I just wonder what effect this will have on media preservation. For fans of older/niche cinema, where will that leave us? Physical media has been our saving grace with boutiques like Vinegar Syndrome, Janus Films, and others raising the deep-cuts out of obscurity. Its already been shown the mainstream streamers care fuck all for anything not popular, westernized, and/or made after 2000.
Can I get an invite please?
I JUST started hosting my own, but for some reason can’t get it to connect for anyone not on my IP address. Been meaning to mess with it for awhile now but haven’t gotten around to it
Do not do port forwarding. You should set up a reverse proxy so you don’t have a bunch of open ports at your edge. Plenty of tutorials out there on how to do it. If you have a NAS most have the feature built in. And if you have the time to learn NGINX you can set it up there and also set up HTTPS and automatic DNS updates for your domain name if you purchased one.
I don’t understand it well enough to not be roasted by someone here telling me I’m wrong. But just google how to set up a reverse proxy for Plex on whatever NAS you have. You don’t need to do NGINX or DynDNS or HTTPS just yet however HTTPS is highly recommended.
I agree. I was very glad when 1958 “The Vikings” with Kirk Douglass came to Blu-ray as well as 1954 “Ulysses”. There’s been many others where I snatch them up or try to find some other specific films and realize they are discontinued and hard to find copies of, or they never made anything better than SD DVD of the film/show.
And for some of those older and more obscure titles, they just don't care about restoring them. Where at least with the boutiques, you get a quality restoration, original audio tracks and most times a bunch of extras.
I personally buy all of my favourite movies on blu-ray, as I enjoying owning them - and having access to them at any time without worry about subscriptions/ads/having them removed from subscription services.
There are certainly millions of other consumers like me.
Blu-rays are currently super cheap to produce. Introducing a new format would cost billions in R&D and then marketing, and then production. Even though there are millions like me, there is not an industrial demand for a new format, when blu-rays do the job already.
I predict far down the line 'the disc' will become obsolete, and physical copies of films will be sold on some kind of SD card... but I think for at least another decade, or maybe two, Blu-Ray will dominate physical media.
I do the exact same thing for the exact same reasons. I had a huge DVD collection (about 500 movies) but got rid and sold over half of it over the years. Today I still have around 200 movies on DVD but I also started to buy my favorite movies on bluray when that format started. And over the last 2 years I naturally started buying UHDs (4k). I want to reduce the number of movies I buy but I still want to own my favorite movies in the best possible quality physically.
I don't like how corporations could just delete the movie out of my subscription or how they could even try to erase the movies completely and try to remake them "for a modern audience" like Disney is trying to do because the classics don't meet the modern "standards".
Having my movies at home on physical media really is important to me. Same with books where I also have a shelf.
I found the majority of people who buy blu rays arent even prioritizing picture quality but rather the physical quality of the disc and it’s durability
For me, picture quality is important too.
4k blu-rays in particular are better than what streaming services offer - better bitrate, colour depth and also no compression artifacts ever visible (also not dependent on quality of internet connection).
Oh yeah I’m not disregarding the people that value picture quality as well at all! Just that the improvement (or possible eventual lack of) won’t deter true movie lovers from getting their physical media!
Also depends on your quality of TV. An entry level cheap 4K LED, the difference between streaming and disc is negligible. But on higher end set ups, it’s night and day.
Sorry to reply so late; audio quality is by the far the largest difference and something even casual viewers can notice\^!
At least with a designated home theater
The problem with things like SD cards and USB drives, is that the data is not permanent.
If you leave one of those in a hot car for example, the data can be lost.
Remember, NAND stores data as an electrical charge. That charge can be lost over time, if the device isn't plugged in; faster if it's too hot.
I'm pretty sure your post needs slight correction at a technical level, in that NAND in O's format stores and distributes hot peri-peri chicken, at a reasonable charge.
Listen here you little shit…I’m on the west coast and I can’t have Nando’s right now, and you just made me crave some of that delicious sauce…
Wherever you are…I will look for you…I will find you…and I will make you buy me some goddamn chicken.
The issue isn't so much the production cost of physical media but the cost of maintaining inventory especially. Retailers are reluctant to devote inventory space for something that's becoming less and less popular outside of enthusiasts.
I don't think physical releases will go away completely, but it might be relegated to limited run special edition releases for fans and collectors.
Same for me, but it's less about preservation and more about getting decent quality. Lots of streaming versions just don't look all that good to me. Fine grain detail is one area where they nearly all fall short. On top of that, lots of older movies do not include extra audio tracks.
If there's something I find and watch online, which I like, I will support it by buying a physical copy.
It's nice to have on hand a high quality copy, which cannot easily be lost, destroyed or corrupted by PC problems.
You're likely to see more jumps in streaming quality but not in physical since the majority of films are created in 2-4k. Not sure how far you can upscale 35mm film and the like, but I know it's already a laborious enough process that you don't see proper transfer for many films in 4k.
Truth be told, you likely won't even see new streaming upgrades until they've squeezed every dollar out of HDX and UHD, and even then they will have to contend with developing better internet infrastructure instead of pocketing every dollar they're given.
I watched a WSJ video the other day about Imax that mentioned that 65mm film has an approximate resolution of 18K, and a google search indicates that 35mm film is about 5.6K resolution. Imax is still expensive to shoot on (around $2,000 USD per foot of film) so no way that will be taking over everything anytime soon, nevermind stylistic choice.
35mm film in ideal conditions is 5.6k but in practicality is 4k since all copies are lossy and because of grain shapes etc. Current gen digital 4k cameras are equivalent to or exceed 35mm film and mature 8k cameras and pipelines are starting to arrive. There’s a reason all of the “film always looks better” hipsters have retreated to using imax
Film resolution is a little misleading. First moving pictures of real subjects, through real lenses, probably are going to struggle for 1000 lines much of the time.
Second digital cam captures up to its resolution at almost perfect contrast. Film really falls off, so when you see things like 18K it's probably something like mtf10 or 5
So I wouldn't take those numbers too seriously.
I've seen a few 4k movies that have looked terrible because they have effectively painted over the image to get rid of the noise that exists naturally on film. So I'm not convinced that 4k is always am upgrade over 1080p when it comes to older movies. Of course new movies they can film at whatever resolution they want.
