DVD sales surpass Blu-ray in 2021: Physical format market
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There are more recent numbers available. Here's the end of October, the latest week available right now: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week... -- at the bottom of the page, you can see a link to the previous week, and you can step back week-by-week.
If you do that, you'll see that DVD sales are larger than Blu-ray sales, but it's in that 50-something range, which puts it about on track with pre-pandemic trends. Also, disc sales in general keep falling annually at an incredibly fast rate, so both DVD and Blu-ray are tanking.
The obvious cause for this has nothing to do with particular weakness in the Blu-ray format, but that the "mainstream" disc market is now increasingly streaming, and the disc market is bifurcating into:
1. Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought.
2. People who want the best possible image/sound quality, collectors, and physical media fetishists. This is a niche market, and always has been.
The obvious end state is that DVD fades out in the same way that CD sales are fading out in the music world, and that 4K UHD Blu-ray ends up in the vinyl-style collector niche.
The jump from VHS to DVD was big with a lot of benefits beyond just quality. But the jump from DVD to Blu-ray was far more marginal so a lot of people didn't bother.
While those people probably would be buying Blu-rays if they had a player at home, they're probably not going to spend $100 replacing their DVD player with a Blu-ray player. And if you have a DVD player in your living room and a couple more in your bedrooms you'll have to replace several DVD players.
I'm not particularly into buying tv shows, but there are definitely quite a few movies out there that look a lot better on a 4k blu-ray than 4k streaming.
I wonder if we should start quoting bit-rates for quality.
https://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com/product-p/cclawarabia4...
The price does suck, though.
(The limited release thing is annoying, but... it's a niche market, and one of the ways they get people to buy things at full price instead of waiting for 50% sales, so I get it.)
The vast majority of video content I consume I probably wouldn't watch more than once. But in the rare cases where I'll probably watch again and want to share it with the future, I'll buy it on physical media.
I do this for other physical media as well. There's been some music I have on vinyl or CD which I can't find on Spotify or for digital download. Most music I wouldn't care if it disappeared tomorrow, but some I'll want to have in the future for sure.
I don’t miss my massive collections of books, dvds or cassettes.
I humped those fucking things across three continents and 6 countries.
iTunes Match obsoleted my cd collection (some of which had rusted and were unplayable on regular stereos), Calibre for my books and I don’t really care about movies enough to archive them, stream most things bought those shows I watch over and over again on iTunes.
On our desk setups wide-screens would be problematic, and it's difficult to get modern 4:3 or 5:4 screens anymore.
Probably not an issue for most folks, but likely still applicable to a few. Especially the smaller screen issue for those who don't own a separate TV, or even a separate monitor from their laptop screen.
Hint: many of the cheap Chinese HDMI-to-VGA (I think that's what you meant) adapters "support" HDCP in that they'll decrypt it. The branded ones don't want the attention of lawyers, but the no-name ones don't care. Ever since the HDCP master key was cracked, it's possible to generate device keys without licensing them from the central authority, and that's what these manufacturers are likely doing.
They're rare, and you'll pretty much only find them used I imagine.
Also, last I checked, UHD Blu-Rays require your drive to be supported by LibreDrive frimware for MakeMKV to be able to rip them. Again not a huge obstacle when you are dedicated to having an offline movie collection but wouln't it be better if we could just get plain video files (on discs or online) without all this DRM crap?
I don't expect people using their DVD players in 2022 to migrate to Blu-ray. I expect them to drift away from discs entirely.
As for DVD vs blu-ray, I just use a 32" TV, so I just pick whichever is cheaper.
If that's weird, I don't want to be normal.
I'm OK with streaming video quality. I'm not OK with subscriptions, depending on internet connection, playback device restrictions and all that other crap that the normal viewing experience entails these days. That means either piracy (risky in many places) or ripping my own Blu-Rays (perhaps not entirely legal everywhere but ~0 risk).
DVD quality is significantly lower, and especially interlacing is something I never want to deal with.
So yeah I'm weird. But I don't consider myself a cinephile or technophobe.
DVD is fine for me. honestly when I’m watching something without a high def reference to compare to probably helps. DVD is clearly not as good. At this point I’m more interested in the quality of the content.
