM. Netflix & Co do.

Pretty sure they have. It's just been broken long ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

I thought this form of copy protection doesn't count as DRM. Not sure on the definition of DRM though.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#135

Post by bluGill »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #105
vouaobrasil wrote: post #57

I wish there were a way to just pay for a movie on a site and download it as an mp4 in 1080P or 4K. I hate streaming because I only want to watch 1-2 movies per month and they are very specific (like a specific martial arts movie or action movie). Streaming interfaces often have DRM and horrible interfaces and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something I'll rarely use. Don't understand the DRM because pirates ge…

I wish there were ready-made hosted Plex servers that could accept a file transfer. Buy a movie online and give them your server "address" and they send the movie to your Plex server. We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.

Write your local congressman (depending on where you live this position may have a different name). Go to the local political party of your choice and make it known that this is an important issue. Remember votes are more important than money in politics - money can buy votes but only when voters don't care about issues. So if many many people make this an issue things will change.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#136

Post by retrac »

codedokode wrote: post #94

The problems with streaming services: - they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information) - stupid geographical restrictions - they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes As an intermediate result, a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video (social media, especially for mob…

> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video

It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#137

Post by gruturo »

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"

It makes complete sense. It's literally pennies for them, esp. when bought in bulk, it's read-only (more or less), and most importantly it absolves them of any responsibility regarding handing you some very sensitive personal data. No credentials, cloud service, hacking, leak, etc etc. They hand you a physical object and that's it. It's your problem now.

A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#138

Post by reginald78 »

retrac wrote: post #136
codedokode wrote: post #94

The problems with streaming services: - they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information) - stupid geographical restrictions - they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes As an intermediate result, a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video (social media, especially for mob…

> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital…

Don't forget the added latency.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#139

Post by carlosjobim »

_fat_santa wrote: post #91
vouaobrasil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah...I just want to pay for a DRM-free copy so I can play it and own it forever. That's it. No streaming accoounts, no tracking, no plastic packaging, just the file in exchange for money. I paid for Sublime text that way and it's a great model.

I'm currently setting up a Plex in my home to play our families "most popular" movies and I genuinely want to buy these movies, pay for them, and just have them but I can't do that so I have to pirate them. I wonder how many others are in the same camp as me, I used to be a pirate back when I was a teenager but now I can genuinely afford this stuff and always prefer to pay versus pirate, but in the case of home movie…

Maybe 0,00000001% of the general population. And 90% of posters here.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#140

Post by acuozzo »

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”.

Studios were making special features before DVD with LD. Not to the same extent, of course, but it wasn't a new thing by the time DVD came around.
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