We all took the DVD boom era for granted
filmstories.co.uk
filmstories.co.uk
But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.
I can hardly sit through The Two Towers, extended or otherwise, without cringing constantly at nonsensical plot changes.
No, Faramir was not a moody nihilistic relativist who changes his entire outlook without any character development.
No, there was no alliance, and getting from Lothlorien to Helm's Deep in the span of a few weeks, with a full army, is physically impossible even if the army were already assembled. (This was only in the movie after a last-minute cancelled attempt to turn Arwen into a warrior; seriously.)
No, Treebeard didn't spend 2/3s of the book stalling.
No, Frodo did not offer a wringwraith the ring, even for a second. And if he did, there's no way he would've survived afterwards.
And on, and on...
This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform. Osamu Tezuka, one of the founding fathers of the modern anime industry, notably created the filler-heavy formats of yesteryear that were the dominant form of popular televised anime well into the 21st century. There are notable early outliers like Yu Yu Hakusho and Death Note, but most of the popular anime had their runtimes padded all to hell in order to continually cash in on the unpredictable zeitgeist popularity of their source material. This trend of creating manga-accurate adaptations was largely spawned during the mid-80's OVA boom (wherein many one-shot OVAs were functionally made as high-production-value advertisements for their corresponding manga), but it largely didn't make the leap to TV anime until well after the turn of the century.
It's hard to argue about 'a newer phenomenon' which is now closer to Astro Boy than our current time.
> most of the popular anime had their runtimes padded all to hell in order to continually cash in on the unpredictable zeitgeist popularity of their source material
You can't 'faithfully recreate shot-for-shot' an ongoing title, you would be out of the material way earlier than out of the runtime.
This is not even diving on the differences between the manga and the manga eiga.
Last I checked, the 2010s are closer to now than to the 1960s. This didn't become the norm until the 2010s. I called out Death Note and Yu Yu Hakusho as notable exceptions and did note the initial start of it in smaller OVAs. I guess if you're going from the earliest OVA that did this then your comment does make sense. I was thinking more in terms of when the trend to do so became dominant.
>You can't 'faithfully recreate shot-for-shot' an ongoing title, you would be out of the material way earlier than out of the runtime.
Right. The modern trend is to wait until a series is done, or at least until it has enough plot/action in the manga to cover a full season before entering production. Chainsaw Man was over before the first season of the anime came out. Demon Slayer finished around the time the anime started. This is a new-ish trend among big popular TV anime. So as I said, it used to be that anime would be produced while the manga was still ongoing and popular, which lead to filler as a much more common phenomenon.
>This is not even diving on the differences between the manga and the manga eiga.
By all means, feel free to split hairs. I was just trying to give newcomers a more zoomed-out view of the history of anime, but if you'd like to delve into details, have at it.
That was a quip to "trend of creating manga-accurate adaptations was largely spawned during the mid-80's OVA boom"[0]
> until it has enough plot/action in the manga to cover a full season before entering production
Yes, though this is still not universal and still things go south with anime-original titles (WEP is 10/13, sadly)
> it used to be that anime would be produced while the manga was still ongoing and popular, which lead to filler as a much more common phenomenon.
> By all means, feel free to split hairs
Yes, I don't object this, though I was thinking more in how the media does not/translate. I even re-read Kaji/Akagi first story from Tsuredzure Children as this is the one best examples of a media adaptation.
[0] Gokushufudō would be an extreme modern 1:1, btw
PS:
ah, read the sibling comment
imma in the bar RN, if you want a hear an opinion on that sweet cash - drop a note
FMA (2003) is a fun example of this not happening, where they basically wound up creating a custom ending to the series because they got ahead of the manga.
Right, so rather than stopping production on the anime until the manga had time to get ahead, most anime created filler to cash in on the popularity of the ongoing manga, rather than to try to make the most faithful adaptation. Nowadays it's more common for anime to halt production and release a follow-up season years later when the manga has gotten farther ahead.
And even changing characters somewhat but still having a development or purpose is arguably fine - it's the changes that aren't good in the context of the movie that are most baffling, especially considering the dedication shown in other areas of the films.
This is as silly as suggesting that Tolkien's work somehow tarnishes or damages nordic/germanic mythology. utterly ridiculous.
