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The problems with streaming services: - they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information) - stup

• bamboozled 2y ago
  - You need to subscribe to ten different services rather than just having one subscription to see the thing you want to watch. Before you just needed a DVD player
  • alt227 2y ago
    > Before you just needed a DVD player However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.
    • robohoe 2y ago
      Yes, and a lot of movies on DVDs cost $10-15
      • vel0city 2y ago
        When DVDs were new, a new release around me would often be more like $25-30. Boxed sets would often be $50+. Of late 90s/early 2000's money, so $30 back then is like $55+ today.
        • sumtechguy 2y ago
          I own lots of DVD's. DVD day was my jam. Most new releases were 20. Sometimes if they were some sort of special collectors edition they would be 25. Then usually after a few months on the shelf they would come down to 15-18. After that the bargain bin. Bluray/HD started around 25-30 when they came out. Box sets were usually like you say 50+ some as much as 200.
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        Nearly every single individual DVD movie is less than $5 on ebay right now. Streaming will never have a secondhand market.
        • kjkjadksj 2y ago
          How many of those dvds are too scratched though? That would be like half of the blockbuster dvds we’d get. Even tried playing a dvd again at my folks and hit an unskippable scratch I couldn’t even see on the disc.
    • jhbadger 2y ago
      Or rent a movie for a couple of bucks. Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.
      • jasode 2y ago
        >Or check out a DVD for free from a public library. Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming. So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues: 1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all. 2) then checked out a British tv series with 10 seasons. The 10th season had 3 discs and the middle disc was so scratched up by a previous borrower that it was unplayable. (The library doesn't have a bunch of duplicate DVDs like Blockbuster Video rentals.) 3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them. On top of those problems, the library has a very small selection in comparison to streaming. She estimates she'll exhaust the DVDs sitting on the library's shelves in a few months and have nothing to watch. Another huge negative to DVDs is that she can't play them (directly) on her iPad. Her exercise bike had a mount for an iPad and she used it to watch video streams from Amazon Prime. She was spoiled by the conveniences of streaming and does not look back on DVDs with any romantic nostalgia at all. The only reason she doesn't just subscribe to Netflix or HBO streaming to get back that convenience was she didn't think she could afford it on her Social Security income. On the other hand, the Amazon Prime Video streaming (without ads) was already part of her Amazon subscription.
        • nradov 2y ago
          Even back when Netflix had a DVD rental service the media quality was kind of crap. I frequently got halfway through a movie only to have it skip and refuse to play due to scratches.
        • reginald78 2y ago
          I used to use netflix DVD as a great supplement to a few streaming services. For awhile they had just about everything and were pretty reliable, which meant the occasional extra media didn't require a separate service just a bit of waiting. But then they let it rot and stopped replacing disks before finally shutting it down. I wish they'd just sold it and let some one else run it for maintenance costs but I guess it was probably also a competitor to their more profitable streaming service.
    • bamboozled 2y ago
      Renting worked fine for me
    • fuzzfactor 2y ago
      For a while there, most desktop PCs came with two optical disk units, one player and one player/burner. So the original disk could be copied to writable media. There definitely would "occasionally" be a movie lover who wasn't actually buying those copies.
      • throwaway04267 2y ago
        You could manage that with only one drive, where you would just store the image on the HD temporarily. You could save space by removing unwanted content, such as foreign sound tracks, subtitles and extras. Sometimes I would even skip the end credits.
  • gwbas1c 2y ago
    Which had "stupid geographical restrictions"
    • KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
      Once you have a player and a disk, you are able to move with them wherever you want.
      • gwbas1c 2y ago
        You still had to deal with PAL <-> NTSC issues.
        • shiroiushi 2y ago
          No problem, you just bring your TV with you when you travel. /s
        • astrange 2y ago
          Computers aren't much better here. You can't display either a PAL or NTSC movie properly on a 60fps display because neither 24 or 50 divide into that.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Multi-region players were always available. Many players could also be made region-free by a “secret” remote control button sequence.
  • layer8 2y ago
    Streaming services are generally still more cost-effective, but the multiple subscriptions and different interfaces are an annoyance, as are differences between services in how easily you can circumvent regional restrictions. Physical media are more straightforward and consistent. Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
• Miraste 2y ago
  DVDs and Blu-rays also have stupid geographical restrictions. They come marked with region codes, and DVD players will only play discs from their home region. You have to go all the way back to VHS to be free of that particular corporate "innovation."
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    I don't know about bluerays but as for DVDs you just had to buy a player from Switzerland or any other country where players were not region locked.
  • theandrewbailey 2y ago
    > You have to go all the way back to VHS to be free of that particular corporate "innovation." Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa).
