The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming | Hacker News Reader

The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming

theguardian.com

29 pointspseudolus16 comments

>> “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”

If we eventually live the dystopian bread-trading future, it won't be a guy with a stack of DVDs that is king. It will be the guy with a NAS full of every Oscar-winning movie for the last forty years.

I am one of those movie hoarders (approaching 2k of the things). This weekend I found out about the 2007-2009 disc rot. One particular factory was making the plastic wrong. The layers are delaminating from each other. So now I probably will be mentally compelled to go back thru all of my discs and find the ones that no longer work. Very annoying. Seems to be particular batches of WB and criterion.

Searching "2007-2009 disc rot" mainly links back to this comment, is there any news I can read about it?

I found it on youtube (which i do not have access to at this moment). There are several videos on dvd disc rot.

“Instead of movies, we would watch prestige miniseries, which are like films, but padded out to eight hours by unnecessary subplots and trauma-related backstories.”

This is the most irritating part about streaming. 5 or 6 episodes of filler and then 2 that might be good and get you to want to watch the next season. There’s really not many good episodic shows left. And the shows that are miniseries would be better as movies.

They’re so very wasteful of one’s time. With rare exceptions, nearly all of the last couple waves of “prestige” tv seasons and miniseries would be improved by cutting 25-50% of their runtime.

On the other hand, I tend to appreciate middling/meandering shows for winding down since I get to stay in the same story/universe over the course of a week or more instead of sprinting through it in 90min sitting.

That said, the problem with this criticism is that a bad show is a bad show and it doesn't mean it would've been better as a movie even if there were the option. Instead of saying "this bad show would've been better as a good movie" you might as well just say "better as a good show". But it just wasn't.

For when the power/internet turns off, get some books, old magazines, crossword puzzles and candles + flashlights. DVDs wont help you much.

edit: my battery powered radio was pretty great too when the power went out.

pedaled generators

https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio...

even stranded castaways had one, with aid from a man of letters

https://gilligan.fandom.com/wiki/Electric_Generator

Lots of people are installing solar panels with batteries.

One thing that has annoyed me in addition to movies being unavailable on streaming, is also just the quality. Netflix's 4k plan ranges in 15.6-25Mbps streams versus a Blu-Ray at 72Mbps-144Mbps. Data has to get lost somewhere. Ultra Blu-Ray doesn't compare to whatever ABR stream providers give.

Even if you want to argue that providers could offer 72Mbps-144Mbps, unless there is a change with how much "prebuffering" there is, have ideal network conditions always, and change hardware on most consumer streaming media devices -- we're still losing that quality.

Most streaming providers are betting folks prefer convenience over quality and that folks don't have ideal setups to tell the difference. That they aren't even getting the right size 4k TV to tell a difference (https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-r...).

The part that frustrates me the most is that it feels streaming services are trying to redefine this as the "peak experience," and try to upsell (Examples: Netflix 4k plan or IMAX Enhanced on Disney+ https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-imax-enhanced)

This exactly. I've got all six original Star Trek films on UHD blu-rays. I was recently visiting my mother and we watched The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) streaming on her TV. The compression artifacts were immediately apparent. I won't judge color accuracy or contrast, since we have very different TV technologies. But I shouldn't be able to see mpeg blocks on a 4k stream that the provider charges extra for!

I don't think of myself as a cinephile, but I have started to pretty aggressively move all my movies to my NAS, and become increasingly frustrated by series and programs that are not distributed unencumbered through legally licensed means.

With streaming, I think Disney (and everyone else) have uncovered the ultimate vault. Before if something was "in the Disney vault" it meant that you just couldn't buy it. You could still watch your old copy.

One idea that I've been rolling around in my head is a "Little Lending Library", but filling it up with DVDs[1]. I don't know if I'm willing to risk my collection of movies to random neighbors.

[1] https://www.freeblockbuster.org/

Streaming isn't going away but physical media is going to make a huge comeback. People want to watch their favorite movies/TV shows and right now the only way is to pay for every streaming service.

It's not just availability, they also don't want it retrospectively edited, censored, flagged, or deleted at the whims of transient corporate faux morality. You will have to tear my DVD copy of Fawlty Towers from my cold dead fingers :)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/27/no-ifs-no-butts... https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/14/disney-attaches...

This post contains outdated cultural depictions. Reader discretion is advised.

See also "Hollywood Keeps Reminding Us Why We Need Physical Media More Than Ever" from January:

* https://www.ign.com/articles/hollywood-keeps-reminding-us-wh...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179418

Reply on news.ycombinator.com