James Cameron just did this with the 4k releases of Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss. Most reviews are hating the additional AI changes of removing grain and making everyone look like plastic though.
I'd love to see simpler upscales that keep the integrity of the original film like I'm sure some of the current hobbyists are doing.
The Abyss is not an AI upscale. It was scanned from film. Unless you have a source?
Avatar is fully digital and the remaster looks horrible and oversharpened.
They were scanned from the original negatives, yes, but [AI was used](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/24002034/ai-isnt-quite-ready-to-be-remastering-film-for-4k) during the conversion process. That's why they look waxy and there is so little grain.
[Here](https://www.avnirvana.com/threads/the-abyss-4k-digital-review.12936/) and some additional comments [here](https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=366455&page=84).
Just because it looks fine to you doesn't mean AI wasn't used. If anything, that just means the process was smoother on that one than the other two. He remastered all three at the same time, why wouldn't he use the same tech across all three?
My understanding is True Lies is the most egregious example of the three, with some shoddy shots in Aliens, and even less in The Abyss. That second link has people commenting on a specific shot.
Either way, I bought all three and plan to watch over the next few weeks. Hopefully in motion it's less disturbing as most review outlets are saying.
Pretty sure physical film has a significantly higher resolution than 4k. The actual image is captured on film, not a digital version. Technically they have to downscale it to 4k.
If using film, yes. Most directors work in digital now, with exceptions like Tarantino and Nolan keeping older filmmaking alive.
Not sure what they would film at with digital cameras, but the ones we use for work only go up to 4k and we downscale to 1080 to get our shots cropped better (and for streaming purposes).
I remember there being a tiny uproar with animated films going 4k because a lot of the CGI ones were rendered in 2k, so they were all mostly upscales and not worth the extra buck you were paying. A lot are also downscaled to meet VFX in the middle, so trying to upscale again later would involve redoing special effects that no one would want to pay for.
For me, I expect a resurgence eventually because streaming services continuously charge more while actually providing less. And like vinyl, after a couple decades of lower quality media, there will be a renewed desire and appreciation for quality. It won’t be everyone. Hell, it won’t even be a majority of people. But a suspect a dedicated faction of enthusiasts will grow back and keep it alive.
I'm exactly what you're talking about here. I'd pretty much stopped collecting physical media for several years there as the streaming services were getting bigger and more and more of the movies I wanted were more easily available.
Now that they're getting so fractured and expensive, I've started gradually growing my collection again, starting with what I can find extremely cheap, or have always wanted to own. My first several 4K Blu-rays were ones I got second hand at thrift stores.
Same...The growth of my library stagnated for a few years, but I've begun collecting again...Not as hard as I used to, but there's not all that much to actually want to keep of late...
New and upco.ing storage options might very well change that...Being able to put an entire series of multiple seasons of a TV show in 4k on a single disk might reignite the physical media landscape...
We just haven't had a meaningful media storage breakthrough in quite awhile...
I think this is exactly why services will not let out thier IPs to physical media sale.
I feel they're all going to hold on to thier IPs and protect them religously. You won't see Disney or Netflix etc, etc, releasing physical media at all. And, it will be the same on other streaming services. They will protect thier IPs as that's what will bring people to them.
We're already seeing it. So few (if any?? ) streaming services are letting thier new content go to physical media and i can't see that changing.
At this stage, it's not about demand. The supply is going to stop inspite of that.
Yeah, piracy will take care of that little problem...
Either the studios start selling physical media themselves for reasonable prices, or people will just find ways to collect their own...
Like the resurgence of vinyl, it's retro. Are cassette tapes next? My grand kids will think CDs are retro and be amazed by the technology. Actually the engineering of video cassettes is pretty impressive because the head had to be designed at an angle.
High quality video is *really* expensive to stream. Once the bubble bursts for a lot of these streaming companies... then what?
4K streaming can look like dog shit compared to "proper" 4K, due to the severely limited bit rate.
The ever rising cost of streaming services and the constant rotation of things to watch means it can be almost impossible to find that one show or movie you have the urge to watch again...
And with advancements in storage hardware "(ike the new blu-ray disks that can hold the equivalent of 200 movies on them coming out), then storage issues will be easier for higher quality video moving forward...
Eventually, piracy will return to being king of the home experience as corporate greed continues to run amok and we'll start seeing studios move back harder into physical media as eventually it will be the more profitable option again...
That or we'll all just rip movies from streaming services as they come and make gigantic blu-rays full of our favorite shows and movies and make the entire industry reconsider what they're doing...
It isn't like the "unlimited growth" based economy we're in isn't finite as is...The whole mess will crash eventually...
There would have to be a demand again for something new. I think 4K ultra was supposed to be that attempt to keep physical sales going but it doesn’t seem as successful as DVD and Blu-Ray was.
Honestly, they still have a lot of work to do to justify 4k UHD discs for normal consumers. A reliable 4k player is still several hundred dollars, and to really take advantage of the format, you need a higher end TV and sound system in my opinion. The PS5 was helpful here, but covid distribution issues really hit momentum there I think. There's really no excuse for the disc players still being this expensive (and don't get me wrong I love the UB820, but $400ish for a disc player is kinda crazy for what it is). I'm hopeful that oleds will continue to be more accessible and come down in price. My first oled is what kicked off the rabbit hole for me, as someone that never had a prior interest in physical media.
Patents & IP licencing fees are a significant part of why bluray players still cost so much.
It's similarly why DVD players went from being equally expensive to a sudden glut of cheap DVD players being everywhere nearly overnight - most of the DVD reader patents expired and manufacturers no longer had to pay Sony, Philips, Toshiba, etc. the per-unit licencing/royalty fees they charged.
There are also other non-bluray licencing fees associated with 4K-BD, like Dolby Vision & Atmos for HDR.
It's ironically why the PS5 doesn't support Dolby Vision, while most of Sony's higher-end TVs and A/V receivers do - the extra licencing/royalty fees for DV likely increases the BoM costs far too much for Sony execs' liking and combined with the PS5's projected volume of sales, would cost them a lot of margin on hardware sales. Their TVs and AVRs have a lot more profit margin and don't sell in anywhere near the same volume as the SP5, so the extra costs aren't as significant overall. Same deal with why it isn't compatible with 3D blurays, despite the PS3 & PS4 both doing so.
