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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

#221

Post by mrguyorama »

WalterBright wrote: post #7
kalaksi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your player is going bad. And blu-ray may be more resilient than DVD if memory serves. My experiences with streaming vary. - You need multiple services with the accompanying headaches. - some content will still get yanked - if you don't subscribe to netflix for 6 months they delete your account and you lose lists you had - quality can be poor depending on circumstance. Even with something like chromecast 4k, ne…

I have several players, they all behave differently wrt which DVDs make them crash. You're right that the bluray players tend to be more robust, but they still randomly crash. I just bought the complete Dynasty series, about 200 episodes (so sue me over my bad taste), and so far about 5 of the episodes won't play all the way through.

Buy a $12 DVD drive for a computer, download handbrake, and never care about any media problem ever again.

I have never experienced a problem with DVD playback that wasn't obviously caused by extreme scratches. I don't even understand how a DVD player could "crash" in most cases. They are just a pipe from a DVD drive to an ASIC that hasn't had to change in 20 years. There's nothing to crash. "Bad" data either fails a checksum and skips or will give you weird microblock artifacts.

Are these actual DVD players or some sort of weird computer system that software decodes DVDs?

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#222

Post by layer8 »

bamboozled wrote: post #97
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…

- 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

Streaming services are generally still more cost-effective, but the multiple subscriptions and different interfaces are an annoyance, as are differences between services in how easily you can circumvent regional restrictions. Physical media are more straightforward and consistent.

Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#223

Post by hx8 »

stronglikedan wrote: post #205
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ 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…

A movie adaptation of a book is a retelling of a story for a completely different type of audience, so it's an apples to oranges comparison always .

That is how Hollywood does movies. Other film traditions will more accurately adapt the source material. For example, many animes are a shot-for-shot recreation of manga.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#224

Post by BryantD »

This article is focused on mainstream cinema and I tend to agree with it; I miss the days when major studios were releasing DVDs packed with extras. Simultaneously, we're in the middle of a major boutique Blu-ray boom. I am not intimately familiar with the economics of this, but it's demonstrably true that it's possible to license and produce high quality Blu-rays with a lot of interesting extras in batches of 2-3K and make a living at it.

We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.

I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.

I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#225

Post by layer8 »

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.

At least in the earlier years, DVD players had dedicated decoder chips (and often still have now I believe), because general-purpose CPUs weren’t powerful enough or else too expensive at the time. So there wasn’t a software codec you could upgrade.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#226

Post by supportengineer »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #181
retrac wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I use phone call quality as my prime example of why most people don't actually care about quality.

Fewer people care about anything any more. We are in a period of decline. Society is collapsing in slow motion, in particular any and all social contracts.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#227

Post by WalterBright »

xnorswap wrote: post #8
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.

You have a bad DVD player and good internet. Lots of people have the opposite: crummy internet where there's no guarantee that they'll get through a streamed movie without buffering issues. On the article itself: indeed sometimes I enjoyed the directors commentaries as much as the films or shows themselves. In particular Requiem for a Dream, where the director's commentary adds a lot of context.

> You have a bad DVD player

As I mentioned, I have accumulated several DVD players over the years (different brands, even a blue ray), and all of them exhibit this characteristic.

The only commentary I've enjoyed are the Eddie Mueller ones commenting on film noir. I'll watch the movie, then re-watch it with Eddie. Good stuff!

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#228

Post by sammorrowdrums »

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…

Mobile voice call compression sucks so much that about a decade ago, in order to play a live drum audition remotely, I once had to find a space with a landline and printer that would also let me play loudly drums to do it.

As a student I had none of those things.

In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.

Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.

It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.

I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#229

Post by WalterBright »

cladopa wrote: post #13
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.

You should have invested in a good quality player. One with lots of buffer memory, and hardware acceleration of formats. People bought the cheapest they could find and then they ranted. At first good players were very expensive but then they became just a little more expensive that bad ones.

I have several, different brands, different years. None will play all the dvds.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#230

Post by WalterBright »

eimrine wrote: post #11
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.

My computer illiterate friends use to ask me to download this or that movie for them from torrents. I don't use streaming because I dont like proprietary software, but seems that there is not every movie on those services, also some kinds of censourship use to deplatform the content from time to time. From my experience, licensed CD and DVD plays well, music CD plays excellent even if it looks too scratched to be goo…

I don't have trouble with CDs playing, even badly damaged ones.
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