Bag of hurt
marco.org
marco.org
And I have absolutely zero urge to buy a Blu-Ray player. None at all. And I don't expect that to change any time soon. DVDs are good enough on the rare I occasion I need them. Netflix Watch Instantly is awesome. I'm at the point where if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else.
Marco's right to be skeptical of the next generation of physical media distribution. That game is going to be over inside of five years.
DVDs are decent but all my movie purchases or netflix rentals these days are Blu rays. I refuse to purchase drm time bombs from itunes or amazon.
And about BluRays vs. DVDs. There is no comparison if you care about picture quality & movie experience, while trying to own the movie. Try watching the first 20 minutes of Dark Knight on BluRay on a decent quality screen at 120HZ, then watch it on DVD. You will buy a BluRay player.
I'm particularly interested in Blu-Ray disks for data because I do projects today that involve burning 10-30 DVDs and my life would be easier with fewer disks.
Someday I'm going to replace my old PPC Mac Mini, and once choice I'd consider is a new Mac Mini -- it's in a wonderful form factor that fits right under my HDTV. Although I live in an average sized house, I'm very sensitive to the volume that my possessions take up, so it would be sweet to have a Blu-Ray player inside a Mac Mini, rather than having to find a spot to stash a bulky Blu-Ray player next to the game system and other paraphernalia that's around the TV.
Of course, if these online services become big enough for anyone to bother cracking the DRM, they are likely to be headed for a similar destiny.
This site is a godsend for that: http://www.instantwatcher.com
Watching Planet Earth on my roommate's 42" (with 8-speaker surround)
There is also BBC Life.
I've just finished watching all 8 parts; it was mindblowing throughout for it's stories and exquisitely shot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Planet#DVD_and_Blu-ray_re...
Right on. Except I'll still buy the DVD for a foreign film. Netflix Instant doesn't seem to have enough of the ones I want (i.e. Y Tu Mama, Tambien).
Renting movies on discs is so old school. Who today wants to deal with something that's all scratched to hell?
I stopped buying Blu-ray discs after one of the players warned that it needed to be upgraded to play the disc, and the other player simply wouldn't play the disc. I don't care what the underlying reasons are, I'm just not interested in playing the upgrade game with a consumer device.
We've gone back to buying DVDs which we can rip to watch on the device of our choice, or we watch video on demand from Amazon/Netflix/etc.
I don't know what sort of Blu-Ray player you have, but both the ps3 and the netflix-capable thing my BiL has include a network connection port around the back. This strikes me as far superior to the old approach where you had to take a buggy or outdated device back to a dealer for a replacement, or sell/donate your existing model to someone if you wanted the improved model. Upgradeable firmware extends the life of the product you bought, generally at zero $ cost and requiring only a few minutes of your time.
As a kid I started hacking before I knew the name of the activity, because I liked finding out how things worked and was surprised to discover that many cheap consumer devices had the same components and functionality as higher priced ones, just disabled by a jumper or solder bridge on a circuit board. Later I discovered that many digital devices came with replaceable EPROMs and that carrying out the replacement required only a miniature screwdriver and a little patience. A good chunk of my career has revolved around selling or developing or consulting on making products more modular and user-configurable and arguing against the inherently wasteful approach of planned obsolescence. The increasing popularity of network connections on video players, DVRs, and consoles has been a big factor in getting streaming services like Netflix from concept into reality, since most people don't want to build video servers of their own.
I can see why you're pissed off with the blu-ray player that just won't play the disc; it's bad standard setting/QA not to have any kind of fallback handling. But your other player is upgradeable precisely so as to avoid this kind of problem. I bet that was even one of the selling points in the product description. I'm baffled that you consider this so much hassle you would prefer to use an inferior technology.
If it was a once in a year thing, then maybe fine, but each of the last three BD's I tried playing required an upgrade. I went through the process twice, but it sort of kills the interest in watching the movie if I have to upgrade each time. Perhaps it was incredibly bad luck, but I really have better things to do with my time then upgrade a consumer device every time I want to use it.
I'm not the one treating the machine as obsolete, it's the media industry which has decided that the best way to combat piracy is to make its customers go through this stupid upgrade process (which may or may not work, and may or may not brick the player). And yes, I would prefer to use inferior technology if I can use it, play it, reuse it as I find necessary. I can burn DVDs once to mp4 format and play to my heart's content on a variety of devices.
I'm curious about whether these were all from the same studio or finishing house (a lot of video publishers outsource the disc authoring to a specialist company, if you are the sort of person who likes to sit through credits you'll see them come up at the very end). Chances are the publishers are not even aware of this problem, since it's not in their interest to make stuff unplayable if it doesn't have to be. Most producers are rather technophobic. I'm sort of curious about which titles were involved, but although I know some people in Hollywood it's unlikely that I'll be able to track down an answer about this.