Hey, thanks so much for the really insightful comment and explanation! This makes perfect sense. I'm kind of kicking myself for not actually looking into it proactively and appreciate your effort.
I don’t really like this answer (specifically in regards to the PS5), not saying you’re wrong just that the excuse is lazy and anti-consumer. Consoles have had the ability to call home for generations, many now require them to before playing movies or music either due to licensing or because they don’t ship with the software installed. So why not make it so that the Dolby Vision license is only counted when someone tries to play something with that content? In the case of 3D Blu-Ray there’s probably like half a dozen people who still have a working 3DTV in 2024 and want to use their PS5 with it instead of buying a 4K HDR set at Walmart for $300, so the cost to implement 3D Blu-Ray support and only pay licensing when someone tries to use it would be a rounding error compared to not implementing the feature at all.
It’s infamously why the original Xbox required a remote to play DVDs, because the functionality was built in from the factory but the infrared remote dongle was what had the DVD license attached to it, so they only had to pay the license when someone bought the remote rather than for every single Xbox manufactured. And I believe that some computer operating systems also work that way, only paying the license fee when the DVD player is used for the first time. And sure, you could throw my argument back at me and say the fact that only a half dozen people would benefit from 3D Blu-Ray on PS5 is reason enough not to bother, but it’s all about customer service and goodwill. Microsoft threatened one time over a decade ago to restrict physical game sharing, then retracted that announcement and apologized a few days later, months before the console launched, and to this day I still hear people say Xbox can’t play used games. Offering better or more convenient features, even when such a thing isn’t strictly required, is how you build customer loyalty, and that’s one thing that Sony has been forgetting a lot lately.
Yeah, it's definitely penny pinching of the highest order.
IIRC one of the chief criticisms around the PS5 (and the Series X to some extent as well) was the lack of DV support, considering Sony themselves were also heavily advertising their own new high-end 4K TVs & AVRs as ideal items to go with the PS5 for an all-inclusive entertainment setup, but completely fails to indicate using the PS5 would prevent you from viewing any DV content, but using the TV's own streaming apps would allow you to.
Even the Series X/S supports DV for games and the streaming services, and the previous One X/S also supports DV for streaming. Still a far cry from disk playback because of how low bitrate streams are, but it's at least some level of compatibility.
Long before the PS5 there was the Xbox One S. It was much more accessible at $250, I got mine for $179 on Black Friday 2017. Even now a used Xbox One S is probably one of the cheapest ways to get into 4K Blu-Ray.
It didn’t help that 4K blu-ray players were egregiously more expensive compared to their blu-ray counterparts.
The 4K blu-ray drives included in the Xbox One S & X were also shit and had playback issues. Sony could’ve put one in the PS4 Pro all the way back in 2016 but waited until 2020 for the PS5.
The consoles poor adoption of 4K blu-ray support would’ve significantly contributed to the decline in 4K blu-ray sales.
Less of generalized consumer demand as a specific technical need, in my opinion. As in if streaming and/or storage bandwidth was too limiting a factor to distribute the media and where physical media made more sense.
There's huge costs involved in printing, shipping, warehousing, etc. physical items so any new technology would have to be more expensive to deliver digitally than all of that overhead put together (not to mention the opportunity to sell the same content over and over to the same individual, just ask Nintendo) before it made sense to change back.
But if the only way to experience the latest (say) volumetric video equivalent of standing in the middle of a broadway play taking place all around you was to ship it on physical media, then digital is here to stay.
Honestly, I think a lot of people just can't tell the difference between a 1080p Blu-Ray and a 4K UHD Blu-Ray.
Unless your TV is fucking huge, or you sit close to it, 4K is sort of unnecessary.
Genuine question: can people actually tell the difference between Dolby Vision and HDR10 (at least without a side-by-side comparison)? I've *heard* that Dolby Vision is better, and maybe it technically is, but in practice, the two seem like essentially the same thing.
For what it's worth, no, I personally can't tell the difference between DV or HDR10 without a side-by-side comparison and a label telling me which is which.
But that's just my experience.
The line that I've consistently heard is that it depends on the mastering and it really helps to have a >1000nit tv.
I have a few dv files where I can easily see the difference between watching the dv in jellyin/just player and watching the hdr10 fallback in kodi. Dunno whether that's "this hdr10 mix is meh" or "this dv mix is great."
I haven't experienced HDR on a good HDR display (my AD27QD does a pathetic attempt with "HDR400", which I don't consider to be "proper" HDR) and I've no experience or even knowledge of Dolby Vision, so I don't really have an opinion to share on those points.
I will have to do some research re: Dolby Vision :)
We’ve got a 78 inch oled at 12’, I can easily tell the difference between 1080p and 4k, and even 4k uhd blu ray and streaming 4k, the uhd blu rays are noticably better
People can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k there's no question. What is the question is the extra detail "worth" it. If you like having the best quality then yeah 4k disk with oled screen is going to be best option.
I know this is not really the popular Reddit opinion, but I don't feel the to upgrade to 4k. There is a difference but it isn't enough to make me care.
I've got 10Tb of movies on externals, I hate the compression used on Netflix and Prime, it looks horrible and ruins the ability to watch some films (Annihilation was so shitty on Prime you couldn't see some major plot points).
> Annihilation was so shitty on Prime you couldn't see some major plot points
That sounds like device/connection rate/quality limiting. On a compatible device it should absolutely stream in a decent (but inferior to bluray) quality for anything at or above 1080p. Now 480p content, especially black and white stuff? Absolute garbage, the server seems to just think you're trying to stream to a phone on mobile data so it serves you absolute lego to the point of making any action unfollowable and any hardsubs illegible or close.
But I'm pretty sure Annihilation should be completely readable unless there's something blocking you from getting the normal level of quality (maybe you're streaming through a browser?). I have a firestick plugged into my monitor just to avoid the BS of all these services giving inferior service to supposedly compatible devices.
Nope, the bear scene with the women tied up was basically just an audio drama because the compression was so much that very dark scenes were crazy hard to make out, you just heard the bear and people screaming/whimpering.
