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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

#361

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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…

Reminds me of the "hear a pin drop" Sprint commercials from the late 80's/early 90s.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#362

Post by qingcharles »

tmm wrote: post #158

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…

Does it have some sort of digital cert on the system that has an expiry date, though?

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#363

Post by dTal »

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…

In Peter Jackson's defense re Treebeard...

Treebeard did spend what seemed to Merry and Pippin an interminable amount of time deliberating, including a full three days in agonizingly plodding discussion with other ents, and it is emphasized that this is THE defining character trait of ents. The shape of the interaction between the hobbits and the ents was of the hobbits becoming extremely bored and impatient. It is more important in a film adaptation to capture the feel rather than slavishly copy the book blow by blow. There is only so much screen time to go around, and the character trait has to be conveyed somehow while still moving the plot along. If the movie faithfully compressed the entire ent episode into its runtime, including the 3 day entmoot, it would be both incredibly boring, and spiritually less accurate because it would feel rushed and cramped.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#364

Post by pie420 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #259
stronglikedan wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

There's a difference between adaptation; and retelling the story in a way that damages the integrity of the original. Many of the above changes don't make sense even within the movie's own material. Even if the books didn't exist, Faramir's filmic story arc (as just one example) would be a badly executed example of character development.

The retelling of a story can never damage the integrity of the original, and it is very foolish of you to even suggest that it could. The original is always the original, and is unimpacted by anything that comes after...

This is as silly as suggesting that Tolkien's work somehow tarnishes or damages nordic/germanic mythology. utterly ridiculous.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#365

Post by pie420 »

hx8 wrote: post #223
stronglikedan wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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.

shot-for-shot recreations are a waste of time. a robot or algorithm could copy. we watch adaptations to see a new perspective on an old tale. if you want a copy, just read the original.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#367

Post by akimbostrawman »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #132
sourcecodeplz wrote: post #45

Why bother with DVDs when you have torrents and russian streaming sites...

Because paying for the art I enjoy is the right thing to do, so I do it.

your hard earned couple dollars made all the difference to hollywood. they absolutely will repay you with even more ads, payment tiers, propaganda and DRM!

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#368

Post by bobdvb »

dsr_ wrote: post #234
numpad0 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't they ever upgrade ISDN to ADSL speeds and beyond, or designed an ISDN-over-PON? Was it cost reasons?

Oh, they did. It's just that ISDN died in the USA. If someone from Germany can chime in, I believe they had higher-bandwidth ISDN services in the late 1990s onwards.

Regular ISDN is 64k and then 128k bonded BRI.

You could go to E1/PRI to get 2048kbps for €€€€.

In North America ISDN was 56k due to the slower T1 it was sent in and framing.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#369

Post by bobdvb »

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…

The reasons compression is strong:

1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost.

2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force.

3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.

Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted

#370

Post by throwaway04267 »

jasode wrote: post #131
jhbadger wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rent a movie for a couple of bucks. Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.

>Or check out a DVD for free from a public library. Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming. So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues: 1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons a…

> 1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.

It's the same problem with streaming services. There are several shows at Netflix and other services that doesn't have the latest seasons (at least in my EU country).

> 3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.

There's no guarantee that a season will be available in a streaming service either. They sometimes only have shows for a limited time, so you could start watching a series but then it is removed before you finish, often without warning.

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