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 used to watch the special features for all the movies in a row when I was home from college during the holidays. Probably because before the advent of streaming, this was the longest, highest-quality content I had access to.
But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.
I want something that is small, May be Mini-CD size but with TeraByte of storage. That is able to fit that whole LOTR and all the Extra, in 4K Ultra High Quality in one disc.
It took a really really long time for Vinyl to make a come back. I hope we could one day innovate enough and bring physical media to the market again.
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.
I think this was the point where they started looking not at ticket sales, but overall lifetime earnings per family...sure, it's the ticket, then the DVD, then the BluRay, then the Extended BlueRay, then the Criterion Edition (with Sting)
- 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 mobile platforms, use even worse compression). And new Apple headphones seem to use lossy compression as well, so we have a codec compressing another codec's artifacts.
> 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 mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
VoLTE-HD has been a thing for many years and the reason people haven't noticed is that most personal voice calls have transitioned to messaging apps and most of what's left are to or from businesses who have the cheapest VoIP setup they can get away with.
Two handsets connected with EVS/VoLTE-HD sound superior to two analog phones on the same circuit, talking to each other.
If I call my parents' iPhone using my iPhone the call connects using a high-bitrate EVS codec, crystal clear.
Mobile voice call compression sucks so much that about a decade ago, in order to play a live drum audition remotely, I once had to find a space with a landline and printer that would also let me play loudly drums to do it.
As a student I had none of those things.
In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.
Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.
It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.
I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.
Digital phone audio, which was μ-law [1] rather than linear PCM, was not exactly uncompressed. However, the compression involved was very simple, and was designed to offer the 8-bit samples a higher dynamic range than linear PCM would be capable of at the same bitrate (linear PCM would need 14 bits to represent the full dynamic range of 8-bit μ-law). It resulted, by design, in quite clear audio for human voice, as compared to the more aggressive compression used today, but couldn't handle non-voice audio like music as well.
[1] μ-law was used in North America and Japan, but a similar encoding called A-law was used elsewhere
A significant percentage of people alive today have never made an analog phone call, or know just how good (and low latency!) it was to literally have two copper wires connecting two phones thousands of miles apart.
I also miss reliable decent quality phone calls. I sometimes give up on Facetime/Whatsapp/Signal and switch to standard mobile call, or vice-versa, and I can hear that the calls through apps have much richer sound quality, when it's working. The voices are much less tinny, but the delays, echos and periods with just no connection, don't seem much better than standard mobile calls. And the delays and reliability of both is worse than analogue landline calls used to be.
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
I know effectively nothing about these topics but I recall having that thought the other day.
With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call
Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
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 effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
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 not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
> 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 by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
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
> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video
I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS.
DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy).
The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate.
As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
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.
Streaming services are generally still more cost-effective, but the multiple subscriptions and different interfaces are an annoyance, as are differences between services in how easily you can circumvent regional restrictions. Physical media are more straightforward and consistent.
Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
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.
> you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
When I grew up during the DVD era we were still watching and listening to lossy content. Heck I remember trying to shove as much low bitrate .mp3 music files I could into my small 128mb MP3 player.
Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
DVDs and Blu-rays also have stupid geographical restrictions. They come marked with region codes, and DVD players will only play discs from their home region. You have to go all the way back to VHS to be free of that particular corporate "innovation."
This is no longer the case with 4k UHD Blu-ray. They CAN be region locked in a technical sense, but I believe that there have only been two ever released that utilized that functionality. For the most part you can just buy one without worry.
I wish there were a way to just pay for a movie on a site and download it as an mp4 in 1080P or 4K. I hate streaming because I only want to watch 1-2 movies per month and they are very specific (like a specific martial arts movie or action movie). Streaming interfaces often have DRM and horrible interfaces and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something I'll rarely use. Don't understand the DRM because pirates get a better copy anyway.
Right now, there is no better and more convenient interface than piracy and I wish that weren't the case.
Edit: there is such an interface for classical music, e.g. Hyperion. DRM free and one-time payment, and I've used it a lot.
For some of the movies I have bought I have ended up also torrenting a copy to have and be sure I can play it. Really tempted to get a bluray player and go back to disks.
yeah...I just want to pay for a DRM-free copy so I can play it and own it forever. That's it. No streaming accoounts, no tracking, no plastic packaging, just the file in exchange for money. I paid for Sublime text that way and it's a great model.
You wish it weren’t the case, but it is the case. Play the hand you are dealt and go and get your clean copies. The market isn’t catering to you but that doesn’t mean you should then cater to the market if you don’t have to.