    • deadbunny 2y ago
      That was due to fundamental differences in standards[1] though. This isn't the case with DVD onwards (mostly). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-definition_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-definition_television
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      > Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa). That's not a georestriction, but a difference in media protocols. You could easily buy a compatible VCR. Heck, in some countries, Japan marketed VCRs that supported both PAL and NTSC (I had one of those) because those countries would have a significant influx of VHSs from both Europe and America. It's like saying the choice of 110 vs 220V (or 120 vs 240V) is a "georestriction".
      • mattl 2y ago
        You could easily buy a region-free DVD player too.
      • 2y ago
• jprete 2y ago
  You're not wrong, but DVDs were also region-locked. I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip. DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
  • KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
    > DVDs were also region-locked A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free. > DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
    • sumtechguy 2y ago
      > Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious. No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer. Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain. Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.
  • Brian_K_White 2y ago
    But region coding granularity was very course, just a few big regions, unlike geofencing today. And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.) Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
• jebarker 2y ago
  > they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes This is the killer for me. I've worked on both video compression and graphics in my career and those projects involved a lot of pixel peeping. The compression artifacts in streaming video are sometimes really distracting now. I keep contemplating switching to bluray but apparently an increasing number of 4K HD releases there are being ruined by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
  • xhkkffbf 2y ago
    I've started to look for old Blu-Ray disks because the quality of the image is generally much better.
    • KETHERCORTEX 2y ago
      As far as I know, you should also look for older Blu-Ray drive if you want to get content off the disks.
      • entropicdrifter 2y ago
        PS3s are cheap and work for every non-UHD blu-ray ever released. Top quality player
  • entropicdrifter 2y ago
    If you're worried about Aliens, I can confirm that it's gorgeous in 4k UHD and the color accuracy is much better than the prior (manually frame-by-frame denoised) 1080p blu-ray release
    • jebarker 2y ago
      Aliens and True Lies were the two i've heard most bad reviews for
    • joney_baloney 2y ago
• retrac 2y ago
  > a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
  • reginald78 2y ago
    Don't forget the added latency.
  • nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    I know effectively nothing about these topics but I recall having that thought the other day. With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
    • theandrewbailey 2y ago
      Apple knows which devices Facetime will run on. Traditional calls need to run on old embedded infrastructure that barely has 2 bits to rub together.
    • giantrobot 2y ago
      FaceTime's audio quality is both higher data rate and better audio codecs. FaceTime uses AAC audio and samples at close to the full audible audio band. It also uses a relatively high data rate compared to typical voice calls. LTE and 5G has the option of higher quality voice codecs (EVS) than older cellular networks when using VoLTE or VoNR. They support wider band sampling and higher data rates for better quality audio. Why most voice calls sound bad is inter-carrier compatibility still sucks. Typically calls will downgrade to AMR-WB or AMR-NB (8KHz and 4kHz sampling respectively). FaceTime calls, or any other pure IP voice services, don't need to downgrade codecs to interoperate. They might have to change encoded bitrates based on network conditions but never go with some lowest common denominator codec because another user is on a different network.
• latexr 2y ago
  > stupid geographical restrictions DVDs had those too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code > they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes As long as the quality is above 480p, it’s still better than DVD.
  • 7734128 2y ago
    I consider streaming 720p to be DVD quality at best. (And no, i'm not basing that on bitrate. I know modern compression is much better.)
    • latexr 2y ago
      > I consider streaming 720p to be DVD quality at best. But it’s not, DVD quality is 480p. This isn’t a matter of opinion, we can look up the numbers.
      • pkroll 2y ago
        That's too simple a comparison, against something that's a little more complicated. A 720p stream without adequate bandwidth can have terrible artifacts, mostly showing up during fast motion/panning/action. They can look objectively worse than DVDs.
      • 7734128 2y ago
        That's similar to saying that a 20 megapixel front facing camera of a cheap chinese phone is superior to a 12 megapixel DLSR.
        • CharlesW 2y ago
          You're right that vertical resolution is just one factor, but streaming uses radically more efficient codecs than DVD, so at typical broadband speeds, streaming 480P on YouTube will look far better than DVD did.
          • 2y ago
• cogman10 2y ago
  > a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS. DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy). The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate. As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
• NoPicklez 2y ago
  When I grew up during the DVD era we were still watching and listening to lossy content. Heck I remember trying to shove as much low bitrate .mp3 music files I could into my small 128mb MP3 player. Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
• musicale 2y ago
  > you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards. What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
• bobdvb 2y ago
  The reasons compression is strong: 1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost. 2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force. 3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.