Blu-ray vs. every other consumer technology (2010) - Page 8

Since DVD distribution didn't take off in the US until 2003 why did you ask a question where there was no correct answer? Personally I had a DVD player in 2001, looking at my Amazon history I started purchasing DVDs from Amazon in 2002.

And currently I purchase the majority (over 90%) of my movies (99% are Blu-rays) from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. This has nothing to do with the lack of a store selling Blu-ray movies, those are around, generally one of the Amazons are much cheaper.

My first DVD player was my 1999 blue iMac. That is when I started buying DVDs. At the time brick and mortar media stores in New York had a huge selection of DVDs. Tower, Virgin Megastore, The Wiz...and so on. None of those stores exist anymore.


That's fine that Amazon is your primary DVD retailer. My point is that Amazon did not absorb the lost sales from the closed brick and mortar stores. Where did those sales go?

What year did you get the DVD drive for the iMac, Apple did sell one then. In New Zealand every DVD store I purchased DVDs from still exist, and they still sell DVDs and Blu-rays and CDs. I would list the store names but they wouldn't mean anything to you.


What makes you think anyone has absorbed those sales changes. As has been noted the fall in DVD sales isn't being picked up by any media type, downloads or Blu-rays, the industry as a whole is down.

Personally I do not purchase anywhere near the number of movies I used to (I used to purchase 75-100 per year, now would be under 10-20 a year), I now have close access to a video rental store (5 minute walk) and use that now instead

I think his point was that physical revenue is down and digital revenue is up. This is evidenced by the almost complete dissapearence of physical media specialty retail chains. While online sale of physical media is up, the overall trend is still down.

It is fully acknowledged that different countries are at different points along this transition.

Most people cant play the 8 tracks, various speeds of records, or cassette tapes that they bought over the past few decades either. The same is true for laserdisc, beta, divx discs (the other divx), and VHS. These can be converted, but this is almost never done except for perhaps things like wedding videos.

Your point about mp3 or aac eventually not being supported is technically true. But have we seen that happen yet with an industry standard non-drm audio or video file format? My guess is that it isnt likely to happen quicker than for physical media.

As for market segmentation, copyrights are most definitely at the center of the issue. Licenses to distribute physical and digital forms are typically negotiated separately. Copyright holders and the copyright enforcement organizations are precisely why you cant buy what you want from iTunes unless you have a credit card from the right country.

I don't think the movie industry wants digital downloads to take off because if your broadband is fast enough to download a large movie, it's fast enough to download a large movie for free. This is why Apple's streaming-only model is the only way legitimate online movies will work. Instant-on is the one advantage you can't give people with P2P but it really should be mixed with pay-per-view for the best advantage. If providers can bypass net neutrality and filter bandwidth based on content, they should support it much more fully as it means file-sharing is throttled to benefit streaming (though there can be exceptions).

The level of broadband needed to reach this level is not all that high. People always say they want Blu-Ray for the highest quality but HD-DVD was fine and was at most 30GB. This means the bitrate is about 45Mbits and in many cases was just mpeg-2 encoding.

AVC encoding can easily manage 2x better encoding at the same bitrate. I'd say the most needed for 1080p is around 15MBits/s, which is a 10GB file for a 90 minute movie.

This would suggest that given the minimum broadband rating is 4MBits and what the vast majority of people will have, 1080p streaming can't happen on a large scale yet and possibly not for a while. PSN manages it with 8Mbits but likely not that many users. 720p however should be fine in the 4-8Mbits range and I don't hear any complaints about 720p quality not being good enough while people are watching it.

Does this mean that Blu-Ray is the only solution for offline high bitrate video? No, we have SD cards, which are way more compact. They are expensive right now but they can easily be reusable. Instead of Amazon shipping you a BD-R, you ship them an SD card, they copy a movie onto it and ship it back. You only need a 16GB card and you can watch it on a netbook or ultraportable.

Not that there's anything wrong with Blu-Ray particularly as a format, the drives just doesn't need to go inside the computer.

I think Apple should support Blu-Ray decoding, authoring and burning so long as it doesn't involve unreasonable licensing and implementations. If the licensing is still problematic (which it must be), then we need to wait on the people who can change it to change it. They are the people to blame for all this.