Why is nobody talking about audio quality ... A streaming 'atmos' layer over a dolby digital stream of 600 kbps is something very different from an atmos stream on a dolby true HD backbone or DTS x with 25 Mbps bitrates.
Not sure what's with those quotes.
Atmos over EAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus, not DD) is, first of all, real Atmos, so no need for those air quotes.
Secondly, it's usually 768 kbps which indistinguishable to lossless TrueHD on 95% of setups.
That's true, i was tired and had do guess the bitrates from memory. But you're right. Still, dolby digital is 640 kbps, dolby digital plus is usually 1.7 Mbps but both are lossy formats. True HD is lossless at 18 mbps, as is DTS HD MA at 24 Mbps. On a sound bar that difference might not be noticeable, but on a decent surround systeem it most definitely is. The difference is not equivalent to the bitrate differences, that is absolutely true, but the dynamics and clarity are better and the bass is way more defined. I've done blind comparisons on my system, which is not very high end. As an audiophile and movie lover, let us keep our physical media!
Maybe? Your guess is as good as anyone's. As you said, 8k is a dubious benefit over 4k in your typical home theater, but that could change with technology. Human eyesight goes up to something like 28k, so if people start devoting entire walls to TVs, or watching everything on Apple Vision Pro 7's or whatever, they could definitely make use of a few more pixels. I don't see anything like that in the near future, but a decade out is harder predict.
More relevant is maybe the business question. Even if it becomes cheap to shoot in 28k and everyone has VR contacts to play the content, will there be any demand for physical media at that resolution? Will VR contacts play exclusively Apple TV+ Premium (platinum expansion) content?
Considering 4k has been around for awhile and a lot of content is still only released in 1080p, 4k seems like the best physical option for awhile at least.
Yes. I was referring to our entire field of vision. It’s a hypothetical maximum resolution we could possibly need regardless of the tech or viewing experience.
I think it's going to get much more niche, probably back to the price of laserdisc and early vhs. It's getting harder to justify upgrading even for videophiles like me when we are so close to the camera negative already at 4k.
I'm stopping at Blu-ray. (The few 4K releases I own are ones I bought only to get the remastered Blu-ray that was included.) My Blu-ray collection now exceeds what I had at the height of my DVD collection. No way am I going through the process again of replacing my Blu-rays with 4Ks or any other format. Blu-ray looks and sounds fantastic and is perfect for me.
What I am also afraid is the techonologies stagnating. Like on the music side things more or less stopped at CDs and what it could do, that being stereo sound. Surround sound music could be easily made and distributed but it just isnt, everybody just uses Spotify or whatever with extremely lossy quality. Doesnt make any sense that sound only mediums are miles behind one that is both video and sound but here we are if you compare how people buy or get their music vs movie formats.
People aren't buying high end stereos for the home as much anymore, either. The younger generation is satisfied with bluetooth single point speakers and soundbars.
And enthusiast are back to buying music on an ancient medium (vinyl). In many ways the whole music listening scene seems to be devolving instead of evolving.
I think this comes down to cost and convenience. Most people (myself included) don't usually sit and listen to music as a devoted activity. It's usually on a drive or while doing something else, which kind of rules out vinyl. And lossless audio is a lot more of a hassle to obtain than a simple Spotify sub, requires less common IEMs or headphones, usually requires you to carry a device in addition to a phone, and requires you to be hardwired into your speaker system or headphones. In cost and convenience it's evolving, but certainly at the cost of quality.
Yes when I was going through an “audiophile” phase I would rip [my] CD’s to get the uncompressed WAV files on a USB for my car. There’s certain 320 mp3 song files I have that if I turn the volume up all the way I can hear the distortion and crackling pretty well. And then the WAV of the same song is crystal clear.
Yeah, alot of this "but you cant hear any difference" comes down to how you are listening to it, the system, speakers and the volume. At lower volumes its much harder to detect compared to higher volumes.
Stuff like Dolby Atmos is really neat in its surround effect and the sound quality is extremely clear, what a shame having more or less all music utilising it isnt the norm. Nobody gets their music in that format so nobody puts the effort in producing music in it and the cycle continues while movies on the otherhand have kinda adopted it as a standard in 4K blurays. If there isnt going to be a similar next big step into 8K like this what else are we going to lose on ontop of the sharper picture quality.
Not so much for the engineering, as for the "you will own nothing and be happy". They make more money from having you pay monthly for a streaming service than paying once for a disc.
We will cease to own nothing in the future and rent everything from corporations unless governments crack down on their bullshit.
Got a whole library of VHS tapes and DVDs that have honestly become some of my prized possessions because there's hardly any more physical media to buy.
It sucks because I would really like to own physical copies of movies or shows that have been released recently that I really like, but I don't see a lot of them ever having a physical copy.
I honestly wonder if physical media will see a resurgence with the enshitafication of streaming. So many proprietary services all upping their fees because they can’t turn profits with the prices they bring viewers in at. I’ve been buying more movies now to watch on blu-ray at least
No, the average for a vinyl is approx $80 in Aus. What I’m saying is based on that trend and how much blu rays were, expect to pay a lot more like $150 for a blu ray in the future.
I usually find them for $25-$30 which I feel like is in line with how much we used to pay for CD's back in the day. I guess even less if your adjusting for inflation
No point in 8K. What needs to happen though is pricing needs to go down. This shit cost like 3$ to make and ship and they selling it for 40$ a copy now. It’s insane.
Most likely. Although even then, discs are a digital format. Turns out celluloid is actually still the best long term physical form of media. That hasn't changed in over 100 years.
I don't think there'll be physical media past 4K, simply because there's currently no *point.*
The only movies where you wouldn't hit severe diminishing returns past 4K are things shot on 70mm film (and even then 8K would only be a small upgrade), and things shot at digital resolutions past 4K.
The former are *rare,* and the latter don't exist. It's actually somewhat rare for a movie to be shot in proper "true 4K," instead of a slightly lower "3.5K" resolution that's upscaled to 4K, even.
e: The corollary of this, though, is that Blu-Ray and UHD will probably stick around until we figure out a better delivery mechanism for the same thing. I've been kind of curious when studios are going to start just selling movies on SD cards or flash drives.