Plug it into the network (because I learned that if I leave it plugged in the discs spend 30-45 minutes downloading crap over the network that I have no interest in watching)
It seems to me that your real complaint is that the extra features offered my most movie studios are not that great in terms of content. You do want to watch them (or you wouldn't have tried and been obstructed by the download requirement), but are generally disappointed by the quality of the supplementary content after you've downloaded it.
As far as the network thing goes: I assume it's extra features, but don't know, it wasn't something I requested, I'd just clicked "play" on the player and, well, watched as it said it was downloading content.
Rather than finding fault with my walking away from blue-ray, could you explain to me why increasing the friction in the experience over what we were used to with DVDs is going to benefit the entertainment industry?
The company is actively telling employees the facility will shutdown at some point in the future. While the timeline is not specified, the parent corporation is not replacing low level production staffers now, hours for all workers have been curtailed, and generally the production projects are falling off.
Compared to even just a few years ago it is a pretty shocking change - this place used to run full out 24/7/365 and employees were typically scheduled for 20+hours of overtime in a two week rolling schedule. These days, they run two shifts, often close up early and I can't remember the last time they offered any overtime.
It's too bad, this was a pretty solid employer in a rather remote region that doesn't have many other options available for the class of workers facing layoffs.
The Netflix online service is not nearly as good.
But having to watch 15 minutes of mandatory nonscippable adds before you get to watch a movie you actually paid for is really really f-ing annoying.
It is a shame the industry could not come up with a standard that actually works. Next time, the manufacturers should just make the most technically advanced and open standard they can come up with and completely ignore the content makers.
I also really like the quality, though having a background in film product/editing I admit to being a bit of a snob about such things.
Forgot to mention: Blu-ray is considerably more consumer-friendly than DVD in terms of region coding. BR players must support region coding (although this is easily defeatable because it's not part of the AACS DRM) - but there are only 3 regions rather than DVD's 6, and most publishers have opted not to use region coding. So when I wanted to get a collectible edition of Inception for my wife at Christmas but limited availability in the US had pushed the price above $1000(!), I got a UK edition for about $70. The included DVD won't play in a consumer player due to region coding, but the Blu-ray disc is just fine. The only difference is that the alternative language/subtitle tracks are for various European languages rather than the Pacific Rim options, but we didn't need those anyway.
We need physical discs here... but we wish we didn't...
But until that time I just pirate stuff of the internet. (They haven't even aired anything past season 5 of Scrubs yet here, at this rate I will have to wait until my death if I want watch Game of Thrones...)
If I actually like something I tend to buy it as a physical disc from amazon.com and let it catch dust in a corner. Even though the quality is (still) clearly superior from a blueray on my screens, the hassle-free experience of torrented mkv's is just much better for casual (re-)viewing.
Actually, most relevant TV shows are available here, on cable, with proper subtitles (dubbing is very rare in Portugal, unlike other european countries). Some shows are just one episode behind their US counterparts, but most are a few months/a season behind.
Cable TV is widespread, and on more rural areas where the "cable" doesn't go, the providers have a satellite alternative. So, every one that wants to watch these shows, can.
So, it's not really ethic to pirate TV shows. But only in the sense that if most people pirate, the cable networks won't have much (financial) incentive to keep the shows close to their original airing.
I guess it's hard problem and everyone has a point. Let's wait and see if the situation gets better because they get to win a lot providing a better service to fans/consumers.
These DVD's end up being converted in Handbrake, and end up as a digital copy anyway. It's also a bag of hurt... but let's hope Apple brings movies to iTunes here soon.
It's sad and frustrating - a while ago I spent a couple of hours searching for a legal way to buy music from a Finnish band I really liked, and each and every service was geographically restricted (I'm from Croatia). A couple of clicks on your torrent index of choice, and there was the album in its full glory. The Industry(tm) should really learn a thing or two from the "evil pirates".
Okay, okay... I'm reaching. But I guess I'm saying, I don't see it as immoral to use a VPN in order to establish network presence in the US or Canada or wherever.
Actually, I think every blu-ray I've purchased recently came with a download code and/or disc containing another copy of the movie specifically for copying to iGadgets. If I cared to put my movies on an iPad, this is even more convenient because it's already pre-ripped.
That said, people already cracked BluRay DRM and using MakeMKV it is trivial to rip most BluRays to DRM-less MKV. I put most of my movies on the Apple TV 2 (which can take surprisingly high bitrates in high profile): rip with MakeMKV, transcode with Handbrake, and you are done ;).
When companies have too many interests integrated, they start to hurt customers, in this case Apple with it's interest in iTunes hurts it's own customers that need BluRay.
It would be interesting to know exactly why, but nobody wants to survey the users, prefering instead to pretend that this isn't true.
My interpretation is that when you're 3 meters from a display with the size regular people buy (between 32 and 42 inches), the quality difference between HD content and a decently encoded DVD is barely noticeable.
