This article is old, and the headline misleading. It's talking about Q1 2021 sales, which in practice means it's talking about 2020 movies, which means that these are weird, pandemic-fucked numbers that don't really mean anything at all.
There are more recent numbers available. Here's the end of October, the latest week available right now: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week... -- at the bottom of the page, you can see a link to the previous week, and you can step back week-by-week.
If you do that, you'll see that DVD sales are larger than Blu-ray sales, but it's in that 50-something range, which puts it about on track with pre-pandemic trends. Also, disc sales in general keep falling annually at an incredibly fast rate, so both DVD and Blu-ray are tanking.
The obvious cause for this has nothing to do with particular weakness in the Blu-ray format, but that the "mainstream" disc market is now increasingly streaming, and the disc market is bifurcating into:
1. Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought.
2. People who want the best possible image/sound quality, collectors, and physical media fetishists. This is a niche market, and always has been.
The obvious end state is that DVD fades out in the same way that CD sales are fading out in the music world, and that 4K UHD Blu-ray ends up in the vinyl-style collector niche.
I think a lot of it is simply that there's a sizable chunk of the market that doesn't own Blu-ray player and doesn't see any point investing in one when the quality of DVDs are acceptable to them.
The jump from VHS to DVD was big with a lot of benefits beyond just quality. But the jump from DVD to Blu-ray was far more marginal so a lot of people didn't bother.
While those people probably would be buying Blu-rays if they had a player at home, they're probably not going to spend $100 replacing their DVD player with a Blu-ray player. And if you have a DVD player in your living room and a couple more in your bedrooms you'll have to replace several DVD players.
Adding on to what you wrote: The monitors my wife and I use are both >15 years old, and still working fine. But they require VGA-to-HDMI adapters to plug into our more modern computers, which renders Blu-rays unplayable on them thanks to DRM. The one Blu-ray we rented to test out the Blu-ray player required using a small laptop screen to display, which kind of defeats the purpose of the higher resolution.
On our desk setups wide-screens would be problematic, and it's difficult to get modern 4:3 or 5:4 screens anymore.
Probably not an issue for most folks, but likely still applicable to a few. Especially the smaller screen issue for those who don't own a separate TV, or even a separate monitor from their laptop screen.
But they require VGA-to-HDMI adapters to plug into our more modern computers, which renders Blu-rays unplayable on them thanks to DRM.
Hint: many of the cheap Chinese HDMI-to-VGA (I think that's what you meant) adapters "support" HDCP in that they'll decrypt it. The branded ones don't want the attention of lawyers, but the no-name ones don't care. Ever since the HDCP master key was cracked, it's possible to generate device keys without licensing them from the central authority, and that's what these manufacturers are likely doing.
Even better, there are EDID injectors that can lie about the capabilities of your display. I used one on front of a HDMI to component cable for years to force blu ray to 1080i for an old projector. Was great until things like the chromecast removed the interlaced modes from their output.
There were some Blu-ray players with high quality analog video outputs. I've played modern Blu-rays which surely had HDCP protection on them on analog display inputs.
They're rare, and you'll pretty much only find them used I imagine.
The jump from dvd to blu ray isn’t marginal though at the tv sizes I assume we are all at now? DVDs look bad on my tv and I get really disappointed when I notice that’s all I have of that movie.
DVD is fine for me. honestly when I’m watching something without a high def reference to compare to probably helps. DVD is clearly not as good. At this point I’m more interested in the quality of the content.
Personally, I agree. My girlfriend often watches DVDs on our 50" HD TV and I don't understand why she does it because the quality is so bad. For a lot of people it's good enough apparently...
But to my point, this is really the only benefit of DVD to Blu-Ray - a sharper image when viewed on a large HD TV.
VHS on the other hand had noticeable visual artifacts and would degrade with use. They didn't feature all of the extra DVDs had like subtitles, director commentary, and other extra content. They had no chapter selection / skip. VHS tapes were bulky and difficult to store. It was just an inferior format to DVD in so many ways.
On the other hand I think you can argue DVDs are still perfectly fine when viewing on smaller TVs.
To me, DVDs look acceptable but bluray is perceptibly better. I do prefer the bluray, but not to the point where I'll pay appreciably more for them. 4K on the other hand is a complete fraud, I've tried about a dozen but I haven't seen any I would prefer over the regular bluray.
The point is that most people _aren't using their legacy DVD players_. They're streaming. If you want to watch a movie in 2022, the extremely normal thing you do is stream it. If you're watching on DVD, you're weird (probably technophobic or backward in some way); if you're watching on Blu-ray/4K disc, you're weird (probably an obsessive cinephile).
I don't expect people using their DVD players in 2022 to migrate to Blu-ray. I expect them to drift away from discs entirely.
I'll stream movies, but when it comes to movies I want to watch more than once, I absolutely will buy it on disc. Why? Easy - that disc will always be present and playable. You can't say that for the rotating options with streaming services. Go back to watch a Christmas movie in July, and it's gone.
As for DVD vs blu-ray, I just use a 32" TV, so I just pick whichever is cheaper.
> if you're watching on Blu-ray/4K disc, you're weird (probably an obsessive cinephile).
I'm OK with streaming video quality. I'm not OK with subscriptions, depending on internet connection, playback device restrictions and all that other crap that the normal viewing experience entails these days. That means either piracy (risky in many places) or ripping my own Blu-Rays (perhaps not entirely legal everywhere but ~0 risk).
DVD quality is significantly lower, and especially interlacing is something I never want to deal with.
So yeah I'm weird. But I don't consider myself a cinephile or technophobe.
Most people mostly stream things these days. This doesn't mean no physical media gets bought.
I mostly buy physical media to give as presents to other people, since the streaming services don't generally provide any pleasant way to gift specific things.
After all these years, though, I still don't remember for sure which of my friends can play blu-rays and which cannot. Therefore I get hybrid (blu-ray and DVD) boxes where they are available, or just DVD where they are not.
That's kind of interesting, I never got to use DVDs because the quality jump from VHS to "kazaa" was sufficient.. and then came HD movies and the DVD rips looked pretty bad..
For physical media, I could see the point in blu-ray, but, I don't see any practical point in it.. So I only have LD, which is slightly worse than DVD in some aspects, and slightly better in others (bit lower resolution, but never any compression artifacts), but that's more for the fun and cozy ritual of spinning up the giant disks and watching them on the big flickery CRT :)
I don’t miss my massive collections of books, dvds or cassettes.
I humped those fucking things across three continents and 6 countries.
iTunes Match obsoleted my cd collection (some of which had rusted and were unplayable on regular stereos), Calibre for my books and I don’t really care about movies enough to archive them, stream most things bought those shows I watch over and over again on iTunes.
Many consoles come with one built in. We just use the PS5.
I'm not particularly into buying tv shows, but there are definitely quite a few movies out there that look a lot better on a 4k blu-ray than 4k streaming.
I got a PS5 with a 4k blu ray player but have yet to put a disk in it since many films are simply not available. Tried to find Lawrence of Arabia but it seems completely unavailable. Maybe the format is great but lacking lots of content.
So it looks like they finally released it in June this year, but only as a $120 limited edition. Before that it was only available as part of a $290 Columbia Classics box set. Think I'll pass.
It was actually released at a normal price (I think I paid $20 for it), but yeah, didn't realize it was a limited release that's now going for big money.
