20 ms·

Bag of hurt

200 points by barredo 16y ago

sambeau 16y ago
Surely the internet has killed the need for little metal discs? I can't remember the last time I used one.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Yes it has, but was it the convenience of typing the name of a movie and streaming it? Or was it the convenience of watching a movie without having to navigate through commercials and menu options designed to ruin the movie experience? Check all that apply :-) One thing that absolutely killed DVDs for me was having children. If you ever want to put a movie on for kids, you want to put it on, press play, and watch. Navigating menus and ads just doesn't work for my kids, no way, no how. I had to handbrake my entire collection of family DVDs. I buy movies through iTunes. A DVD is a pain in the ass if you want to watch a movie with kids.
  - sambeau 16y ago
    Indeed - plus the fact that kids can scratch a DVD to the point of unusable within seconds.
  - noonespecial 16y ago
    Its even worse in the car. Ever tried to start a Disney movie for a 3 year old while driving? For our own safety, every movie in the car is HandBraked from the original so it starts instantly when inserted. I can just about guarantee that a serious accident has been caused by those damn menus.
    - vl 16y ago
      Aren't you concerned that prolonged looking at the movie screen in the moving (and thus vibrating) vehicle will be bad for the kid's eyesight? I personally feel eye strain if I try to watch or read something on my iPhone for too long in a moving car (not so bad on a bus).
- potatolicious 16y ago
  The concept of broadband means the death of little metal discs. Companies like Comcast and AT&T are ensuring that we will need them forever.
  - MikeCapone 16y ago
    The Canadian regulators are trying very hard too. If it was only up to them, we'd have 60 gig caps and no viable indie ISPs...
- czhiddy 16y ago
  Likewise. I'm looking forward to when DVD/BD drives on laptops are replaced with additional batteries.
  - whatusername 16y ago
    Like these ones: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-73222.html http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-73222.html
- wewyor 16y ago
  Not for me, my internet choice is dsl (I think 1.2 Mbit which I currently have) and satellite. Hard tech rules rural America, as well as my parents' house.
- alex_h 16y ago
  It seems Sony has been on the wrong side of this twice now. They released MiniDisc just before digital music players and music downloads took off, and now a new and improved video disc just as the tide is turning toward video streaming. It seems they really should have learned from the first time.
- kalleboo 16y ago
  It sure has, but only thanks to piracy, not through any initiative from the movie studios' part.
danilocampos 16y ago
I'm pretty tech savvy. I write code. I have a half-decent living room setup, with an HDTV and surround sound. I have an Xbox 360. I get the latest gear when it tickles my fancy. New technology does not scare me. And I have absolutely zero urge to buy a Blu-Ray player. None at all. And I don't expect that to change any time soon. DVDs are good enough on the rare I occasion I need them. Netflix Watch Instantly is awesome. I'm at the point where if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else. Marco's right to be skeptical of the next generation of physical media distribution. That game is going to be over inside of five years.
- billpaetzke 16y ago
  >if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else Right on. Except I'll still buy the DVD for a foreign film. Netflix Instant doesn't seem to have enough of the ones I want (i.e. Y Tu Mama, Tambien). Renting movies on discs is so old school. Who today wants to deal with something that's all scratched to hell?
  - gcheong 16y ago
    I also go for the DVD when you can only get the dubbed versions of foreign films (mainly things like anime) on instant.
  - bjhess 16y ago
    BluRay has scratch resistance built into the spec. Get one from Netflix and you'll notice a surprising lack of scratches.
- seanalltogether 16y ago
  I'm all the above and I love my Blu-Ray player. Netflix Watch instantly is full of mediocre B-rated movies. Good for background noise on a saturday afternoon, yet too boring for night time viewing. DVDs are decent but all my movie purchases or netflix rentals these days are Blu rays. I refuse to purchase drm time bombs from itunes or amazon.
depoisfalamos 16y ago
Internet streaming/renting is great for the US market. But where I live (Portugal) there's no TV Shows tab in iTunes or Amazon Instant or even Netflix. We are tied to DVDs or Blu Rays. They are much more expansive for sure and that's why people don't buy as much, see as much or consume as much media (movies or Tv Shows). Anyway, when they do, it's in DVD or Blu Ray (or piracy...). We need physical discs here... but we wish we didn't...
- statictype 16y ago
  Do you feel you're being unethical by downloading pirated copies of tv shows that are not available in your country?
  - albemuth 16y ago
    Even worse is when you try to _buy_ something but can't because it's not available for your country or because they only take domestic (US) credit cards. No, it doesn't seem unethical to me, not one bit.
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    Interesting question. My initial reaction was "no". But I realised I don't do it. I guess I just don't watch much TV anymore. Anything worth watching is worth buying the whole series for.
    - statictype 16y ago
