Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine.
Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration.
I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.
DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them.
Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify.
I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.
The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
Nor can anyone hear the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit file, all else being equal.
While we don't know the exact dynamic range of human hearing, we do know it to be above 96dB.
Either way, using these 96dB in 16bit requires careful mastering.
With CDs, it is not possible to e.g. make a song quieter than the others in the CD without losing this 96dB range. There's no "ReplayGain" metadata in the discs; the format is aged and not fancy at all.
At 24bit, there is plenty, thus preserving what was in the original recording is possible even with bad mastering.
Lets say the mastering process compresses the recording extremely to a 42dB (8bit) range - outputting that to either 16 or 24 bit will make zero difference. The audio will still have a dynamic range of 42dB.
If we're talking unmastered recordings for archival, yes 24bit is very useful. For final mastered copies released for listening it's completely untrue that 16bit doesn't offer enough dynamic range.
Not going to question your subjective experience, but I do not think most people will hear any difference between 16 and 24 bit playbacks under normal conditions, even with fancy headphones.
"120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.
16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever." [1]
Read enough glowing product reviews from "audiophiles" on nonsense like $100 electrical sockets and $75 Ethernet cables and you'll start to question everything.
That's a great article; thank s.
" It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions. Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.
None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space. "
16-bit is (IIRC) 96 dB of dynamic range, going from well below human perceptual noise level to above damage threshold.
24-bit is good for headroom when recording/mixing but useless for listening.
If there's any difference between a 16-bit and a 24-bit version it's either because they're actually not the same (different mixing/mastering^) or they're just poorly mixed/mastered from the start and don't use the full 16-bit (or 24-bit for that matter) dynamic range: if you by and large use only 2/3 of the bits to actually convey a signal change then it may say 16-bit on the tin but it's actually 10-bit or something, (and for 24-bit it's only using... 16-bit!) and the remainder bits are just wasted space.
^ I find that quite frequent on vinyl vs digital: vinyl sounds better not because of some inherent property of the medium but because the mastering (and sometimes even the mixing) is simply not the same, presumably because it doesn't cater for the same audience/use case (vinyl at home for amateurs/enthusiasts/audiophiles, digital for a much wider variety of users, listening conditions, and listening hardware)
However, seeing as in audio bit depth only affects dynamic range, you'd have to be listening to something with an extreme dynamic range to hear it. I can see why higher bit depth is useful in recording, but not in playback.
Audio quality is famous for having an extremely strong placebo effect. Unless you did the test double blinded, your anecdote has a good chance of being wrong.
But I can play it on many devices, or it can be format shifted if needed.
I can't play Blu-ray on Linux even if I had a compatible reader.
I can't remember if I've tried to play any Blu-ray disc recently, but I know for sure that they can be read. I have a recollection that you might need some software to "mount" the disc so that normal media players can work with the disc.
There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues
And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
Or the high seas...
And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD...
I don't think anyone upscaled a dvd recently for release on BR though, was mainly an issue right around when BR came out in the rush to get content out. Same with UHDs, today it shouldn't be as much of an issue.
Doesn't matter when they remaster it to be way too dark or screw up with colours and tone mapping to give it a "more modern" tint.
Some are also re-cut from original aspect ratios (whether 4:3 or CinemaScope) to be equal or closer to 16:9.
e.g The Wire on DVD is 4:3 (as originally shot) and has been re-framed to 16:9 on BD. They did a a seriously good job at it but it really changes the impact and/or mood of some key scenes. And that's when it goes well.
On the other end of the spectrum I've seen 2.55:1 movies butchered into some lazy [anything-between 1.77 and 2]:1 crop + autopan conversion "remaster". Those are 1080p alright and not upscales but are a totally shoddy cash-grab job.
The movie studios still manage to mess it up, changing the colors/contrast and using terrible AI de-noising that wipes out actual details
Mine is a 1080p model. I have seen 4K TVs at friends houses but I can't say I miss it. Somehow the when you watch some old non HD it still looks good when projected on a wall. Sure it is not highres but the image seems smoothen the image instead of having a pixelated or badly upscaled result. For example these last few months I have been watching a lot the ER TV show and I wasn't the least annoyed by the lower res.
If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
The biggest problem visible on the TNG sets is the black cardboard pieces on the consoles in the rear of the bridge, used to block reflections from the lights. Those weren't visible after conversion to NTSC, but in HD they're noticeable. I'm not a director, but I wouldn't call this a problem with a shoddy set, but rather too many assumptions made at the time about how the video would be viewed. Surely, if they were filming a theatrical movie at the time instead of a TV show, they would have simply filmed it a different way, or rigged the lighting differently to avoid this problem.
That doesn't just meant that smaller details weren't important, so they were left out. But also that if something in your set needs to fulfill a role in the story, you better make that thing big enough to be legible on an NTSC screen, instead of something more subtle.
That is exactly what I am trying to say. While I have an overall lower max res, my viewing experience is much more consistent across all kind of contents. And it never feels as crappy as upscaled content.
>If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
I know I've seen it at friends place. But what I mean is I don't really feel it unless I compare both side by side thus it doesn't make my viewing experience less enjoyable. Ignorance is bliss I guess. And I much prefer the immersion of having an albeit lower res projected in the full size of my living room wall than 4K res in a smaller screen. It would maybe be different if I was watching ice hockey games and trying to follow the puck but I am not.
YMMV of course.
If you decrypt and grab the pristine content of a 4:3 or 16:9 DVD, then process it properly through Handbrake or such, it will look fine.
I did this purposely for a couple of rare old movies because the VHS and streaming copies looked terrible. The DVD versions in various regions are much, much better and came out as playable artifacts I can put on an 4K or 8K output device. They look cleaner than when I play these than with a DVD player because of the extra computational effort that went into the filtering during the transcoding process.
Also, the parent seemed to be talking about simply popping a DVD into a drive and watching that directly. What you're talking about sounds very interesting, but also a fair amount of work and compute time. I've never used Handbrake, but I would assume the ripping and transcoding process would take a fair amount of time.
Actually downloading is legal too, you just can't upload (making Bittorrent effectively illegal)
"In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 (I've not looked at this link, I just know it to be the case and prima facie this looked right)