(The limited release thing is annoying, but... it's a niche market, and one of the ways they get people to buy things at full price instead of waiting for 50% sales, so I get it.)
It is pretty rare for me to buy movies on physical media, but I do sometimes buy some. I only really buy movies that I would want to share or watch again some far time in the future and don't want to risk getting de-listed from whatever streaming sites I have access to.
The vast majority of video content I consume I probably wouldn't watch more than once. But in the rare cases where I'll probably watch again and want to share it with the future, I'll buy it on physical media.
I do this for other physical media as well. There's been some music I have on vinyl or CD which I can't find on Spotify or for digital download. Most music I wouldn't care if it disappeared tomorrow, but some I'll want to have in the future for sure.
Not if you use MakeMKV. I own so many BluRays now that I could start my own underground Netflix. It's funny because this is what I always imagined Heaven being like.
Same here, but I'm sure you can see how having to use MakeMKV is an additional hassle that your average consumer is not going to bother with.
Also, last I checked, UHD Blu-Rays require your drive to be supported by LibreDrive frimware for MakeMKV to be able to rip them. Again not a huge obstacle when you are dedicated to having an offline movie collection but wouln't it be better if we could just get plain video files (on discs or online) without all this DRM crap?
> Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought.
That seems like a strangely unfriendly reduction.
Although I don't buy DVDs, I am perfectly fine watching subHD content because the visual quality is good enough and not what interests me. I also don't have a 'modern' or especially large TV (it's already too large, if anything). I care about the story. When I read a book, it is similarly of no significant importance to me whether I'm reading from an old paperback or a new hardcover, or an e-reader. As long as the text is legible (book's not deteriorated and the font's not too small), I don't care.
This is not technophobia, it is merely the absence of technophilia.
In addition to some reason cited for the increase around DVD format, i would posit some of the following too:
* Parents buy cheaper DVDs for their very young children...Children who care less about display quality.
* While travel plummeted during middle of pandemic, there were still people who took road trips (e.g. maybe for staying with family, etc.)...and during those roadtrips, i'm sure some families opted for DVDs and DVD players instead of trying to stream stuff while on the road, etc.
* Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptionsof streaming servicews. I hate this myself. So, my partner bought 3 or 4 of their favorite movies, so we can watch them whenever we want - even if we lack internet (though we would need power for the dvd player of course)
* Vinyl records have their followers who revitaliuzed the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?
I'm sure there are other reasons for why this is happening.
"Vinyl records have their followers who revitalized the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?"
I think it's possible this is happening or will happen, perhaps in a similar vein to how vintage gamers/collectors now venerate the GameCube and PS2 as the last bastion of consoles that weren't designed to be online all the time, and will therefore be playable "forever" in a way that everything which has come after them will not.
At the same time, I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a DVD— from the analog tactility of them, the size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork, the fact that they were the dominant format for decades, while DVDs got barely fifteen years (the aughts and a bit beyond). It's easy to love a record when you put it on and you can immediately tell "yes, this is a high quality stereo audio experience that I am having with this piece of media and the equipment I have invested in for consuming it", and I'd argue there just isn't really an equivalent experience for DVDs: they're always going to be blurry, with janky menus and unskippable ad reels, blocky subtitles, cheap plastic cases. Some of that changes with collectors editions in special boxes or whatever, but I don't know if it's widespread enough across the format as a whole to really enable the kind of culture that exists around vinyl.
Are they doing collectory things like alphabetizing them and putting them in special preservation cases, going online to seek out mint copies of special editions, etc?
Not to discount your observations, but I'm curious to differentiate between an active, intentional, curated collection effort, vs hoarding or just not having gotten around to tossing them all out yet despite that none have been touched in 10 years. Most people I know who still have a shelf or two of physical discs in their media/living rooms look a lot more like the second case than the first one.
I have a pair of IKEA dressers on either side of the TV, with the DVDs placed 2 deep in the drawers. And then a couple of bookcases in the basement for the overflow that doesn't fit the dressers. The current count stands at 1845.
Why not both? The missus and I have both been collecting DVD's for over 20 years. The resulting pile of movies fills a large part of the spare room in the house, and neither of us seem to show indications of stopping to grab cool old movies on DVD when at flea markets etc.
The physical DVD's are rather irrelevant, though. Most are ripped and streamed to the TV rather than watched in a player.
> ...I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a DVD— from the analog tactility of them, the size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork...
Agreed, for many it is an experience - or, as you so rightly said "rituals". It's more than just merely consuming media. It's listening to the warmth of the sound, and yes even the crackles and pops of some tracks. And likely a feeling of nostalgia for some. I bet that's one reason for vinyl's resurgence.
What are you talking about blurry? Upscaled DVD is perfectly fine. For most movies from the 80s and 90s it's not like you're going to notice a difference going to Blu Ray or UHD streaming.
> For most movies from the 80s and 90s it's not like you're going to notice a difference going to Blu Ray or UHD streaming.
Complete crock of shit. Movies from the 80s and 90s were usually shot on 35mm - DVD quality does not begin to extract the detail nor the dynamic range in these films.
It’s not a subtle difference.
And if bitstarving is an issue it’s usually going to be DVD. No amount of encoder magic can overcome MPEG-2 inherent shortcomings.
Speak for yourself. Upscaling a DVD to a 4k large TV looks tremendously bad unless you're doing it with specialized software with some format-aware intelligence in it. So you need a computer hooked to your TV.
There's plenty of bitrate starved streaming content that's available on streaming that's poorly upscaled from a DVD, but that's not the case on studio upscale Blu-Rays with extremely plentiful bitrates and sometimes even film re-scans resulting in a quality that was better than what you could even get in the theater from the original film stock.
UHD streaming, even if it is bit-starved, should be far ahead of a DVD. HD content that is bit-starved is more of a tossup, but I rarely see egregious behavior even from youtube's bad bitrates. I only see that on overcompressed television stations.
The lack of good content from Hollywood lately has been pushing me towards cancelling streaming services and buying used old favorites from a local store (going as low as £0.50 a pop) and buying blu-rays of the new ones I'm interested in.
I know they will always available for a rewatch and I don't have to finance the whole bunch of canned crap they have been putting out.
While i can find all manner of esoteric, oddball things to watch on the streaming services - which admittedly are not major studio movies - my partner feels the same as you. They lament that many of the services lack "big budget films" (as they put it)! :-)
>Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptions of streaming services.
This is it for me, except I’ve never bothered with the subscription services because they never seem to have what I want to watch at that moment.
I can “rent” a digital viewing for $4, or go on eBay and buy a new or gingerly used copy for at most $6.50 - even 4K Blu-Rays. eBay every time. RIP it, add it to media library, and the disc lives in a binder as the ultimate backup. Watch it whenever, on whatever, forever.
I have Vinyl records, but my goal is to digitize them. They're my Dads from 1940s, 50s, and many are 78s, so I had so search Kijiji ads to get a player that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was what I settled on.
As for DVDs/Blu Ray, I only buy things like Planet Earth or other docs. Sure enough, just yesterday I tried playing Planet Earth II on UHD 4K Blu Ray on an Xbox Series X, albeit I still have a 1080p TV (bought used) and 1080p Receiver (bought used, Sony STR-DN1000 that I paid $50 for) and it was glitching. sigh Time to hit up Bit Torrent and download a ripped version of the Documentary that I already paid for. Argh.
