3 ms·

I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop

I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions. By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads. When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous. I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...

p0w3n3d 2y ago
Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  When I was 15 I discovered that my local doctor lost all of my medical records. Poof, all gone. Whoops, next patient please. My last doctor no longer had a copy of my files, either. I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    did you by chance undergo any operation you never consented too?
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Now instead of losing a yellow folder, a system will lose 1 million people’s records all at once. Aren’t school vaccines registered with the state? Given how many parents cannot keep records, I am surprised the solution would be “get them again”.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Offsite backup needs to always be the answer. Fires have always been a concern in any human situation. Plus lots of other accidents. Of course the real hard part is how do you mark a record as do not restore anymore. In a medical context this isn't much a problem, but in other cases it is an issue.
- lukan 2y ago
  They could offer you a download link, that is valid for 10 days. Or since storage is cheap, stays valid. But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).
  - no92 2y ago
    Depending on the jurisdiction, the minimum required storage time for medical data varies - but it needs to be kept around usually. Patients can, within that time frame, request that data to be provided, but may be required to pay some fee to cover the material costs. In my jurisdiction, this time frame is 10 years, and radiology data is usually provided as a paper slip with a link and password, valid for 1-2 years, or DVDs on request. Keeping that data around and managing requests for it is a part of why older physicians are so keen to sell their practices to younger doctors here - they can pass on the duty of keeping up with storing the data that way.
    - zxexz 2y ago
      FWIW, I'm in a jurisdiction with a 10 year retention requirement, and also have had no issues getting imaging data from beyond that (on DVD, of course - one department even had a side hustle selling external DVD drives for $50 on the side; they even offered to drop the files onto a USB drive for free).
  - smolder 2y ago
    Offering USB flash versions would make sense, too, given the low cost presently. There's probably a market for write-once flash drives.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    If it stays valid that's a security nightmare People are very good as securing physical items. They are awful at securing files. A dvd or maybe an SD card or USB stick is a much better approach.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    There is some utility unique to the dvd imo. It seems way more secure to me if another practitioner is just being handed a dvd direct from the imaging dept by the patient, compared to an emailed link that could be cloned in phishing attempts hospitals get. Anyone who expects to look at these images probably has a disk drive. It is kind of better than a thumb drive because its cheaper to make for the hospital but also can sit in a folder with other paperwork nicer than any thumb drive.
- galleywest200 2y ago
  It is worth noting that a lot of people DO own DVD and Blu-Ray drives still - they are just stuck inside of gaming consoles.
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    Game consoles are starting to come without optical drives.
- gruturo 2y ago
  It makes complete sense. It's literally pennies for them, esp. when bought in bulk, it's read-only (more or less), and most importantly it absolves them of any responsibility regarding handing you some very sensitive personal data. No credentials, cloud service, hacking, leak, etc etc. They hand you a physical object and that's it. It's your problem now. A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).
Ekaros 2y ago
It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.
- eru 2y ago
  You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Well yes, on other hand there is also hardware acceleration case which make lot of sense when you are manufacturing devices at scale. And with codec. What code it is in? For what architecture or operating system? What is system constraints it has to operate in? Do you have some specification? Do you need to due something beyond it for new codec. And from security viewpoint running some arbitrary code from disk sounds like questionable idea. Specially for say pc or console...
    - smolder 2y ago
      The solution of the day would have been to put a .jar on each disc and it would have been a nightmare, I think.
      - thrw42A8N 2y ago
        There's a JAR on every SIM and payment card and it works fine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card
        YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
        That Java runs on the SIM, not on the AP. The DVD equivalent would be the Java running on the DVD itself, but a DVD is an inert plastic and aluminium sandwich. And even if it looks portable, it’s not. In practice there’s just enough quirks that code written for one Java Card won’t reliably install and run on all others. Actually portable Java Card that would work like DVD codecs would need to work didn’t come until eSIMs, which is decades later.
arp242 2y ago
How would that realistically work? Because "just use a new codec" would mean you'd end up with old DVD players not being able to play newer DVDs, and a very frustrating transition period. They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Call it blu-ray because that is what it is. If you just want a new codec with the same media you need some DVD2 label and get DVD player manufacturers onboard with the new spec so that players are common before the first disc. Also because consumers are not happy about replacing their DVD players all the time you have to not create new specs too often. (or perhaps you can have a standard decoder cartridge which can be put into your existing DVD players and sells for $5 thus making upgrading to DVD3 not a big deal). there are lots of options, but the point is always don't make it too hard for consumers to know their DVDs and drives are compatible.
  - bobdvb 2y ago
    There were TVs made that you could upgrade the processor on, they were more expensive and never took off. People want cheap, they'll forgo the better product if they can get one that's on sale cheap. Consumer choice says that an upgradable product sells worse and the company that makes the upgradeable models will get the lowest market share. You'd have to legislate modularity and then you get people complaining about government over reach.
dspillett 2y ago
> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content. DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s. You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.
Lammy 2y ago
> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality Relevant dead ends: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc
commandlinefan 2y ago
> I still prefer to own movies It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"