      Where I live, most shows air a few years late. I don't feel bad about torrenting them when I want the latest episodes. However I do go out and buy the earlier seasons on disc (though I'm suspicious about how authentic those discs are - they're certainly expensive but the printing on the CDs seem to indicate otherwise)
  - merijnv 16y ago
    Absolutely not, I'd be perfectly happy to pay a reasonable fee (for music I now have a Spotify subscription and I love it!) or be forced to watch adds or whatnot. I keep waiting for hulu.com and similar sites to eventually (hopefully) open up to Europe, but I'm not holding my breath :\ But until that time I just pirate stuff of the internet. (They haven't even aired anything past season 5 of Scrubs yet here, at this rate I will have to wait until my death if I want watch Game of Thrones...)
tedunangst 16y ago
"enough copy protection to kill almost all casual piracy (including such innocent cases as ripping movies you own so you can play them on vacation on your iPad)" Actually, I think every blu-ray I've purchased recently came with a download code and/or disc containing another copy of the movie specifically for copying to iGadgets. If I cared to put my movies on an iPad, this is even more convenient because it's already pre-ripped.
- blutonium 16y ago
  It's a DRM'd copy[1], and which devices it's supported on depend on the studio (and other mysterious factors). Some will work on iPod & PSP, some only work on Windows. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_copy
- danieldk 16y ago
  Those are usually DRMed copies and/or in worse quality. Besides that, the download codes usually invalidate after a certain amount of time. So, for older (cheaper) BluRays, this is often not an option. That said, people already cracked BluRay DRM and using MakeMKV it is trivial to rip most BluRays to DRM-less MKV. I put most of my movies on the Apple TV 2 (which can take surprisingly high bitrates in high profile): rip with MakeMKV, transcode with Handbrake, and you are done ;).
nkurz 16y ago
We have a Panasonic BluRay player at home that gets used quite a lot. Almost every evening it gets used by someone to watch streaming videos from Netflix or Amazon Prime using the built in network interface. Once or twice a week, it also gets used to play standard DVD's from Netflix, and a couple times since getting it we've even found something we want to watch on actual BluRay. (Translation: BluRay disks aren't going to take over, but the additional features of the devices are a bulkhead for streaming media in the living room.)
hristov 16y ago
He is right and it is a darned shame, because with the big screens of today the quality of blu ray is sorely needed. I do own a blu ray player, and i am a huge arthouse movie buff and it does make a difference for the very few good movies that make it on bluray. The Netflix online service is not nearly as good. But having to watch 15 minutes of mandatory nonscippable adds before you get to watch a movie you actually paid for is really really f-ing annoying. It is a shame the industry could not come up with a standard that actually works. Next time, the manufacturers should just make the most technically advanced and open standard they can come up with and completely ignore the content makers.
- ecuzzillo 16y ago
  The content owners (not content makers, note) are liable to just refuse to use such a new medium, relegating it to a mostly irrelevant piracy channel.
- AngryParsley 16y ago
  On the bright side, codecs are getting more efficient and consumer broadband connections are getting faster. A 20 megabit connection (Comcast's fastest residential plan) can download a 10GB blu-ray rip in about 70 minutes. There will be hiccups along the way (ISP bandwidth caps, piracy concerns, etc) but it looks like streaming quality will eventually be on par with blu-ray.
  - brianbreslin 16y ago
    Comcast has 40mbit+ in Miami. Think it hits 50. Just fyi
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Hmm, we watch a lot of movies in this household and my two brothers-in-law are avid movie buffs/traders, so quite a lot of blu-ray films go through the PS3 here. I can remember only one or two that imposed trailers, piracy warnings, or other undesired material before the movie. I've seen a lot more of that in DVDs, and on HD-DVD. Blu-ray seems by far the more customer friendly platform. I also really like the quality, though having a background in film product/editing I admit to being a bit of a snob about such things.
hoggle 16y ago
Owning the Blu-Ray version of a movie is like owning the original film roll to me. Priceless experience, in fact the first time I'm really happy to spend money on my favorite films ever since the Laser Disc. I love Blu-Ray.
- vl 16y ago
  I sorely miss BluRay support on Macs, because of this my media center computer is PC and on top of that I can't play movies I own and rent on family trips because our laptops are MacBook Pro and MacBook. It's just lame, I would pay $150 for an option to have BluRay in my MacBook Pro, why not just give it to me? When companies have too many interests integrated, they start to hurt customers, in this case Apple with it's interest in iTunes hurts it's own customers that need BluRay.
tom_b 16y ago
I have a family member working directly in the manufacture/production of DVD/Blueray media (movies and games). The company is actively telling employees the facility will shutdown at some point in the future. While the timeline is not specified, the parent corporation is not replacing low level production staffers now, hours for all workers have been curtailed, and generally the production projects are falling off. Compared to even just a few years ago it is a pretty shocking change - this place used to run full out 24/7/365 and employees were typically scheduled for 20+hours of overtime in a two week rolling schedule. These days, they run two shifts, often close up early and I can't remember the last time they offered any overtime. It's too bad, this was a pretty solid employer in a rather remote region that doesn't have many other options available for the class of workers facing layoffs.