Nowhere can one pay a fee and receive a legal digital copy of a movie. YouTube allows people to pay for the privilege of being allowed to stream a movie for and indefinite period of time. YouTube retains the right to revoke all movie "purchases" at any time.
GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.
I wish there were ready-made hosted Plex servers that could accept a file transfer. Buy a movie online and give them your server "address" and they send the movie to your Plex server.
We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.
Write your local congressman (depending on where you live this position may have a different name). Go to the local political party of your choice and make it known that this is an important issue. Remember votes are more important than money in politics - money can buy votes but only when voters don't care about issues. So if many many people make this an issue things will change.
I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions.
By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.
When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.
I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...
> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality,
That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content.
DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s.
You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.
It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.
Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"
It makes complete sense. It's literally pennies for them, esp. when bought in bulk, it's read-only (more or less), and most importantly it absolves them of any responsibility regarding handing you some very sensitive personal data. No credentials, cloud service, hacking, leak, etc etc. They hand you a physical object and that's it. It's your problem now.
A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).
When I was 15 I discovered that my local doctor lost all of my medical records. Poof, all gone. Whoops, next patient please. My last doctor no longer had a copy of my files, either.
I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
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 be put into your existing DVD players and sells for $5 thus making upgrading to DVD3 not a big deal). there are lots of options, but the point is always don't make it too hard for consumers to know their DVDs and drives are compatible.
It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.
Not mentioning the non-skippable anti piracy noise that ironically made the legit product worse than the pirated one poisoned the well for interactive features later on Blu Ray. Who cares about getting extras if they are hidden behind obnoxious menus and abusive junk when the Internet will tell you anyway?
That said I remember that era fondly because of things like the Tartan output. In the UK if you had a multi region player (and many did) you could get stuff from all over the place, on top of the local but now forgotten play dot com.
Experience matters, especially for consumer goods like media. Unskippable notices about piracy that are only shown to people who have pirated is silly and clunky. You can probably tell this by the fact that none of the streaming services show something similar.
This will sound very silly, but one of my favorite features of my Tesla Model 3 is that it doesn't stall the screen for 5-10 seconds every. single. time. you get in the car reminding you to drive safely and to pay attention to the road.
Slightly annoying everyone watching a movie in exchange for putting out their little bit of propaganda, doesn’t make it useless but it does make it worse.
Enshitificstion isn’t about companies making products worse because they don’t like their customers it’s just they have different interests. Thus shelf life is generally favored over taste etc.
It's funny ... I'm old enough to have a HUGE collection of DVDs and BluRays (many still in their original shrink-wrap lol).
But these days, if I feel like watching a movie that I own physically... sometimes I still look to see if it's on a streaming service that I'm subscribed to, or will even pirate it ... just because it's more convenient than having to turn on the BluRay player and then navigate those awful menus with un-skippable ads (you forgot those) and copyright screens.
The copyright notices were especially egregious and annoying to me BECAUSE I PAID FOR IT! Don't punish your paying customers because of the people you don't like... people that are not reading your annoying message.
I like watching movies, and thus, I have watched a lot. When I try to find a movie to watch on HBO/Netflix (I'm from Scandinavia - not the same selection as in the US), I have a hard time finding something to watch. A lot of newer movies doesn't cater to my taste.
On the other hand, I can find a lot of classics from the 80s/90s/00s and even 10s in thriftstores for as little as 1-3$. I then get to keep the movies, that I often end up rewatching, and I get the added features mentioned in the article.
I'm not to nostalgic about the cases, which I often just dump (I have considered keeping the fact-sheets though, just not the plastic casing).
I'll soon cancel my remaining subscriptions, and only purchase them a month at a time when something I truly want to watch arrives...
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, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
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.
I started doing it as well. Not only is the quality great (4k, HDR 10+ or Dolby Vision, uncompressed audio) but equally important is that it cannot be taken away.
If I love a movie on X streaming service and they have some licensing problem or decide it's not worth what they're paying to host it, they can remove it at any time. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of what's available changing on a daily basis, and constantly getting split among more and more services that charge more and more monthly.
I've been ramping up on UHD Blueray lately, especially since I upgraded to an OLED TV. It's a massive picture quality upgrade. I think I have like 6 discs, all ~$10. A mix of newer movies I haven't seen, and 80s-90s movies I want to show the kids in a few years. It's been fun.
It seems to me that the extra features on DVD were originally part of the marketing benefits driving people to adopt the format because the studios preferred it to VHS because of CSS and region-locking. Then they found they had painted themselves into a corner making all these extra features that people came to expect, until finally streaming let them get back to “just the movie”.