Strong feelings for an adaptation or a sequel can taint or enhance how someone feels about the source material even if the original was experienced first. For example, it's understandable if someone who really loved star wars before the prequels and disney acquisition found that they can't help but experience a sense of loss and disappointment while revisiting those original films knowing about midi-chlorians and how the franchise ended up.
The original works are unchanged, but in many cases the way we view and experience them isn't.
A general one. And if you think about that its sad that a story has to be rewritten in order to ensure maximal appeal to generate maximal profit. The story isn't rewritten for the screen, it's rewritten for the investors polluting the story with money.
But on the flip side the story reaches a large audience, perhaps larger than the books might have, though not in true form. Double edged sword really.
Treebeard did spend what seemed to Merry and Pippin an interminable amount of time deliberating, including a full three days in agonizingly plodding discussion with other ents, and it is emphasized that this is THE defining character trait of ents. The shape of the interaction between the hobbits and the ents was of the hobbits becoming extremely bored and impatient. It is more important in a film adaptation to capture the feel rather than slavishly copy the book blow by blow. There is only so much screen time to go around, and the character trait has to be conveyed somehow while still moving the plot along. If the movie faithfully compressed the entire ent episode into its runtime, including the 3 day entmoot, it would be both incredibly boring, and spiritually less accurate because it would feel rushed and cramped.
It took a really really long time for Vinyl to make a come back. I hope we could one day innovate enough and bring physical media to the market again.
Should be familiar if you know any anime fangirls.
- they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information)
- stupid geographical restrictions
- they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As an intermediate result, a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video (social media, especially for mobile platforms, use even worse compression). And new Apple headphones seem to use lossy compression as well, so we have a codec compressing another codec's artifacts.
Before you just needed a DVD player
However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.
Streaming will never have a secondhand market.
Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming.
So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues:
1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.
2) then checked out a British tv series with 10 seasons. The 10th season had 3 discs and the middle disc was so scratched up by a previous borrower that it was unplayable. (The library doesn't have a bunch of duplicate DVDs like Blockbuster Video rentals.)
3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
On top of those problems, the library has a very small selection in comparison to streaming. She estimates she'll exhaust the DVDs sitting on the library's shelves in a few months and have nothing to watch.
Another huge negative to DVDs is that she can't play them (directly) on her iPad. Her exercise bike had a mount for an iPad and she used it to watch video streams from Amazon Prime.
She was spoiled by the conveniences of streaming and does not look back on DVDs with any romantic nostalgia at all. The only reason she doesn't just subscribe to Netflix or HBO streaming to get back that convenience was she didn't think she could afford it on her Social Security income. On the other hand, the Amazon Prime Video streaming (without ads) was already part of her Amazon subscription.
We also have reciprocal borrowing privileges at many libraries that aren't in the network. You can always find a DVD you want!
It's the same problem with streaming services. There are several shows at Netflix and other services that doesn't have the latest seasons (at least in my EU country).
> 3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
There's no guarantee that a season will be available in a streaming service either. They sometimes only have shows for a limited time, so you could start watching a series but then it is removed before you finish, often without warning.
So the original disk could be copied to writable media.
There definitely would "occasionally" be a movie lover who wasn't actually buying those copies.
Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa).
That's not a georestriction, but a difference in media protocols. You could easily buy a compatible VCR. Heck, in some countries, Japan marketed VCRs that supported both PAL and NTSC (I had one of those) because those countries would have a significant influx of VHSs from both Europe and America.
It's like saying the choice of 110 vs 220V (or 120 vs 240V) is a "georestriction".
If course the most likely reason is corporate greed, but it's also fun to consider other possibilities. Another hypothetical reason would be for sales in Islamic nations where certain content is prohibited. They could show the government censors that there is some level enforcement to prevent "illegal media" from being easily watched. Whereas without it, the government could have potentially made DVDs illegal in their entire nation. I'm trying to see this through the lens of the design committee back in the early 90s.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-definition_television
I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip.
DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer.
Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain.
Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.
And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.)
Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.
We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.
Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.
My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)
Go on vacation and we could not access that show.
It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.