I don't think Apple should sell Blu-Ray drives with Macs because you can fit 2 x 2.5" hard drive in place of an optical and slim BD-R drives are expensive. Why force people to have the bulk and expense of a drive they might never use?

1999. Yes Apple was the first computer manufacturer to sell DVD players in all of their computers at that point.


Once Netflix and Hulu come to NZ things will change.


The demand for movies and television is growing. The reason sales are down is because DVD at its hight was extremely lucrative. People are buying less and renting more.

Yes exactly.

As this is the "Blu-ray" thread you need to remember to split the physical media sales. DVD sales are generally down, Blu-ray sales are continuing to increase. Just like downloads, Blu-ray increases don't match the decrease in DVD sales.

Jolly good, another mistake for Wikipedia...



We have ondemand sites now, the quality is terrible, the data usage is terrible, and one network tries to charge you for the use.


And like I keep saying, and you keep ignoring, digital downloads (even rentals) are not currently matching the shortfall either

Then you keep missing the point.

They are still missing the interoperability, I don't want to be locked to one vendor for purchasing or renting movies, using the current systems I can play DVDs or Blu-rays on a number of devices from manufacturers, digital downloads (or renting), if I choose Apple, I have to use an Apple product to use it. Fine I have an Apple TV, oh, the price is 50% higher (on new releases, greater on older items) than walking 5 minutes to the video store, and the selection is smaller than the video store.

No one is denying that digital downloads are going to the be market leader product one day, it just isn't today, and won't be tomorrow.


Unless I am reading you wrong, it was the initial Blu-ray releases that were MPEG2, the initial HD-DVD releases where VC1


The thing is, while you are watching it most qualities are ok, when you compare it to what you can get the Apple 720p and below are not nice.


If you have downgraded your 40GB movie to 16GB is it really high bitrate anymore? And don't forget audio, the vast majority of these Blu-ray movies have HD audio as well.

I just purchased a Blu-ray player. I don't yet own a single Blu-ray disk (although I plan to).

The model I bought also has built-in WiFi and streams Netflix, Pandora, and CinemaNow. We watch streaming Netflix shows and movies pretty regularly.

The player cost $130.

It replaced a HTPC that we were using to pretty much do the exact sasme thing: watch Netflix and DVDs. Now the HTPC has been put to better use.

I'm with those who like to have a physical, "original", full quality copy of media on-hand for several reasons.

I'm extremely finicky when it comes to quality. Most people either don't care about or can't tell the difference between MP3 quality and CD quality, but I can. Same with video.

Now sure, I own an iPod Touch and I enjoy watching videos and listening to music on it even though they're not original quality. With an iPod, it's about convenience and portability, anyway.

But there are times when I want to watch a movie or listen to a song in all it's "original glory". It makes a world of difference to me.

I also like having a physical copy as a backup. Sure, you can backup digital copies on hard drives, thumb drives, etc. But in most cases you're backing up a copy that is not original, lossless quality. And if you are backing up all your media in its original quality to a hard drive, you'll need an awful lot of space depending on the size of your media library.

Someday, if on-demand digital and streaming media can be delivered at lossless or near lossless quality and internet bandwidth can accommodate it, I may change my mind!

Lastly, much media simply cannot yet be obtained via the internet and the physical media must be acquired in order to enjoy it.

For example years ago I wanted the Japanese edition of soundtrack to a PSOne video game (Wild Arms). For all I know, it may now be available as a legal digital download somewhere, but it wasn't back then. And I don't condone media piracy. I scoured the internet, finally found an online CD store that sold it at a fair price and ordered a copy.

Here it is: iMac DV/SE



Yes on demand existed in the US before Netflix and Hulu existed. What they did was organize the business model into something that works and is popular.


I'm not ignoring that. Its not my point that download/streaming will be as popular as DVD. None of the distribution methods will ever replace DVD at its height. Home movie distribution is splintering among several different options. DVD, Blu-ray, downloading, streaming, cable television, video on demand.

Interoperability matters more for ownership than renting and I think the distinction between them is important. I would say Blu-Ray is ideal for ownership but you don't need to own every film. If you watch a film less than 3 times, you will save money renting over owning. This will apply to the vast majority of the media you consume.

So is Blu-Ray better for rental? I don't think so. The quality is comparable:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/art...he-comparison/

Sure if you watch each one side-by-side, frame-stepping through each from 12 inches away on a 60" TV, you will see the differences but at a reasonable viewing distance, watching each separately, you will get a pleasing experience with both and streaming is more convenient.


