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Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

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Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#161

Post by MrDOS »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #64
donohoe wrote: post #21

Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals. You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage. You now "own" the movie (or T…

The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using. A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD. A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

Resolution isn't the only problem. SD resolution (particularly PAL) is quite tolerable, if it's well-encoded from a good source.

DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.

DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).

If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.

Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#162

Post by jldugger »

kllrnohj wrote: post #86
commandlinefan wrote: post #22

My father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those. OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselve…

> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins. I don't think I'…

About half of the DVDs and Blu-rays I get from the library skip at some point in my PS5. They're usually not visibly scratched, though usually the scratches that matter are on the top not the bottom.

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#163

Post by altairprime »

HWR_14 wrote: post #158
toddmorey wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things. My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection. So now when I hear him play, the super villain try…

It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.

Netflix chose to negotiate revocable licenses to save money and draw in users, so it does seem valid to assign blame to Netflix for signing such contracts.

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#164

Post by prmoustache »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #64
donohoe wrote: post #21

Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals. You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage. You now "own" the movie (or T…

The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using. A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD. A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

On paper yes it feels like a downside. Practically if the movie/show is good, you don't really mind.

I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).

I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#166

Post by altairprime »

kllrnohj wrote: post #75
donohoe wrote: post #21

Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals. You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage. You now "own" the movie (or T…

> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it'…

As a kid I watched Fantasia on VHS so many times that the tape quality started to decay and my parents stored it away for special occasions. The quality decay didn’t bother me at all.

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#167

Post by KK7NIL »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #119
KK7NIL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates. The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.

You would think so, but the prices keep going up and the bitrate keeps going down. Some of that is up to codec and encoding improvements, but I think a lot of it is just that they know they can get away with it. If you'd have asked me 20 years to bet on whether streaming or shiny disks would be producing better quality audio/video in 20 years my money would NOT have been on disks but here we are. Ye Olden Plastic Dis…

Prices keep going up and bitrates down because most streaming services (except for Netflix and YouTube) have been basically break-even or money losing for years now, and the appetite for that is cooling.

Also, display resolution is not scaling like it used to. The move up from 4k to 8k is far more expensive and less worthwhile than the previous jumps.

So, I think your assumptions about the business side of streaming and the way the hardware is scaling are wrong and we will, in fact, not see physical media make a comeback.

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#168

Post by autoexec »

HWR_14 wrote: post #158
toddmorey wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things. My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection. So now when I hear him play, the super villain try…

It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.

Netflix is ultimately responsible for what they put on the platform, for delivering a consistent product to their users, and for setting expectations.

Netflix is exceptionally shitty at letting people what is leaving their platform and when, and even letting them know when the shows they saved or were in the middle of watching have been removed. Netflix has been around for ages but we still have to depend on third party websites to tell us what's coming/leaving. Some items will have a "leaving soon" banner on the thumbnail, but that's only good for shows netflix decides to push at you. There's no section or search that will find all that stuff (searching for "leaving soon" will show you some of them)

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#169

Post by BryantD »

genxy wrote: post #78
bko wrote: post #20

I was wondering if there is a DVD service similar to Netflix when it first came out. And of course there is, but pricing seems high! DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out. Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they char…

https://scarecrowvideo.org/ has thousands of videos you could never get on netflix.

Came here to say this! It’s the largest public video collection I’m aware of, at over 150,000 titles. Also they rent by mail. Not cheap but when you really need that movie…

Re: Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

#170

Post by prmoustache »

to11mtm wrote: post #126
tehwebguy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!

I think too many people remember DVDs but mostly remember them on Interlaced displays. Or hooked their DVD player to the HDTV with an RCA cable and were disappointed. On the flipside, if you had a DVD player capable of progressive scan and Component or HDMI-out, it's fine for couch viewing. That said, there are plenty of DVDs out there (extreme case, single layer DVD with extras on same disc as movie) where the bitra…

I am watching DVDs on a 1080p projector to the large wall of my living room. It is a 10y old cheap aliexpress one so it is not the sharpest you can get and it actually makes the DVD enjoyable as it smoothen a bit the whole thing. I don't really know what is at play but I can only say it seems to blur the image in a pleasant "optical way", not like if I was applying a gaussian blur and was watching it on an high dpi screen.
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