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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I understand that streaming is a great option but what about high quality? I buy Blu-rays of media where quality is a high point of the experience. Things like Pixar films, traditional animation, films with extraordinary visuals (e.g. LoTR).

Are there full-quality digital/downloadable options that I'm not aware of?

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Agreed. Streaming is wildly inappropriate for things like horror films where compression and macro blocking ruin the dark scenes.

The bitrate of a 4k blu ray sometime peaks above 100MB/s, yet most streaming providers max out around 20MB/s.

There will always be a place for the enthusiast who is willing to put up with a little hassle and higher cost for a better overall experience, and boutique blu ray sales have really taken off lately for this exact reason.

This isn’t the death of physical media, but it might be the death of retail physical media.

FWIW If you find yourself without a choice other than streaming, check Apple first. They offer the highest bitrate typically.

You will still be able to buy Blu-rays, just not from Best Buy

It probably marks the beginning of the end for the medium though

To me it looks more like a continuation of the decline of brick and mortar retail. Even if I want to watch films on blue-ray, why would I ever want to drive to a Best Buy to purchase them?

Because you can have it now and not in three days?

Sometimes urgency is a factor.

If I really must have something right now, I'm highly unlikely to spend 30 minutes plus to drive to the nearest Best Buy to purchase a physical disc. And I don't think that's atypical. I have to believe the most common pattern for someone to buy physical media at a local store is that they're in the store for some other reason and they see a disc for a movie they want to watch.

Browsing an enormous shelf of hundreds (at peak thousands) of films is a much better way to find new things than clicking "Next" 5-20 at a time and trying to parse a tiny thumbnail with a probably half-corrupted title.

Because of overall efficiencies in carbon emissions and packaging waste when things are delivered by a palette load to a local-to-you retailer rather than individually packaged to be sent directly to homes?

Interesting… why wouldn’t you? Do you live far from one?

I love going to Best Buy (and most stores), but maybe that’s just because it was great growing up with them as a source for all things electronic.

Personally I get more joy from browsing stores in person compared to browsing digitally. It becomes something to do—an event of sorts. We exist in the physical world; the digital world is less satisfying to my other senses.

I think the beginning of the end happened already when streaming became commonplace.

There was quite the kerfuffle around the Internet Archive and their controlled lending efforts wrt books online. The disappearance of media formats that could be physically lent out and the total lack of media owners being willer to offer the same digitally was the risk they were attempting to mitigate.

Culture dies when libraries can't lend it (which they can today due to first sale doctrine applicable to physical media, whether books, DVDs, etc), and it's locked behind digital rights and streaming portals (where first sale doctrine does not apply). When physical media dies, you'll either be a consumer willing to pay "whatever the market will bear" for your temporary license (books, music, video, whatever), or a pirate. Archives can still accumulate culture for safekeeping (physically and digitally), it'll just be inaccessible to the public for a century or two sliding window into the past based on current flavor of copyright statute insanity.

https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

Steam was the beginning of the end for physical media, it got the ball rolling on normalizing for a whole generation the lack of media ownership.

I think a lot of streaming services offer some sort of 4K upgrade pricing. [0] Doesn't seem like the requirements for netflix are even that demanding, minimum 15mbps is at least a common internet speed where I'm from.

[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

Netflix 4k is laughably bad in comparison to Blu-ray 4k. Blu-Ray 4k has about 10x higher bitrate.

Haha yeah that's possible, I don't even own a 4K TV at the moment, so I'm out of the loop here. I guess in the exact terms of how many lit-up pixels you get per second, it's the same. 15mbps sounds like some serious compression though I bet.

The requirements are so low because the bitrate is so low. 4k off an internet stream doesn’t compare to off the disc.

If you want DolbyVision, HDR, highest resolution and bitrate, physical media is still the only option that I’m aware of. Bummed about this happening because when I’ve tried ordering Bluray from Amazon, the discs sometimes show up loose in the cases and scratched up.

4k content from Netflix does not look as good as 4k content from Blu-ray. Especially for dark scenes, Netflix's stream is full of decompression artifacts making everything grey and blotchy.

They also have a problem with older noisy 1080p sources. Badly upscaled to 4k and then bandwidth-limited it sometimes looks comically bad.

When I tried out the 4k Netflix option in early 2023 I found myself wanting an option to downgrade to their 1080p encoding for a few of the shows I was watching.

I was told Netflix hired really smart people for like 300-500k/year for the express purpose of avoiding stupid shit like this.

By comparison Blueray can do 92 mbps on 50GByte disks or 144 mbps on 100GByte disks.

I realize different encoding can be more efficient but Netflix etc still just looks worse.

UHD disc media has a bitrate from 72mbps to 144mbps. I won't say it's a night and day difference, my parents can't tell the difference. But there's a difference and if you're really particular about quality (okay okay, I'm a bit of a snob) it's a big deal.

For something like a Marvel movie, whatever. For something like Planet Earth or 2001, watching it on streaming is disappointing after owning the disc version.

Not all titles are available in 4K unfortunately. We used to have the 4K plan, and in my experience very few of the things we watched had it.

Sony has a streaming service called Bravia Core. To use it, you need to be able to download at a sustained 115 Mbps.

It's kind of funny that on Bravia TVs, this means you have to connect wirelessly because their ethernet port only supports 100 Mbps.

Apple will sell you 4K downloads through iTunes. IME they're pretty good about getting you on to the latest/highest quality version of something if there is ever an upscaled edition released.

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