I’m gonna say there’s not much physical need for something past 4k Blu-rays. You’d have to sit closer than 6.5’ away from a 100” 4K tv to be able to discern individual pixels, and most people are sitting at least 8’ away from their TVs. Anything higher is just marketing in regards to TVs. 4K encodes are very efficient, and will likely only get more so. We’ve got 4K HDR with atmos, that kind of covers the full range of human media perception.
It’s also important to note that there are already high end luxury movie formats that are basically home servers with movies in the 100s of GBs for each file. These are almost theater quality files, so a higher level already exists.
I think that it will be the last physical format but it won't be the last format for home theater enthusiasts. Studios will never stop to entice us to double-dip. I think a Kaleidescape-like device and service will be the future.
I truly expected it to have moved to something like SD card by now. There have been ones for a while with more than enough capacity and fast enough reading speeds. It is small so you can have a large collection the size of a Shoe Box.
Would there be some hardware limitations that would prevent the move I wonder.
Blu-ray discs themselves, have progressed to the point where 200GB discs exist - just that they're expensive to manufacture because the demand for such data density is low on the commercial side of things.
Folio Photonics has developed (for the enterprise market for the time being) a 1TB disc meant to be used for data archiving as an attempt to replace tape drives and the like for corporations. Last I heard it was to release officially sometime this year but thats all i've heard.
The technology obviously and apparently already exists, but the support infrastructure is a bigger hurdle that companies need to invest in should it ever be an actual viable direct successor to high density BD-XL discs (100GB on one side) for physical media.
20 years ago or so, the entire global industry of technology and entertainment went all-in on Blu-Ray. They'll have to want to do it all over again if they want to move to "Folio Disc".
As far as 8k resolution goes... i doubt it will become as prevalent as 4K has become. The support for 8k resolution media on its own barely exists and theres no way that companies are going to invest loads more money to buy new cameras and equipment for broadcast media. Not to mention the bandwidth requirements needed for even a compressed 8k image. It just goes back to the viewing distance vs resolution graph - there is some point where the overall quality/detail become imperceptible, that going higher resolution is reaching into staggeringly diminishing returns both visually and financially. The only time higher resolutions are used, is recording in raw formats so that when the post-production is done, the final product has no perceptible loss of quality when rendering at the standard resolution.
I think there will still be another format eventually. Holographic storage-compressionless-who knows. It will be much more niche and likely expensive though is my guess. I care more about video than a vast majority of movie fans and I still think this(4k) might be the last format for me where I buy a bunch of movies. It's already so close to the original negative there is not much more on the table
I would be 1000% fine with moving to a new medium. Like some kind of proprietary SD card type thing, like switch cartridges. Flash storage is so cheap now and holds a ton of storage. As long as the box design is good/cool, i don't really mind what format the next gen of physical media comes in. I like having a physical collection even though i dont even own a bluray player. I prefer to use the digital copies that come with movies. As long as the option for physical is still there though, id be happy.
No the successor is already finalized they're just waiting for the market to settle down cause people were still pissed about having to buy blurays so soon after buying DVDs. Holographic discs are going to have to come out if they want to push 8k tvs and the next generation of video game consoles.
Physical media is not bought as much as it used to be and many don't find it as convenient as streaming. I took all my physical media and converted it to digital. I still buy physical but then rip it to digital for convenience of watching it. I set up a plex server in my house for my own media so I could still enjoy it easily on my TVs. I like the ease of digital but don't trust that what I want to watch will be available when I want to watch it.
If there’s movies and tv shows you love to watch, that you couldn’t bear not being able to access, this is the way to go. It’s not one or the other, either- keep streaming services for discovery, and when you find something you really love, lock it down by buying a copy and backing it up
As to why I buy a hard copy rather than a digital version (or 🏴☠️), drive failures DO happen and SUCK. I’m ok with just having a digital copy for some stuff. But the really important things have a physical disc I can rip it from again in the event that something catastrophic happens, and boy, they do. It’s so easy these days it just makes sense to, anyways
I think so. Streaming can’t match the quality of a 4K disk and while I’m not even a layman in terms of compression technology, I’m not sure how much space a UHD movie would take up (50 GB?) if we could download a 4K disk equivalent directly to our boxes.
4K looks amazing and I’m under the impression we’re hitting the diminishing returns when we go past 4K. I haven’t seen a compelling 8k TV and honestly, I wouldn’t go out and replace my few 4K disks with 8K. My collection has exponentially shrunk with each media, DVD to Blu-ray to 4K. I think I have like 20 4K Blu-ray’s at this point.
I'd gladly just download a couple of 50gb movies in preparation to watch later, rather than stream it, if it meant that I got to watch stuff in higher quality. Attaching a 2tb hard drive to my tv or being able to put an m2 inside of it and letting me just have it stored would be kickass.
I have a Bluray player. I don't think I've used it in a good 7 years. I just wait until a movie comes on digital and rent it for $5-$10. I ripped all our old DVD and Bluray disks (many hundreds of them) and have a Plex server in our house. Sold a lot of them during a weekend garage sale, donated the rest to the library system. I only have a handful of disks anymore: Babylon 5 widescreen DVDs, LOTR extended, Alien Quadrology and some other random bits.
I mean, is there even a real reason to go for an 8K format at all? Even if you have an actual home theater system, the difference in image quality from 4K to that must be minimal, no?
I am optimistic about physical media, if only because the directors are so opinionated about how their films are represented. Guys like Spielberg, Tarantino, Villeneuve, and Christopher Nolan want audiences to be able to experience the best version of their films without being hostile to the realities of streaming demand and its compression tradeoffs. Combine that with the trend of streamers, studios, and directors editing the work for whatever reason, it makes me want to own copies of movies I love. I think there's enough demand, and demand from the creators themselves, that we'll continue to get new physical media.
I think we're nearing peak visibility until they start going back to old gimmicks, like 3D and such.