Both Blu Ray and Vinyl are susceptible to one day not being playable. By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the content playable well into the future.
> many are 78s, so I had so search Kijiji ads to get a player that plays that speed. Dual 1009 was what I settled on
Many modern turntables, including cheap ones, support 78 rpm. (Quick search finds 11 new 78 rpm-supporting models at Best Buy in Canada, starting from $80. An $85 Sylvania that supports 78s can also digitize directly to USB storage.[1])
Did you mean 16 2/3 rpm records, which the Dual 1009 supports and most modern turntables don't?
No, they are 78s, but the quality was so-so. I was able to buy this one for about $120! For the price difference, I didn't want to get an average one, and I can easily resell the Dual 1009 and get some money back as I didn't want to keep it forever.
I thought about that, but I didn't want to fiddle too much with various tweaks as I'm not an expert in this area. In fact, I'm actually thinking of buying a Tascam DR-05X, https://tascam.com/us/product/dr-05x/top and just connecting that to the amplifier, and having it produce the digital files for me. No software, no computer. Just record player to amp to Tascam.
I can then repurpose it as a microphone for Zoom/MS Teams or whatever is used.
I have a NAD C715 that can record any input, and record it straight to MP3 at 160kbps, but I'd rather record at a higher bitrate. I've yet to find ANY receiver that can do that. It's still cool that they had that, where the FM signal is converted via ADC and straight to the CODEC for mp3 on the chip.
If it gets the project done, then it sounds like a great tool!
While you're doing the analog-to digital-conversion, I would suggest sticking with 24-bit 96Khz wav, and focus purely on maximizing the quality of the analog signal. i.e. dialing in levels and stuff. Each time you play a record it degrades a little bit, and it needs to be done at 1x speed, so you don't want to be futzing with compression settings.
Once you have the uncompressed wav files, you can experiment with different codecs and bitrates until you're happy. Figuring out the software to do that isn't difficult.
You could then also keep the uncompressed wav files around on the SD card in your drawer (or losslessly compress with something like flac). If a year later you realize you made poor compression choices, you can easily fix it. Maybe you eventually become an "expert" and decide you want to do some frequency filtering or something. If the SD card dies or gets lost, oh well! :-)
Thanks for the tips! I'll keep that in mind and do 24-bit 96Khz wav. I think converting digital to digital, i.e. WAV to FLAC or mp3/aac will be straight forward, but given that I may not have that many records to convert, I'll try and keep them lossless.
I've also managed to get a working Sony STR-6800SD receiver for $200 CAD. That should help in getting a good analog phono signal.
> ...By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the content playable well into the future...
Yep, this is my preferred direction, and of course an offline-accessible though digital edition may be less prone to issues of wonky players, or warped physical media.
Why would modern ones not be reliable? They’re fantastic! Having said that, for your old vinyl collection, you will find the quality of the player mostly irrelevant. The age of those vinyls will make them sound like a 32kbits/s mp3 file!
Modern ones are reliable. However, I only went with an older "vintage" one as it came up on Kjiji for a good price, and I could resell it once I was done. I don't plan on listening to Vinyl forever. We are now so used to digital music and asking Alexa to play playlists and songs and radio stations is soooo convenient.
Btw, the Dual 1009, which is from 1964-66, maintains the speed REALLY well. I also have an Onkyo CP-1200A (got for free, someone put in the garbage), and the Dual was actually better at maintaining the speed!
You can download an app on your phone to measure the accuracy of your record player.
Oh yeah, those are all good reasons, and there's a bunch more too. It's legacy tech that is cheap, reliable, and independent, it works well anywhere that has limited scale and cares more about cost than video quality. For example :
* Some hospitals, for instance, still have entire wards using DVDs. Downtime in a room is many tens-of-thousands-of-dollars lost per hour. Outpatient medical settings often use them as well (pediatricians offices, dialysis clinics, etc)
* Some schools are still tied to the format, for multimedia installations / video carts / pre-purchased equipment / etc.
* Tens-of-thousands of minivans are sold with infotainment that's always 10 years behind modern tech. (For almost 10 years, you had to have a binder-full-of-DVDs to use any Chrysler Minivan's video player system, the only other option was the analog RCA ports next to a kids seat). My 2016 Minivan, for example, only supports DVDs and nothing else (even though both BluRay and HDMI had been common standards for 10+ years by that point)
* And of course, there's millions of homes that aren't bothering to upgrade. (Netflix still has something like 2+ million unique DVD-only subscribers each month)
The number of DVD subscribers that netflix has is definitely less than 2 million. That number is three years old, and in 2019, they lost 500,000 subscribers.
This service will not exist in less than six years.
Maybe, but the point still stands about legacy formats living a long life. I forgot about that side of Netflix's business but it's still alive and kicking!
* The bins of shit-tier movies near checkout lanes at Menards and Wal-Mart are mostly or all DVDs—if disc sales in general decline, that particular segment might remain steady.
DVDs are the main way I watch movies these days. Not because I'm a techophobe or backward, as some comments here speculate, but because I've soured on streaming, and the quality increase of Blu-ray isn't important to me.
This was a concern in the mid-to-late aughts very early into the format's debut, but not so much anymore, if at all. I have Pioneer Elite Blu-ray players running pre-2010 firmware that have never had any playback issues with new releases for 13 some years now.
AFAIU ripping software providers have switched to distributing the per-release AACS processing keys instead of the per-device keys so there is nothing to revoke unless they somehow find out which devices or device keys are being used to decrypt those processing keys - and even that would only delay new leaks until another device/player is cracked.
- Ripping DVDs I own is simple and reliable.
- Ripping my Blu-rays is complicated, error-prone, and expensive (custom software, custom hardware)
- I'm macOS-based and there is no first-party Blu-ray player for macOS.
- Third-party Blu-ray apps are awful and unreliable and they jank through ripped Blu-rays.
As a result, I stopped buying Blu-rays because ripped DVDs provide the security/longevity of physical media with the convenience of digital accessibility.
"Custom hardware" just amounts to having a Blu-ray Drive, and they're not really expensive (or do you think $20 is expensive?). You have a point on software, but MakeMKV can be used for free for as long as it's called beta, which appears to be forever at this point.
For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that. Lately I've been buying 2160p discs when they're available (and if I don't have a 1080p already... unlike the other jump, 1080p→2160p is not significant), and for a couple years now, ripping them in MakeMKV has been equally as trivial as 1080p discs.
Maybe your concession could be that most 1080p disc releases bundle a DVD with them. ;)
If I understand correctly for UHD discs it amounts to having not just any drive, but having a supported drive flashed to a supported, sometime old, firmware version such that MakeMKV is able to dynamically overwrite the drive firmware (ie, root the drive) before ripping the disc. The whole process also depends on downloading encryption keys from a server that are per-disc, so if that goes down or stops being updated that could prevent you ripping your discs again in future.
MakeMKV is incredible but the whole process seems fragile and very complex.
Good to know, but flashing an e.g. ASUS drive with LibreDrive firmware is also no as complicated as the GP makes it out to be and supported drives are easy to find.
>For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that
You'd be amazed how high quality you can stuff into 4.7gb if you use a proper encoding format like H264 or HEVC. Pirates have been doing it for years, it wouldn't be too unreasonable for legit companies to offer it as well.
> For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that.