Realistically, how many devices can you watch a Blu-Ray or even DVD movie on? Netbook? Not without another external drive. Mobile phone? No, not unless a version is provided on the disc and you have the facility to copy it off the disc. This pretty much limits you to your TV system in the case of Blu-Ray.


But is it soon enough that we can ignore Blu-Ray in the near-term? Blu-Ray is fine for ownership and data archiving but there's no urgency to support it, especially if the licensing is unreasonable.


In that case, the bitrate measure would be the 35-50GB movies on Blu-Ray but the required bitrates for streaming are in the same range.


But I can use the same line of thinking to say that Blu-Ray isn't good enough. 1080p30 8bpc isn't good enough. I want the full 4k 60FPS, 10-bit original movie in uncompressed format at 8GBit/s. There's always going to be a compromise up until you reach the original version. The question is at what point do you stop caring about quality?

Usually it's when the quality comes at an inconvenience or expense. Blu-Ray is already an inconvenience and expense IMO because the files are huge and the discs are slow and noisy and a lot of people have had to upgrade hardware. Say you don't get a mobile format on your BD-R disc, ripping and encoding can take over 3 hours, assuming you even have a Blu-Ray drive for your computer and a way of running Windows. The same process from a DVD takes 15-30 minutes.

Out of 40GB, about 15-20GB is video file and rest is versions of HD audio (compressed and uncompressed), other language audio tracks, and other junk in most cases, unless the disc is encoded with MPEG2.

The HD audio is possible with 1.5Mbps DD+ track and only adds about 1-2 GB of data. DD+ is compressed, but it still is HD audio.

So, yes, you can have high bitrate HD video & audio experience with about 15 to 20 GB of data for most movies in 1080p. Now, if you can compromise to 720p or 1080i, you can reduce to 1/2 the required data size to 1080p fromat at the same bit rate.

I only have a 40" TV, I can tell without issue if I am watching TV, DVD, Apple TV, or a Blu-ray, it isn't that hard.


I can take my Blu-ray to any other place that has a blu-ray play and play that movie, I can't do that with the current digital download systems.



You need to update your sayings, they licensing argument was solved a long time ago.



For me it is easy, why would I pay more for a product of lesser quality. Digital downloads are more expensive and poorer quality than Blu-ray, as a consumer it doesn't make sense for me to support it.


You may need to purchase smarter if this is your impression of Blu-ray, my Blu-rays players are not noisy, they are not slow, I have owned one for 3.5 years, still works fine, plays all movies. They are not expensive (players are NZ$150 now), the movies are not expensive (Apple HD movies are more expensive to purchase, more expensive to rent).

If you want to go the portable route, then maybe blu-ray isn't the right choice for you, but I don't really want to watch all my movies on a 2-4 inch screen.

While Dolby Digital Plus is an advancement over DD, it is not HD audio, and shouldn't be confused with HD audio. I think you will find movies that contain HD audio formats like DTS-HDMA or TrueHD have a slightly larger audio track than your suggested enhanced audio formats.

If you are sitting close enough, sure. The further back you go the less noticeable the difference.




I can plug an iPod, iPhone, iPad into any television with AV ports and the play video. Every television has AV ports, not every television has a Blu-ray player.

Once they make AirPlay an open API. You will be able to stream video content to any device that supports it.



As I said this will change when you guys receive Netflix and Hulu type services. Paying Netflix $12 or Hulu $10 a month is a great deal cheaper than buying Blu-ray discs.


You keep bringing this up as though it is the only online content service.

Exactly! I just discovered Vudu's selection of $.99 movie rentals. That's cheap enough to lure cheapskates like me into renting movies again. Wow does HDX look good, especially for just one dollar!

The main difference between 720p ATV and Blu-Ray is the sharpness. The following is a scan showing XVid, DVD, 720p and 1080p from top to bottom:



1080p is at best slightly sharper than 720p. 720p is 2/3rds the picture size of 1080p. It may be that some streaming services show other visual artifacts but the bitrate Apple use should be high enough for 720p.