bengl3rt 16y ago
Unfortunately, nothing can match the quality of Blu-ray, and as other commenters have noticed, on really big/high-resolution televisions - the kind that movie buffs tend to have, personally I have a projector - it really makes a difference. Netflix is pretty compressed both in the audio and video departments. The only thing that comes close is the HDX catalog on the Vudu box. I have my eye on this as a potential replacement but for now I use a PS3 to play Blu-rays because the audio and video quality is just superb.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  Projector here too. I can definitely see the difference between blu-ray and DVD. It doesn't bother me much (DVD being lower quality) but when I have the option to watch in high definition I choose to, even if it's slightly more expensive. I don't like how I can't stream in high definition, even though my bandwidth is enough that it's technically feasible for me.
- ctdonath 16y ago
  I just saw Toy Story 3 on our newish HDTV. At the end, I smiled and marveled at how great Blu-ray is. Then I ejected the ... DVD. One of Steve Jobs' great insights is the balance of specs vs. usability. Yeah, the Apple product line may not beat out the competition on specs (though it happens more than the naysayers like to admit), but by maintaining a high bar for user experience, the need for top "checkbox" specs is reduced. Yeah, Blu-ray is better and desirable ... but upscaled DVD and 'net streaming is plenty good enough for most users, and the few users for whom it isn't aren't worth the "bag of hurt" to make it happen now. Broadband is improving. Codecs are improving. Most viewers can't discern 720p from 1080p (as my wife likes to often opine on the subject "I can't see the difference so who cares?"). We'll get pervasive 1080p on Apple platforms soon enough; until then, I'll put up with the good-enough upscaled DVD, 720p streaming, and the occasional Blu-ray from Redbox.
Hominem 16y ago
I own a blu-Ray player that has never seen a disc, I use it exclusively for streaming. Even though the quality of netflix streaming is pretty poor some of the time, it is still not worth the effort of obtain physical discs.
nhangen 16y ago
I agree, but I refuse to go 100% digital when the quality sucks like it does. Netflix's streaming catalogue is bad...like really bad, and I don't intend on paying $15-$20 for an HD version on iTunes when I can get the same thing for the same price on Blu-Ray. Yes, I'm tired of the shitty menus and load times, but until they find a way to reproduce Blu-Ray quality in a digital format, it's a price I'm willing to pay. Still, great piece by Marco.
- jfb 16y ago
  Of course, Blu-Ray is digital. What it really comes down to is that 1) existing broadband in the US is too pissweak to stream anything even resembling the 40Mb/s Blu-Ray datarate; and more importantly 2) nobody cares. I mean, I care — I spent a good part of my life's blood (metaphorically speaking) getting those iTunes HD versions to look as good as 3Mb/s of H.264 can, and I can't watch HD TV programming, let alone SD without griping about quality; but for the average consumer, convenience (1.5Mb/s < SD basic profile H.264 streamed from Netflix) trumps all.
Kilimanjaro 16y ago
Spinning media is the way of the dodo. If there is ever a replacement it will be in the form of an SD card or memory stick. But then again, streaming killed it before being even born. Video cameras went from tape to cd, dvd, hd and now flash mem. If we could insert removable flash memory in different devices like our own TV and play it, then there might be a slight chance for it to start a new era, but I doubt it. Blu ray? I hardly knew ya.
ABFrep 16y ago
How short our memories are! It started with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and the studies 'decided' to abandon HD-DVD (and the customers that chose the format). At that point, Blu-Ray became a joke. The new LaserDisc.
- wladimir 16y ago
  It looks like the market for a 'next generation DVD' format is much smaller than what they expected. There wasn't place for two formats, and even the remaining format isn't doing that well. Either that, or the DRM-related inconvenience caused them to price themselves out of the market compared to online streaming.
jsz0 16y ago
I can see the appeal of BluRay for home theater enthusiasts but on a computer it has limited uses. Not sure there's even a good case to be made that BR is useful for removable storage given the size/prices/speed of USB/magnetic storage. Does anyone really travel around with a laptop and a binder full of BR disks? I doubt it. So that leaves you with HTPCs. Not a big market and most of them have a file server in the closet full of 1080P MKV rips anyway.
kondro 16y ago
The trouble is, the average consumer doesn't understand or see the difference. They get bombarded with acronyms and marketese and they just shut down. And, they don't want to have to replace their movie collection with another one that seems to cost 20% more per disk for a difference they just don't see. When it comes to media what people want is library size, convenience and cost-effectiveness. DVDs and Internet-based streaming have all of these things for the average consumer. Blu-ray™ is a 'premium' product that average Joe six-pack can't justify.