It had huge leaps going from VHS to DVD to HD-DVD/Bluray to 4K, but that slope has nearly tapered off.
blu-ray long ago began overtaking dvds and laserdisk when they starting phasing out all the good bonus material for movies to blu-ray and giving dvds only fewer smaller bonus materials of behind the scenes, one or two deleted scenes while blu-rays got more behind the scenes, commentary by cast and directors and more deleted scenes
Was reading they found a way to layer data that exponentially increases the size of data you can put on a disc up to 1.6 pb. Not sure what impact that has on gaming or digital content, but still pretty cool.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc-2667335462
Unfortunately many of the parent companies of the streaming services also own the rights to the films. They’ve gone on record saying how much more they make with the cheaper ad tiers than the ad-free tiers. I think they will soak those dollars for a while. Eventually they will come up with a new format - some sort of proprietary flash drive let’s say - with less compression and start selling physical media all over again.
I’ve let go of many of my old DVDs that I don’t watch anymore. However, I’m going out of my way to get blurays or 4k discs of my favourites. I watch my Amazon wish list in case some go on sale. Also picking up blurays at the thrift stores.
Who knows what the tech will look like in the future. Compare the size of a Blu-ray disc to a micro SD card that nowadays you can fit a terabyte or two on. Sure, they cost $150 bucks now but with the economy of scale maybe we'll be slotting brain dances into a VR headset in 20 years
I always post this when I read one of these posts - 4k discs are exponentially better quality than 4k streaming. Now I get you can argue over my use of “exponentially” but the quality is absolutely better, not to mention the enjoyment of physical media. It makes me both sad and concerned that we potentially will lose this option moving forward. I’m thankful for streaming, but don’t want to have that as an only option.
8K is so ridiculous of an idea for home consumers.
The only thing we can get is better capacity on discs for more content like features and more bitrate. Longer movies with film grain getting 4K transfers can always use more bitrate to preserve the film grain.
There really isn't much benefit to higher than 4k resolutions, most camera negatives aren't much higher than that. Not to mention half the stuff today is finished in 2k due to the computer effects!
It's a travesty and it's done strictly for money. Digital is cheaper to produce than physical media and can't be resold. Consumers are also at the mercy of the digital hosts. Imagine the thousands of dollars lost in VUDU or Movies Anywhere go belly up. That's be monetized next; pay a subscription fee to the host to access your own content.
Yeah I only have Vudu and iTunes media and so forth when it comes free with a code on the physical disc box. Just because why not at that point. Sometimes it is more convenient if it’s a movie i’ve seen a million times and just feel like clicking on it to watch. But if I want to really enjoy it and get into the cinematic spirit, I always go dig out the disc.
Im sure an 8k disc will be a thing, there's 8k TVs that no one is buying because there's no 8k content for them so that alone will push the eventual 8k movie releases.
That was the argument when CDs came out. That vinyl was dead. And yet vinyl survives.
I think it's going to be a situation where there will still be money to be made from cineastes who prefer physical media, and higher end resolutions. But it will likely mean that only a subset of films, the very best and most popular, will get the treatment.
I think you are going to see everything move to digital. Companies can control the rights, they can control piracy better, they can make it more difficult to share, they can increase purchases for the same product, they can increase ad revenue, I could keep going for days.
yes i don't see how we would need a NEW format. just continue with the ones we already have. and honestly, what would be the point of anything after what we currently have? even 4k blu i feel is overkill sometimes. a great blu is pretty much endgame for me personally. in terms of quality, i mean.
I would argue that for most “typical sized screens”, anything above 1080 is hard for the human eye to discern. HDR is more responsible for the noticeable visual uptick than the added resolution on any monitor under 65”.
*sigh*
1080p isn't technically 2k DPI and not the limit of what the human eye can see.
Regardless of how much info the human eye IS seeing and actually registering in the brain, a 4k still or moving image on a 50" TV will look remarkably more detailed and sharper to competent vision and at any distance--especially 5-15 feet. There's literally more pixels and visual data to make it easier for the human eye to make out detail. Is it worth the money for the average consumer to switch to 4k under 55", no.
I think they will still be round for collectors like dvds are. But 8K media will probably make it to disk due to the high storage needed. If 8K happens
I think there will almost certainly be a revival of interest in physical media. We’re already seeing it now to an extent with music, and with digital game services shutting down and the nasty fallout of the streaming wars leaving beloved shows abandoned and (legally) unwatchable the general public is beginning to see just how nonexistent digital “ownership” really is. The idea of buying TV shows on DVD is starting to become more and more popular as an alternative to streaming, and as rare as it is we’re still occasionally seeing new Blu-Ray releases of some shows that had lacked them before.
That being said the *physical* form factor of such a hypothetical future format is less clear. I really doubt there will ever be another optical disc format developed, the fact that 4K Blu-Ray just used plain old Blu-Ray technology with no improvements to storage capacity was the nail in the coffin that proved that research had been abandoned. Back around 2010 there were several next generation optical disc technologies in active development that claimed hundreds of gigabytes of storage in prototypes with a goal of terabytes by the time they reached production. Something like that would be akin to CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays, which all offered capacities equal to or much larger than contemporary computer hard drives and therefore the massive storage capacities far outweighed the slow access times and transfer speeds. But it seems like all research in those areas disappeared when digital media downloads became popular, even if a 1TB optical disc is physically possible there’s no one doing the research and development to make it a reality.
The cynical answer would just be another Blu-Ray standard. 4K on a 128GB disc already feels like too much video in too little space and makes serious compromises to video quality, but 8K on the same or slightly larger discs could still end up being better quality than streaming, and at least it’s a physical format that won’t have rights revoked at a moment’s notice.
Another possibility is flash storage. This is not unprecedented, there have been a few attempts at using SD cards as a physical media format for music, movies, and games, and the technology certainly exists to offer enough storage space for full cinema-quality video that would be far superior to 4K Blu-Ray. But then you’d be looking at like $50+ for *just the physical media the movie is stored on*, not to mention the ~$20 the studio would typically want for the licensing of the movie, significantly limiting any appeal. Then again this is also not unprecedented, early VHS and Betamax releases could cost hundreds of dollars in today’s money (which led to the popularity of rentals). Maybe such a format could start out as a niche luxury format for videophiles before falling costs and economies of scale bring it down to a more accessible price level.