But to my point, this is really the only benefit of DVD to Blu-Ray - a sharper image when viewed on a large HD TV.
VHS on the other hand had noticeable visual artifacts and would degrade with use. They didn't feature all of the extra DVDs had like subtitles, director commentary, and other extra content. They had no chapter selection / skip. VHS tapes were bulky and difficult to store. It was just an inferior format to DVD in so many ways.
On the other hand I think you can argue DVDs are still perfectly fine when viewing on smaller TVs.
It sucks when the only non-streaming option for some content is DVDs even though the source material is higher quality.
I mostly buy physical media to give as presents to other people, since the streaming services don't generally provide any pleasant way to gift specific things.
After all these years, though, I still don't remember for sure which of my friends can play blu-rays and which cannot. Therefore I get hybrid (blu-ray and DVD) boxes where they are available, or just DVD where they are not.
That seems like a strangely unfriendly reduction.
Although I don't buy DVDs, I am perfectly fine watching subHD content because the visual quality is good enough and not what interests me. I also don't have a 'modern' or especially large TV (it's already too large, if anything). I care about the story. When I read a book, it is similarly of no significant importance to me whether I'm reading from an old paperback or a new hardcover, or an e-reader. As long as the text is legible (book's not deteriorated and the font's not too small), I don't care.
This is not technophobia, it is merely the absence of technophilia.
* Parents buy cheaper DVDs for their very young children...Children who care less about display quality.
* While travel plummeted during middle of pandemic, there were still people who took road trips (e.g. maybe for staying with family, etc.)...and during those roadtrips, i'm sure some families opted for DVDs and DVD players instead of trying to stream stuff while on the road, etc.
* Many folks buy cheap DVDs, because their favorite movies stop being available on their current subscriptionsof streaming servicews. I hate this myself. So, my partner bought 3 or 4 of their favorite movies, so we can watch them whenever we want - even if we lack internet (though we would need power for the dvd player of course)
* Vinyl records have their followers who revitaliuzed the format...so maybe there are collectors of DVDS...?
I'm sure there are other reasons for why this is happening.
I think it's possible this is happening or will happen, perhaps in a similar vein to how vintage gamers/collectors now venerate the GameCube and PS2 as the last bastion of consoles that weren't designed to be online all the time, and will therefore be playable "forever" in a way that everything which has come after them will not.
At the same time, I feel like vinyl records are a little different from a DVD— from the analog tactility of them, the size of the packaging leading to beautiful artwork, the fact that they were the dominant format for decades, while DVDs got barely fifteen years (the aughts and a bit beyond). It's easy to love a record when you put it on and you can immediately tell "yes, this is a high quality stereo audio experience that I am having with this piece of media and the equipment I have invested in for consuming it", and I'd argue there just isn't really an equivalent experience for DVDs: they're always going to be blurry, with janky menus and unskippable ad reels, blocky subtitles, cheap plastic cases. Some of that changes with collectors editions in special boxes or whatever, but I don't know if it's widespread enough across the format as a whole to really enable the kind of culture that exists around vinyl.
Not to discount your observations, but I'm curious to differentiate between an active, intentional, curated collection effort, vs hoarding or just not having gotten around to tossing them all out yet despite that none have been touched in 10 years. Most people I know who still have a shelf or two of physical discs in their media/living rooms look a lot more like the second case than the first one.
There used to be a healthy market for DVD-specific shelving; I have seen multiple bookcase-sized shelves packed completely in one house.
The physical DVD's are rather irrelevant, though. Most are ripped and streamed to the TV rather than watched in a player.
Yeah, I can see what you mean.
Same doesn't apply between dvd and blueray.
There's plenty of bitrate starved streaming content that's available on streaming that's poorly upscaled from a DVD, but that's not the case on studio upscale Blu-Rays with extremely plentiful bitrates and sometimes even film re-scans resulting in a quality that was better than what you could even get in the theater from the original film stock.
UHD streaming, even if it is bit-starved, should be far ahead of a DVD. HD content that is bit-starved is more of a tossup, but I rarely see egregious behavior even from youtube's bad bitrates. I only see that on overcompressed television stations.
