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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

#231

Post by WalterBright »

mrguyorama wrote: post #221
WalterBright wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Are these actual DVD players

Do you want a photo of them? :-) Sheesh!

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#232

Post by layer8 »

ta1243 wrote: post #84
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”.

Features I don't want on DVD and much prefer streaming * Adverts (especially the anti piracy "you wouldn't steel a car" ones) * Logos * Menus It can take nearly a minute to go from the disk going in to the film starting.

It was a good investment to get a modded player that ignored UOP and let you easily skip stuff. As for menus, most DVD remote controls had a button to directly start the movie without having to figure out the menu.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#233

Post by dsr_ »

dboreham wrote: post #198
bombcar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)!

I'm skeptical there's anyone alive who made an analog phone call over thousands of miles. Local calls yes, but even so I'm pretty old and I never made one because I had no friends on the same CO as my parents' house.

Hi, I'm alive.

East Coast of the US to London, UK, in the early 1980s. Over three thousand miles. Quite expensive. Quality was dreadful.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#234

Post by dsr_ »

numpad0 wrote: post #195
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…

Why didn't they ever upgrade ISDN to ADSL speeds and beyond, or designed an ISDN-over-PON? Was it cost reasons?

Oh, they did. It's just that ISDN died in the USA.

If someone from Germany can chime in, I believe they had higher-bandwidth ISDN services in the late 1990s onwards.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#235

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

giantrobot wrote: post #179
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know effectively nothing about these topics but I recall having that thought the other day. With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.

FaceTime's audio quality is both higher data rate and better audio codecs. FaceTime uses AAC audio and samples at close to the full audible audio band. It also uses a relatively high data rate compared to typical voice calls. LTE and 5G has the option of higher quality voice codecs (EVS) than older cellular networks when using VoLTE or VoNR. They support wider band sampling and higher data rates for better quality au…

Awesome, thanks for this.

Where can I learn about these topics?

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#236

Post by layer8 »

WalterBright wrote: post #227
xnorswap wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That’s odd, unless maybe you always bought very cheap players. I owned half a dozen players over the years, played a 4-digit number of discs, and barely ever had any playback issues.

With streaming, on the other hand, I have intermittent hangs and stuttering every few weeks, and navigating the video is worse than with physical discs (no chapter stops, skipping forward/backwards often takes longer to resync/rebuffer the stream), switching subtitles and audio language takes more steps, and other inconveniences.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#237

Post by sumtechguy »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #182
jprete wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but DVDs were also region-locked. I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip. DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effe…

> DVDs were also region-locked A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free. > DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.

> Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.

No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer.

Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain.

Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#238

Post by pwarner »

arielweisberg wrote: post #216

I started buying Bluray/UHDs as a replacement for going to the theatre and purchasing/renting digital copies and streaming. 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, an…

I've been ramping up on UHD Blueray lately, especially since I upgraded to an OLED TV. It's a massive picture quality upgrade. I think I have like 6 discs, all ~$10. A mix of newer movies I haven't seen, and 80s-90s movies I want to show the kids in a few years. It's been fun.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#239

Post by belmead »

_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…

> 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.

> have to

Can you elaborate, please?

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#240

Post by Brian_K_White »

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.

I don't think this follows, because the function of a telephone call is more utilitarian than anything else.

People call for leisure of course, but the phone's part of that leisure activity is still just to convey information not art. The kids all switched completely to txt for the same non-utilitarian conversations once it became available.

For all it's low fidelity, it was actually quite high fidelity, in that it was actually very good at conveying all the "voice body language" information besides merely the words. It was just highly optimized for one job and that job was not music.

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