msy 16y ago
Once again the movie industry seems to believe it calls the shots only to be bitch-slapped by the invisible hand of the market. You'd think they'd learn by now.
nosse 16y ago
So the High priest of the magnificent cult of Apple was right again!
glenjamin 16y ago
I was watching a film the other day on DVD, but I wasn't enjoying it. I managed to get hold of a copy on blu-ray, and enjoyed it much more...
StudyAnimal 16y ago
There is one use case for Blu-Ray that Apple does not have an answer for yet. Home movies that people have taken with their HD camcorders, that they want to keep on permanent medium, play easily on their home theater, and not necessarily upload to youtube or facebook. Until Apple offers free online storage for high bitrate movies (keeping them on a huge hard drive is ok, but even a terabyte drive wont hold more than a year or so of a typical families precious memories, and you would want some form of cloud backup anyway rather than relying on a hard drive not crashing), and we all have 25Mbps+ bandwidth to support it, AND I can watch my home movies without buying a special device like an Apple TV or whatever, then they are still not competing with Blu-Ray for home movies, or hobbyist film makers. You know apple used to focus on the creators rather than the consumers, but their attitude towards blu-ray assumes we are only interested in consuming content. I have a handful of blu-ray films that I bought when i got my PS3, watched once I never watched again. But I have stacks of home movies burnt on blu-ray that we watch all the time.
- silvestrov 16y ago
  Blu-Ray isn't a permanent medium. Don't expect to be able to read all the discs after 10-20 years. Look at how quickly recordable CDs and DVDs detoriates. The manufactures promised a lot longer life time when they launched them, but reality was different. There isn't any media which is permanent. The one that comes closest is non-acid paper stored in a vault.
- acdha 16y ago
  I hope you have backups of those blu-ray discs: even assuming the media doesn't get lost, disappear in a fire, flood, etc. it has a limited lifespan before the media deteriorates. The manufacturers quote lifetimes which are far in excess of what's actually been verified - and that's for professionally produced media, not the home burners which generally use less durable media. Our guidelines recommend a 5 year lifecycle for archived media: http://digitalpreservation.gov/you/ http://digitalpreservation.gov/you/ That's conservative but at times I'm inclined to give up on tape, disc, etc. and simply say that you shouldn't rely on anything which isn't online and regularly verified (e.g. ZFS scrubs or manual checksum validation) - and since Blu-Ray hasn't sold particularly well combined with general consumer electronics trends makes me hesitant to say that you should assume easy access to a compatible drive over a decade from now.
tintin 16y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with the medium. You could create one track on a CD with all the songs, commercials included. But this will be so annoying nobody will buy it. If you don't like the commercials a producer is putting on the BD, just skip the producer.
CrLf 16y ago
As other people pointed out, most people don't care about the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray, even when they have HD displays. It would be interesting to know exactly why, but nobody wants to survey the users, prefering instead to pretend that this isn't true. My interpretation is that when you're 3 meters from a display with the size regular people buy (between 32 and 42 inches), the quality difference between HD content and a decently encoded DVD is barely noticeable. Some say that sound quality is more important than picture quality. That may be true, but that's not the reason people ignore the quality difference between DVDs and Blu-ray. When you live in an apartment, you tend to watch movies with a low volume anyway, so sound is always crap. Then, there's the mistake that people moved to DVDs from VHS because of picture quality. This is false, people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie. DVDs hit the sweet spot of price/quality and convenience. Blu-ray offers little more. If the successor to the DVD had been a flash-memory card, it may have been a hit. The same movies in 1/10th the space. Now it is too late. People will keep their DVDs until online distribution is mature. And this doesn't necessarily mean internet distributed content. Here in Portugal, the two major cable providers have a video-on-demand service (in old-school parlance) that was the final nail in the video rental shops 'coffin, and that all but removes the need for the average consumer to buy physical media.
- neutronicus 16y ago
  people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie. I miss VHS fast-forwarding. It was impossible to accidentally skip scene, which always fucking happens when I try to rewind a DVD to catch some dialogue I missed.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  FYI, DVD actually has about the same sound quality - it does 5.1 surround, which is good enough for everyone besides audiophiles. Blu-Ray can do up to 24 bit-192khz, whereas DVD typically uses AC-3 and only goes up to 48Khz - but this is fine for end-user purposes. Higher bitrates are more important for recording and mixing than for playback, unless it's something like opera or classical music where the acoustics really matter. Film soundtracks are only tenuously connected to reality to begin with :-)