Heh, for me the quality of VHS (not bootleg) was good enough. The main reason I eventually switched to DVD is because DVDs don't need to be rewound, were cheaper, and seemed more durable.
Second or third generation bootleg VHS was often quite poor, as were worn out VHS from rental shops. Plus SD digital encodes from the 00s internet were very low quality compared to VHS, but I think that's the source of reference for many younger people who don't remember VHS well.
I legitimately don’t understand how you can care enough about movies and TV to buy physical media, but little enough that standard definition is not a deal breaker. This is not a criticism, it just makes absolutely no sense to me.
Personally, I started during the days when things went on and off netflix rather often.
It turns out the few shows I really wanted to watch were available on ebay reasonably cheaply, and I didn't have to pay any attention to availability anymore. It snowballed from there, as I kept adding more shows.
As far as the quality goes, I don't really like wearing my glasses when I get home. I literally can't tell the difference from my couch. Unless it's a show that requires subtitles, then I need to put on my glasses, but I'm pretty used to everything being a little blurry anyways.
Seriously - 480i is pretty awful these days. I don't even watch YouTube videos at that resolution on my phone. I can't imagine watching full movies at that resolution in 2022.
These days if I'm watching youtube on my TV I'll usually preference 4K content because 1080 is just noticeably bad. I wish people would start uploading HDR content because it's another huge leap in quality.
FHD Blu-rays rips really easily and the media are far more durable/reliable. About 5% of my DVD collection fails to rip in the simple manner, 1% doesn't rip at all[1], 100% of my Blu-ray collection rips cleanly on the first try with makemkv.
1: ddrescue on two different DVD drives can rip most DVDs (make sure you authorized the drive first by opening it with a player first), but I have 2 (out of nearly 200) that do not.
I've had Blu-Rays that required multiple tries and even some that I haven't managed to rip yet due to apparent damage (though resurfacing might yet make them readable).
> ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is essential for any kind of data recovery for sure - not to be confused with the older dd_rescue wrapper around dd which is a lot more limited. For archival though it is not always enough though (it might be for DVDs) as some copy protection schemes store data outside the normal data area or in the error correction information.
> I've had Blu-Rays that required multiple tries and even some that I haven't managed to rip yet due to apparent damage (though resurfacing might yet make them readable).
Are you using a slim BD drive? I switched to a "normal" 5.25 sized (a.k.a. 41mm tall half-height bay) and got significantly improved speeds and reliability after trying two different slim drives.
I haven't seen this be a problem on MacOS with MakeMKV and a good external bluray drive (one a slim bluray and another a LG drive in a usb3 enclosure). I've had maybe 1 bad bluray disk that I backed up out of the hundreds of blu-ray disks that I own, and in that case it was the physical material separating on the disk itself.
Edit: I have one of the good LG drives that works well with Libredrive and as far as I've tested it can back up everything I've thrown at it.
I've tried both Macgo Blu-ray Player [1] and Anymp4 Blu-ray Player [2] and both have their playback issues. (Just a note that Anymp4 may look sketchy, but they are a legit company who do provide refunds if necessary.)
I usually transcode using Don Melton's other-video-transcoding ruby gem, albeit I think doing it on my PC w/ nvidia card seems to yield more consistent quality vs. the Apple Silicon built-in HEVC encoder.
While MakeMKV can rip decrypted Blu-Rays as-is, the default mode of operation is to encapsulate the audio and video streams in a Matroska (.mkv) container for each track (hence the name MakeMKV) which should be playable in any video player worth its salt. Personlly I like mpv for its minimalism.
As someone who use to buy Blu-Ray kids movies and rip them to my own media server long before "netflix" your post makes zero sense and I strongly agree with the other guy.
Get a Blu-Ray drive for your computer and makemkv (works on Windows, Linux, Macos) and be done with it.
I've ripped both Blu-Ray and DVD's via makemkv and the process is pretty much identical so i don't see where the "complicated, errror-prone and expensive" part comes from given makeMKV is free?
It has been in "beta" for decades and so they offer a time-limited license.
Having a DVD library is tempting. Physical media that you own and is easy to rip digitally, etc. However I popped in a disc recently and was reminded of how bad the dvd experience was. It just stopped playing two scenes in. Took it out, the disk looked perfect. Tried again, stopped at the exact same moment. There goes that disk I guess, it was probably 20 years old to be fair but thats true for most dvds you’d find in the used bin.
I regularly discover that even new DVDs won't play. It's a crap shoot.
Then there's the menu system on it. Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly. For example, they often do not display what options are actually set or not. Sometimes it's even hard to find the cursor.
The only good thing about DVDs is you can turn on the Eddie Mueller commentary for film noir movies. That man is an unending gold mine of snark, wit, and funny/interesting comments. He's often more interesting than the movie.
He makes a great point at then end when comparing VHS to DVD: Its like we are moving forward in technology but moving backwards in the amount of BS we have to put up with just to enjoy what we paid for. The VCR gave you more control compared to DVD players.
Streaming has eliminated many of these pain points in exchange for freedom to truly own your media.
The best way to fight back is to buy the Blu-Ray, rip it using MakeMKV thereby creating an MKV file that contains the ability to jump chapter by chapter, have any audio track you want, etc but with none of the junk that you are forced to use when you pop the Blue-Ray into the player. The best of all worlds.
It's been at least 15 years since I've touched a DVD, but I recall the menu system to be the worst feature of it. I've never once wanted anything but the main feature. Also may the product people who decided on "unskippable scenes" go to a purgatory where they're surrounded by nothing but copyright notices for eternity.
> Also may the product people who decided on "unskippable scenes" go to a purgatory where they're surrounded by nothing but copyright notices for eternity.
The first time I used Netflix about a decade ago I was surprised how fast play worked.
Now that you mention that, I was coming from a world of DVD menus and unskippable notices. So the Netflix UX was a great improvement.
I use VLC for the very few movies I watch so can't say if it works on all movies. Most of the time you can just select "No disc menus" and it goes directly to the movie. Then you can select language and subs as you want in the normal windows style menus in VLC.
Since I bought the DVD, it's mine to do whatever I want to be able to see the movie. If I decide not to watch the adverticement, there isn't something they can do about it.
Good luck arguing that in court, no matter how correct you are. Lawyers cost a lot of money.
Still, no one's going to sue you personally for this. However, there have been cases of legal action against those who make "hacking tools" available. I believe there was a case against Apex for their cheap DVD players that ignored region codes, for instance.
Anyway, the keyword here is "threatened". Corporate lawyers make all kinds of baseless legal threats all the time. It should be illegal.
Since the creators of VLC are also the maintainers of libdvdcss I don't think getting sued over letting people skip unwanted content is their primary concern. They seem to be doing alright legally - probably helps to not be US-based.
> Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly.
My favorite one is the Fifth Element DVD. It has menus implemented as options flying towards you in a loop and you need to press the OK button on the remote just when the right one is passing by. Works great if you have a DVD player with a slightly laggy CPU and an IR remote. It always reminds of that "the worst volume control UI" website that was doing rounds on social media a while back.
Almost 2 decades ago, when I was considering getting a DVD+RW drive for my PC, I thoroughly researched them and found they all had differing error correction algorithms, and it made a world of a difference. I got one known for this, and it often played DVDs that neither my standalone DVD player nor my roommate's DVD player on his PC could play.
I would have thought that by now they'd all be good at this, but it seems not.
I remember reading reviews of DVD players to find the ones that "slipped through" testing with things like ad skip and "direct to menu" and "direct to feature" options that you could enable.
The commentary tracks on DVDs could be quite good at best--even if they were also hit or miss. Unfortunately they seem to have pretty much vanished. I assume that the volume of DVDs these days doesn't justify the cost/effort of recording these any longer.
My impression is that a bunch of it has to do with "4K UHD" Blu-Ray uses just about all the space for the main feature and required languages per region and has very little spare room. (As did "3D" Blu-Ray, though those are mostly extinct today.) The early solution to that was "4K UHD" releases were all expensive "Collector's Editions" that bundled a standard Blu-Ray and/or DVD with all the "special features" including commentaries (increasing the marginal costs of all the packaging by including multiple discs). The late solution today seems to be to just ignore all the "special features" entirely, planning only for the lowest common denominator amount of extra space, and things like commentaries are slowly disappearing as an expected bonus feature (again; it's not like these features existed in VHS or Laserdisc; DVD was its own weird golden age).
Laserdiscs had extra audio tracks with commentary on some discs as I recall. (But the stack of LDs I have is in the garage and it's too cold to check :-)) An audio track shouldn't take much room. But not sure about actual numbers.
Huh, all the normal non-collectors UHD releases I got so far still come with a HD Blu-Ray. If that has changed it must be recent enough that I haven't run into it yet.
Laptops partially fixed this issue - you can just skip the bad parts.
Higher end dvd players used to do the same, but players are a vanishing breed and consoles are not much more than dumb players usually.
Ofc it would be nice if there were just no skipping - there were a number of technologies being employed back when DVD was the pretty much the only format in town, I suspect the data redundancy may have been traded for cramming more features on a disk.
Back when ripping (my own) disks was a thing, you could compress a movie to half its size on disk (no coded compression just more intensive picture compression) and burn it twice to the same disk...
Ofc the problem with that was the consumer burnable disks use a degrading chemistry unlike stamped copies, so they would last 3-4 years before undergoing significant corruption.
I tried watching Terminator 2 with my son the other day, we'd had the DVD for ages to eventually watch. The mint looking DVD refused to load in the DVD player so we pirated it to watch instead.
It's a good idea to try ripping the DVD anyway... often ripping software is more tolerant (better at correcting/retrying/skipping) errors than the players. And as I think you're implying, once ripped you don't have to worry about THAT physical media.
You remind me. I have some DVDs I need to rip (before they go bad)!
> I get my DVDs almost exclusively from the library - not once has one ever failed to play for me.
Over the last few years, the experience with DVDs/Blu-Rays from the library has been trending downwards. I would say about a quarter of the movies I check out from the library have some problem somewhere in the movie where the player either gets stuck or skips.
To be fair that seems to happen quite regularly for me on Netflix and Prime. The encoder hits a bug and the whole app crashes. Fortunately it's usually random and you can just restart the app.
Never seems to happen with pirated videos & VLC though.
Yeah the only thing I've found I miss in the world of piracy is reliable subtitles (sometimes they just don't bother with foreign bits) and Amazon's X-ray thing that shows you who the actors are. It's pretty useful occasionally.
Yeah, subtitles are very hit-or-miss. Some pirate groups do a great job of including every subtitle track available, others cut out everything except the one they're interested in (usually English, but sometimes Italian etc. so you have to watch out which torrent you get).
Consistency is definitely one big problem with piracy; some stuff is just done better than others, and it's hard to tell what's what.
I wish they'd published the graph on an absolute scale and not a relative one, because I have no idea if DVD sales have increased or decreased. Only that the ratio with blu-ray has changed.
I strongly suspect that the subheadline "DVD sales skyrocket in the last year" is simply false.
Yeah, and even the relative bump in Q1 2021 was due to backlogged sales from 2020 supply interruptions. A more recent release of the same periodic data indicates that:
"""The total video disc market is still clearly in decline in the US (and globally) and does not appear to be recovering after the Covid 19 delays of new disc releases due to theatrical releases being postponed or moved to streaming. In the US, video disc sales fell 25.5% from $3.29 billion in 2019 to $2.45 billion in 2020 and an additional 20% to $1.97 billion in 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, video disc sales continued their decline with an additional 19% drop year-over-year."""
The article seems to be confusing relative share of the physical media market with absolute sales. Its claim that "DVD sales skyrocket in the last year" is simply not true. Both DVD and Blu-ray sales have been declining every year - but Blu-ray sales declined more rapidly in 2020 than DVD.
At the risk of sounding like a complete snob, it annoys me that DVDs are still sold. Blu Ray has been on the market 6 years longer than DVD had when Blu Ray players were first released.
I appreciate that many don’t care about visual quality, but the baseline of TVs continues to improve with time, and DVD supports literally nothing rolled out in the last 15 years.
At 720x480 resolution (rectangular pixels!), they’re guaranteed to look like crap on any TV produced this decade. I can only imagine it’s a case of “people keep buying ‘em so we keep selling ‘em”, which is doubly annoying because it allows the price of BD players and discs to be kept artificially high as an “enthusiast” option. A standard player on Amazon today is only about half the price of what I paid for a nice Sony player in 2012. And that’s adjusted for inflation.
The industry groups only have themselves to blame. The fragile and shitty Blu-ray DRM makes it random whether a disc will work or not. Who the hell would buy that?
> I appreciate that many don’t care about visual quality, but the baseline of TVs continues to improve with time, and DVD supports literally nothing rolled out in the last 15 years.
Technically the physical DVD format supports 1080p content.
e.g. Terminator 2 was released on “Extreme DVD” in 2003 in 1080p. However AFAIK they’re bricks now as the licensing server for the required DRM has been taken offline.
> Technically the physical DVD format supports 1080p content.
But only as a data DVD, not as a video DVD. I feel like it's misleading not to make that clear. And those Extreme DVDs are just data DVDs with a file on them.
And yet most movies are closer to 24:10 which even Blu-Rays don't seem to support so all the video streams come with built in black bars to make them 16:9 :|
We only buy physical movies on DVD because that's what our minivan can play and that's the only time we need a physical disc. I thing the general reason is just cost though, I'm not going to spend $25 on a disc I'm only going to watch once. I'll just rent it from Prime etc.
We also have a dvd player in our van. It’s hell on earth when you put on a dvd for the kids and then 20 minutes in it starts skipping or just freeze. Been looking into replacing it with a more modern player with hdmi input or something so I can just hook up an iPad or something instead.
"""USED""" DVDs on ebay are $4 or so a pop, reliably available, ship in a couple days, and nobody is going to rob your collection of your favorite movie 3 years down the line.
DVD could have a new lease on life if they'd create an updated spec with something like AV1. IIRC, Youtube uses around 2.5GB/hr for 4k which would mean almost 3 hours of 4k content on a dual-layer DVD at streaming quality. That would be good enough for most people.
The value of DVD is that you can stick a disc into anything that says "DVD player" and it'll work. Inventing a new format, like AV1 on DVD media, means you need new player hardware -- at which point you might as well just use Blu-ray.
Calling it DVD would almost make it a non-starter. HD DVD lost, DVD is old. Who wants something old? You'd probably have to call it something like red disc (Stylized as reDisc of course).
