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Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

My wife has churned through a few video services, netflix, amazon, disney, etc.

I've seen her frustration as series come and go from the catalogs, and the lack of things that we can watch together. So recently I've gone back to DVDs.

Many local shops sell used DVDs for €1 each, and I recently discovered a store in Helsinki which is lined with DVDs basically from floor to ceiling - a little more expensive, but not much. It was fun spending an hour browsing around looking for things I remembered or wanted to see for the first time.

Sure DVDs won't last forever, but I think having TV shows, and films, on disk is going to keep me going for the next 10+ years quite happily. Maybe after that I'll switch to something else, but I struggle to imagine it.

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I don't necessarily need 4k Blu-ray quality myself but DVD quality is unbearable in my opinion.

Agreed. On modern TVs 480p looks rough.

I don't mind 480p upscaled with a decent filter. Depending on the content, even 240p can work. What kills watchability for me is 480i. Maybe I just don't understand how things are suppposed to be done on modern setups, but it seems like the combination of deinterlacing plus upscaling is something that used to "just work" ca. 15 years ago and now it's almost impossible to get good results without either hooking up an old DVD player or getting a Ph.D. in ffmpeg.

So much this and it really sucks for older sub-720p content that isn't released on Blu-Ray because of the low resolution so for non-interlaced versions you have to resort to streaming services (no thanks) or the high seas. Even 720p series often never got Blu-Ray releases so you are stuck with both interlacing and a signficantly lower resolution than what should be available.

You have to understand the various TV types. OLED especially can look like crap if you don’t tune it right, because the pixels go on and off instantly, at least if what I heard was correct.

480i was built for the exact opposite, CRTs where pixels fade slowly.

OLED is irrelevant because the display isn't driven with interlaced data like a CRT TV might have been - instead the no matter the technology, all pixels are updated at the same time. The deinterlacing needs to happen before that and that was also needed for many displays back when DVDs were common.

In my experience DVD looks bad when you hit pause, but a decent upscaler and not hitting pause is fine for most things.

If I really like it or watch it more than twice, I’ll get the Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray.

I never got this. Yes, higher res looks better but I watch movies/shows for the story.

Matters a lot depending on what you're viewing it on. If you're watching something bad quality on a big 4K OLED panel, you'll be a lot more distracted compared to watching the same on a small smartphone display.

It is faszinating that people keep saying this. Yes, the story is important. But a huge thing with movies (vs. traditional tv productions) is cinematography. Which is why movie theaters are magical: you watch the movie in high resolution on big screens.

It was a big relevation to me watching classic movies carefully remastered on Blu Ray.

If ALL I wanted was the story, I’ll read a book, not watch with my eyes.

I mean, I totally get your side, but DVD is 1/24 the resolution of 4K and actual 4K with HDR on an OLED is simply another dimension of immersion for me.

As with all compressed media, resolution takes a backseat to quality of mastering / compression.

I've yet to see a poorly mastered Blu-Ray, and only watched a couple Blu-Ray 4k discs, but online streams at 1080p or 4k are sometimes rather bitstarved so...

With DVDs, some, perhaps many look just fine on a larger screen, but there are some whose mastering is very poor, and those will look really bad on a larger screen. My copy of Forest Gump features closeups where the characters face translates around on their head. But most of the other DVDs I've watched are fine. Yes, Blu-Ray would be better, but not so much that its worth rebuying.

I myself saw "Road House" on Thursday, 4K stream. A lot of dark scenes, perfect for OLED. But also very vulnerable to bitrate related quality problems. And it was fine.

But other examples, like the first season of "Reacher", look like shit in 4K. Many artifacts resulting in skintones that get pushed into green or red. Super weird.

Good encoding comes a long way, and not all services go the extra mile.

Dark scenes don't have higher bitrate requirements than brighter scenes. The problem with dark scenes in movies is simply that video encoders have been tuned based on shit perceptual models that don't match how humans see things. If anything, something encoded for a constant bitrate will have less problems with dark scenes than something targeting an overall file size but with the encoder given leeway to assign bits to different parts of the movie.

FWIW, a USB DVD or Blu-Ray drive can be had for a very reasonable price, and MakeMKV is pretty straightforward and works pretty much perfectly on the big three OS's (Windows, Mac, Linux). If you're afraid of the DVDs breaking, it's not necessarily a bad idea to just keeping a digital backup somewhere.

Of course, if you're not careful you end up like me having spent multiple thousands on disks and servers and data tape backups, so be less dumb than me.

Now rip them to a Plex server and have something like your own streaming service.

And by ripping I of course mean "create a private backup".

> Sure DVDs won't last forever

"No termination date. I didn't know how long we had together... Who does?"

The thing that’s really stood out for me of how the vast majority of things produced for these services - often at great expense - are just flat out garbage.

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