Bag of hurt

200 points by barredo 16y ago

sambeau 16y ago

Surely the internet has killed the need for little metal discs? I can't remember the last time I used one.

raganwald 16y ago
Yes it has, but was it the convenience of typing the name of a movie and streaming it? Or was it the convenience of watching a movie without having to navigate through commercials and menu options designed to ruin the movie experience? Check all that apply :-) One thing that absolutely killed DVDs for me was having children. If you ever want to put a movie on for kids, you want to put it on, press play, and watch. Navigating menus and ads just doesn't work for my kids, no way, no how. I had to handbrake my entire collection of family DVDs. I buy movies through iTunes. A DVD is a pain in the ass if you want to watch a movie with kids.
- sambeau 16y ago
  Indeed - plus the fact that kids can scratch a DVD to the point of unusable within seconds.
- noonespecial 16y ago
  Its even worse in the car. Ever tried to start a Disney movie for a 3 year old while driving? For our own safety, every movie in the car is HandBraked from the original so it starts instantly when inserted. I can just about guarantee that a serious accident has been caused by those damn menus.
  - vl 16y ago
    Aren't you concerned that prolonged looking at the movie screen in the moving (and thus vibrating) vehicle will be bad for the kid's eyesight? I personally feel eye strain if I try to watch or read something on my iPhone for too long in a moving car (not so bad on a bus).
potatolicious 16y ago
The concept of broadband means the death of little metal discs. Companies like Comcast and AT&T are ensuring that we will need them forever.
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  The Canadian regulators are trying very hard too. If it was only up to them, we'd have 60 gig caps and no viable indie ISPs...
czhiddy 16y ago
Likewise. I'm looking forward to when DVD/BD drives on laptops are replaced with additional batteries.
- whatusername 16y ago
  Like these ones: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-73222.html http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-73222.html
wewyor 16y ago
Not for me, my internet choice is dsl (I think 1.2 Mbit which I currently have) and satellite. Hard tech rules rural America, as well as my parents' house.
alex_h 16y ago
It seems Sony has been on the wrong side of this twice now. They released MiniDisc just before digital music players and music downloads took off, and now a new and improved video disc just as the tide is turning toward video streaming. It seems they really should have learned from the first time.
kalleboo 16y ago
It sure has, but only thanks to piracy, not through any initiative from the movie studios' part.

danilocampos 16y ago

I'm pretty tech savvy. I write code. I have a half-decent living room setup, with an HDTV and surround sound. I have an Xbox 360. I get the latest gear when it tickles my fancy. New technology does not scare me. And I have absolutely zero urge to buy a Blu-Ray player. None at all. And I don't expect that to change any time soon. DVDs are good enough on the rare I occasion I need them. Netflix Watch Instantly is awesome. I'm at the point where if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else. Marco's right to be skeptical of the next generation of physical media distribution. That game is going to be over inside of five years.

billpaetzke 16y ago
>if I want to watch something I can't stream from Netflix I say fuck it and watch something else Right on. Except I'll still buy the DVD for a foreign film. Netflix Instant doesn't seem to have enough of the ones I want (i.e. Y Tu Mama, Tambien). Renting movies on discs is so old school. Who today wants to deal with something that's all scratched to hell?
- gcheong 16y ago
  I also go for the DVD when you can only get the dubbed versions of foreign films (mainly things like anime) on instant.
- bjhess 16y ago
  BluRay has scratch resistance built into the spec. Get one from Netflix and you'll notice a surprising lack of scratches.
seanalltogether 16y ago
I'm all the above and I love my Blu-Ray player. Netflix Watch instantly is full of mediocre B-rated movies. Good for background noise on a saturday afternoon, yet too boring for night time viewing. DVDs are decent but all my movie purchases or netflix rentals these days are Blu rays. I refuse to purchase drm time bombs from itunes or amazon.

depoisfalamos 16y ago

Internet streaming/renting is great for the US market. But where I live (Portugal) there's no TV Shows tab in iTunes or Amazon Instant or even Netflix. We are tied to DVDs or Blu Rays. They are much more expansive for sure and that's why people don't buy as much, see as much or consume as much media (movies or Tv Shows). Anyway, when they do, it's in DVD or Blu Ray (or piracy...). We need physical discs here... but we wish we didn't...