(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)
(They say it's for security but they have nearly no security benefit.)
This is the killer for me. I've worked on both video compression and graphics in my career and those projects involved a lot of pixel peeping. The compression artifacts in streaming video are sometimes really distracting now. I keep contemplating switching to bluray but apparently an increasing number of 4K HD releases there are being ruined by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
So of the two, I'd take the new AI version, though it's not perfect. But the happy medium might be the new AI release on regular Bluray. The lower 1080p image toned down the fakeness a bit I thought.
It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call
Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
LTE and 5G has the option of higher quality voice codecs (EVS) than older cellular networks when using VoLTE or VoNR. They support wider band sampling and higher data rates for better quality audio. Why most voice calls sound bad is inter-carrier compatibility still sucks. Typically calls will downgrade to AMR-WB or AMR-NB (8KHz and 4kHz sampling respectively).
FaceTime calls, or any other pure IP voice services, don't need to downgrade codecs to interoperate. They might have to change encoded bitrates based on network conditions but never go with some lowest common denominator codec because another user is on a different network.
Where can I learn about these topics?
Direct at the speed of light (almost)!
East Coast of the US to London, UK, in the early 1980s. Over three thousand miles. Quite expensive. Quality was dreadful.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.
TAT-7 - 4000 analog 3 kHz channels over coaxial, laid 1983
TAT-8 - 280 Mbit/s over fibre optic, laid 1988
No.
Analog copper signals are TERRIBLE. A big reason telecom was one of the first to embrace digital transmissions was due to all the quality issues of copper.
Yes, latency was low, but that was about the only thing going for it.
To get a clear signal over copper you NEED a very large amount of insulation, and that insulation needs to be through the entire circuit. Just one section with frayed plastic, ran too close to a powerline, or is passing under a thunderstorm would introduce all sorts of noise onto the line. The longer the distance, the bigger a problem this was.
Sure, some calls might have been clear, but a lot were utterly terrible.
Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.
If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't be heard. Sending out a really strong vocal signal made it easier to hear that over the noise and pops.
As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 70s would play is stacking very long lines back and forth. Route a call across the country, then back, then back again. You could do NY - SF four or five times with a circuit length of like 10,000 miles sometimes before the channel was unusable.
You are otherwise totally right about the potential distortion of a long distance analog circuit. Other times filters would be out of tune and you would hear the hundreds of other analog channels just murmuring in the background not quite discernible, and calling the next town over was almost impossible.
Screaming into the phone was more the pre-electronics era with carbon microphones. The original analog phone systems had no active amplification at all. Voice powered microphones were typical in the military until quite late - I think they still use them as backups on ships.
Two handsets connected with EVS/VoLTE-HD sound superior to two analog phones on the same circuit, talking to each other.
If I call my parents' iPhone using my iPhone the call connects using a high-bitrate EVS codec, crystal clear.
I never do that, of course.
I FaceTime them.
[1] μ-law was used in North America and Japan, but a similar encoding called A-law was used elsewhere
People call for leisure of course, but the phone's part of that leisure activity is still just to convey information not art. The kids all switched completely to txt for the same non-utilitarian conversations once it became available.
For all it's low fidelity, it was actually quite high fidelity, in that it was actually very good at conveying all the "voice body language" information besides merely the words. It was just highly optimized for one job and that job was not music.
an example would be i game on my computer and for years i had a 60Hz monitor and it wasnt til 2020 i upgraded to 144Hz monitor. it is night and day difference in feel that i can never go back to a monitor under 120Hz
If someone from Germany can chime in, I believe they had higher-bandwidth ISDN services in the late 1990s onwards.
You could go to E1/PRI to get 2048kbps for €€€€.
In North America ISDN was 56k due to the slower T1 it was sent in and framing.
As a student I had none of those things.
In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.
Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.
It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.
I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
DVDs had those too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As long as the quality is above 480p, it’s still better than DVD.
But it’s not, DVD quality is 480p. This isn’t a matter of opinion, we can look up the numbers.
I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS.
DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy).
The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate.
As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost.
2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force.
3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.
Right now, there is no better and more convenient interface than piracy and I wish that weren't the case.
Edit: there is such an interface for classical music, e.g. Hyperion. DRM free and one-time payment, and I've used it a lot.
