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Comment by jebarker | Hacker News Reader

> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes

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.

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I've started to look for old Blu-Ray disks because the quality of the image is generally much better.

As far as I know, you should also look for older Blu-Ray drive if you want to get content off the disks.

PS3s are cheap and work for every non-UHD blu-ray ever released. Top quality player

If you're worried about Aliens, I can confirm that it's gorgeous in 4k UHD and the color accuracy is much better than the prior (manually frame-by-frame denoised) 1080p blu-ray release

I liked it more than I thought I would, but the "AI fake" effect was a bit noticeable here and there. After watching the 4k UHD, I put in my Blu-ray from 10 years ago or whatever, sort of thinking I was going to prefer it's "less digital" graininess, but nope. Definitely found it more distracting than I'd remembered.

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.

This is how I feel about it as well. It's not perfect, but it is the best, prettiest version of Aliens, hands down. James Cameron is notoriously picky about the quality of the re-releases of his films and I honestly think this was the best outcome here. Yes, a "grindhouse" style 4K HDR transfer of the original film negative would also be nice in order to get that classic film grain for those who are in the mood for it, but as it is, the release we got was exceptionally high quality even with its imperfections.

Aliens and True Lies were the two i've heard most bad reviews for

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