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Comment by NathanielK | Hacker News Reader

My local library never made the jump to Blu-Ray and still only has DVDs. They have physical copies of video games too though.

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I don’t know the stats but I would guess more people have DVD players then Blu-Ray, so it makes sense for libraries to rather offer DVDs. DVDs is also one of these things that is good enough. The jump in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is very unnoticeable (when fully immersed) compared to e.g. between VHS and DVD (or even between vinyl and CD).

Yeah bluray is really only necessary for 4k. And dvd probably beats streaming quality

Uhm, no. What are basing this on?

The jump in quality from DVD to Blu-ray is huge, as much as it was from VHS to DVD. Going to 4k from there isn't noticeable, but going to HD in the first place is massive.

VHS was bad quality, DVD had good enough. The jump from bad to good enough has a much better impact then from good enough to amazing. While most people will make the switch to go from bad to good enough, not many will make the effort to switch from good enough to amazing, unless they are pushed in that direction.

The jump between vinyl and CD was also massive, but vinyl was still good enough. what CDs had though over the massive sound quality improvements was the added convenience of playing specific songs, not needing to turn it over, or play on the move in your car/walkman/etc, and added features such as easy skipping, shuffle, ripping, etc.

I would wager that it were those extra features + added convenience (and the cheaper price) which got people to switch to CDs over the massive improvements of sound quality. Blu-Ray had exactly the same features as DVDs (until publishers artificially decided to skip adding extra content on their DVD releases), were exactly as convenient to playing DVDs, but were more expensive. So I think for most people it simply wasn’t worth their time to upgrade from if all they got was to bump their picture quality from good enough to amazing.

DVDs and VHS are more or less the same resolution. And depending on encode quality some DVDs can be even worse, although unlikely to be a problem for mainstream releases.

This is an overly reductive argument. Resolution is only a relatively small part of the quality. Generally people value sound quality much higher, which DVD brought to CD level, and Blu-Ray has exactly the same sound quality (nobody has speakers for the 7.1 surround sound). VHS also had interlacing, and older VHS also had plenty of the tape artifacts polluting the image, DVDs had none of those.

At the end of the VHS era (when DVDs had already been available for years) maybe you had a good enough (picture) quality on the first few plays of the tape (which you still had to rewind etc.), but at the same time you could go to your local video rental get a 5 year old DVD that had been played hundreds of times, had the same (or slightly better) picture quality, much better sound quality, no need to rewind, and tons of extra features.

Lol most people buy an expensive TV for the display features and then use the crappy TV speakers that come with it. They do NOT care about sound. AT ALL.

And DVDs have interlacing too. True, they add the ability to not store the repeated fields from a telecine but that's mostly because the lossy codec would otherwise fuck things up even more. And not all movies even make use of this and even more don't use it for 100% of the frames.

And while DVD's don't have analogue artifacts, they do have a VERY BAD lossy codec with noticeable blocking. Add to that that contemporary encoders didn't even use the limited encoding space of that codec very well.

DVDs winning has nothing to do with quality but was all about convenience. Smaller package size. Don't have to be rewinded. Can be pressed for duplication instead of having to run through a long tape.

DVDs have pretty good bitrate, just lower res and old codecs. HD would be nice, but as long as you aren't using an old DVD player with composite, they look ok.

Much better than 480p youtube these days.

DVD bitrates are good for the resolution but without a codec that doesn't just waste those bits it doesn't mean anything.

4K is still a noticeable increase but, yes, much less so than going from NTSC/PAL resolutions (sometimes even halved horizontally due to interlacing) to 1080p.

That is very much not true and even less true when the blu-ray release comes from a new master that isn't limited by older technology.

If you are right and I am wrong, then that very much goes against the public perception. The switch to DVD was pretty quick and universally pretty well received. So the public was very much willing to spend their money and time to make the switch for the extra quality (or maybe the convenience) of DVD. The switch to Blu-Ray is still ongoing now what 20 years later, and it looks like it will never be complete.

In the eye of the public the quality of DVDs are obviously good enough, and the jump to Blu-Ray is simply not worth the time and effort to make the switch.

DVDs winning has nothing to do with quality but was all about convenience. Smaller package size. Don't have to be rewinded. Can't be entangled like a tape. Can be pressed for duplication instead of having to run through a long tape.

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