And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.
this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a
edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive scale that they were beyond the law, and archive.com didn't
Prior to the DMCA this was only a civil matter. A question of whether you were vulnerable to a lawsuit.
Now it is a federal crime to circumvent any digital copy protection measures, no matter how feeble they are. Metaphorically, if the MPAA leaves a locked door standing in nothing but a bare doorframe in the middle of an open field on their digital distribution methods, the US federal government considers it a crime to walk around that locked door.
It really does feel like the capitalist system that we as a society locked in during the industrial revolution is just running on hotfixes and fumes at this point, I gotta say.
Eg - fundraise to cover the cost of producing the movie and paying the salaries of everyone involved, because physically making a movie costs money. Then give the mp4 away for free because copying a digital file costs nothing. Piracy is only a problem because companies are trying to charge money for copying a file, which is fundamentally free.
You don't.
Regardless of what DRM is applied to official releases, every single mainstream movie gets released through pirate channels the same day as and often even before the official release. There may be a couple of obscure titles that slip through the cracks because no one in the pirate community noticed they existed but the stuff the industry actually cares about has never been successfully protected.
The DRM only stops people who are trying to stay "legit" from doing things they should be able to do like store it on a NAS, play it on whatever device they want, etc. It has never and will never stop pirates.
If I can go to a pirate site and locate a "REMUX" or "COMPLETE" rip of a movie, which is the case for the vast majority of movies ever released to digital formats, an official DRM-free release would change nothing for pirates and only make the experience better for people trying to stay legal.
Often the problem is misrepresented as "streaming vs. physical media", wrongly implying that streaming is the only means of purely digital distribution. However, it is actually a question of whether you actually own media vs. only renting them.
I wonder how many others are in the same camp as me, I used to be a pirate back when I was a teenager but now I can genuinely afford this stuff and always prefer to pay versus pirate, but in the case of home movies I just can't do that.
I think the studios will be very surprised if they just opened the floodgates and let folks pay for and download movies, because I think a large chunk of us are like me, only pirating because there's no other avenue to acquire the movie.
> have to
Can you elaborate, please?
(source: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/119599)
For some of the movies I have bought I have ended up also torrenting a copy to have and be sure I can play it. Really tempted to get a bluray player and go back to disks.
GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.
We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.
Copyright itself isn't what's stopping that, but the legal apparatuses and laws surrounding the distribution of digital copyrighted information and the industry protectionism that spawned said laws and legal apparatuses is what's stopping it.
By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.
When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.
I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...
I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
Aren’t school vaccines registered with the state? Given how many parents cannot keep records, I am surprised the solution would be “get them again”.
Of course the real hard part is how do you mark a record as do not restore anymore. In a medical context this isn't much a problem, but in other cases it is an issue.
But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).
Keeping that data around and managing requests for it is a part of why older physicians are so keen to sell their practices to younger doctors here - they can pass on the duty of keeping up with storing the data that way.
People are very good as securing physical items. They are awful at securing files.
A dvd or maybe an SD card or USB stick is a much better approach.
A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).
And with codec. What code it is in? For what architecture or operating system? What is system constraints it has to operate in? Do you have some specification? Do you need to due something beyond it for new codec.
And from security viewpoint running some arbitrary code from disk sounds like questionable idea. Specially for say pc or console...
Joke aside, this question is close to the file format obsolescence problem in long term digital preservation: the longer the term, the closer to bootstrapping the answer is.
In the shorter term, detailed metadata, widely used containers and choice of codecs that have well-known open source implementations is a good start.
This. In those days any general-purpose CPU with enough grunt to do realtime software decoding of MPEG2 and hypothetical newer codecs would have needed a fan - which would have been a dealbreaker for a living-room appliance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J
Admittedly not for codecs at least.
Consumer DVD players have (cheaper) ASICs for hardware-decoding of MPEG. The algorithm to decode is literally burned into the chip. It wouldn't have made economic sense for manufacturers to pay extra for general-purpose CPUs such as x86/ARM/MIPS to enable future scenarios of loading & executing arbitrary code from discs.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pentium-ii-release-d...