Complete crock of shit. Movies from the 80s and 90s were usually shot on 35mm - DVD quality does not begin to extract the detail nor the dynamic range in these films.
It’s not a subtle difference.
And if bitstarving is an issue it’s usually going to be DVD. No amount of encoder magic can overcome MPEG-2 inherent shortcomings.
Just getting rid of interlacing makes any upgrade from DVDs worth it IMO.
As for DVDs/Blu Ray, I only buy things like Planet Earth or other docs. Sure enough, just yesterday I tried playing Planet Earth II on UHD 4K Blu Ray on an Xbox Series X, albeit I still have a 1080p TV (bought used) and 1080p Receiver (bought used, Sony STR-DN1000 that I paid $50 for) and it was glitching. sigh Time to hit up Bit Torrent and download a ripped version of the Documentary that I already paid for. Argh.
Both Blu Ray and Vinyl are susceptible to one day not being playable. By ripping them into digital, we can hopefully keep the content playable well into the future.
Are modern turntables reliable? Or is a vintage one preferred?
Have fun and good luck!
Btw, the Dual 1009, which is from 1964-66, maintains the speed REALLY well. I also have an Onkyo CP-1200A (got for free, someone put in the garbage), and the Dual was actually better at maintaining the speed!
You can download an app on your phone to measure the accuracy of your record player.
Many modern turntables, including cheap ones, support 78 rpm. (Quick search finds 11 new 78 rpm-supporting models at Best Buy in Canada, starting from $80. An $85 Sylvania that supports 78s can also digitize directly to USB storage.[1])
Did you mean 16 2/3 rpm records, which the Dual 1009 supports and most modern turntables don't?
[1]: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/sylvania-src831-3-speed...
I can then repurpose it as a microphone for Zoom/MS Teams or whatever is used.
I have a NAD C715 that can record any input, and record it straight to MP3 at 160kbps, but I'd rather record at a higher bitrate. I've yet to find ANY receiver that can do that. It's still cool that they had that, where the FM signal is converted via ADC and straight to the CODEC for mp3 on the chip.
While you're doing the analog-to digital-conversion, I would suggest sticking with 24-bit 96Khz wav, and focus purely on maximizing the quality of the analog signal. i.e. dialing in levels and stuff. Each time you play a record it degrades a little bit, and it needs to be done at 1x speed, so you don't want to be futzing with compression settings.
Once you have the uncompressed wav files, you can experiment with different codecs and bitrates until you're happy. Figuring out the software to do that isn't difficult.
You could then also keep the uncompressed wav files around on the SD card in your drawer (or losslessly compress with something like flac). If a year later you realize you made poor compression choices, you can easily fix it. Maybe you eventually become an "expert" and decide you want to do some frequency filtering or something. If the SD card dies or gets lost, oh well! :-)
I've also managed to get a working Sony STR-6800SD receiver for $200 CAD. That should help in getting a good analog phono signal.
Yep, this is my preferred direction, and of course an offline-accessible though digital edition may be less prone to issues of wonky players, or warped physical media.
I know they will always available for a rewatch and I don't have to finance the whole bunch of canned crap they have been putting out.
This is it for me, except I’ve never bothered with the subscription services because they never seem to have what I want to watch at that moment.
I can “rent” a digital viewing for $4, or go on eBay and buy a new or gingerly used copy for at most $6.50 - even 4K Blu-Rays. eBay every time. RIP it, add it to media library, and the disc lives in a binder as the ultimate backup. Watch it whenever, on whatever, forever.
* Some hospitals, for instance, still have entire wards using DVDs. Downtime in a room is many tens-of-thousands-of-dollars lost per hour. Outpatient medical settings often use them as well (pediatricians offices, dialysis clinics, etc)
* Some schools are still tied to the format, for multimedia installations / video carts / pre-purchased equipment / etc.
* Tens-of-thousands of minivans are sold with infotainment that's always 10 years behind modern tech. (For almost 10 years, you had to have a binder-full-of-DVDs to use any Chrysler Minivan's video player system, the only other option was the analog RCA ports next to a kids seat). My 2016 Minivan, for example, only supports DVDs and nothing else (even though both BluRay and HDMI had been common standards for 10+ years by that point)
* And of course, there's millions of homes that aren't bothering to upgrade. (Netflix still has something like 2+ million unique DVD-only subscribers each month)
This service will not exist in less than six years.
