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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

He is right and it is a darned shame, because with the big screens of today the quality of blu ray is sorely needed. I do own a blu ray player, and i am a huge arthouse movie buff and it does make a difference for the very few good movies that make it on bluray.

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.

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Hmm, we watch a lot of movies in this household and my two brothers-in-law are avid movie buffs/traders, so quite a lot of blu-ray films go through the PS3 here. I can remember only one or two that imposed trailers, piracy warnings, or other undesired material before the movie. I've seen a lot more of that in DVDs, and on HD-DVD. Blu-ray seems by far the more customer friendly platform.

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.

I recently watched a blu ray at a friends, then tried to watch the special features listed on the cover. We couldn't. Turns out the blu ray player didn't have the most current firmware. WTF was my reaction, and I came to fully understand Jobs.

I like having upgradeable hardware, as opposed to a) having to replace a perfectly functional existing device or b) being stuck with the same features for the lifetime of the format. How can you work with computers all day and still have a problem with the concept of a firmware upgrade?

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Region_codes

Try this: On your VCR and/or Blue-Ray hit STOP STOP PLAY. In many instances it will skip the previews and go straight to the movie.

This does work for me, but I think you mean DVD rather than VCR.

Also: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, b, a should let you skip the FBI warnings.

Huh? Blu-ray isn't the only way to get 1080p/60fps on a TV. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most inconvenient ways to do so in the modern age.

At bluray bitrates? Typical iTunes HD bitrate is 4, vs the 20-40 you get with bluray movies.

Not surprisingly, there's an "iso rip" available for pretty much every Blu-Ray disk ever released. It's like iTunes... but cheaper, higher-quality, and without DRM.

On the bright side, codecs are getting more efficient and consumer broadband connections are getting faster. A 20 megabit connection (Comcast's fastest residential plan) can download a 10GB blu-ray rip in about 70 minutes. There will be hiccups along the way (ISP bandwidth caps, piracy concerns, etc) but it looks like streaming quality will eventually be on par with blu-ray.

Comcast has 40mbit+ in Miami. Think it hits 50. Just fyi

The content owners (not content makers, note) are liable to just refuse to use such a new medium, relegating it to a mostly irrelevant piracy channel.

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