> I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format.
I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all.
I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered.
You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".)
Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention.
Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous.
Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc).
1. Aka the "do not" sign <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol>
2. <https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose>