doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
Because the person is usually a friend or a friend of a friend.
Has Blu-Ray failed?
- Thread starter 23skidoo
- Start date
Why not use the material you already have on hand to pad out the package? If Hollywood didn't include these features in the Blu-Ray package, people would cry it was a 'conspiracy' to make you buy multiple copies of the same show or movie.
To this consumer, Blu-Ray has exceeded expectations. More detailed picture, better color reproduction and deeper, crisper sound. I currently have two players... a Playstation 3 and a Magnavox ($128 @ Wal-Mart). Both play flawlessly anything (Blu-ray/DVD) I put in them.
I've noticed in my area that the Blu-Ray selection is expanding quickly at retailers. Not sure where people are buying movies for $30 on Blu-Ray, they are more expensive, but I usually only pay $2 or $3 dollars above the DVD price for a movie. Bought Modern Family season 1 on Blu-Ray at the local Wal-Mart for $44.96, the DVD was $39.96. I was more than happy to pay the additional five dollars for the superior product. YMMV.
^Yeah, my local Best Buy has even begun to shrink its DVD section in favor of Blu-Ray, and the prices really aren't that different anymore. Blu-Ray is usually about $5 more for a movie, $10 more for seasons of TV, but sometimes they have awesome sales that actually make the Blu-Rays cheaper than DVDs.
I don't think Blu-Ray has failed at all, and I don't even think regular DVDs are finished just yet. I know plenty of people who are still buying/renting both.
I still like to bring up Laser Disc on occasion. The next "big thing" between VHS and DVD that never took off. Part of the problem there was the size of the discs and the price. It never quite took off. Blu-Ray has fared better, no question, but it has not done the VHS-DVD leap.
Blu-Ray is still firmly a middle release to me. It's better than DVD just like Laser Disc was better than VHS but what's the next technology after Blu-Ray? Digital? Digital is probably an ancillary at this stage. There will always be a demand for a physical format and until technology is at a point that digital is less volatile (oops, that magnet got too close to the harddrive or oops, that power surge just blew up your computer, or oops, the harddrive wore out and now your entire collection of digital copies is dead) I think we'll continue to see new physical formats take precedence.
Blu-Ray is still firmly a middle release to me. It's better than DVD just like Laser Disc was better than VHS but what's the next technology after Blu-Ray? Digital? Digital is probably an ancillary at this stage. There will always be a demand for a physical format and until technology is at a point that digital is less volatile (oops, that magnet got too close to the harddrive or oops, that power surge just blew up your computer, or oops, the harddrive wore out and now your entire collection of digital copies is dead) I think we'll continue to see new physical formats take precedence.
Laserdisc was expensive, bulky, you had to swap discs multiple times over the course of the playback and, IIRC, it's quality wasn't that much better than VHS to be worth the expense and trouble.
Personally, I'll really upgrade when physical media goes from BluRay to UV-Ray.
Personally, I'll really upgrade when physical media goes from BluRay to UV-Ray.
And similarly, Blu-Ray is not that big an upgrade from DVD when compared fairly. It's an upgrade, that's not the question, the fact is though the quality is not the leap from VHS to DVD that was. Blu-Ray also has some flaws in it as every technology does.
They have it tied to the internet which is inevitable everything with a computer chip will be but it also currently allows them to lock you out of the system if they decide they don't like the "after market" alterations you make. Anything that effectively disables and bricks your hardware because the manufacturer doesn't like what you're doing (legal or not) is immediately something to be wary of.
They have it tied to the internet which is inevitable everything with a computer chip will be but it also currently allows them to lock you out of the system if they decide they don't like the "after market" alterations you make. Anything that effectively disables and bricks your hardware because the manufacturer doesn't like what you're doing (legal or not) is immediately something to be wary of.
The real question for me is: what is going to happen after Blu-Ray? DVD is an already awesome format, and Blu-Ray is basically just a way more awesome DVD. But now that we have Blu-Ray, what can be done to make it better? I can't really see them making the picture or sound any clearer than it is, and I sincerely doubt 3-D is going to be a huge hit. So really, what will the next big format change entail? Will it simply be a matter of data storage? Get rid of discs altogether and replace them with a better physical storage device?
The next format is the question. I think there will be a point we have holodeck-esque entertainment but that's a long ways off. Before that we'll probably have "true" 3D in the form of some kind of holographic display. The current 3D is just an illusion to make you see in 3D. When we have holographic displays, you'll be able to see from any or almost any angle.
Laserdisc was a format for videophiles. VHS produced a resolution of 250x480 Laserdisc was 425x480. DVD is 720x480. It had a lot of the extras that most people associate with DVD's. Commentaries, multiple languages, chapters etc. in a lot of cases the audio from Laserdiscs was actually superior to DVD. It would output uncompressed PCM in CD quality. It could also have an analog soundtrack as well. Output in DTS was twice the bitrate of DVD's. The video is analog so it does not suffer from compression artifacts like macroblocking.
However, like you mentioned. Laserdiscs were bulky, harder to find. You had to swap discs sometimes. The players themselves are highly susceptible to wear and tear.
As for Blu-Ray. I think it will be around for a while. Everyone is touting streaming content and digital content as the next big thing but it is going to take a while to get there. Physical media will always be around. Anyone can go to a store and buy a player or a movie. Not everyone has access to downloadable content. Until the infrastructure is dramatically upgraded physical media will always be superior in terms of quality.
Increased picture quality will certainly happen. 35mm film already has much more information than will show up on any home video format--including 1080p HD. The 4K scans they're doing for many films have much more information in their images than can show up at simple 1080p resolutions--so the transition to an even greater picture quality will be pretty easy in the case of some transfers. But that will require even better televisions, which I don't see happening in the near future.