DVDs are just the best solution for my use case.
- Ripping DVDs I own is simple and reliable.
- Ripping my Blu-rays is complicated, error-prone, and expensive (custom software, custom hardware)
- I'm macOS-based and there is no first-party Blu-ray player for macOS.
- Third-party Blu-ray apps are awful and unreliable and they jank through ripped Blu-rays.
For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that. Lately I've been buying 2160p discs when they're available (and if I don't have a 1080p already... unlike the other jump, 1080p→2160p is not significant), and for a couple years now, ripping them in MakeMKV has been equally as trivial as 1080p discs.
Maybe your concession could be that most 1080p disc releases bundle a DVD with them. ;)
MakeMKV is incredible but the whole process seems fragile and very complex.
Heh, for me the quality of VHS (not bootleg) was good enough. The main reason I eventually switched to DVD is because DVDs don't need to be rewound, were cheaper, and seemed more durable.
Second or third generation bootleg VHS was often quite poor, as were worn out VHS from rental shops. Plus SD digital encodes from the 00s internet were very low quality compared to VHS, but I think that's the source of reference for many younger people who don't remember VHS well.
You'd be amazed how high quality you can stuff into 4.7gb if you use a proper encoding format like H264 or HEVC. Pirates have been doing it for years, it wouldn't be too unreasonable for legit companies to offer it as well.
Edit: I have one of the good LG drives that works well with Libredrive and as far as I've tested it can back up everything I've thrown at it.
I've tried both Macgo Blu-ray Player [1] and Anymp4 Blu-ray Player [2] and both have their playback issues. (Just a note that Anymp4 may look sketchy, but they are a legit company who do provide refunds if necessary.)
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macgo-blu-ray-player-pro/id140...
I usually transcode using Don Melton's other-video-transcoding ruby gem, albeit I think doing it on my PC w/ nvidia card seems to yield more consistent quality vs. the Apple Silicon built-in HEVC encoder.
1: ddrescue on two different DVD drives can rip most DVDs (make sure you authorized the drive first by opening it with a player first), but I have 2 (out of nearly 200) that do not.
> ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is essential for any kind of data recovery for sure - not to be confused with the older dd_rescue wrapper around dd which is a lot more limited. For archival though it is not always enough though (it might be for DVDs) as some copy protection schemes store data outside the normal data area or in the error correction information.
Are you using a slim BD drive? I switched to a "normal" 5.25 sized (a.k.a. 41mm tall half-height bay) and got significantly improved speeds and reliability after trying two different slim drives.
It turns out the few shows I really wanted to watch were available on ebay reasonably cheaply, and I didn't have to pay any attention to availability anymore. It snowballed from there, as I kept adding more shows.
As far as the quality goes, I don't really like wearing my glasses when I get home. I literally can't tell the difference from my couch. Unless it's a show that requires subtitles, then I need to put on my glasses, but I'm pretty used to everything being a little blurry anyways.
Get a Blu-Ray drive for your computer and makemkv (works on Windows, Linux, Macos) and be done with it.
I've ripped both Blu-Ray and DVD's via makemkv and the process is pretty much identical so i don't see where the "complicated, errror-prone and expensive" part comes from given makeMKV is free?
It has been in "beta" for decades and so they offer a time-limited license.
Then there's the menu system on it. Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly. For example, they often do not display what options are actually set or not. Sometimes it's even hard to find the cursor.
The only good thing about DVDs is you can turn on the Eddie Mueller commentary for film noir movies. That man is an unending gold mine of snark, wit, and funny/interesting comments. He's often more interesting than the movie.
Still, no one's going to sue you personally for this. However, there have been cases of legal action against those who make "hacking tools" available. I believe there was a case against Apex for their cheap DVD players that ignored region codes, for instance.
Anyway, the keyword here is "threatened". Corporate lawyers make all kinds of baseless legal threats all the time. It should be illegal.
The first time I used Netflix about a decade ago I was surprised how fast play worked.
Now that you mention that, I was coming from a world of DVD menus and unskippable notices. So the Netflix UX was a great improvement.
