Making Peace with Blu-ray

[stratman]

There will be no "One." The internet just won't allow it. All three can survive and thrive because ultimately, it is the content that matters, not the way you get it.

Good point. The vehicle is not inportant, but the content. As long as the vehicle can be controlled (DRM protocols)the publishers will be happy, whatever the consumer ends up with is inconsequential to the studios/corporations (publishers), if you follow your line of thought, studios can make middlemen (Netflix, Blockbuster, etc.) irrelevant and obsolete. Scenario: Huge movie debut for studio, it makes a gazillion dollars...studio sets up portal to "sell" limited viewing rights to consumers, you'll have no physical media and the studio benefits from multiple views. The downside is obvious, since you don't own it, you'll always have to pay for a viewing session. Can you imagine? Anytime we want to watch Star Wars on a lazy Saturday afternoon all we do is pop in our disc and it's free, in the future everytime you pop that disc in it's going to cost you. You guys understand this is where the studios want to be in the future, not just studios, but printed matter publishers, they want you to pay everytime you use. And the best way to do this is through Content On Demand.

 

[Jack Hammer]

...Can you imagine? Anytime we want to watch Star Wars on a lazy Saturday afternoon all we do is pop in our disc and it's free, in the future everytime you pop that disc in it's going to cost you. You guys understand this is where the studios want to be in the future, not just studios, but printed matter publishers, they want you to pay everytime you use. And the best way to do this is through Content On Demand.

That's essentially what they tried to do with the divx format that lost the format war with dvd 10 years back. You had to have a player with a phone line connected so they could charge your card and unlock the movie for a 48 hour viewing period.

Jack

 

[mouettus]

I think I'll bring new opinions here on VOD.

This is a great concept for any normal movie viewer. I never bought a DVD in all those years. I just rent them. I'm not the kind of guy to watch a movie over and over again. On those rare occasions, I rent again. Still cheaper that way. VOD is perfect for me. I have a 24h access of the movie with my cable company and I can pause, stop, rewind it if I want to. It costs about the same (5$) to rent a SD movie (HD being another story -- 7-8$). I would like to be able to pay for it immediately though. Because it adds up to the bill at the end of the month and if you're not careful then you can have a little surprise. What more can you have against VOD. great idea no? (actually I think video is being limited to 720p/1080i with no hi-def audio)

I still think that a physical media has to co-exist though. Been pointed out that if you can't own it, you have to pay everytime you want to see it. That's why the situation right now is great. You have options. I don't care how many options you have but the only thing I demand is availability. Every time I want to rent a blu-ray there is only one copy of each movie in hi-def (and sometimes no blu copy at all).

Oh and yeah. There is a second rental store inauguring its first Blu-ray purchase next friday. Alvin and the Chipmunks. Great!

 

[Wayde Robson]

The only people I have met who care at all about Blu Ray or HD are serious videophiles...sentiment expressed by my parents is common: "Oh sure, another new format.

Did your parents buy an HDTV? And if so, why?

 

[Wayde Robson]

High Def movie downloads are available with the much better h.264 compression. Most are at 720p24, including Apple TV and Xbox360, but Vudu offers 1080p24.

Sure it's possible to make movie downloads as good as a disc. I just have yet to see it. Xbox 360 downloads don't stack up to the Blu-ray disc of the same movie.

There will be no "One." The internet just won't allow it. All three can survive and thrive because ultimately, it is the content that matters, not the way you get it.

Sure. No arguments here. In the editorial I wasn't trying to cover every possibility. It simply expresses my fear that movie downloads will become the same as audio downloads - scalability trumps quality.

I'm sure there are lossless audio download services. But the 128bit MP3 has somehow become the ad-hoc standard for MP3. Apple makes you pay extra for a slight bump in bit-rate.

I fear digital downloads are a one way ticket to mediocrity. Sure, it's physically possible that it doesn't have to be. But I don't see that happeneing. It's just my opinion.

But I could be proved wrong... All it'd take is for 1080P24 movie downloads accompanied by a variety of lossless audio choices to become mainstream.

 

[JackT]

I fear digital downloads are a one way ticket to mediocrity. Sure, it's physically possible that it doesn't have to be. But I don't see that happeneing. It's just my opinion.

You mean like digital music downloads did for music?

This raises an interesting point that has actually bothered me.

I believe humans are much more forgiving with audio than they are with video. We are much more oriented toward the sense of sight than hearing. Being able to SEE compression will bother people more than hearing it.

Having said that, I have seen audiophiles poo-poo HD as not being a big deal, only a marginal improvement over DVD, not that noticeable an improvement, etc. But some of these same people will worry about audio improvements that are not objectively verifiable AT ALL.

HD IS a big deal, and anybody who sees it wants EVERYTHING to be HD. I don't care if its an enthusiast or your mom.

Saying BluRay won't catch on because people don't care about HD is just silly.

One side point about VOD: I have FiOS and the VOD is not only SD, but it is VHS quality!!! I would settle for anamorphic 480p VOD offerings, but we are not even up to that point, and I have the highest bandwidth provider you can have!