Of course you can. You can take your iPad that you rent a movie on round to someone else's house who has an Apple TV and view the movie or even plug a device into the TV. I've played iTunes movies off my iPhone on a TV. In the case of iTunes rentals, you need to have an Apple device to stream it to but it's not the case for all rentals.


The licensing was changed a while ago but no one said their changes made it acceptable.


It makes perfect sense because they are more convenient and the cost and quality difference is negligible to most people. You can buy/rent a movie and start watching it within seconds without leaving your seat.


That's just for the Blu-Ray player attached to the TV though. When you get the Blu-Ray player for the computer in order to get the ability to play anywhere, that's when the price gets higher and you notice the noise. For a slight improvement in sharpness it's not worth it. Some streaming services are instant-on too, Blu-Ray can take as much as 25 seconds to load the disc.


Me neither but I want to be able to watch any of them on a mobile device when I go away for a break and it's all I have with me. Also, a lot of people are portable now - 70% of all computer owners are buying laptops/netbooks now and I don't have to say how popular mobile devices and tablets are. I would be shocked to see tablets supporting Blu-Ray, which means that you have to find an alternative way of watching movies on them.

You are wrong again. You mean to say that DD+ is not a lossless HD audio, but it is HD audio. The HD audio track formats vary from compressed & uncompressed, lossy and lossless.

Has there been a suggestion that it might be opened? Or was it like Facetime, where Apple quietly dropped any mention of sending it to a standards body or otherwise producing a specification?

One those Steve Jobs emails. Someone asked him about when will Air Print and Air Play be available to more devices. His reply, "we are working on it, all in due time."

I know its heresay, but I don't see any advantage for Apple to limit the use of Air Print and Air Play. I can see them rolling it out slowly to make sure it works.

True, and if I turn the TV off I can't tell any difference.



All at SD resolutions... Oh wait, you can use that new format VGA now.



Again, locking you into one vendor, Apple won't open up AirPlay.



Well that really depends on what you watch, and when you want to watch it. SkyTV is currently releasing an online system, I don't want to pay them them watch old programs. The prices you list would be double by the time they come here, so NZ$24 to $30 a month is more expensive than renting a tonne of movies or TV shows on blu-ray. Then, I have to pay for the delivery system as well, jacking the price up some more.


Where I live it basically is the only way of getting movies online, hence why I bring it up. Now since you live in basically the richest city in the world, maybe you see things differently than the rest of the world.

No, I think you will find you are wrong.

Go lookup DD+, then lookup TrueHD and DTS-HDMA, DD+ is not a HD format, it is an enhanced format.

Since this sharpness comes from a much higher resolution and much higher bitrate I would still prefer the quality Blu-ray gives me.



Someone else's house that has an Apple TV... Apart from myself, I don't know anyone that has an AppleTV, and I have the original, so no Airplay, and I don't own an iPad or iPhone, or iPod touch, so that is no good either.

Interoperability needs to be implement before digital downloads can take off, you can't assume everyone will purchase from the one manufacturer because it won't happen.


Lots of people have said it is more acceptable, I think what you are trying to say is Apple hasn't said it is more acceptable.


Seconds? I can't watch an preview on my AppleTV without it stopping every two seconds to buffer some more.




My Apple TV can take 25 seconds to start up sometimes, what is your point? And stop with the slight stuff, it is more than slight.



Personally if it is one way of the other, I prefer the higher quality option, I'm afraid Blu-ray wins here again.

you can learn about it from dolby.

http://www.dolby.com/consumer/unders...s-details.html

It is HD audio, but not in a total lossless format. Just like in the video market, 720p/1080i is considered HD as well as 1080p.

i live in Canada. places that sell pre-recorded entertainment on physical media persist alongside their online storefronts.

i have an opinion of DD+ but we don't need yet another subthread

i would like to know, however, if anyone reading this knows which films on Blu-ray have the DD+ audio track. in my library of about 20 discs, none of them have DD+. the Blu-ray spec mentions that DD+ is optional as well.

Been watching HD downloads for a while now, and I have HD TV broadcast on various channels, in fact I'm watching Wall-E on HDTV right now!

The quality of these compressed broadcasts and downloads is vastly inferior in general to what you experience with a well made Blu-ray and a decent TV. Wall-E on Blu is incredible, the version I'm watching now is merely ok.

That's really vague........yes I know physical media sales persist. That's not in debate. The debate is about the decline of the sales of physical media. And the rise of on demand media.