My favorite one is the Fifth Element DVD. It has menus implemented as options flying towards you in a loop and you need to press the OK button on the remote just when the right one is passing by. Works great if you have a DVD player with a slightly laggy CPU and an IR remote. It always reminds of that "the worst volume control UI" website that was doing rounds on social media a while back.
In order to see the deleted scenes you had to race a broom through a maze in the forbidden forest selecting the correct way each time.
Those players were always the best.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE
He makes a great point at then end when comparing VHS to DVD: Its like we are moving forward in technology but moving backwards in the amount of BS we have to put up with just to enjoy what we paid for. The VCR gave you more control compared to DVD players.
Things haven't improved with Blue-Ray
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c
Streaming has eliminated many of these pain points in exchange for freedom to truly own your media.
The best way to fight back is to buy the Blu-Ray, rip it using MakeMKV thereby creating an MKV file that contains the ability to jump chapter by chapter, have any audio track you want, etc but with none of the junk that you are forced to use when you pop the Blue-Ray into the player. The best of all worlds.
Almost 2 decades ago, when I was considering getting a DVD+RW drive for my PC, I thoroughly researched them and found they all had differing error correction algorithms, and it made a world of a difference. I got one known for this, and it often played DVDs that neither my standalone DVD player nor my roommate's DVD player on his PC could play.
I would have thought that by now they'd all be good at this, but it seems not.
Never seems to happen with pirated videos & VLC though.
Consistency is definitely one big problem with piracy; some stuff is just done better than others, and it's hard to tell what's what.
Higher end dvd players used to do the same, but players are a vanishing breed and consoles are not much more than dumb players usually.
Ofc it would be nice if there were just no skipping - there were a number of technologies being employed back when DVD was the pretty much the only format in town, I suspect the data redundancy may have been traded for cramming more features on a disk.
Back when ripping (my own) disks was a thing, you could compress a movie to half its size on disk (no coded compression just more intensive picture compression) and burn it twice to the same disk...
Ofc the problem with that was the consumer burnable disks use a degrading chemistry unlike stamped copies, so they would last 3-4 years before undergoing significant corruption.
Do you mean the annoying FBI Anti-Piracy warning? If so, that's actually a voluntary thing the publisher added.[^1]
You remind me. I have some DVDs I need to rip (before they go bad)!
Over the last few years, the experience with DVDs/Blu-Rays from the library has been trending downwards. I would say about a quarter of the movies I check out from the library have some problem somewhere in the movie where the player either gets stuck or skips.
I strongly suspect that the subheadline "DVD sales skyrocket in the last year" is simply false.
"""The total video disc market is still clearly in decline in the US (and globally) and does not appear to be recovering after the Covid 19 delays of new disc releases due to theatrical releases being postponed or moved to streaming. In the US, video disc sales fell 25.5% from $3.29 billion in 2019 to $2.45 billion in 2020 and an additional 20% to $1.97 billion in 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, video disc sales continued their decline with an additional 19% drop year-over-year."""
I appreciate that many don’t care about visual quality, but the baseline of TVs continues to improve with time, and DVD supports literally nothing rolled out in the last 15 years.
At 720x480 resolution (rectangular pixels!), they’re guaranteed to look like crap on any TV produced this decade. I can only imagine it’s a case of “people keep buying ‘em so we keep selling ‘em”, which is doubly annoying because it allows the price of BD players and discs to be kept artificially high as an “enthusiast” option. A standard player on Amazon today is only about half the price of what I paid for a nice Sony player in 2012. And that’s adjusted for inflation.
Playing a DVD is easy. Playing a Bluray is difficult, you need special SW.
For a start barely any of them come with optical drives anymore.
IMO this is a cool thing because it handles both 4:3 and 16:9 equally well!
Technically the physical DVD format supports 1080p content.
e.g. Terminator 2 was released on “Extreme DVD” in 2003 in 1080p. However AFAIK they’re bricks now as the licensing server for the required DRM has been taken offline.
But only as a data DVD, not as a video DVD. I feel like it's misleading not to make that clear. And those Extreme DVDs are just data DVDs with a file on them.
