15 ms·

I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds

I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the TV and surround setup to take advantage of it. Sometimes WAY better. Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from home or something. Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the digital version! I can even go to my local used bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices. And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago
The biggest difference for me is the sound quality. Lossless 7.1 24/96 or even 24/192. Compared to, at best, DTS or DD+.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  Definitely, although most people don't even have a crappy soundbar, let alone a quality 7.1 discrete speaker setup.
- rthomas6 4y ago
  I currently have a 5.1 setup, and I want your opinion. Do you think 7.1 or 5.1.2 with on-ceiling speakers would be better? I'm leaning toward 5.1.2.
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    Really depends on the room, your personal taste, and the source material. Do you have room in the room for the side speakers? Do you watch a lot of movies with planes or other things flying over your head? I don't have gear that can decode Atmos, unfortunately, so I haven't tried ceiling speakers myself - only at movie theaters. Why not 7.1.2? =)
    - rthomas6 4y ago
      My receiver only has 7 channels or I would totally do 7.1.4 :) One day.
nsxwolf 4y ago
I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR, but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code to use on iTunes. The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal. It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  "Noisy, grainy, just bad." AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    Which explains the downvotes I'm getting. I've apparently angered the cinephiles. Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences have made multiple people this upset.
    - p_j_w 4y ago
      Or maybe you're getting downvoted because you were denigrating other people's personal preferences when you called the disc version "trash." You're guilty of what you accuse others.
    - f1refly 4y ago
      I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy" search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose and complained about it in a public forum without understanding the mechanics.
iamacyborg 4y ago
I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.
- paxys 4y ago
  Might as well skip the extra step and just torrent them directly. What you are doing is illegal either way, so why do the extra work?
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    Yeah, no.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    Maybe in America (Land of the Free). Elsewhere in the world it's perfectly legal to backup your owned media.
- rthomas6 4y ago
  I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I’ve not noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the Android OS.
    - rthomas6 4y ago
      That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_current_state_of_dolby_vision_on_plex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...
stackedinserter 4y ago
Do you have to watch these non-skippable FBI warnings?
- rthomas6 4y ago
  Yeah.
- PNWChris 4y ago
  The worst part is that the old “stop stop play” trick doesn’t work on any devices I have that can play disks (Xbox and computers). Every time I play a disk and hit the unskippable nonsense, I’m reminded why nobody uses those things anymore. If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.
  - account42 4y ago
    Meh, I just rip the video files and watch those in mpv.
pdntspa 4y ago
You have stumbled upon one of the greatest virtues of owning your bits and bytes, which is something that people seem to be forgetting
chiefalchemist 4y ago
I've been doing similar (i.e, growing my collection of physical medium entertainment). I also prefer physical medium and my own player because I don't feel comfortable with someone else (unseen) recording my every pause, rewind, login, etc. I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.
cxr 4y ago
> I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all. I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered. You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".) Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention. Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous. Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc). 1. Aka the "do not" sign <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol> 2. <https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose>
m463 4y ago
Except for the unskippable nonsense, and the hit-or-miss ability to resume a show you that you paused or stopped. other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.
cgrealy 4y ago
>4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)
- rthomas6 4y ago
  I doubt it. All streaming services are around this bitrate or a little higher, like around 30 Mb/s or so. This bitrate is good enough for most people and is likely to remain so. People watch on their 50" bargain TVs with a soundbar, or even just on a laptop/tablet. Most people wouldn't even be able to tell a difference. It's just not worth the cost of the almost 10x bandwidth for Netflix to stream losslessly encoded video and sound that like 95% of customers won't even notice.
  - account42 4y ago
    You also can't always just 100% directly compare bitrates because Netflix can more easily adopt efficient new codecs while e.g. for 1080p Blu Rays a lot of them are still VC-1.
ycombinete 4y ago
Where do you buy them from to ensure their authenticity?

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

The biggest difference for me is the sound quality. Lossless 7.1 24/96 or even 24/192. Compared to, at best, DTS or DD+.

brokenmachine 4y ago
Definitely, although most people don't even have a crappy soundbar, let alone a quality 7.1 discrete speaker setup.
rthomas6 4y ago
I currently have a 5.1 setup, and I want your opinion. Do you think 7.1 or 5.1.2 with on-ceiling speakers would be better? I'm leaning toward 5.1.2.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Really depends on the room, your personal taste, and the source material. Do you have room in the room for the side speakers? Do you watch a lot of movies with planes or other things flying over your head? I don't have gear that can decode Atmos, unfortunately, so I haven't tried ceiling speakers myself - only at movie theaters. Why not 7.1.2? =)
  - rthomas6 4y ago
    My receiver only has 7 channels or I would totally do 7.1.4 :) One day.

nsxwolf 4y ago

I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR, but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code to use on iTunes. The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal. It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
"Noisy, grainy, just bad." AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  Which explains the downvotes I'm getting. I've apparently angered the cinephiles. Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences have made multiple people this upset.
  - p_j_w 4y ago
    Or maybe you're getting downvoted because you were denigrating other people's personal preferences when you called the disc version "trash." You're guilty of what you accuse others.
  - f1refly 4y ago
    I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy" search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose and complained about it in a public forum without understanding the mechanics.

iamacyborg 4y ago

I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

paxys 4y ago
Might as well skip the extra step and just torrent them directly. What you are doing is illegal either way, so why do the extra work?
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  Yeah, no.
- deadbunny 4y ago
  Maybe in America (Land of the Free). Elsewhere in the world it's perfectly legal to backup your owned media.
rthomas6 4y ago
I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I’ve not noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the Android OS.
  - rthomas6 4y ago
    That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_current_state_of_dolby_vision_on_plex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...

stackedinserter 4y ago

Do you have to watch these non-skippable FBI warnings?

rthomas6 4y ago
Yeah.
PNWChris 4y ago
The worst part is that the old “stop stop play” trick doesn’t work on any devices I have that can play disks (Xbox and computers). Every time I play a disk and hit the unskippable nonsense, I’m reminded why nobody uses those things anymore. If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.
- account42 4y ago
  Meh, I just rip the video files and watch those in mpv.

pdntspa 4y ago

You have stumbled upon one of the greatest virtues of owning your bits and bytes, which is something that people seem to be forgetting

chiefalchemist 4y ago

I've been doing similar (i.e, growing my collection of physical medium entertainment). I also prefer physical medium and my own player because I don't feel comfortable with someone else (unseen) recording my every pause, rewind, login, etc. I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.

cxr 4y ago

> I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all. I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered. You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".) Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention. Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous. Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc). 1. Aka the "do not" sign <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol> 2. <https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose>

m463 4y ago

Except for the unskippable nonsense, and the hit-or-miss ability to resume a show you that you paused or stopped. other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.

cgrealy 4y ago

>4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)

rthomas6 4y ago
I doubt it. All streaming services are around this bitrate or a little higher, like around 30 Mb/s or so. This bitrate is good enough for most people and is likely to remain so. People watch on their 50" bargain TVs with a soundbar, or even just on a laptop/tablet. Most people wouldn't even be able to tell a difference. It's just not worth the cost of the almost 10x bandwidth for Netflix to stream losslessly encoded video and sound that like 95% of customers won't even notice.
- account42 4y ago
  You also can't always just 100% directly compare bitrates because Netflix can more easily adopt efficient new codecs while e.g. for 1080p Blu Rays a lot of them are still VC-1.

ycombinete 4y ago

Where do you buy them from to ensure their authenticity?