Actually when done strictly by the numbers the upgrade in picture quality is leaps and bounds ahead of VHS to DVD.
VHS is 250x480 which is 120000 pixels
DVD is 720x480 which is 245600 pixels
BR is 1920x1080 which is 2073600 pixels
DVD has a 2.88x increase in the number of pixels over VHS
BR has a 6x increase in the number of pixels over DVD
It's kind of unfair to compare the leap in quality between the formats because VHS is an analog format that is subject to noise and quality loss over repeated viewings and time. Pre recorded movies on VHS in SP were good quality. Most people however only remember the quality after the 100th viewing. Or the quality of the shows recorded off of TV in SLP format.
The biggest problem that I see is that most people sit too far away from their TV's to notice the difference between DVD and BR. Maximum viewing distance on a 42 inch 1080p screen is only 5.5 feet. Any farther than that and the added resolution and detail starts to lose its effectiveness.
I believe current resolutions are pushing the limits of what the human-eye can really see.
I think this is the biggest issue. It was just 10 years ago that it was predicted that today our computers would pretty much be "dumb terminals" and your OS, your storage, etc. would all be off-site in massive servers. The problem is people don't upgrade that often and as fast as it does move technology doesn't move that fast due to resistance of time, money, and techno-luddite-ism. Many, many people today still don't even have broadband internet service and still use dial-up. Dial-up!
My best-friend has Netflix through his 360 through cable-internet and he's often talking about how much the quality on it shifts around from high-quality to low-quality and, IIRC, it's not even capable of HD quality. So, yeah, I don't think the technology or even the infrastructure is "there" yet. I mean we can do it but we can also have wireless internet available to everyone, everywhere. There's just no system in place to do it.
I think this is the biggest issue. It was just 10 years ago that it was predicted that today our computers would pretty much be "dumb terminals" and your OS, your storage, etc. would all be off-site in massive servers. The problem is people don't upgrade that often and as fast as it does move technology doesn't move that fast due to resistance of time, money, and techno-luddite-ism. Many, many people today still don't even have broadband internet service and still use dial-up. Dial-up!
My best-friend has Netflix through his 360 through cable-internet and he's often talking about how much the quality on it shifts around from high-quality to low-quality and, IIRC, it's not even capable of HD quality. So, yeah, I don't think the technology or even the infrastructure is "there" yet. I mean we can do it but we can also have wireless internet available to everyone, everywhere. There's just no system in place to do it.
UHDTV 7680x4320 16:9 format. About equal to 33.2 megapixels. (kinda makes the current 2 megapixel BR look quaint)
Audio is 22.2 Channels. 9 above you, 10 at ear level, 3 below you, and 2 subwoofer channels. (Eat that 7.1 True HD)
I agree. When 6 feet back from a 42 inch display is "too far" then we are reaching that limit. The higher the pixel density closer you have to be to reap the benefits.
And it will be a long time before everyone has broadband. Let alone broadband fast enough to support good quality streaming or acceptable download times on digital content.
I don't know the bandwidth restrictions in the US but in Canada an SD netflix stream is about 1.5 megabits per second. HD is available on some shows and it is 3.8 megabits/second. So an HD stream consumes about 1.7 Gigabytes per hour. That can put a big dent in any bandwidth cap your ISP might enforce.
Not very noticeable at all really. You would need a much bigger screen for the benefits to become apparent. We are talking a wall sized TV here. (200 inches) Or a large screen built into a bay window. Or the viewscreen of the Enterprise in Trek XI
Heck, that resolution is far higher than digital movies projected in the theaters. About twice the resolution of 70mm Imax films actually You asked how much better it could get, I just posted info about a proposed next gen TV format
BTW. I do apologize for spouting off seemingly incomprehensible numbers. I sometimes forget that I can go a bit overboard in my geekspeak. Maybe this link will give a clearer picture than I can. <---- See what I did there
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ultra-high-definition2.htm
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Okay, by those numbers it's an improvement but only under certain circumstances will it be noticed.
And yet it's entirely the point. People went from VHS to DVD. That change is immense. The fact DVD's don't wear out from the first to thousandth view is why people are slower to jump to Blu-Ray. The difference in quality is just not that big to the average human eye with the average television and average set up.
Once again, people aren't looking to sit right up on their television to see a difference. They want to sit a reasonable distance away to get the feel of the home theater experience. If it requires the latest HDTV, connections and a Blu-Ray player to see it and then must sit within 5.5 feet, most people are just going to stick with their "lesser" DVD quality which can still be upscaled and look nice on a 42" or smaller television.
Despite the videophiles such as yourself seeing all this as a big upgrade, most average people are just not convinced. It's not the change people are looking for, especially after only a decade of DVD acceptance and the large numbers of DVD's people own and feel obligated to upgrade just for a moderate increase in video fidelity.
Yeah, but I guess that was my whole point. You can improve things all you want, but at some point it stops being practical. Blu-Ray is a huge improvement over DVD, and you can still watch it in your living room. How much better than Blu-Ray can a home entertainment device actually get while remaining practical for the average person?
Not very noticeable at all really. You would need a much bigger screen for the benefits to become apparent. We are talking a wall sized TV here. (200 inches) Or a large screen built into a bay window. Or the viewscreen of the Enterprise in Trek XI
You asked how much better it could get, I just posted info about a proposed next gen TV format
Whereas I make absolutely no attempt to know what those numbers mean. If I were to describe the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray, I would say, "Blu-Ray is way prettier."
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