soulofmischief 2y ago
When I was 15 I discovered that my local doctor lost all of my medical records. Poof, all gone. Whoops, next patient please. My last doctor no longer had a copy of my files, either. I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  did you by chance undergo any operation you never consented too?
- liontwist 2y ago
  Now instead of losing a yellow folder, a system will lose 1 million people’s records all at once. Aren’t school vaccines registered with the state? Given how many parents cannot keep records, I am surprised the solution would be “get them again”.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Offsite backup needs to always be the answer. Fires have always been a concern in any human situation. Plus lots of other accidents. Of course the real hard part is how do you mark a record as do not restore anymore. In a medical context this isn't much a problem, but in other cases it is an issue.
lukan 2y ago
They could offer you a download link, that is valid for 10 days. Or since storage is cheap, stays valid. But why change a running system (and I have an external USB DVD device).
- no92 2y ago
  Depending on the jurisdiction, the minimum required storage time for medical data varies - but it needs to be kept around usually. Patients can, within that time frame, request that data to be provided, but may be required to pay some fee to cover the material costs. In my jurisdiction, this time frame is 10 years, and radiology data is usually provided as a paper slip with a link and password, valid for 1-2 years, or DVDs on request. Keeping that data around and managing requests for it is a part of why older physicians are so keen to sell their practices to younger doctors here - they can pass on the duty of keeping up with storing the data that way.
  - zxexz 2y ago
    FWIW, I'm in a jurisdiction with a 10 year retention requirement, and also have had no issues getting imaging data from beyond that (on DVD, of course - one department even had a side hustle selling external DVD drives for $50 on the side; they even offered to drop the files onto a USB drive for free).
- smolder 2y ago
  Offering USB flash versions would make sense, too, given the low cost presently. There's probably a market for write-once flash drives.
- ta1243 2y ago
  If it stays valid that's a security nightmare People are very good as securing physical items. They are awful at securing files. A dvd or maybe an SD card or USB stick is a much better approach.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  There is some utility unique to the dvd imo. It seems way more secure to me if another practitioner is just being handed a dvd direct from the imaging dept by the patient, compared to an emailed link that could be cloned in phishing attempts hospitals get. Anyone who expects to look at these images probably has a disk drive. It is kind of better than a thumb drive because its cheaper to make for the hospital but also can sit in a folder with other paperwork nicer than any thumb drive.
galleywest200 2y ago
It is worth noting that a lot of people DO own DVD and Blu-Ray drives still - they are just stuck inside of gaming consoles.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  Game consoles are starting to come without optical drives.
gruturo 2y ago
It makes complete sense. It's literally pennies for them, esp. when bought in bulk, it's read-only (more or less), and most importantly it absolves them of any responsibility regarding handing you some very sensitive personal data. No credentials, cloud service, hacking, leak, etc etc. They hand you a physical object and that's it. It's your problem now. A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).

Ekaros 2y ago

It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.

eru 2y ago
You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Well yes, on other hand there is also hardware acceleration case which make lot of sense when you are manufacturing devices at scale. And with codec. What code it is in? For what architecture or operating system? What is system constraints it has to operate in? Do you have some specification? Do you need to due something beyond it for new codec. And from security viewpoint running some arbitrary code from disk sounds like questionable idea. Specially for say pc or console...
  - smolder 2y ago
    The solution of the day would have been to put a .jar on each disc and it would have been a nightmare, I think.
    - thrw42A8N 2y ago
      There's a JAR on every SIM and payment card and it works fine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card
      - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
        That Java runs on the SIM, not on the AP. The DVD equivalent would be the Java running on the DVD itself, but a DVD is an inert plastic and aluminium sandwich. And even if it looks portable, it’s not. In practice there’s just enough quirks that code written for one Java Card won’t reliably install and run on all others. Actually portable Java Card that would work like DVD codecs would need to work didn’t come until eSIMs, which is decades later.

arp242 2y ago

How would that realistically work? Because "just use a new codec" would mean you'd end up with old DVD players not being able to play newer DVDs, and a very frustrating transition period. They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.

bluGill 2y ago
Call it blu-ray because that is what it is. If you just want a new codec with the same media you need some DVD2 label and get DVD player manufacturers onboard with the new spec so that players are common before the first disc. Also because consumers are not happy about replacing their DVD players all the time you have to not create new specs too often. (or perhaps you can have a standard decoder cartridge which can be put into your existing DVD players and sells for $5 thus making upgrading to DVD3 not a big deal). there are lots of options, but the point is always don't make it too hard for consumers to know their DVDs and drives are compatible.
- bobdvb 2y ago
  There were TVs made that you could upgrade the processor on, they were more expensive and never took off. People want cheap, they'll forgo the better product if they can get one that's on sale cheap. Consumer choice says that an upgradable product sells worse and the company that makes the upgradeable models will get the lowest market share. You'd have to legislate modularity and then you get people complaining about government over reach.

dspillett 2y ago

> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content. DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s. You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.

Lammy 2y ago

> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality Relevant dead ends: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Versatile_Disc - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Multilayer_Disc

commandlinefan 2y ago

> I still prefer to own movies It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.