statictype 16y ago
Do you feel you're being unethical by downloading pirated copies of tv shows that are not available in your country?
- albemuth 16y ago
  Even worse is when you try to _buy_ something but can't because it's not available for your country or because they only take domestic (US) credit cards. No, it doesn't seem unethical to me, not one bit.
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  Interesting question. My initial reaction was "no". But I realised I don't do it. I guess I just don't watch much TV anymore. Anything worth watching is worth buying the whole series for.
  - statictype 16y ago
    Where I live, most shows air a few years late. I don't feel bad about torrenting them when I want the latest episodes. However I do go out and buy the earlier seasons on disc (though I'm suspicious about how authentic those discs are - they're certainly expensive but the printing on the CDs seem to indicate otherwise)
- merijnv 16y ago
  Absolutely not, I'd be perfectly happy to pay a reasonable fee (for music I now have a Spotify subscription and I love it!) or be forced to watch adds or whatnot. I keep waiting for hulu.com and similar sites to eventually (hopefully) open up to Europe, but I'm not holding my breath :\ But until that time I just pirate stuff of the internet. (They haven't even aired anything past season 5 of Scrubs yet here, at this rate I will have to wait until my death if I want watch Game of Thrones...)

tedunangst 16y ago

"enough copy protection to kill almost all casual piracy (including such innocent cases as ripping movies you own so you can play them on vacation on your iPad)" Actually, I think every blu-ray I've purchased recently came with a download code and/or disc containing another copy of the movie specifically for copying to iGadgets. If I cared to put my movies on an iPad, this is even more convenient because it's already pre-ripped.

blutonium 16y ago
It's a DRM'd copy[1], and which devices it's supported on depend on the studio (and other mysterious factors). Some will work on iPod & PSP, some only work on Windows. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_copy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_copy
danieldk 16y ago
Those are usually DRMed copies and/or in worse quality. Besides that, the download codes usually invalidate after a certain amount of time. So, for older (cheaper) BluRays, this is often not an option. That said, people already cracked BluRay DRM and using MakeMKV it is trivial to rip most BluRays to DRM-less MKV. I put most of my movies on the Apple TV 2 (which can take surprisingly high bitrates in high profile): rip with MakeMKV, transcode with Handbrake, and you are done ;).

nkurz 16y ago

We have a Panasonic BluRay player at home that gets used quite a lot. Almost every evening it gets used by someone to watch streaming videos from Netflix or Amazon Prime using the built in network interface. Once or twice a week, it also gets used to play standard DVD's from Netflix, and a couple times since getting it we've even found something we want to watch on actual BluRay. (Translation: BluRay disks aren't going to take over, but the additional features of the devices are a bulkhead for streaming media in the living room.)

hristov 16y ago

He is right and it is a darned shame, because with the big screens of today the quality of blu ray is sorely needed. I do own a blu ray player, and i am a huge arthouse movie buff and it does make a difference for the very few good movies that make it on bluray. The Netflix online service is not nearly as good. But having to watch 15 minutes of mandatory nonscippable adds before you get to watch a movie you actually paid for is really really f-ing annoying. It is a shame the industry could not come up with a standard that actually works. Next time, the manufacturers should just make the most technically advanced and open standard they can come up with and completely ignore the content makers.

ecuzzillo 16y ago
The content owners (not content makers, note) are liable to just refuse to use such a new medium, relegating it to a mostly irrelevant piracy channel.
AngryParsley 16y ago
On the bright side, codecs are getting more efficient and consumer broadband connections are getting faster. A 20 megabit connection (Comcast's fastest residential plan) can download a 10GB blu-ray rip in about 70 minutes. There will be hiccups along the way (ISP bandwidth caps, piracy concerns, etc) but it looks like streaming quality will eventually be on par with blu-ray.
- brianbreslin 16y ago
  Comcast has 40mbit+ in Miami. Think it hits 50. Just fyi
anigbrowl 16y ago
Hmm, we watch a lot of movies in this household and my two brothers-in-law are avid movie buffs/traders, so quite a lot of blu-ray films go through the PS3 here. I can remember only one or two that imposed trailers, piracy warnings, or other undesired material before the movie. I've seen a lot more of that in DVDs, and on HD-DVD. Blu-ray seems by far the more customer friendly platform. I also really like the quality, though having a background in film product/editing I admit to being a bit of a snob about such things.

hoggle 16y ago

Owning the Blu-Ray version of a movie is like owning the original film roll to me. Priceless experience, in fact the first time I'm really happy to spend money on my favorite films ever since the Laser Disc. I love Blu-Ray.

vl 16y ago
I sorely miss BluRay support on Macs, because of this my media center computer is PC and on top of that I can't play movies I own and rent on family trips because our laptops are MacBook Pro and MacBook. It's just lame, I would pay $150 for an option to have BluRay in my MacBook Pro, why not just give it to me? When companies have too many interests integrated, they start to hurt customers, in this case Apple with it's interest in iTunes hurts it's own customers that need BluRay.

tom_b 16y ago

I have a family member working directly in the manufacture/production of DVD/Blueray media (movies and games). The company is actively telling employees the facility will shutdown at some point in the future. While the timeline is not specified, the parent corporation is not replacing low level production staffers now, hours for all workers have been curtailed, and generally the production projects are falling off. Compared to even just a few years ago it is a pretty shocking change - this place used to run full out 24/7/365 and employees were typically scheduled for 20+hours of overtime in a two week rolling schedule. These days, they run two shifts, often close up early and I can't remember the last time they offered any overtime. It's too bad, this was a pretty solid employer in a rather remote region that doesn't have many other options available for the class of workers facing layoffs.

