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We all took the DVD boom era for granted

filmstories.co.uk

351–360 of 381 posts

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#351
People still haven't quantified the value of compilation and curation. Putting a bunch of related things together results in something that is a product of its parts, not the sum. You'd think that LLMs would have drilled that into our heads by now.

Still, somehow, online archives are just document databases of mixed content. Just bags of crap and treasure that can be picked through using search engines if you can guess the correct magical incantation and the engine hasn't been told to selectively ignore what you've said. Archive.org and books.google.com are said to be valuable archives (and they are), but try to find all four volumes of a four volume set, or all of the works of an author in chronological order. I'll give you an hour.

This could be solved by giving users the ability to add those connections, and providing a deliberative system to edit and cultivate those added connections. They'll do it for free. It mostly works on wikipedia, even when as they dramatically fail in other ways.

Let people add links to content, and come up with deliberative procedures to avoid problems such as spam. "Community Notes" is a good attempt on Twitter. Wikipedia has a process for auditing references and links.

Instead of using public deliberation, we have random drones or execs hardcoding "Jonathan Turley" into secret LLM prompts because somebody saw him on TV complaining about LLMs libeling him. Ad hoc authoritarianism is not the answer, but somehow it's the only solution we ever use because deliberation is hard and requires relinquishing a bit of control.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#352

*Cinephiles took the DVD boom era for granted The reason it ended is because the general public doesn't care.

Did the cinephiles even like all of those "extra features" that the rest of us ignored? All of that stuff is (as it should be) free on the internet for anybody who cares.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#353
post #104

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.

For a while there, most desktop PCs came with two optical disk units, one player and one player/burner.

So the original disk could be copied to writable media.

There definitely would "occasionally" be a movie lover who wasn't actually buying those copies.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#354

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…

Most of the people I know who talk about LOTR movies are women who watched them once, but mainly rewatch the making of parts, because they don't care about the story as much as they care about seeing a group of dirty-looking men be friends with each other in ways that sort of look homoerotic but aren't explicitly.

Should be familiar if you know any anime fangirls.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#355
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…

YouTube is full of ads for VPN services whose point is to let you get around streaming geofencing.

(They say it's for security but they have nearly no security benefit.)

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have a player and a disk, you are able to move with them wherever you want.

You still had to deal with PAL NTSC issues.

Computers aren't much better here. You can't display either a PAL or NTSC movie properly on a 60fps display because neither 24 or 50 divide into that.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#357
post #5

What I don't like about DVDs (I have a lot of them) is it's always a crapshoot if they play, or if they play for a while and halfway through the movie it sputters and hangs. The disk is pristine. Sometimes taking it out and putting it back in will get it to work, trying it in a different player will work, arggh. With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.

Unless anyone else in the house is doing anything at all on the internet. Then the stream has weird hitches and pauses, it buffers occasionally, and it'll "seamlessly" switch between glorious 4k and half-baked potato quality at random. Sorry did I suggest other people in the house were a requirement? Nah, it just does that anyway. Too many points of failure between the endpoint and the provider, and way too much dist…

You probably have bufferbloat. Run https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#358
post #9

I didn't like DVD. Those screens and advertisements that only made you loose time. I used those to "learn" French and German and the subtitles never matched what was said. When you are advanced in the language you don't care, but when you are learning it is a big flaw. The DVD usually only had English (and another one) audio tracks, subtitles in several languages, but not audio. You had to buy another DVD from Amazon…

Subtitles aren't designed to help you learn the language, they're designed to entertain you. They'll often be shortened or translate jokes so locals will understand them, and that's unavoidable.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#359

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…

For a while the cheat code for cheap Blu-ray Discs was to buy them from RedBox. Now, I’m struggling for a decent place to buy discs from. When I was a student and had far less cash I had no problem spending $20 on a DVD of a new release. Now that I have the cash, it seems like I’m always looking for those great sales where you can grab a BluRay or UHD for $10.

Quality is great and they just work.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I liked it more than I thought I would, but the "AI fake" effect was a bit noticeable here and there. After watching the 4k UHD, I put in my Blu-ray from 10 years ago or whatever, sort of thinking I was going to prefer it's "less digital" graininess, but nope. Definitely found it more distracting than I'd remembered.

So of the two, I'd take the new AI version, though it's not perfect. But the happy medium might be the new AI release on regular Bluray. The lower 1080p image toned down the fakeness a bit I thought.

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