Also, weren't video DVDs and data DVDs the same format just with a special directory structure for videos?
I expect the bigger problem is available storage space and codec support (H.264 is a lot better than MPEG-2).
DVD HD or similar player branding could distinguish these decently well too.
We'll have to go with DVDPro or QuantumDVD or DVD 2 or something ridiculous :)
2) But you can fit a basically-perfect 1080P rip on a dual-layer DVD with modern codecs. Easily.
A great setup will show a difference, but those people probably think nothing of shelling out tons of money for 4k and 8k media. They'd hardly be the target market here.
It has the problem that it only works in Blu-ray Players, not standard DVD players, so the usefulness of it is drastically diminished.
I'm getting to the point where i want ther video file so i can save it locally. Sure DVDs are fine, because i can rip them....I really only want physiucal media until i have ripped to my local digital library. I know some movie companies used to offer a "digital download" of the move if you bought a disc....Not sure if that's still a thing. And who knows if that format was even some crap proprietary, locked doen edition anyway. But, yeah, i prefer my own offline-available, digital copy of media myself.
Yes, "owning" shit is more expensive. But plenty of us would rather pay that cost than give up control.
However, IMO the jump from 1080p to 4K is way more marginal. It's definitely better, but it's just not that much better than what your TV's built in upscaler can do, nevermind some future AI-powered DLSS-type upscaler.
I haven't felt any appetite for picking up a 4K unit, particularly if it means having to navigate the whole world of "smart" TV apps, figuring which stuff I want to use vs disable, and how to go about doing that.
On the other hand there are some very stunning 4k nature videos on Youtube that blow me away
My screen does HDR but it's not oled so the benefit to hdr sources is barely noticeable, and anyway you can get high-quality 1080p downsample rips that retain the hdr data.
Blu Ray releases would be great if they didn't mess with the source material. But this seems to happen all the time. I'll take the flaws of 480p over that kind of stuff any day.
It doesn't have to be this way, as long as you don't assume your audience to be complete idiots (as apparently The Wire's owners do). Go watch the new versions of Star Trek (the original series): it looks beautiful. Luckily, it was all shot with real film, so it looks fantastic in HD, but they didn't do something stupid like changing the aspect ratio, they just left it at the standard 4:3. They did redo all the FX shots since those just weren't going to work in HD, but they look good.
Star Trek: TNG on the other hand has a few problems, though nothing as bad as this other stuff. There's a few places where things that wouldn't have been visible now are, such as one of the early episodes (probably the pilot) where there's an extra piece of carpet under Data's chair. The old rounded screens wouldn't have shown this, so they just left it in on the original TV version, but in HD with rectangular screens it shows up. The other problem is that, with HD resolution, you can see the black cardboard they strategically stuck on the control panels on the bridge to prevent reflections from lights. It would have been nice if they had done a little more digital editing to fix these minor issues.
They also included versions with the original VFX upscaled in case you don't like the new VFX. I agree that that was a great release, same with TNG really even with the small nits you mentioned.
Unfortunate that DS9 and Voyager are (and will be for the forseeable future it seems) stuck on crappy interlaced DVD (or streaming rips for pirates) if you want an offline copy. I'd be happy with just a 720p non-interlaced and professionally cleaned up release.
Recommendations for most viewing is 30 degrees, but for the fully immersive THX/Theatre style viewing you want 40 degeres.
That means for watching your 70" TV you should be about 8' away. If you are watching UHD then that's great, you won't see any resolution artifacts, but with HD you will see a difference.
However if you're 9' away from your screen you won't get any uhd resolution benefits.
(That's setting aside other UHD features, especially HDR)
Of course maybe you have better than 20:20 eyesight.
The size of the screen, for instance, how far you're sitting from it, your actual visual acuity, and so forth and so on. Because these things tend to be suboptimal more than they are optimal, the benefits of higher resolution have diminishing returns, because you have to increasingly have everything "just right" for it to matter.
There's been studies showing that in actual typical viewing conditions for most actual people, higher resolution formats are overkill.
My preference is for blu-ray for instance but we have a small screen by today's standards, which we really don't have any desire to replace in size.