 

[mouettus]

One side point about VOD: I have FiOS and the VOD is not only SD, but it is VHS quality!!! I would settle for anamorphic 480p VOD offerings, but we are not even up to that point, and I have the highest bandwidth provider you can have!

How come I get dvd quality with DD5.1 then?

 

[Djizasse]

I guess most of you can see the difference between a DVD9 movie and a 4.3Gb copy. The artifacts jump at us in subtle color gradations, dark scenes, faces and fast panning complex scenes.
For me, picture quality is easier to perceive than audio quality. I get satisfied with 320Kbps mp3, maybe because my audio equipment does not let me discern more, but i tend to zoom in on any compression/transcoding artifact, even on my lowly big bottom 32" CRT TV.

I'm sure many of you have seen (or know about) the illegal movie and music copies that are made today. With DVDs it started with full movies ripped and converted to one 650GB CD. Then, with the advance in public networks the movies started to fill two CDs. Today, it's common to find DVD9s converted to a 4.3GB DVD5 and even full DVD9 copies.

The latest craze is downloading 1080p movies. The most common rips I see people craving for are the 4.3GB rips, enough to fill one DVD5. And they are happy because they got a HD movie. They seem to forget, or don't care, that their copies are "plagued" with very strong compression levels. They don't even have a full HD TV.

I believe the majority of the population does not care about audio or video quality. The average joe certainly does not give a damn. Even the "internet and mp3 generation" does not seem to care much. What they want is just immediate access to "their" media. I believe this is what drives many of the downloaders, immediate access to a movie/album.

This is why I don't pay any attention to VOD, I don't expect it to reach Blu-ray disc quality soon. Why should it? It can even get to 1080 lines, but at very strong compression levels, the average joe will not complain (most will have a 720p lcd). But it's HD and it must be good, right?

This whole HD evolution started all wrong, it seems so atypical from a consumer electronics perspective. The HD TVs are here before the tv stations have anything to broadcast. There are two types of HD TVs (720 and 1080), the first sets where not HDCP complyant. There were two domestic formats (HD-DVD and Blu-ray). The HD disc format war was just a bribing game. There's also the player region and profiles. The disc and the player prices are high. What a mess.

I think that for the first time in the consumer entertainment history, the industry is ahead of the market needs. But the industry will succeed in pushing their products down our throats The prices will start dropping and everyone will jump aboard. With all the players rowing in the same direction it will be easy to convince joe that he really needs HD, even if it's just because his neighbor has it

I believe there's nothing to worry about. Blu-ray will last. Bose succeeded and it's just one company. Blu-ray is backed by the whole industry

 

[allargon]

However, HDTV did a very good job convincing Joe Six Pack he needs one.

Why does a guy who doesn't know a pixel from a piston want to spend so much more than he has to on a TV?

Err... HDTV adoption in the US is going up because of the flat panel craze. People (read: wives) like the looks of flat panels (plasma or LCD). If we were still in the CRT (or even RP CRT) era, HDTV penetration would be low just like it was 8 years ago.

 

[Joe Schmoe]

Did your parents buy an HDTV? And if so, why?

Actually, yes. The reason is that they wanted a bigger screen, and virtually all new TVs are HD capable.

 

[Wayde Robson]

Actually, yes. The reason is that they wanted a bigger screen, and virtually all new TVs are HD capable.

Just wondering. Because HDTV sales aren't going down, so someone must care about the picture quality. But the post before this one also pointed out that modern HDTV form factor might be why HDTV is so popular.

Do people really just want flat panels and larger screens and don't care about the resolution. It could be... I know I've been to people's places who just got a new HDTV and they thought they were watching HD, but it was just SD, they had yet to get a legit HD source

 

[Jack Hammer]

Quite a few people I've talked with are under the impression that they have to replace their old sd tvs prior to all broadcasts going hd next year or they wont be able to watch tv after that. Very few of them seem to be aware of the converter box option. I think that's helping fuel a lot of hdtv sales.

Jack

 

[Joe Schmoe]

Do people really just want flat panels and larger screens and don't care about the resolution.

I think so, yes.

 

[autoboy]

I totally agree that video is a totally different animal than audio. The average person cannot tell the difference between 128K mp3, and lossless audio, especially on his own home equipment. However, with an average TV, SD, DVD, and HD quality are all easy to see the difference. We are visual animals. Picture quality matters to us over audio quality. That is why I think higher quality broadcasts will dominate. Even my Mom can tell that her HD is full of compression, and upon seeing BluRay, perfers BluRay over DVD for all her content.

Once you see HD done right, even the average Joe has a hard time going back. That is why I think video quality will continue to improve with the download services. I don't think we are going to see one winner in downloadable services like we do with audio. This leaves room for services with improved quality. If you haven't experimented with the convenience of VOD from Apple, Xbox, or Vudu, then you really can't talk. For much of the throw away content out there, it is perfectly acceptable quality. One of the advantages that downloads have, is that it is not limited to fixed formats and size limits (except the AppleTV whose hardware is only a 1ghz Core processor and an nvidia 7300GS video card that lacks full hardware acceleration of h.264), but can be upgraded to higher quality as the bandwidth capacity of our networks rises.