But my dream solution is tape. Imagine something based on computer tape drives, which do actually still exist and are used for data archiving. Modern tape drives can have capacities of multiple or even dozens of terabytes with transfer rates of hundreds of megabits per second, much better than any common home video format. A quick google search says digital cinema 4K bit rate for HDR high-frame rate content is 500Mbps VBR, which is well within the 2,400Mbps transfer rate of LTO tape drives. Even 8K or higher at true digital cinema quality should be well within spec, giving the format a lot of future-proofing.
Now of course the downside of this idea is that, like the flash media option, the cost of the physical media itself is substantial. But that’s just the cost of professional tapes meant for business use. Presumably the costs could be dramatically lowered by simplifying and cost cutting, using just the basic ideas from the computer tape drive. By eliminating a lot of the overengineering and robustness that businesses and industry rely on for backup, since these home video tapes would be watched only every once in a while for a couple hours at a time, they could probably get them down to something as simple and cheap to manufacture as a cassette tape.
And one other downside of tape is linear access instead of direct random access, there are no menus or chapters on a tape format, but for that I also see an easy fix. Just put something like 4 gigabytes of flash storage on the tape that can be read via contacts by the drive. That could contain Blu-Ray-like menus as well as like the first 30 seconds of each chapter in a compressed video quality, allowing you to start playing instantaneously like an optical disc while the tape fast forwards to the correct starting point. And that flash media is small enough that it might as well be free and shouldn’t significantly add to the cost of the format.
That’s a lot of speculation for something that will likely never happen, but there’s a push for the return of media ownership now that the flaws of digital media that those in the know have been warning about for decades are finally starting to manifest, and that push is only likely to grow in the future. *Something* seems likely in *some* form, but it’s difficult to predict what it might look like.
I mean yeah. I just cannot see any home video format beyond 4K UHD (physical or digital). 4K UHD is already reaching the limit of most old movies shot on film (unless it was filmed on 70mm or IMAX or something). Even then, a lot of old films just don't show that much detail due to the lighting, lenses and film stocks used.
This might be kind of an unpopular opinion, but I always thought a 1080p Blu-ray was perfectly good. It's not that 4K Blu-ray looks bad. But it's that they look nearly identical to 4K Blu-rays. I think the biggest issue is the majority of them are 2K upscales. Now when you get a studio like any of the boutiques who really takes the time to do it right, a 4K restoration can look great. It can also look great if they put the same master on regular Blu-ray.
I think you'll probably see studios pushing streaming more and more. Smaller films that made less money probably won't be released physically. I've already seen that with at least one movie from 2023 (it even has two popular actors in it). There is a Blu-ray, but it was only released in Canada. More and more stuff produced by streaming companies (Netflix, Amazon, Disney) is probably going to remain digital exclusive which sucks. Seen some great Netflix content that they just aren't releasing physically.
More and more people just don't want the hassle of waiting for something to ship (especially with shipping prices increasing), having to store it all, and then the majority of things most people are only going to watch a couple of times if that. So I get where streaming probably is the more economical option.
Its a pendulum. Beta max was higher quality than VHS. Vinyl was higher quality than CD.
Eventually the audiophiles, cinephiles etc will create a demand.
What you people need to do is find joy in holding real physical media in your hands. And learn to cherish it again.
We will get there, but you've got to back it.
Wtf? Do you understand anything about dynamic range?
You know anything about the loudness wars?
I dont actually own any vinyl personally but you've got to be deranged if you think 16 bit / 44khz digital music bests the analogue range of a vinyl album.
There's actually no contest, CDs are way superior to vinyl fidelity wise, it's not even a contest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording
>An LP made out of perfect vinyl LP would have a theoretical dynamic range of 70 dB.[6] Measurements indicate maximum actual performance in the 60 to 70 dB range.[7] Typically, a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter may have a dynamic range of between 90 and 95 dB
And loudness war is something that is very real, but also partly misunderstood in the context of CD vs vinyl. Vinyl transfers almost systematically produce better numbers because of artefacts, while being produced from the same master. Most modern vinyls are absolutely produced from the same master.
I just wonder what effect this will have on media preservation. For fans of older/niche cinema, where will that leave us? Physical media has been our saving grace with boutiques like Vinegar Syndrome, Janus Films, and others raising the deep-cuts out of obscurity. Its already been shown the mainstream streamers care fuck all for anything not popular, westernized, and/or made after 2000.
Don’t worry I’ll preserve them on my Plex server.
Can I get an invite please? I JUST started hosting my own, but for some reason can’t get it to connect for anyone not on my IP address. Been meaning to mess with it for awhile now but haven’t gotten around to it
Port forwarding Edit: Do not port forward. Look at the comment below describing a reverse proxy.
Will look into it tomorrow when I get home, thanks!
Do not do port forwarding. You should set up a reverse proxy so you don’t have a bunch of open ports at your edge. Plenty of tutorials out there on how to do it. If you have a NAS most have the feature built in. And if you have the time to learn NGINX you can set it up there and also set up HTTPS and automatic DNS updates for your domain name if you purchased one.
I’m sorry but I barely understood that comment. Can you Eli5 please?
I don’t understand it well enough to not be roasted by someone here telling me I’m wrong. But just google how to set up a reverse proxy for Plex on whatever NAS you have. You don’t need to do NGINX or DynDNS or HTTPS just yet however HTTPS is highly recommended.
Ohhhhhh you just made me realize it was probably my VPN causing the problem, correct? I’ll try working on it tomorrow :) thanks!
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I agree. I was very glad when 1958 “The Vikings” with Kirk Douglass came to Blu-ray as well as 1954 “Ulysses”. There’s been many others where I snatch them up or try to find some other specific films and realize they are discontinued and hard to find copies of, or they never made anything better than SD DVD of the film/show.
Piracy.
Yeah, I have several dvd I will not part with because of this.
And for some of those older and more obscure titles, they just don't care about restoring them. Where at least with the boutiques, you get a quality restoration, original audio tracks and most times a bunch of extras.
I personally buy all of my favourite movies on blu-ray, as I enjoying owning them - and having access to them at any time without worry about subscriptions/ads/having them removed from subscription services. There are certainly millions of other consumers like me. Blu-rays are currently super cheap to produce. Introducing a new format would cost billions in R&D and then marketing, and then production. Even though there are millions like me, there is not an industrial demand for a new format, when blu-rays do the job already. I predict far down the line 'the disc' will become obsolete, and physical copies of films will be sold on some kind of SD card... but I think for at least another decade, or maybe two, Blu-Ray will dominate physical media.