Some say that sound quality is more important than picture quality. That may be true, but that's not the reason people ignore the quality difference between DVDs and Blu-ray. When you live in an apartment, you tend to watch movies with a low volume anyway, so sound is always crap.
Then, there's the mistake that people moved to DVDs from VHS because of picture quality. This is false, people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie.
DVDs hit the sweet spot of price/quality and convenience. Blu-ray offers little more.
If the successor to the DVD had been a flash-memory card, it may have been a hit. The same movies in 1/10th the space. Now it is too late.
People will keep their DVDs until online distribution is mature. And this doesn't necessarily mean internet distributed content. Here in Portugal, the two major cable providers have a video-on-demand service (in old-school parlance) that was the final nail in the video rental shops 'coffin, and that all but removes the need for the average consumer to buy physical media.
people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie.
Check all that apply :-)
One thing that absolutely killed DVDs for me was having children. If you ever want to put a movie on for kids, you want to put it on, press play, and watch. Navigating menus and ads just doesn't work for my kids, no way, no how.
I had to handbrake my entire collection of family DVDs. I buy movies through iTunes. A DVD is a pain in the ass if you want to watch a movie with kids.
For our own safety, every movie in the car is HandBraked from the original so it starts instantly when inserted.
I can just about guarantee that a serious accident has been caused by those damn menus.
I personally feel eye strain if I try to watch or read something on my iPhone for too long in a moving car (not so bad on a bus).
Companies like Comcast and AT&T are ensuring that we will need them forever.
The only thing that comes close is the HDX catalog on the Vudu box. I have my eye on this as a potential replacement but for now I use a PS3 to play Blu-rays because the audio and video quality is just superb.
At the end, I smiled and marveled at how great Blu-ray is.
Then I ejected the ... DVD.
One of Steve Jobs' great insights is the balance of specs vs. usability. Yeah, the Apple product line may not beat out the competition on specs (though it happens more than the naysayers like to admit), but by maintaining a high bar for user experience, the need for top "checkbox" specs is reduced. Yeah, Blu-ray is better and desirable ... but upscaled DVD and 'net streaming is plenty good enough for most users, and the few users for whom it isn't aren't worth the "bag of hurt" to make it happen now.
Broadband is improving. Codecs are improving. Most viewers can't discern 720p from 1080p (as my wife likes to often opine on the subject "I can't see the difference so who cares?"). We'll get pervasive 1080p on Apple platforms soon enough; until then, I'll put up with the good-enough upscaled DVD, 720p streaming, and the occasional Blu-ray from Redbox.
When it comes to media what people want is library size, convenience and cost-effectiveness. DVDs and Internet-based streaming have all of these things for the average consumer. Blu-ray™ is a 'premium' product that average Joe six-pack can't justify.
(Translation: BluRay disks aren't going to take over, but the additional features of the devices are a bulkhead for streaming media in the living room.)
Until Apple offers free online storage for high bitrate movies (keeping them on a huge hard drive is ok, but even a terabyte drive wont hold more than a year or so of a typical families precious memories, and you would want some form of cloud backup anyway rather than relying on a hard drive not crashing), and we all have 25Mbps+ bandwidth to support it, AND I can watch my home movies without buying a special device like an Apple TV or whatever, then they are still not competing with Blu-Ray for home movies, or hobbyist film makers.
You know apple used to focus on the creators rather than the consumers, but their attitude towards blu-ray assumes we are only interested in consuming content.
I have a handful of blu-ray films that I bought when i got my PS3, watched once I never watched again. But I have stacks of home movies burnt on blu-ray that we watch all the time.
Look at how quickly recordable CDs and DVDs detoriates. The manufactures promised a lot longer life time when they launched them, but reality was different.
There isn't any media which is permanent. The one that comes closest is non-acid paper stored in a vault.
The manufacturers quote lifetimes which are far in excess of what's actually been verified - and that's for professionally produced media, not the home burners which generally use less durable media. Our guidelines recommend a 5 year lifecycle for archived media: http://digitalpreservation.gov/you/ That's conservative but at times I'm inclined to give up on tape, disc, etc. and simply say that you shouldn't rely on anything which isn't online and regularly verified (e.g. ZFS scrubs or manual checksum validation) - and since Blu-Ray hasn't sold particularly well combined with general consumer electronics trends makes me hesitant to say that you should assume easy access to a compatible drive over a decade from now.
Netflix's streaming catalogue is bad...like really bad, and I don't intend on paying $15-$20 for an HD version on iTunes when I can get the same thing for the same price on Blu-Ray.
Yes, I'm tired of the shitty menus and load times, but until they find a way to reproduce Blu-Ray quality in a digital format, it's a price I'm willing to pay.
Still, great piece by Marco.
At that point, Blu-Ray became a joke. The new LaserDisc.
Either that, or the DRM-related inconvenience caused them to price themselves out of the market compared to online streaming.
Blu ray? I hardly knew ya.