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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Recently I got The Abyss on DVD. Yes, DVD. It looks phenomenal. Yes, on my huge 4k TV. It also sounds phenomenal. I think the whole format war jumped the shark at some point. A lot of these Blu Ray transfers look awful. Every streaming service sounds terrible, with the downmixes all irreversibly ruined.

I cancelled all of my streaming services and now I just go down to the used bookstore downtown and buy DVDs for two bucks.

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My experience is the opposite: now that so much great art cinema has been released in Blu-Ray, even fairly obscure stuff, it feels like a much poorer experience when I have to watch the one or two films in a director’s oeuvre that are still solely on DVD. Especially if one is dealing with those visually stunning filmmakers to whom the saying “every frame a painting” applies.

I get my films exclusively through filesharing communities as DVD or Blu-Ray images and remuxes, so I have never seen streaming. However, the complaints I frequently see about streaming services offering subpar encodes even at high resolutions keeps me a faithful collector of physical-release rips.

The problem isn't the format. The problem is that the more advanced formats are contemporaneous with great directors who are still alive, but senile and blind. DVD and even Laserdisc were contemporaneous with the time before those directors lost their minds. This is why the very standard def Laserdisc of Star Wars is such a hot collectible.

Cases where a still-living director mucked up a Blu-Ray release of a classic film are fairly rare occurrences, though. There are a handful of examples that get discussed time and time again. But most cinephiles are happy that Agnes Varda, for example, lived long enough to oversee the HD transfers of her body of work. And often when color-grading on new releases gets criticized by random people on social media, actual familiarity with the theatrical prints shows that the new transfer is in fact faithful – the new 4K release of Kieślowski’s Trois couleurs (where the director died but the process was overseen by crew) is one example.

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