311–320 of 381 posts
It's true. Streaming services are really a downgrade in this respect. I don't get why they don't include the same sort of bonus content that DVDs had.
Back when I used to make digital copies of DVD's to watch on my PC, I used software that would specifically remove all of the menu's and bonus content and just digitise the movie itself to save space.
Yes it was cool, but I just wanted the movie.
hope physical media makes a comeback. one thing with dvd era - it allowed small scale / budget movies to made. movies that were not blockbusters but allowed art exploration.
They don't need to consider making DVD's and shipping them all around the world in the hope people will buy them.
There is so much content we consume that is made by small productions that likely wouldn't have been seen my many around the world unless they managed to get their hands on the DVD.
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…
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
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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)!
> just how good No. Analog copper signals are TERRIBLE. A big reason telecom was one of the first to embrace digital transmissions was due to all the quality issues of copper. Yes, latency was low, but that was about the only thing going for it. To get a clear signal over copper you NEED a very large amount of insulation, and that insulation needs to be through the entire circuit. Just one section with frayed plastic…
Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.
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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.
I wish Kaleidescape[1] was more affordable. It's a download rather than streaming service, with a comprehensive movie library (12,000+ titles) and you buy movies individually rather than a monthly subscription. But then you can watch the movies as many times as you want and they don't disappear from your library if Kaleidescape stops carrying them. I don't know if they include the extra content typically available on…
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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…
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…
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
That fact that all the bonus material on DVDs (documentaries, audio commentaries, story board drawings etc) was hardly appreciated at the time until it went away in the Netflix era is something that also reminds me of movie awards. Many film classics were only really appreciated years later, and we are left to wonder why they didn't won an Academy Award at the time while some other totally unremarkable movie took it…
The Academy Awards are a poor indicator of movie quality, largely because the process is flawed and prone to all sorts of bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Awards#Criticism_and_c...