Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We all took the DVD boom era for granted

filmstories.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 381 posts

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#301

Post by OptionOfT »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #244
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…

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…

Region encoding yes, but countries had their own versions. So the version in Belgium for example did not come with English subtitles, only Dutch, French and German.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#302

Post by grepfru_it »

kbolino wrote: post #176
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…

Digital phone audio, which was μ-law [1] rather than linear PCM, was not exactly uncompressed. However, the compression involved was very simple, and was designed to offer the 8-bit samples a higher dynamic range than linear PCM would be capable of at the same bitrate (linear PCM would need 14 bits to represent the full dynamic range of 8-bit μ-law). It resulted, by design, in quite clear audio for human voice, as co…

Thank you for the memory of the horrible horrible sound of someone putting their phone up to a loudspeaker to hear a song.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#303

Post by bamboozled »

alt227 wrote: post #104
bamboozled wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

> Before you just needed a DVD player However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.

Renting worked fine for me

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#304

Post by strunz »

massysett wrote: post #74
episteme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great, how do you propose stopping people from sharing that mp4 with the world?

Same way that you stop them from sharing MP3 files: you don’t. Some people share them, but most don’t bother because there are convenient ways to pay for them, and those ways offer better value than scouring the internet for pirate downloads. So there is still a reason to hunt down pirate sites, as the copyright holder doesn’t want piracy to be too convenient, but locking down files with DRM ultimately just isn’t a g…

Many people no longer pirate because of how inconvenient and risky it is. It's not so simple to find a private tracker invite that you trust, use a VPN, find the quality you want, etc. One email from your ISP threatening to cancel your service is enough to scare people off. I think you greatly underestimate how much effort has gone into to anti-piracy, and how well it has worked.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#306

Post by 7jjjjjjj »

CharlesW wrote: post #288
7734128 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's similar to saying that a 20 megapixel front facing camera of a cheap chinese phone is superior to a 12 megapixel DLSR.

You're right that vertical resolution is just one factor, but streaming uses radically more efficient codecs than DVD, so at typical broadband speeds, streaming 480P on YouTube will look far better than DVD did.

That's not even close to true, WTF. YouTube 480p has criminally low bitrate, even the crappiest DVDs have better quality.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#307

Post by hedora »

latexr wrote: post #261
7734128 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but switching to downscaled 4k streams on my 1080p TV was at least as big a jump as upgrading the set from 720p to 1080p.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#308

Post by NoPicklez »

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…

When I grew up during the DVD era we were still watching and listening to lossy content. Heck I remember trying to shove as much low bitrate .mp3 music files I could into my small 128mb MP3 player.

Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#310

Post by NoPicklez »

giobox wrote: post #209

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.

So many of these things are purely nostalgic.

I remember building a computer 8 years ago that for the first time I didn't need an optical drive. Not needing to dig around for 3-4 separate disks or worry if they were scratched was very handy.

Yes the ownership piece is one thing, but I have yet to play a game in over a decade that was eventually taken away from me.

Why do I want the booklets when there are other incredible sources of game info online, from Youtube tutorials though to subreddits and wiki articles.

Post reply on HN