There is always a compromise in quality for convenience.

The movie you are watching on Blu-ray is a compromise in quality for convenience. A Blu-ray disc is more convenient to use than a thirty pound reel of film and a 35mm projector. The thirty pound reel of film is of higher visual and sound quality than the Blu-ray disc.

For many people the convenience of watching a movie right now without having to leave my home is worth the compromise in quality.

What's to debate? Physical media will ultimately die out, but at the moment for the best viewing experience you need a blu-ray player.

Have you tried a Vudu HDX stream yet?

Yes, but thank goodness we have the choice of watching films like Blade Runner in all their maximised amazingness rather than only being able to download inferior versions. And unless you live in a place devoid of shops or the internet buying a disc is hardly an effort. I'd rather not receive a Netflix download for Christmas either thanks very much.

I download or record off the TV most of my casual HD viewing, but I have many of my favourite films on blu-ray and the best ones are just brilliant. No comparison.

Nope. How do I get it on my TV?

No one's saying that downloads and TV wont get up to speed eventually, I mean current HD technology and streaming is still in its infancy really and there'll be Super HD or whatever before too long. But for the here and now picking up a disc for a few dollars gives the best pics, and if you love film, why not make use of it? Like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Like I say, 720p is 2/3 the size of 1080p. That's not much lower resolution. It's not even the difference between the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 screen. The following chart has an indicator of screen size to viewing distance benefits based on 20/20 vision:



So if you have a 40" TV, the difference between 720p and 1080p is visible when you are 5ft away from the screen. 10ft away from a 60" screen and you'd see some benefit in 1080p.

The full article promotes 1080p as according to the following chart based on the THX guidelines:



"1080p is the lowest resolution to fall within the recommended seating distance range. Any resolution less than 1080p is not detailed enough if you are sitting the proper distance from the screen. For me and many people with large projection screens, 1080p is the minimum resolution you'd want."

But that's if you have a projector. The conclusion is the following:

"If you are a videophile with a properly setup viewing room, you should definitely be able to notice the resolution enhancement that 1080p brings. However, if you are an average consumer with a flat panel on the far wall of your family room, you are not likely to be close enough to notice any advantage. Check the chart above and use that to make your decision.

ISF states the the most important aspects of picture quality are (in order): 1) contrast ratio, 2) color saturation, 3) color accuracy, 4) resolution."

http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter


I don't know anyone including myself who owns Blu-Ray. They all have XBox 360s.


There's an agreement being worked on to that effect. I can't remember the name of it but there are discussions to allow you to buy a movie on one format and own it on any distribution. I'm not entirely sure how it will work as bandwidth has to be paid for so if you buy a Blu-Ray disc, how would Apple make money if you could also download it for free?


Well, either that or they have found it acceptable and are in the process of adopting it. What I'm fairly sure about is that the laptops will never get the drives. They simply don't need them built-in.


It doesn't work with dial-up.


It doesn't take 25 seconds for every movie not including inserting/ejecting the disc and putting them in the packet.


For you it does, that's fine. Not everyone puts picture quality first just like with video games. For me personally it's accessibility, then content, then quality. I can watch movies ok on an iPhone screen and have exclusively watched some movies on an iPhone screen. I wouldn't say it's a great experience at that level but my point is that not everyone sees picture quality as the ultimate deciding factor in the success or failure of a distribution format.

You are right that Blu-Ray sales grew more than VOD last year:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118029765?refCatId=14

but overall sales are going down. This means that the DVD buyers are moving to Blu-Ray, which you'd expect but overall, that market is dropping to favour VOD, which has now reached over 12% marketshare and grown over 50%.


You will see more compression artifacts on cable than a VOD service like ATV so you won't be getting a true comparison between just the resolution.

720p and 1080p images within the same scale can vary enormously. You can download a 720p movie and it'll be vastly inferior in audio and video to another 720p video due to differing compression.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the best puddings at the moment are well produced blu-rays. Wont always be that way but that's where we are right now.

debate?! re-read what i said over at http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...&postcount=255

"yes, i do forsee a time when entertainment will be predominantly available without the option of physical media. this scenario, however, won't be available anytime soon. CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays will be around for years to come. this will be especially true in places where access to reliable and relatively fast broadband connectivity is cost prohibitive."