1) It's probably not good enough for 4K if you've got a viewing set-up on which you can actually tell the difference between 4k and 1080p. Which, sure, is only a smallish minority of viewers.
2) But you can fit a basically-perfect 1080P rip on a dual-layer DVD with modern codecs. Easily.
With an 85" TV, you have to be within 11 feet to notice the difference with 1080p. With a 55" TV, that drops down to about 7 feet.
A great setup will show a difference, but those people probably think nothing of shelling out tons of money for 4k and 8k media. They'd hardly be the target market here.
I much prefer to own a physical copy of media instead of relying on streaming services. I have a large DVD collection and I'm proud of it. Streaming doesn't sit well with me and you have to re-download the media each time you watch it, which feels wrong and a waste of bandwidth too.
I'm getting to the point where i want ther video file so i can save it locally. Sure DVDs are fine, because i can rip them....I really only want physiucal media until i have ripped to my local digital library. I know some movie companies used to offer a "digital download" of the move if you bought a disc....Not sure if that's still a thing. And who knows if that format was even some crap proprietary, locked doen edition anyway. But, yeah, i prefer my own offline-available, digital copy of media myself.
Until your internet connection drops out on movie night. Or the streaming service shuts down. Or their license expires and they are too cheap to renew so silently remove your movie. And you won't get the full resolution on your favorite OS. And you can't use your own player so have to put up with whatever options the official one has or doesn't have. And when you move somewhere else half the catalogue is not available.
Yes, "owning" shit is more expensive. But plenty of us would rather pay that cost than give up control.
My power could also drop out, my apartment could burn down, I could be hit by a car that day. Ultimately watching a specific movie at a specific time is not a very critical thing so I'm perfectly happy to accept issues in exceptional situation for the benefit of a much better average experience.
For me at least the ever increasing DPI increases have just not been worth the extra expense, I see 4K is better than my 1080 TV but i don’t care enough about it to spend the money to upgrade. I imagine the dirt cheap DVDs are more preferable to people than the more expensive Blu-rays, I get the same amount of entertainment from both for most movies that aren’t really focussed on the visuals alone.
The jump to 1080p from 480p is very, very noticeable— I own Firefly on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and I accidentally watched a few minutes of an episode on the DVD version before being like.... wait, what? and then realizing what had happened and switching discs.
However, IMO the jump from 1080p to 4K is way more marginal. It's definitely better, but it's just not that much better than what your TV's built in upscaler can do, nevermind some future AI-powered DLSS-type upscaler.
There's a problem though when studios mess with the original to do the Blu-Ray release. For example, The Wire went from 4:3 (DVD) to 16:9 (Blu-Ray) and introduced some problems[1]. There are worse cases like the infamously bad Buffy Blu Ray release[2].
Blu Ray releases would be great if they didn't mess with the source material. But this seems to happen all the time. I'll take the flaws of 480p over that kind of stuff any day.
Wow, it's really amazing these crappy remastered versions were ever released in these states.
It doesn't have to be this way, as long as you don't assume your audience to be complete idiots (as apparently The Wire's owners do). Go watch the new versions of Star Trek (the original series): it looks beautiful. Luckily, it was all shot with real film, so it looks fantastic in HD, but they didn't do something stupid like changing the aspect ratio, they just left it at the standard 4:3. They did redo all the FX shots since those just weren't going to work in HD, but they look good.
Star Trek: TNG on the other hand has a few problems, though nothing as bad as this other stuff. There's a few places where things that wouldn't have been visible now are, such as one of the early episodes (probably the pilot) where there's an extra piece of carpet under Data's chair. The old rounded screens wouldn't have shown this, so they just left it in on the original TV version, but in HD with rectangular screens it shows up. The other problem is that, with HD resolution, you can see the black cardboard they strategically stuck on the control panels on the bridge to prevent reflections from lights. It would have been nice if they had done a little more digital editing to fix these minor issues.
> It doesn't have to be this way, as long as you don't assume your audience to be complete idiots (as apparently The Wire's owners do). Go watch the new versions of Star Trek (the original series): it looks beautiful. Luckily, it was all shot with real film, so it looks fantastic in HD, but they didn't do something stupid like changing the aspect ratio, they just left it at the standard 4:3. They did redo all the FX shots since those just weren't going to work in HD, but they look good.
They also included versions with the original VFX upscaled in case you don't like the new VFX. I agree that that was a great release, same with TNG really even with the small nits you mentioned.
Unfortunate that DS9 and Voyager are (and will be for the forseeable future it seems) stuck on crappy interlaced DVD (or streaming rips for pirates) if you want an offline copy. I'd be happy with just a 720p non-interlaced and professionally cleaned up release.
I'd say the jump from 480 to 720 is huge, and to 1080 is quite nice. 4K is already fairly marginal to my eyes and I can't imagine shopping for an 8K TV. Perhaps at a wall size TV, but I'm still quite well served by a 42" 1080p Sony TV I got in 2009 or 2010 (can't remember exactly).
Definitely fair— I'm rocking a 60" 1080p panel that was left by the previous occupants of the house, and it's perfectly adequate to my needs; I expect it is of similar vintage, in any case.
I haven't felt any appetite for picking up a 4K unit, particularly if it means having to navigate the whole world of "smart" TV apps, figuring which stuff I want to use vs disable, and how to go about doing that.
For my money, 720p is more than enough for any movie except visually compelling movies. For things like LOTR, Star Wars, and some of the super-hero series I really appreciate that 1080p. My eyesight isn't good enough to discern 4k.
At about 8' distance from my 65" 4K TV I don't notice the difference between 720p and 1080p. At 5' distance I do notice. Even at 5', though, the visible difference between 1080p vs. 4k is tiny. And it's practically impossible to sit much closer than that and still have room to walk between the TV and front row. Maybe if I ever get a projector with an 80" diagonal screen or something, it will matter.
My screen does HDR but it's not oled so the benefit to hdr sources is barely noticeable, and anyway you can get high-quality 1080p downsample rips that retain the hdr data.
I’ve got a projector with a 100” screen, still using a 1080p projector. My 1080p projector of choice was under $1k, while good 4K projectors are in the $5k range. I’d be willing to pay like 20% more for a 4K projector, not 400% more.
For someone with 20:20 (6:6) vision SD means your screen should fill 20 degrees of your viewing angle, HD 30, and UHD 40.
Recommendations for most viewing is 30 degrees, but for the fully immersive THX/Theatre style viewing you want 40 degeres.
That means for watching your 70" TV you should be about 8' away. If you are watching UHD then that's great, you won't see any resolution artifacts, but with HD you will see a difference.
However if you're 9' away from your screen you won't get any uhd resolution benefits.
(That's setting aside other UHD features, especially HDR)
Of course maybe you have better than 20:20 eyesight.
The thing these discussions invariably miss for awhile until someone points it out — I see this on art cinema forums all the time — is that all of the resolutions are functionally bottlenecked by things having nothing to do with the disc.
The size of the screen, for instance, how far you're sitting from it, your actual visual acuity, and so forth and so on. Because these things tend to be suboptimal more than they are optimal, the benefits of higher resolution have diminishing returns, because you have to increasingly have everything "just right" for it to matter.
There's been studies showing that in actual typical viewing conditions for most actual people, higher resolution formats are overkill.
My preference is for blu-ray for instance but we have a small screen by today's standards, which we really don't have any desire to replace in size.
