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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

#331

Post by shadowerm »

gwbas1c wrote: post #114
pro14 wrote: post #87

have you noticed that the quality of movies has been progressively declining? i think it's because the pirated movie boom ended. there was a theory that DVD movie piracy increases the box office revenue. bring back movie piracy?

I think it's because there's more movies made today than in the past. The streaming boom has lowered the barrier to entry. Also: There's always been bad movies, we just tend to forget them.

This is not correct.

The loss of DVD sales has changed the type of movies that are being created.

Matt Damon himself has explained how Good Will Hunting would not get made today because of this.

It is really simple too if you think of yourself as the investor in the film getting pitched. "Will Hunting, a genius-level IQ but chooses to work as a janitor at MIT. When he solves a difficult graduate-level math problem, his talents are discovered by a professor"

Only an idiot would invest in that in 2024 but we are way past that. I imagine no one would even bother pitching that at all in 2024. Certainly wouldn't get a meeting with anyone.

There was a golden era of film not long ago and that era is gone forever. The Fountain might be the best example though. I love that movie but it lost millions of dollars even at the height of the golden era.

The future is going to be AI Batman vs Superman part 276.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#332

Post by bobdvb »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #48
smolder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution of the day would have been to put a .jar on each disc and it would have been a nightmare, I think.

There's a JAR on every SIM and payment card and it works fine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card

SIM cards are doing relatively basic transactional crypto functions, not processing many Mbps of data in real time.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#333

Post by bobdvb »

bluGill wrote: post #150
arp242 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that realistically work? Because "just use a new codec" would mean you'd end up with old DVD players not being able to play newer DVDs, and a very frustrating transition period. They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.

Call it blu-ray because that is what it is. If you just want a new codec with the same media you need some DVD2 label and get DVD player manufacturers onboard with the new spec so that players are common before the first disc. Also because consumers are not happy about replacing their DVD players all the time you have to not create new specs too often. (or perhaps you can have a standard decoder cartridge which can b…

There were TVs made that you could upgrade the processor on, they were more expensive and never took off. People want cheap, they'll forgo the better product if they can get one that's on sale cheap. Consumer choice says that an upgradable product sells worse and the company that makes the upgradeable models will get the lowest market share. You'd have to legislate modularity and then you get people complaining about government over reach.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#334

Post by justsomehnguy »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #248
hx8 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>For example, many animes are a shot-for-shot recreation of manga. This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform. Osamu Tezuka, one of the founding fathers of the modern anime industry, notably created the filler-heavy formats of yesteryear that were the dominant form of popular televised anime well into the 21st century. There are notable early outliers like Yu Yu Hakusho and…

> This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform

It's hard to argue about 'a newer phenomenon' which is now closer to Astro Boy than our current time.

> most of the popular anime had their runtimes padded all to hell in order to continually cash in on the unpredictable zeitgeist popularity of their source material

You can't 'faithfully recreate shot-for-shot' an ongoing title, you would be out of the material way earlier than out of the runtime.

This is not even diving on the differences between the manga and the manga eiga.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#335

Post by mrbigbob »

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 dont think its that people dont care about quality but they simply have never experienced a better alternative.

an example would be i game on my computer and for years i had a 60Hz monitor and it wasnt til 2020 i upgraded to 144Hz monitor. it is night and day difference in feel that i can never go back to a monitor under 120Hz

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#336

Post by cogman10 »

red369 wrote: post #315
cogman10 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder if some areas/countries had better quality phone lines. I'm not doubting you, but I didn't have this experience at all. Could have just been luck - I probably didn't call that many different people. Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.

Long distance pretty quickly adopted digital transmission. Unless you made calls in the 70s there's a pretty good chance you were just using digital calls which is why they were so clear.

If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't be heard. Sending out a really strong vocal signal made it easier to hear that over the noise and pops.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#337

Post by retrac »

cogman10 wrote: post #336
red369 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if some areas/countries had better quality phone lines. I'm not doubting you, but I didn't have this experience at all. Could have just been luck - I probably didn't call that many different people. Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.

Long distance pretty quickly adopted digital transmission. Unless you made calls in the 70s there's a pretty good chance you were just using digital calls which is why they were so clear. If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't…

Plenty of long distance circuits remained analog into the 90s, particularly the microwave relay tower networks in rural areas. They used all sorts of techniques to produce rather good results.

As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 70s would play is stacking very long lines back and forth. Route a call across the country, then back, then back again. You could do NY - SF four or five times with a circuit length of like 10,000 miles sometimes before the channel was unusable.

You are otherwise totally right about the potential distortion of a long distance analog circuit. Other times filters would be out of tune and you would hear the hundreds of other analog channels just murmuring in the background not quite discernible, and calling the next town over was almost impossible.

Screaming into the phone was more the pre-electronics era with carbon microphones. The original analog phone systems had no active amplification at all. Voice powered microphones were typical in the military until quite late - I think they still use them as backups on ships.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#338

Post by [deleted] »

shiroiushi wrote: post #327
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long distance between US coasts is thousands of miles.

His point is that the long-distance connection has been digital for many decades now, even back in the 1980s according to one comment here. He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was al…

[deleted]

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#339

Post by Klonoar »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #248
hx8 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>For example, many animes are a shot-for-shot recreation of manga. This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform. Osamu Tezuka, one of the founding fathers of the modern anime industry, notably created the filler-heavy formats of yesteryear that were the dominant form of popular televised anime well into the 21st century. There are notable early outliers like Yu Yu Hakusho and…

In some cases, the runtime being padded with filler was less about cashing in and more about trying to not catch up to the manga too quickly.

FMA (2003) is a fun example of this not happening, where they basically wound up creating a custom ending to the series because they got ahead of the manga.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#340

Post by disambiguation »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #199
justinator wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider the books to be canonical, honestly.

+ 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…

For me, the fact they don't spend hours singing songs of lore makes it literally unwatchable.
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