Watching 480p content on an old 65" Panasonic plasma is somehow much more tolerable than watching it on my M1 MacBook or another LCD-style monitor.
Your MacBook probably doesn’t attempt any sophisticated upscaling.
Studios will love this as they can cut costs on manufacturing and distribution, while forcing consumers into their subscription service.
At that point piracy will be the only way to consume content without any restrictions.
I have a new-ish blu-ray player that baulks at the layer change on a DVD, or refuses to play some titles. I also have a high quality Sony upscaling player I bought at a thrift shop that will play anything. I will be unhappy when that dies. Unfortunately, the introduction of HDMI seemed to coincide with the drop in quality of DVD players so you may have to buy a chain of chinese dongles to get the good quality players to work in your lounge.
Ripping your DVDs is probably a good idea, not because of the playability issues to do with the disks themselves, but to do with finding a decent, working DVD player at any price.
edit: the main problem I have with commercial streaming media is that they are using all the nasty tricks of DVD to compress the image below what you can notice on a modern TV. Crushed blacks, blockiness when the stream gets compromised by traffic etc. Blu-ray held such promise and it can look fantastic with a higher average bit stream rate than streaming, but they are getting harder to purchase as the retail outlets disappear.
This is exactly the approach I've taken for the HD era and it works great.
Back in the DVD era I had a well optimized ripping setup, I put hours in to tuning everything so I could pop a new disc in and have it ready to play on my Windows Media Center instance as quickly as my drive would read it.
At this point though, it's just not worth the trouble. Especially for UHD content, ripping that is just a nightmare. These days when I buy a new disc I just add it to a list on my server and my server goes out, finds whatever quality copy I told it to look for, downloads it, extracts it, names it according to my standards, and tells Plex to update its metadata.
More often than not by the time I get home the content is already there on my server waiting for me and I can toss the disc on the rack for display purposes. In my last move I had an entire box of discs that were still sealed in their original plastic.
It's the best of all worlds. The content owners get their money, I get a DRM-free copy that I can play on what I want when I want. It's not strictly legal but it's morally clean. The end result is the same as if I had ripped it myself, just with less effort on my part.
I lost interest in HD ripping when it required commercial software to do reliably, the cat and mouse games with the DRM, etc.
Combine that with my home server getting in to the multiple terabyte range and my internet connection working its way up to gigabit speeds and suddenly "REMUX" type rips that are the exact A/V content from the disc just repackaged in to a more convenient container became practical. Re-encoding just isn't worth the time or CPU cycles when disk and bandwidth are cheap.
The challenge and annoyance went through the roof and the benefits dropped off, so I'd rather put my effort in to something else.
Then again you have to store physical disks. And pay for them, of course. Pick your poison I guess.
How many laptops still have any form of optical drive? None of the laptops I'm aware of
No, not only Macbooks. My 6 years old Thinkpad doesn't have one and it was completely normal back then too.
In the codec realm, I find myself going all the way back to MPEG1 for a side project. Getting 100% of the patents/royalties out of the equation does wonders for compatibility. ISO is still getting me on the standards docs, but that's a one-time cost.
Not every application/customer on earth demands the bleeding edge in efficiency or quality. Especially in the information theory arena - you are always trading something else important. It's usually latency, memory & compute, which are very powerful dragons when trying to scale real-world applications.
Expanse: Season Five, specifically: why must I get Prime when I've got Seasons 1 - 4 on disc? And who's gonna buy GoT S5-8? Westworld S4?
I've got no comment on any increase in DVD sales, though. That's not my market. I only rip CDs (which skip like crazy, while I've literally never had a disc issue with DVD/Blu).
I did, although as a complete set along with 1-4 even with the knowledge that a lot of people weren't happy with the ending.
It was OK, seen worse.
Would 99% of people on 99% of tvs not be able to tell any difference? Probably.
That doesn't exist on 4K Blu-ray. 2160p titles use the HEVC codec in combination with discs up to 125GB in capacity to minimize the artifacts as much as possible, but they are never gone.
That's video, anyway. Both 1080p and 2160p discs usually include lossless audio tracks of at least one language. If your box uses terms like "PCM", "DTS-HD MA"/"DTS-HD Master Audio", "Dolby TrueHD", that audio track is lossless.