The Panasonic plasma has state of the art upscaling silicon for it’s time, especially since plasma became prevalent when 480p sources were still common.
Your MacBook probably doesn’t attempt any sophisticated upscaling.
Honestly I agree with you, but I was one of those people who mostly cared about high definition TV because the sound was better. I think we're something of a rare breed.
Judging by how the gaming industry is going, I'm afraid the subscription model will only expand more in the movie industry as well, until all physical media is considered a legacy format. There will likely never be a successor to current Bluray media.
Studios will love this as they can cut costs on manufacturing and distribution, while forcing consumers into their subscription service.
At that point piracy will be the only way to consume content without any restrictions.
I mostly didn't care about games on physical media but recently I saw "collector's editions" steelbooks that have plastic inserts for disk but contain only download code. I mean, it is probably a natural step after "golden disk" is literally unplayable and downloads 30GB patch on day of release.
This has already started; I think even the new Call of Duty basically has a disk option, but the game isn't really on it. It's basically just a verification and you have to download the game. I don't have the game, but I think I've read that somewhere.
I think you've just defined the balance of freedom with fair capitlaism...The artist(s) presumably gains revenue from your purchase, but you gain vastly more flexibility to consume however, whenver, and as many times as you wish the art produced. Kudos!
DVD players themselves seem to have declined markedly in quality since they became commodities.
I have a new-ish blu-ray player that baulks at the layer change on a DVD, or refuses to play some titles. I also have a high quality Sony upscaling player I bought at a thrift shop that will play anything. I will be unhappy when that dies. Unfortunately, the introduction of HDMI seemed to coincide with the drop in quality of DVD players so you may have to buy a chain of chinese dongles to get the good quality players to work in your lounge.
Ripping your DVDs is probably a good idea, not because of the playability issues to do with the disks themselves, but to do with finding a decent, working DVD player at any price.
edit: the main problem I have with commercial streaming media is that they are using all the nasty tricks of DVD to compress the image below what you can notice on a modern TV. Crushed blacks, blockiness when the stream gets compromised by traffic etc. Blu-ray held such promise and it can look fantastic with a higher average bit stream rate than streaming, but they are getting harder to purchase as the retail outlets disappear.
> Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators get paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and keep forever?
This is exactly the approach I've taken for the HD era and it works great.
Back in the DVD era I had a well optimized ripping setup, I put hours in to tuning everything so I could pop a new disc in and have it ready to play on my Windows Media Center instance as quickly as my drive would read it.
At this point though, it's just not worth the trouble. Especially for UHD content, ripping that is just a nightmare. These days when I buy a new disc I just add it to a list on my server and my server goes out, finds whatever quality copy I told it to look for, downloads it, extracts it, names it according to my standards, and tells Plex to update its metadata.
More often than not by the time I get home the content is already there on my server waiting for me and I can toss the disc on the rack for display purposes. In my last move I had an entire box of discs that were still sealed in their original plastic.
It's the best of all worlds. The content owners get their money, I get a DRM-free copy that I can play on what I want when I want. It's not strictly legal but it's morally clean. The end result is the same as if I had ripped it myself, just with less effort on my part.
I definitely found it fun, and back then I was working with limited disk space so I enjoyed the challenge of optimizing for quality and encoding speed while still getting the file size down to a reasonable target.
I lost interest in HD ripping when it required commercial software to do reliably, the cat and mouse games with the DRM, etc.
Combine that with my home server getting in to the multiple terabyte range and my internet connection working its way up to gigabit speeds and suddenly "REMUX" type rips that are the exact A/V content from the disc just repackaged in to a more convenient container became practical. Re-encoding just isn't worth the time or CPU cycles when disk and bandwidth are cheap.
The challenge and annoyance went through the roof and the benefits dropped off, so I'd rather put my effort in to something else.
That "forever" for the .mkv comes at a pretty high cost in time and money, if you really want a decent chance of it actually lasting a lifetime. You can reduce one by making the other go up, but there's gonna be some cost in both.
Then again you have to store physical disks. And pay for them, of course. Pick your poison I guess.
Modern laptops are getting too slim for ethernet ports. Of course they're not going to include a bulky drive that would reduce the space for battery capacity by 30-40% and is used by almost nobody. I think I haven't seen anyone use a disk drive in a computer at all in the last 10 years, except for the few times I ripped a CD with an old external drive.
No, not only Macbooks. My 6 years old Thinkpad doesn't have one and it was completely normal back then too.
Not surprising based on my experience. BR hardware/software is a nightmare to maintain. Lots of new multimedia tech really sucks in terms of the overall experience.
In the codec realm, I find myself going all the way back to MPEG1 for a side project. Getting 100% of the patents/royalties out of the equation does wonders for compatibility. ISO is still getting me on the standards docs, but that's a one-time cost.
Not every application/customer on earth demands the bleeding edge in efficiency or quality. Especially in the information theory arena - you are always trading something else important. It's usually latency, memory & compute, which are very powerful dragons when trying to scale real-world applications.
I used to buy more Blu-Rays but some TV series have stopped disc releases, presumably to drive streaming, or just aren't worth buying.
Expanse: Season Five, specifically: why must I get Prime when I've got Seasons 1 - 4 on disc? And who's gonna buy GoT S5-8? Westworld S4?
I've got no comment on any increase in DVD sales, though. That's not my market. I only rip CDs (which skip like crazy, while I've literally never had a disc issue with DVD/Blu).
For a few years now in the US I have found some TV shows _only_ released on DVD. Shows that aired in HD. The industry tries to understand the market, e.g. the valid examples shared here, and they simply ignore the now smaller blu ray market. Maybe a little of this is self fulfilling.
Blu-ray 4k is an amazing media format for true enthusiasts. Nothing beats the 100% complete compression artifact free viewing experience. Good streaming services like apple tv get close, but nothing beats Blu-ray UHD disks.
Would 99% of people on 99% of tvs not be able to tell any difference? Probably.
It really is a revelation to watch an older movie on UHD Blu-ray after being subjected to the mush that streaming services put up.
Services like Apple TV+ do pretty well on 4K when it's their own flagship content, but none of them care about movies that were shot before digital. They'll serve a terrible automatic encoding that loses all the detail from the original film.
I just bought Lynch's "Lost Highway" on UHD Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and this 1997 movie has probably never looked this good in any format. Even the original film prints shown in theatres were second-generation compared to this 4K. It's mastered from the negative and perfectly encoded to preserve the massive film grain in the indoor scenes.
That doesn't exist on 4K Blu-ray. 2160p titles use the HEVC codec in combination with discs up to 125GB in capacity to minimize the artifacts as much as possible, but they are never gone.
That's video, anyway. Both 1080p and 2160p discs usually include lossless audio tracks of at least one language. If your box uses terms like "PCM", "DTS-HD MA"/"DTS-HD Master Audio", "Dolby TrueHD", that audio track is lossless.
Uncompressed 10 bit YUV444 UHD at 3840x2160 and 60fps runs at 15gbit a second, so you aren't getting a complete compression artifact free viewing experience. The largest UHD blueray will only deliver at 1% of that speed, and if you could cache it you'd get less than a minute's worth on the disk.