In other words, there was simply no way to ship affordable DVD players that would use a general purpose CPU for video decoding. It needed to be in hardware.
A good brand would buffer compute and memory capacity by a decent factor at time of sale in order to support future codecs needs...
You probably don't want that kind of capability since it ends up being used for nefarious purposes by the rights holders and media companies.
For example the keys on your BluRay player can be revoked just by playing a BluRay disc, as the drive first reads the code on the disc and executes the appropriate code to "update" your player according to the wishes of the DRM overlords. It's a very anti-consumer feature. Sony was also distributing their music CDs with rootkits to try to prevent piracy.
I think VHS and Laserdisc were better since they had little DRM and you could freely rewind and view whatever parts you want at your own discretion. The advent of tech also meant the advent of anti-user DRM that dictate how the (paying!) user must enjoy the content.
Thanks for mentioning this. The LibreDrive firmware is specifically designed to address this and other issues.
The problem is a physical media format absolutely cannot afford to gain a reputation for not playing.
You see, if stores accept returns for opened DVDs? People can buy a DVD movie, watch it, then return it for a refund.
But if stores don't accept returns for opened DVDs? If I paid two hours' wages for that DVD, it doesn't play, and they won't give me a refund? I'm going to be mad about being ripped off, and I'm going to complain a lot.
They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.
That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content.
DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s.
You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.
Relevant dead ends:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc
It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.
That said I remember that era fondly because of things like the Tartan output. In the UK if you had a multi region player (and many did) you could get stuff from all over the place, on top of the local but now forgotten play dot com.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car
That sound this made as well, not conducive to sitting down to be entertained. It was deliberately obnoxious.
Enshitificstion isn’t about companies making products worse because they don’t like their customers it’s just they have different interests. Thus shelf life is generally favored over taste etc.
This will sound very silly, but one of my favorite features of my Tesla Model 3 is that it doesn't stall the screen for 5-10 seconds every. single. time. you get in the car reminding you to drive safely and to pay attention to the road.
That sounds astoundingly patronising. Can't you just turn the car on and drive without a public service annoucement?
Oh how I long for the You wouldn't download a car days
But these days, if I feel like watching a movie that I own physically... sometimes I still look to see if it's on a streaming service that I'm subscribed to, or will even pirate it ... just because it's more convenient than having to turn on the BluRay player and then navigate those awful menus with un-skippable ads (you forgot those) and copyright screens.
The copyright notices were especially egregious and annoying to me BECAUSE I PAID FOR IT! Don't punish your paying customers because of the people you don't like... people that are not reading your annoying message.
I like watching movies, and thus, I have watched a lot. When I try to find a movie to watch on HBO/Netflix (I'm from Scandinavia - not the same selection as in the US), I have a hard time finding something to watch. A lot of newer movies doesn't cater to my taste.
On the other hand, I can find a lot of classics from the 80s/90s/00s and even 10s in thriftstores for as little as 1-3$. I then get to keep the movies, that I often end up rewatching, and I get the added features mentioned in the article.
I'm not to nostalgic about the cases, which I often just dump (I have considered keeping the fact-sheets though, just not the plastic casing).
I'll soon cancel my remaining subscriptions, and only purchase them a month at a time when something I truly want to watch arrives...
I was spending the money anyways, why not own a copy?
Streaming is primarily just for specific TV shows, subscribe, immediately cancel, watch the series, then resubscribe when something worthwhile exists. I can't stand the bugs, slow interfaces, forced ads in ad free tiers, bad audio quality, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
If I love a movie on X streaming service and they have some licensing problem or decide it's not worth what they're paying to host it, they can remove it at any time. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of what's available changing on a daily basis, and constantly getting split among more and more services that charge more and more monthly.
Quality is great and they just work.
I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.
Animated films were usually dubbed, everything else was narrated by one monotone voice.
Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content
* Adverts (especially the anti piracy "you wouldn't steel a car" ones)
* Logos
* Menus
It can take nearly a minute to go from the disk going in to the film starting.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.
It's often to monetize their back catalogue by giving people a way to buy a gift for a fan.
I think there's totally an opportunity to do the same with films.
Those user-hostile abominations were a great reason to have DVDs. They were slow, made starting to watch a movie more complicated than it need be, and frequently committed the cardinal sin of showing spoilers.