It was a good investment to get a modded player that ignored UOP and let you easily skip stuff. As for menus, most DVD remote controls had a button to directly start the movie without having to figure out the menu.
Region locking was more that US videos were 60hz ntsc and most of the rest of world was 50hz pal, and multi-region hardware was fairly rare
Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content
Many VHS were subbed instead. Sometimes two versions of a popular film were released, one dubbed and one with baked-in subs. This did limit the desire to copy between regions a bit, though not as much as you might think given how many people speak one of a few languages as a second language.
I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.
Region locking stops (or is designed to stop) someone, for example, in the USA buying a DVD sold in the UK market. The localization of the product on sale isn't relevant to the decision not to sell the product.
Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.
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But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.
It took a really really long time for Vinyl to make a come back. I hope we could one day innovate enough and bring physical media to the market again.
Should be familiar if you know any anime fangirls.
- 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 mobile platforms, use even worse compression). And new Apple headphones seem to use lossy compression as well, so we have a codec compressing another codec's artifacts.
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 mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
Two handsets connected with EVS/VoLTE-HD sound superior to two analog phones on the same circuit, talking to each other.
If I call my parents' iPhone using my iPhone the call connects using a high-bitrate EVS codec, crystal clear.
I never do that, of course.
I FaceTime them.
As a student I had none of those things.
In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.
Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.
It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.
I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.
[1] μ-law was used in North America and Japan, but a similar encoding called A-law was used elsewhere
Direct at the speed of light (almost)!
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call
Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
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 effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
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 not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
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 by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS.
DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy).
The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate.
As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
DVDs had those too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As long as the quality is above 480p, it’s still better than DVD.
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.
Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
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.
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa).
Right now, there is no better and more convenient interface than piracy and I wish that weren't the case.
Edit: there is such an interface for classical music, e.g. Hyperion. DRM free and one-time payment, and I've used it a lot.
(source: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/119599)
For some of the movies I have bought I have ended up also torrenting a copy to have and be sure I can play it. Really tempted to get a bluray player and go back to disks.
GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.
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We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.
By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.
When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.
I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...
That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content.
DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s.
You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.
A good brand would buffer compute and memory capacity by a decent factor at time of sale in order to support future codecs needs...
A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).
But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).
I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.
Relevant dead ends:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc
It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.
That said I remember that era fondly because of things like the Tartan output. In the UK if you had a multi region player (and many did) you could get stuff from all over the place, on top of the local but now forgotten play dot com.
Oh how I long for the You wouldn't download a car days
This will sound very silly, but one of my favorite features of my Tesla Model 3 is that it doesn't stall the screen for 5-10 seconds every. single. time. you get in the car reminding you to drive safely and to pay attention to the road.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car
That sound this made as well, not conducive to sitting down to be entertained. It was deliberately obnoxious.
Enshitificstion isn’t about companies making products worse because they don’t like their customers it’s just they have different interests. Thus shelf life is generally favored over taste etc.
But these days, if I feel like watching a movie that I own physically... sometimes I still look to see if it's on a streaming service that I'm subscribed to, or will even pirate it ... just because it's more convenient than having to turn on the BluRay player and then navigate those awful menus with un-skippable ads (you forgot those) and copyright screens.
The copyright notices were especially egregious and annoying to me BECAUSE I PAID FOR IT! Don't punish your paying customers because of the people you don't like... people that are not reading your annoying message.
I like watching movies, and thus, I have watched a lot. When I try to find a movie to watch on HBO/Netflix (I'm from Scandinavia - not the same selection as in the US), I have a hard time finding something to watch. A lot of newer movies doesn't cater to my taste.
On the other hand, I can find a lot of classics from the 80s/90s/00s and even 10s in thriftstores for as little as 1-3$. I then get to keep the movies, that I often end up rewatching, and I get the added features mentioned in the article.
I'm not to nostalgic about the cases, which I often just dump (I have considered keeping the fact-sheets though, just not the plastic casing).
I'll soon cancel my remaining subscriptions, and only purchase them a month at a time when something I truly want to watch arrives...
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, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
Quality is great and they just work.
If I love a movie on X streaming service and they have some licensing problem or decide it's not worth what they're paying to host it, they can remove it at any time. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of what's available changing on a daily basis, and constantly getting split among more and more services that charge more and more monthly.
* Adverts (especially the anti piracy "you wouldn't steel a car" ones)
* Logos
* Menus
It can take nearly a minute to go from the disk going in to the film starting.
Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content
I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.