Now you might think that the compression you choose is suitable, and perhaps you'd be right, but it's not 100% compression artifact free, and realistically you aren't going to be seeing uncompressed UHD outside of a broadcast facility. When I stream UHD from say a music festival, I'm compressing it for the WAN section to around 120mbits of h265 at 2160p50 (europe). Even with that level of compression (15:1) it's likely better than your UHD disk.
Honestly I’d take a 1080 Blu-ray over a 4K stream in most instances. It’s not universal, but streaming services are often incredibly stingy with the bitrate. Mr Robot on Amazon Prime was like watching a watercolour painting in dark scenes.
Even 4-6GB h.265 1080p pirated rips are usually better-looking than streaming "4K", let alone how much better an actual 1080p blu ray looks. Especially netflix, god their streams look like dogshit.
Something I've noticed: when DVD players came out, they quickly dropped in price so after a few years you could buy one for $40 or so. Blu-ray players were the same, initially expensive, but after awhile they were fairly cheap.
UHD Blu-ray players though have been out since 2016, and average prices are still hovering around $200. Sometimes you see one now around $150, so maybe prices are starting to drop.
You could blame inflation for part of that, but is it also just that far fewer of them are being sold because people aren't buying physical disks anymore? I.e. they've turned into a niche luxury item.
I pay for all the streaming services but purchase Blu-rays when it’s something I really love. (True detective season 1, Chernobyl). I especially like exploring certain eras of film - I just watched “Get Carter”, “Point Blank” (w/Lee Marvin), and “The Outfit” (all of these are late 60’s/early 70’s genre movies). I bought the last two on blu-ray. These kind of movies don’t usually stick around on streaming. “The Outfit” was absolutely terrific and I’m so glad I own it now.
We have a movie room with a 140 inch projected screen that really brings these films to life. And when I travel for work (I’m a photographer/producer) I have an RV with a wonderful blu-ray setup for when I’m off grid (which is frequent).
In my work I’m producing in 4K or 5k and edit in these resolutions. But for my home, I’ve never expanded beyond standard 1080p which looks terrific at 140 inches.
I do love physical media and have vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, minidisc players. The audio quality is not as good as CD (which I also collect) or streaming - but I find it remarkable and stimulating when interacting with these archaic machines.
One thing I've noticed is that many DVDs look like utter crap when I watch them on a 70" TV. The MPEG compression artifacts are very noticeable; unless the DVD is compressed very carefully.
I just decided that, if I think I'm going to watch something a few times, I'll seek out the 4k disk.
I love the audiophile-like condescention of "there are many people who do not care about quality, and they do care more about saving money"
Some people like first editions and specially printed first editions.
Some people just want a paper book with legible printing that won't fall apart (e.g. me).
Some people are delighted to read a book on their screen, or even just listen to someone else read it to them.
They are all correct. And the same goes for movie viewers. Or those who listen to music through airbuds or their bluetooth speaker from the other room. I repeat: they are all correct.
I only buy a physical format if I can't find the movie online one way or another. That typicaly means lesser known movies that are often only available on DVD. Not sure if I am representative of the market but that would be a reason.
The increase in fidelity over the last two decades is not the biggest visual improvement in home entertainment. Color is.
I have an OLED 4k TV, maybe 10 Blu Rays, and well over 1000 DVDs. I can definitely see the difference between a DVD and even 720p content, but that's a difference you see when you are looking for it. The pitch blacks are what grab you when you are not paying attention, and you can get that regardless of the resolution.
(Also, ripping DVDs is a fun hobby, and much quicker to experiment with than BR :) )
In my opinion, the main point is that "quality" is highly subjective. High definition may not matter most to some users, at least not compared to acting, direction and photography of the movie. Also I believe the customers of physicals are more interested in those parameters than resolution.
Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that much from blue ray.
In conclusion, the higher price of blue rays doesn't justify the increase of quality for some users, who may value other parameters more.
As with all media, mastering makes a big difference. If you just stick a film into a TC machine and directly encode to DVD then film-grain (and other artifacts) will demolish the quality of a DVD because so many of the bits end up being spent encoding noise. HEVC handles this somewhat better and the higher bitrate of Blu-ray gives the codec some breathing-room.
> Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that much from blue ray.
Disagree :) The oldest movies I own on Blu-ray are Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and both of them are visually improved by being in HD compared to the DVD releases. I wouldn't really prefer SD for anything regardless of age.
> I wouldn't really prefer SD for anything regardless of age.
For movies, sure. But a lot of content produced for TV wasn't produced and/or archived in HD formats. Some older shows are occasionally remastered in HD if the original film can be found and digitized, but that's a fairly expensive and time-consuming process when it's possible at all. Older content that's in low demand, like children's shows or soap operas, may stay SD forever.
If the original production isn't possible to master in HD, then fine, you don't have a choice but to (hopefully) enjoy the show in SD. Same if it is possible but it hasn't been done (eg: Star Trek DS9 and Voyager).
On thinking about things when I make this post, I remember that DragonBall has never had a good HD remaster done, there's always DNR applied to it, soundtracks switched out, et al. Old VHSes might actually be preferable to the modern Blu-rays in that circumstance.
For shows that cannot be sourced in HD I would still like the highest quality there is made available as Blu-Rays without the bitrage and usage constraints of streaming. 480i on DVDs is shit enough that very few productions, even early all-digital ones, cannot be released with better quality.
Can, yes. I know that film allows such a detail. That's not my point, rather an aesthetic and, I know, extremely subjective point of view. Film where made (and consumed) a certain way back then: consuming differently today makes a different experience. Not better or worse, but different. Maybe for some dvd customers the added detail doesn't matter that much
To 4K, yes. Beyond, returns will be very diminishing. Grain does limit what you can get out, and even if it didn't, not all shots are going to be sharp enough so will need added grain to hide that anyway.
I’m still surprised they never came out with a new “sim” memory card format for movies. Streaming has gone main stream, but lots of people still like owing their movies.
Movies aren't always available on streaming platforms, and often cost as much as the physical cost of a DVD for only a single viewing.
In addition, some moves/series are only available on streaming platforms that are not easily accessible outside of North America.
Here in the UK I have Prime and Netflix. If something I want to watch is not freely available on either of those then I have to buy either DVD or Blu-ray.
When bluray sales were ahead of DVD were they including PS3 discs? I know so few people who ever have BluRay players so that's all I can think of.
Always surprises me laserdiscs haven't had a big boom period with resellers; the ornamental value of a Laserdisc with nice artwork is drastically higher than a DVD.
I re-watch movies and TV shows all the time. If I enjoyed the action sequences, the witty dialog, and felt the feels the first time, why wouldn't it happen again?
There are more recent numbers available. Here's the end of October, the latest week available right now: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week... -- at the bottom of the page, you can see a link to the previous week, and you can step back week-by-week.
If you do that, you'll see that DVD sales are larger than Blu-ray sales, but it's in that 50-something range, which puts it about on track with pre-pandemic trends. Also, disc sales in general keep falling annually at an incredibly fast rate, so both DVD and Blu-ray are tanking.
The obvious cause for this has nothing to do with particular weakness in the Blu-ray format, but that the "mainstream" disc market is now increasingly streaming, and the disc market is bifurcating into:
1. Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought.
2. People who want the best possible image/sound quality, collectors, and physical media fetishists. This is a niche market, and always has been.
The obvious end state is that DVD fades out in the same way that CD sales are fading out in the music world, and that 4K UHD Blu-ray ends up in the vinyl-style collector niche.