211–220 of 381 posts
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VHS were dubbed… no need to do region locking.
Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.
Animated films were usually dubbed, everything else was narrated by one monotone voice.
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> 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…
A significant percentage of people alive today have never made an analog phone call, or know just how good (and low latency!) it was to literally have two copper wires connecting two phones thousands of miles apart. Direct at the speed of light (almost)!
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Yes, and a lot of movies on DVDs cost $10-15
When DVDs were new, a new release around me would often be more like $25-30. Boxed sets would often be $50+. Of late 90s/early 2000's money, so $30 back then is like $55+ today.
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YouTube does still allow to "buy"/rent movies one apiece.
Nowhere can one pay a fee and receive a legal digital copy of a movie. YouTube allows people to pay for the privilege of being allowed to stream a movie for and indefinite period of time. YouTube retains the right to revoke all movie "purchases" at any time. GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.
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DVDs and Blu-rays also have stupid geographical restrictions. They come marked with region codes, and DVD players will only play discs from their home region. You have to go all the way back to VHS to be free of that particular corporate "innovation."
This is no longer the case with 4k UHD Blu-ray. They CAN be region locked in a technical sense, but I believe that there have only been two ever released that utilized that functionality. For the most part you can just buy one without worry.
I was spending the money anyways, why not own a copy?
Streaming is primarily just for specific TV shows, subscribe, immediately cancel, watch the series, then resubscribe when something worthwhile exists. I can't stand the bugs, slow interfaces, forced ads in ad free tiers, bad audio quality, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
Funny to see movie people going through the same pain PC gamers did (lamenting the loss of "big box" retail games - the reasoning is much the same), especially the complaints around the loss of things like booklets etc.
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All you need to make a copy of a physical book these days is a scanner or camera. Even a smartphone is usable. The only thing stopping people from making copies of physical books these days is that it's time consuming. That's it. And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.
ohmuhgawd becky, look at the pedantry on this one. this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive…
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I consider the books to be canonical, honestly.
+ 1 Here. I can hardly sit through The Two Towers , extended or otherwise, without cringing constantly at nonsensical plot changes. No, Faramir was not a moody nihilistic relativist who changes his entire outlook without any character development. No, there was no alliance, and getting from Lothlorien to Helm's Deep in the span of a few weeks, with a full army, is physically impossible even if the army were already a…
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- You need to subscribe to ten different services rather than just having one subscription to see the thing you want to watch. Before you just needed a DVD player
Which had "stupid geographical restrictions"