bengl3rt 16y ago

Unfortunately, nothing can match the quality of Blu-ray, and as other commenters have noticed, on really big/high-resolution televisions - the kind that movie buffs tend to have, personally I have a projector - it really makes a difference. Netflix is pretty compressed both in the audio and video departments. The only thing that comes close is the HDX catalog on the Vudu box. I have my eye on this as a potential replacement but for now I use a PS3 to play Blu-rays because the audio and video quality is just superb.

citricsquid 16y ago
Projector here too. I can definitely see the difference between blu-ray and DVD. It doesn't bother me much (DVD being lower quality) but when I have the option to watch in high definition I choose to, even if it's slightly more expensive. I don't like how I can't stream in high definition, even though my bandwidth is enough that it's technically feasible for me.
ctdonath 16y ago
I just saw Toy Story 3 on our newish HDTV. At the end, I smiled and marveled at how great Blu-ray is. Then I ejected the ... DVD. One of Steve Jobs' great insights is the balance of specs vs. usability. Yeah, the Apple product line may not beat out the competition on specs (though it happens more than the naysayers like to admit), but by maintaining a high bar for user experience, the need for top "checkbox" specs is reduced. Yeah, Blu-ray is better and desirable ... but upscaled DVD and 'net streaming is plenty good enough for most users, and the few users for whom it isn't aren't worth the "bag of hurt" to make it happen now. Broadband is improving. Codecs are improving. Most viewers can't discern 720p from 1080p (as my wife likes to often opine on the subject "I can't see the difference so who cares?"). We'll get pervasive 1080p on Apple platforms soon enough; until then, I'll put up with the good-enough upscaled DVD, 720p streaming, and the occasional Blu-ray from Redbox.

Hominem 16y ago

I own a blu-Ray player that has never seen a disc, I use it exclusively for streaming. Even though the quality of netflix streaming is pretty poor some of the time, it is still not worth the effort of obtain physical discs.

nhangen 16y ago

I agree, but I refuse to go 100% digital when the quality sucks like it does. Netflix's streaming catalogue is bad...like really bad, and I don't intend on paying $15-$20 for an HD version on iTunes when I can get the same thing for the same price on Blu-Ray. Yes, I'm tired of the shitty menus and load times, but until they find a way to reproduce Blu-Ray quality in a digital format, it's a price I'm willing to pay. Still, great piece by Marco.

jfb 16y ago
Of course, Blu-Ray is digital. What it really comes down to is that 1) existing broadband in the US is too pissweak to stream anything even resembling the 40Mb/s Blu-Ray datarate; and more importantly 2) nobody cares. I mean, I care — I spent a good part of my life's blood (metaphorically speaking) getting those iTunes HD versions to look as good as 3Mb/s of H.264 can, and I can't watch HD TV programming, let alone SD without griping about quality; but for the average consumer, convenience (1.5Mb/s < SD basic profile H.264 streamed from Netflix) trumps all.

Kilimanjaro 16y ago

Spinning media is the way of the dodo. If there is ever a replacement it will be in the form of an SD card or memory stick. But then again, streaming killed it before being even born. Video cameras went from tape to cd, dvd, hd and now flash mem. If we could insert removable flash memory in different devices like our own TV and play it, then there might be a slight chance for it to start a new era, but I doubt it. Blu ray? I hardly knew ya.

ABFrep 16y ago

How short our memories are! It started with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and the studies 'decided' to abandon HD-DVD (and the customers that chose the format). At that point, Blu-Ray became a joke. The new LaserDisc.

wladimir 16y ago
It looks like the market for a 'next generation DVD' format is much smaller than what they expected. There wasn't place for two formats, and even the remaining format isn't doing that well. Either that, or the DRM-related inconvenience caused them to price themselves out of the market compared to online streaming.

jsz0 16y ago

I can see the appeal of BluRay for home theater enthusiasts but on a computer it has limited uses. Not sure there's even a good case to be made that BR is useful for removable storage given the size/prices/speed of USB/magnetic storage. Does anyone really travel around with a laptop and a binder full of BR disks? I doubt it. So that leaves you with HTPCs. Not a big market and most of them have a file server in the closet full of 1080P MKV rips anyway.

kondro 16y ago

The trouble is, the average consumer doesn't understand or see the difference. They get bombarded with acronyms and marketese and they just shut down. And, they don't want to have to replace their movie collection with another one that seems to cost 20% more per disk for a difference they just don't see. When it comes to media what people want is library size, convenience and cost-effectiveness. DVDs and Internet-based streaming have all of these things for the average consumer. Blu-ray™ is a 'premium' product that average Joe six-pack can't justify.

msy 16y ago

Once again the movie industry seems to believe it calls the shots only to be bitch-slapped by the invisible hand of the market. You'd think they'd learn by now.

nosse 16y ago

So the High priest of the magnificent cult of Apple was right again!

glenjamin 16y ago

I was watching a film the other day on DVD, but I wasn't enjoying it. I managed to get hold of a copy on blu-ray, and enjoyed it much more...

