281–290 of 381 posts
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I consider streaming 720p to be DVD quality at best. (And no, i'm not basing that on bitrate. I know modern compression is much better.)
> I consider streaming 720p to be DVD quality at best. But it’s not, DVD quality is 480p. This isn’t a matter of opinion, we can look up the numbers.
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But that just ruins the spontaneous movie watching experience you get with DVDs.
Surely you mean the spontaneity after you have actually bought the DVD.
I rewatched Firefly on the whim the other week and now Malcom In The Middle because I own them on DVD.
Not available anywhere else digitally, at least with my subscription's.
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+ 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 .
A general one. And if you think about that its sad that a story has to be rewritten in order to ensure maximal appeal to generate maximal profit. The story isn't rewritten for the screen, it's rewritten for the investors polluting the story with money.
But on the flip side the story reaches a large audience, perhaps larger than the books might have, though not in true form. Double edged sword really.
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> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes This is the killer for me. I've worked on both video compression and graphics in my career and those projects involved a lot of pixel peeping. The compression artifacts in streaming video are sometimes really distracting now. I keep contemplating switching to bluray but apparently an increasing number of 4K HD releases there are being ruined…
If you're worried about Aliens, I can confirm that it's gorgeous in 4k UHD and the color accuracy is much better than the prior (manually frame-by-frame denoised) 1080p blu-ray release
How in the world can you have a discussion about DVD packaging and special features without mentioning the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition box sets? Not only did the movies come in beautiful collector’s cases with two DVDs per movie, they were also completely packed with special features, the run time of which exceeded that of the movies themselves. Hours and hours of in-depth making-of documentaries. I us…
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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…
But region coding granularity was very course, just a few big regions, unlike geofencing today. And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.) Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just no…
In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.
We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.
Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.
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could have been accommodated by putting executable codec files ON the DVD. A good brand would buffer compute and memory capacity by a decent factor at time of sale in order to support future codecs needs...
>could have been accommodated by putting executable codec files ON the DVD You probably don't want that kind of capability since it ends up being used for nefarious purposes by the rights holders and media companies. For example the keys on your BluRay player can be revoked just by playing a BluRay disc, as the drive first reads the code on the disc and executes the appropriate code to "update" your player according…
Thanks for mentioning this. The LibreDrive firmware is specifically designed to address this and other issues.
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> I consider streaming 720p to be DVD quality at best. But it’s not, DVD quality is 480p. This isn’t a matter of opinion, we can look up the numbers.
That's similar to saying that a 20 megapixel front facing camera of a cheap chinese phone is superior to a 12 megapixel DLSR.
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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…
Are there truly that many movies which aren't released on physical media? I've also recently set up Plex, and just rip blu-ray copies to my NAS for it. Haven't failed to find any movies I've looked for.