The reason it ended is because the general public doesn't care.
Because the general public "doesnt care" we are in a world you can own nothing, control nothing, repair nothing, keep nothing a secret, do nothing without going through gatekeepers. In short, idiocracy.
kinda funny to think you are not subject to constraints when your access to the limitless potential library can be revoked at any moment.
pressumably you also don't own any house, car, books, clothes, etc. as that gives you limitless potential to rent stuff.
Unlike practically every example you provide, I am typically watching a film once. I may revisit it years later but I am not consuming it on a frequent basis.
I am not arguing that there should not be alternatives but rather customers don’t want those alternatives so the cost to make a dvd/Blu-ray for less than .1% of your market can be quite expensive.
I worked in the film industry, in DVDs, at the height of that market. Sales of DVDs tumbled. End of story. There was nothing for the studios to do because the ROI was dead, and their previous efforts (which were terrible natch) to manipulate the DVD market (cheaper, limited play product) were dumb.
DVDs were great, streaming ate their lunch.
Calling capitalism's market economics an idiocracy is.. tautological.
Thats definitely not true. The most ardent and smart defender of markets argued that they operate and optimize within the boundaries that society decides. If you legislate that people should be able to repair, own, exchange etc. stuff then markets will deliver exactly that. If you let them race to the bottom thats also exactly what you will get.
I was thinking about this. Normal people bought maybe one or two Disney movies a year? Now Disney Plus cashes in 20 eurodollars per month and they don't have to share it with anyone.
We truly live in the Cyberpunk timeline.
DVD "extras" help bootstrap film students.
Less film students, less future films for general publics.
You have to buy their player ($4,000) and their media server ($5,000 for 8TB up to $27,000 for 96TB). Then buy movies (about $9 - $30 depending on how new they are).
If you have the money, you can buy a pre-loaded system for $98,000 which includes their entire 4k library (only about 2000 movies), two 96TB storage arrays and a 4k player.
If the player was around $2,000 and I could use my own storage, I'd have bought one already and ditched all the streaming platforms.
Edit: looking through their library, some titles do include extra content (special features, deleted scenes, music videos, etc).
An interesting DVD set was the first season of The IT Crowd, which has base64 encoded subtitles. It was a fun little project to OCR those, combine them together, and then decode them.
In terms of interesting DVD commentaries, Goodfellas and Catch Me if You Can have commentaries with the actual criminals who are the subject of the film, which gives an interesting perspective. There was also a hidden commentary track on one of The Simpsons episodes where the writers go into details about why there was a drop off in quality on the show. Actually the commentary tracks on The Simpsons episodes are generally excellent.
Many film classics were only really appreciated years later, and we are left to wonder why they didn't won an Academy Award at the time while some other totally unremarkable movie took it instead. I think it's this: Often we assume that certain things (e.g. certain types of movies, DVD extras) just will be as good or better in the future, and often they do, but if they unexpectedly get worse, we realize that we did hit a high water mark in the past without noticing at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Awards#Criticism_and_c...
The other aspects of DVDs, the materialism/commercialism, DRM, I don't miss. My ideal consumption format is a fucking file.
What happens to the company and its services once he dies is extremely concerning to me given depth of my own investment now in game licences on the platform. Things may not be so rosy if/when Steam is sold to a publicly traded parent and has to do boring things like deliver quarterly growth for shareholders etc.
Would a Steam/Valve owned and run by Microsoft be as good? It might not be Microsoft in the end of course, but that question is going to come up a lot sooner than a lot of Steam fans probably realise, especially as Gabe ages out.
Big box games generally had very little of these types of concerns.
I remember building a computer 8 years ago that for the first time I didn't need an optical drive. Not needing to dig around for 3-4 separate disks or worry if they were scratched was very handy.
Yes the ownership piece is one thing, but I have yet to play a game in over a decade that was eventually taken away from me.
Why do I want the booklets when there are other incredible sources of game info online, from Youtube tutorials though to subreddits and wiki articles.
Still, somehow, online archives are just document databases of mixed content. Just bags of crap and treasure that can be picked through using search engines if you can guess the correct magical incantation and the engine hasn't been told to selectively ignore what you've said. Archive.org and books.google.com are said to be valuable archives (and they are), but try to find all four volumes of a four volume set, or all of the works of an author in chronological order. I'll give you an hour.
This could be solved by giving users the ability to add those connections, and providing a deliberative system to edit and cultivate those added connections. They'll do it for free. It mostly works on wikipedia, even when as they dramatically fail in other ways.
Let people add links to content, and come up with deliberative procedures to avoid problems such as spam. "Community Notes" is a good attempt on Twitter. Wikipedia has a process for auditing references and links.
Instead of using public deliberation, we have random drones or execs hardcoding "Jonathan Turley" into secret LLM prompts because somebody saw him on TV complaining about LLMs libeling him. Ad hoc authoritarianism is not the answer, but somehow it's the only solution we ever use because deliberation is hard and requires relinquishing a bit of control.
It's why I can't stand the 'information wants to be free' argument. Where the hell do you think that intellectual labor required comes from, the aether?
Assuming your goal is to understand - yes, that thinking is a product of time when people were altruistically publishing very high quality content on the web. The time before adspam, blogspam, llmspam, etc. You could punch queries into search engines and find no-nonsense sites with detailed information, not trying to sell you anything but rather just wanting to be the most complete resource about a certain topic.
I'm not saying that ethos works for million dollar movie production. But on the other hand the ethos of people needing to be paid evidently doesn't work for high quality informational content, given that it has all but disappeared in the torrent of commercialized/intermediated spam.
This wasn't meant to be a moral argument. It's not the information yearns for liberation and we ought to provide it. It's a physics analogy. Like a ball 'wants' to roll downhill. Free is the lowest entropy state of information.
I did not take it for granted at all. My DVDs can not be cancelled, do not require internet or streaming accounts. Most of them have bonus features that the streaming providers do not always offer. Solar power and a portable player means I am not restricted to books during a prolonged power outage. Please do bring back a greater DVD boom but do not bring in any physical media that requires checking for a license.
With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.
My experiences with streaming vary.
- You need multiple services with the accompanying headaches.
- some content will still get yanked
- if you don't subscribe to netflix for 6 months they delete your account and you lose lists you had
- quality can be poor depending on circumstance. Even with something like chromecast 4k, netflix doesn't offer way to enforce 4k quality but seems to decidw by itself. The picture looks bad with no way to tell why.
I just bought the complete Dynasty series, about 200 episodes (so sue me over my bad taste), and so far about 5 of the episodes won't play all the way through.
I have never experienced a problem with DVD playback that wasn't obviously caused by extreme scratches. I don't even understand how a DVD player could "crash" in most cases. They are just a pipe from a DVD drive to an ASIC that hasn't had to change in 20 years. There's nothing to crash. "Bad" data either fails a checksum and skips or will give you weird microblock artifacts.
Are these actual DVD players or some sort of weird computer system that software decodes DVDs?
Do you want a photo of them? :-) Sheesh!
Sorry did I suggest other people in the house were a requirement? Nah, it just does that anyway. Too many points of failure between the endpoint and the provider, and way too much distrust that the user may try to capture the footage once they have it, to solve all of the above problems, because the license holders don't like that.
I've got gigabit fiber now, but in my last place I had 76mbps (but in practice it was more like 60 or so). We were able to watch two streams, with my wife's instagram and my reddit scrolling comfortably. The only reason we upgraded was when we moved 1) fiber was cheaper, and 2) I changed jobs and all of a sudden needed to download far more build files (hundreds of gigabytes a week)
If we had 4 people streaming different things we might have struggled.
On the article itself: indeed sometimes I enjoyed the directors commentaries as much as the films or shows themselves. In particular Requiem for a Dream, where the director's commentary adds a lot of context.
As I mentioned, I have accumulated several DVD players over the years (different brands, even a blue ray), and all of them exhibit this characteristic.
The only commentary I've enjoyed are the Eddie Mueller ones commenting on film noir. I'll watch the movie, then re-watch it with Eddie. Good stuff!
With streaming, on the other hand, I have intermittent hangs and stuttering every few weeks, and navigating the video is worse than with physical discs (no chapter stops, skipping forward/backwards often takes longer to resync/rebuffer the stream), switching subtitles and audio language takes more steps, and other inconveniences.
Unless your provider or server is running low on bandwidth, then it stutters or lowers the quality :D
With both disks and internet my method is to copy the entire content locally before watching it. I do it even for youtube videos (also because the browser doesn't prevent screen dimming but the video player does).
I miss when studios and directors would actually edit movies properly. If Anchorman were released today on Netflix, it would have been a 2 hour 15 minute slog, with 10 minutes of laughs here and there, rather than the sharp and hilarious 90 minute comedy that it was.
Also: There's always been bad movies, we just tend to forget them.
The loss of DVD sales has changed the type of movies that are being created.
Matt Damon himself has explained how Good Will Hunting would not get made today because of this.
It is really simple too if you think of yourself as the investor in the film getting pitched. "Will Hunting, a genius-level IQ but chooses to work as a janitor at MIT. When he solves a difficult graduate-level math problem, his talents are discovered by a professor"
Only an idiot would invest in that in 2024 but we are way past that. I imagine no one would even bother pitching that at all in 2024. Certainly wouldn't get a meeting with anyone.
There was a golden era of film not long ago and that era is gone forever. The Fountain might be the best example though. I love that movie but it lost millions of dollars even at the height of the golden era.
The future is going to be AI Batman vs Superman part 276.
For this reason budget and revenues of series have increased dramatically and series are more and more produced like movies. This probably created an artistic and talent shift from movies to series.
There were a lot of shitty movies too back in the days but some never even reached the theaters and were only sold on VHS and DVDs.
TV shows have been more a case of you may have missed yesterdays show, but want to see today's show. The format doesn't lend to complex plots because of the limited time to resolve them, and anything long term means people are seeing spoilers. Thus they tend to focus on characters, so you can watch in more or less any order.
I used those to "learn" French and German and the subtitles never matched what was said. When you are advanced in the language you don't care, but when you are learning it is a big flaw.
The DVD usually only had English (and another one) audio tracks, subtitles in several languages, but not audio. You had to buy another DVD from Amazon.de or something, when it was way harder than today.
I find arcade games or classics like Sonic or Mario, brilliant, even today. Sometimes the emulator is not properly setup: Nobody saw individual pixels on CRT screens.
Not that VHS didn't have ads. I remember my little mermaid VHS that had a few minutes of promo for disneyland before starting.
But at least you could skip past it.
"I feel like watching a movie, NAS" vs "I feel like watching a movie, ETA: 4 hours"
And besides my TV is dumb enough that I'm proud of it. It supports DNLA and works well.
I rewatched Firefly on the whim the other week and now Malcom In The Middle because I own them on DVD.
Not available anywhere else digitally, at least with my subscription's.
one thing with dvd era - it allowed small scale / budget movies to made. movies that were not blockbusters but allowed art exploration.
They don't need to consider making DVD's and shipping them all around the world in the hope people will buy them.
There is so much content we consume that is made by small productions that likely wouldn't have been seen my many around the world unless they managed to get their hands on the DVD.
Back when I used to make digital copies of DVD's to watch on my PC, I used software that would specifically remove all of the menu's and bonus content and just digitise the movie itself to save space.
Yes it was cool, but I just wanted the movie.
I stopped buying DVDs around 2005-ish: With BluRay coming around, and everyone saying that film was closer to 4k, why would I want to invest in a disk, only to need to rebuy it in BluRay and then 4k every few years? I also realized that most movies I only watch once, so streaming makes a lot more sense.
Now that I have a 4k player I've gone back to buying 4k disks if I think I'll re-watch them.
I kind of think that if media ownership remained a priority, and the focus was on an improved home experience instead of increasing consumption via streaming, things would've turned out broadly better. Then again, I look at series that never would've had a chance in the old media environment (Invincible, The Boys, Hasbin Hotel, The Amazing Digital Circus, etc), and I'm reminded that nostalgia for the past is a powerful reality warp.
All that being said, ultimately the strongest voice inside of me is that of the librarian: "Thank f*k all this media uses the same dimensions for a change. All those fancy-pants novelty boxes were a real pain to keep organized and pristine."