StudyAnimal 16y ago

There is one use case for Blu-Ray that Apple does not have an answer for yet. Home movies that people have taken with their HD camcorders, that they want to keep on permanent medium, play easily on their home theater, and not necessarily upload to youtube or facebook. Until Apple offers free online storage for high bitrate movies (keeping them on a huge hard drive is ok, but even a terabyte drive wont hold more than a year or so of a typical families precious memories, and you would want some form of cloud backup anyway rather than relying on a hard drive not crashing), and we all have 25Mbps+ bandwidth to support it, AND I can watch my home movies without buying a special device like an Apple TV or whatever, then they are still not competing with Blu-Ray for home movies, or hobbyist film makers. You know apple used to focus on the creators rather than the consumers, but their attitude towards blu-ray assumes we are only interested in consuming content. I have a handful of blu-ray films that I bought when i got my PS3, watched once I never watched again. But I have stacks of home movies burnt on blu-ray that we watch all the time.

silvestrov 16y ago
Blu-Ray isn't a permanent medium. Don't expect to be able to read all the discs after 10-20 years. Look at how quickly recordable CDs and DVDs detoriates. The manufactures promised a lot longer life time when they launched them, but reality was different. There isn't any media which is permanent. The one that comes closest is non-acid paper stored in a vault.
acdha 16y ago
I hope you have backups of those blu-ray discs: even assuming the media doesn't get lost, disappear in a fire, flood, etc. it has a limited lifespan before the media deteriorates. The manufacturers quote lifetimes which are far in excess of what's actually been verified - and that's for professionally produced media, not the home burners which generally use less durable media. Our guidelines recommend a 5 year lifecycle for archived media: http://digitalpreservation.gov/you/ http://digitalpreservation.gov/you/ That's conservative but at times I'm inclined to give up on tape, disc, etc. and simply say that you shouldn't rely on anything which isn't online and regularly verified (e.g. ZFS scrubs or manual checksum validation) - and since Blu-Ray hasn't sold particularly well combined with general consumer electronics trends makes me hesitant to say that you should assume easy access to a compatible drive over a decade from now.

tintin 16y ago

I don't think this has anything to do with the medium. You could create one track on a CD with all the songs, commercials included. But this will be so annoying nobody will buy it. If you don't like the commercials a producer is putting on the BD, just skip the producer.

CrLf 16y ago

As other people pointed out, most people don't care about the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray, even when they have HD displays. It would be interesting to know exactly why, but nobody wants to survey the users, prefering instead to pretend that this isn't true. My interpretation is that when you're 3 meters from a display with the size regular people buy (between 32 and 42 inches), the quality difference between HD content and a decently encoded DVD is barely noticeable. Some say that sound quality is more important than picture quality. That may be true, but that's not the reason people ignore the quality difference between DVDs and Blu-ray. When you live in an apartment, you tend to watch movies with a low volume anyway, so sound is always crap. Then, there's the mistake that people moved to DVDs from VHS because of picture quality. This is false, people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie. DVDs hit the sweet spot of price/quality and convenience. Blu-ray offers little more. If the successor to the DVD had been a flash-memory card, it may have been a hit. The same movies in 1/10th the space. Now it is too late. People will keep their DVDs until online distribution is mature. And this doesn't necessarily mean internet distributed content. Here in Portugal, the two major cable providers have a video-on-demand service (in old-school parlance) that was the final nail in the video rental shops 'coffin, and that all but removes the need for the average consumer to buy physical media.

neutronicus 16y ago
people moved from VHS to DVDs because DVDs have are random-access media. No more rewinds, no more fast-forwards and searching for parts of the movie. I miss VHS fast-forwarding. It was impossible to accidentally skip scene, which always fucking happens when I try to rewind a DVD to catch some dialogue I missed.
anigbrowl 16y ago
FYI, DVD actually has about the same sound quality - it does 5.1 surround, which is good enough for everyone besides audiophiles. Blu-Ray can do up to 24 bit-192khz, whereas DVD typically uses AC-3 and only goes up to 48Khz - but this is fine for end-user purposes. Higher bitrates are more important for recording and mixing than for playback, unless it's something like opera or classical music where the acoustics really matter. Film soundtracks are only tenuously connected to reality to begin with :-)