Services like Apple TV+ do pretty well on 4K when it's their own flagship content, but none of them care about movies that were shot before digital. They'll serve a terrible automatic encoding that loses all the detail from the original film.
I just bought Lynch's "Lost Highway" on UHD Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and this 1997 movie has probably never looked this good in any format. Even the original film prints shown in theatres were second-generation compared to this 4K. It's mastered from the negative and perfectly encoded to preserve the massive film grain in the indoor scenes.
Uncompressed 10 bit YUV444 UHD at 3840x2160 and 60fps runs at 15gbit a second, so you aren't getting a complete compression artifact free viewing experience. The largest UHD blueray will only deliver at 1% of that speed, and if you could cache it you'd get less than a minute's worth on the disk.
Now you might think that the compression you choose is suitable, and perhaps you'd be right, but it's not 100% compression artifact free, and realistically you aren't going to be seeing uncompressed UHD outside of a broadcast facility. When I stream UHD from say a music festival, I'm compressing it for the WAN section to around 120mbits of h265 at 2160p50 (europe). Even with that level of compression (15:1) it's likely better than your UHD disk.
UHD Blu-ray players though have been out since 2016, and average prices are still hovering around $200. Sometimes you see one now around $150, so maybe prices are starting to drop.
You could blame inflation for part of that, but is it also just that far fewer of them are being sold because people aren't buying physical disks anymore? I.e. they've turned into a niche luxury item.
We have a movie room with a 140 inch projected screen that really brings these films to life. And when I travel for work (I’m a photographer/producer) I have an RV with a wonderful blu-ray setup for when I’m off grid (which is frequent).
In my work I’m producing in 4K or 5k and edit in these resolutions. But for my home, I’ve never expanded beyond standard 1080p which looks terrific at 140 inches.
I do love physical media and have vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, minidisc players. The audio quality is not as good as CD (which I also collect) or streaming - but I find it remarkable and stimulating when interacting with these archaic machines.
I just decided that, if I think I'm going to watch something a few times, I'll seek out the 4k disk.
Some people like first editions and specially printed first editions. Some people just want a paper book with legible printing that won't fall apart (e.g. me). Some people are delighted to read a book on their screen, or even just listen to someone else read it to them.
They are all correct. And the same goes for movie viewers. Or those who listen to music through airbuds or their bluetooth speaker from the other room. I repeat: they are all correct.
I have an OLED 4k TV, maybe 10 Blu Rays, and well over 1000 DVDs. I can definitely see the difference between a DVD and even 720p content, but that's a difference you see when you are looking for it. The pitch blacks are what grab you when you are not paying attention, and you can get that regardless of the resolution.
(Also, ripping DVDs is a fun hobby, and much quicker to experiment with than BR :) )
Blu-ray/4k isn't the crutch the studios were hoping for. Make better movies.
Another point to consider is that old movies don't gain that much from blue ray.
In conclusion, the higher price of blue rays doesn't justify the increase of quality for some users, who may value other parameters more.
Disagree :) The oldest movies I own on Blu-ray are Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and both of them are visually improved by being in HD compared to the DVD releases. I wouldn't really prefer SD for anything regardless of age.
For movies, sure. But a lot of content produced for TV wasn't produced and/or archived in HD formats. Some older shows are occasionally remastered in HD if the original film can be found and digitized, but that's a fairly expensive and time-consuming process when it's possible at all. Older content that's in low demand, like children's shows or soap operas, may stay SD forever.
On thinking about things when I make this post, I remember that DragonBall has never had a good HD remaster done, there's always DNR applied to it, soundtracks switched out, et al. Old VHSes might actually be preferable to the modern Blu-rays in that circumstance.
Very much not the case. The detail in 35mm film can scale to 4K and beyond very nicely.
In addition, some moves/series are only available on streaming platforms that are not easily accessible outside of North America.
Here in the UK I have Prime and Netflix. If something I want to watch is not freely available on either of those then I have to buy either DVD or Blu-ray.
Always surprises me laserdiscs haven't had a big boom period with resellers; the ornamental value of a Laserdisc with nice artwork is drastically higher than a DVD.
Once you’ve watched a movie or show once, why watch it again?