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'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

theguardian.com

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Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#21

Post by everforward »

aldarisbm wrote: post #19

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me. Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Re…

Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches.

I find it roughly equal as things go.

The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer.

That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while.

The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#23

Post by dirtyhippiefree »

sn41 wrote: post #10

Rental stores were great, except for the late fees. Many local rentals had good collections of older movies and TV series. They are simply non-existent in the streaming world.

Even libraries have dropped late fees, but YMMV…

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#24

Post by Dalewyn »

aldarisbm wrote: post #19

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me. Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Re…

>I absolutely need a wired connection

You do.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#25

Post by mdp2021 »

demondemidi wrote: post #16
nusl wrote: post #9

I enjoy physical media but not the finding space for it part. Somehow stuff accumulates over time and if you've got 100 DVDs it is a lot of space that you may not actively be using. That being said, I don't have a huge living space so that would contribute.

Ask yourself if you really need 100s of dvds? Are you gonna rewatch all the avengers that many times?

> Are you gonna rewatch all the

No, but you are probably going to rewatch Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" or Foley's "Glengarry Glen Ross" or (etc.) that many times.

And you may like to also have their physical token.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#26

Post by mu53 »

One of the things that I will miss about physical medium is the permanence of the data. A famous movie from 2006 had a racist joke. I remember it very clearly because of an argument at the time with my friends watching it.

In 2021, I bought the movie on google. I looked for clips, but I couldn't find a copy of that racist joke. Its as if it never happened. No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment.

While its not bad in this instance, its just a comedian trying to protect their image. The possibilities in the future are not fun.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#27

Post by Macha »

everforward wrote: post #21
aldarisbm wrote: post #19

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me. Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Re…

Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches. I find it roughly equal as things go. The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer. That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a lo…

I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length).

But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive.

Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time.

Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#28

Post by adzm »

mu53 wrote: post #26

One of the things that I will miss about physical medium is the permanence of the data. A famous movie from 2006 had a racist joke. I remember it very clearly because of an argument at the time with my friends watching it. In 2021, I bought the movie on google. I looked for clips, but I couldn't find a copy of that racist joke. Its as if it never happened. No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "i…

> No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment.

well, what was the movie?

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#29

Post by everforward »

basisword wrote: post #2

As physical media has been replaced with digital I've come to miss those walls filled with books, videos, and records. Stores (and homes) seem much more sanitised without them. You could tell a lot about a person from a glance at the various media items displayed in their home. Given there are a lot of people who buy vinyl records that don't own a record player, it seems this feeling is common.

I think this still exists, as the items that filled the space the books took. Eg the younger D&D folks I know fill their bookshelves with minis and action figures instead of adventure guides.

It does seem diminished, though I wonder how much of that is being converted to digital and how much is “the average person is too poor for a personal library now”.

Re: 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming

#30

Post by Macha »

bazil376 wrote: post #20
vodou wrote: post #8

I don't miss physical media. Streaming works fine from a technical perspective. What I DO miss is the huge supply of films from all eras, forgotten gems, B-movies, etc. In my part of the world we had Lovefilm where I got rentals delivered by post. I guess this was the same kind of service Netflix had in the US. The number of titles were just incredible. The number of films I can access today is just a tiny fraction o…

I do miss it a bit. Something about the scarcity made it more special. Also, the ceremony of going to the video store, browsing the shelves, and bringing it home. Same applies to music for me, but maybe even more so. I know I’m wearing rose-colored glasses in a lot of ways, but im okay with it.

Also when people had fewer shows they spent more time watching extras and since studios knew that they put effort into making them.

Nowadays a lot of projects don't bother or do the bare minimum of grabbing two actors on a zoom call for a commentary track.

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