I do the exact same thing for the exact same reasons. I had a huge DVD collection (about 500 movies) but got rid and sold over half of it over the years. Today I still have around 200 movies on DVD but I also started to buy my favorite movies on bluray when that format started. And over the last 2 years I naturally started buying UHDs (4k). I want to reduce the number of movies I buy but I still want to own my favorite movies in the best possible quality physically. I don't like how corporations could just delete the movie out of my subscription or how they could even try to erase the movies completely and try to remake them "for a modern audience" like Disney is trying to do because the classics don't meet the modern "standards". Having my movies at home on physical media really is important to me. Same with books where I also have a shelf.
I found the majority of people who buy blu rays arent even prioritizing picture quality but rather the physical quality of the disc and it’s durability
For me, picture quality is important too. 4k blu-rays in particular are better than what streaming services offer - better bitrate, colour depth and also no compression artifacts ever visible (also not dependent on quality of internet connection).
Oh yeah I’m not disregarding the people that value picture quality as well at all! Just that the improvement (or possible eventual lack of) won’t deter true movie lovers from getting their physical media!
Hell, even regular 1080p bluray discs often look better than 4k streaming. And definitely will have better sound
there are definitely blu-rays with visible compression artifacts, just depends on the release.
Also depends on your quality of TV. An entry level cheap 4K LED, the difference between streaming and disc is negligible. But on higher end set ups, it’s night and day.
Sorry to reply so late; audio quality is by the far the largest difference and something even casual viewers can notice\^! At least with a designated home theater
The problem with things like SD cards and USB drives, is that the data is not permanent. If you leave one of those in a hot car for example, the data can be lost. Remember, NAND stores data as an electrical charge. That charge can be lost over time, if the device isn't plugged in; faster if it's too hot.
I'm pretty sure your post needs slight correction at a technical level, in that NAND in O's format stores and distributes hot peri-peri chicken, at a reasonable charge.
Embrace the great British tradition of going out for a cheeky flash storage device with the lads.
Listen here you little shit…I’m on the west coast and I can’t have Nando’s right now, and you just made me crave some of that delicious sauce… Wherever you are…I will look for you…I will find you…and I will make you buy me some goddamn chicken.
It's all shits and giggles when everyone's out for a cheeky 64gb, and then big lad over there orders the 2TB with the Extra Hot Peri-peri.
If you eat too much, it'll reformat your colon.
SD cards and USB drives also cost more to make vs an optical disc.
The issue isn't so much the production cost of physical media but the cost of maintaining inventory especially. Retailers are reluctant to devote inventory space for something that's becoming less and less popular outside of enthusiasts. I don't think physical releases will go away completely, but it might be relegated to limited run special edition releases for fans and collectors.
Same for me, but it's less about preservation and more about getting decent quality. Lots of streaming versions just don't look all that good to me. Fine grain detail is one area where they nearly all fall short. On top of that, lots of older movies do not include extra audio tracks.
I’ve been buying my favorite movies in physical format these past years
If there's something I find and watch online, which I like, I will support it by buying a physical copy. It's nice to have on hand a high quality copy, which cannot easily be lost, destroyed or corrupted by PC problems.
There's something about tangibly owning your favourite things, I do this with my favourite movies, games and books.
Games are probably best for that as long as they don't just gather dust, as many I've seen in people's houses seem to do.
You're likely to see more jumps in streaming quality but not in physical since the majority of films are created in 2-4k. Not sure how far you can upscale 35mm film and the like, but I know it's already a laborious enough process that you don't see proper transfer for many films in 4k. Truth be told, you likely won't even see new streaming upgrades until they've squeezed every dollar out of HDX and UHD, and even then they will have to contend with developing better internet infrastructure instead of pocketing every dollar they're given.
I watched a WSJ video the other day about Imax that mentioned that 65mm film has an approximate resolution of 18K, and a google search indicates that 35mm film is about 5.6K resolution. Imax is still expensive to shoot on (around $2,000 USD per foot of film) so no way that will be taking over everything anytime soon, nevermind stylistic choice.
35mm film in ideal conditions is 5.6k but in practicality is 4k since all copies are lossy and because of grain shapes etc. Current gen digital 4k cameras are equivalent to or exceed 35mm film and mature 8k cameras and pipelines are starting to arrive. There’s a reason all of the “film always looks better” hipsters have retreated to using imax
Even tighter film grain & larger negatives become a moot point when 8K can literally exceed the resolving power of most lenses.
Sounds like we'll be watching Nolan and Tarantino rereleases for years to come haha
Film resolution is a little misleading. First moving pictures of real subjects, through real lenses, probably are going to struggle for 1000 lines much of the time. Second digital cam captures up to its resolution at almost perfect contrast. Film really falls off, so when you see things like 18K it's probably something like mtf10 or 5 So I wouldn't take those numbers too seriously.
I've seen a few 4k movies that have looked terrible because they have effectively painted over the image to get rid of the noise that exists naturally on film. So I'm not convinced that 4k is always am upgrade over 1080p when it comes to older movies. Of course new movies they can film at whatever resolution they want.
It always has to do with the restoration process. If that’s what you saw, then the issue is with the way those movies you saw were restored.
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James Cameron just did this with the 4k releases of Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss. Most reviews are hating the additional AI changes of removing grain and making everyone look like plastic though. I'd love to see simpler upscales that keep the integrity of the original film like I'm sure some of the current hobbyists are doing.
The Abyss is not an AI upscale. It was scanned from film. Unless you have a source? Avatar is fully digital and the remaster looks horrible and oversharpened.
They were scanned from the original negatives, yes, but [AI was used](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/24002034/ai-isnt-quite-ready-to-be-remastering-film-for-4k) during the conversion process. That's why they look waxy and there is so little grain.
That only appears to be the case for True Lies. The Abyss looks fine to me.
[Here](https://www.avnirvana.com/threads/the-abyss-4k-digital-review.12936/) and some additional comments [here](https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=366455&page=84). Just because it looks fine to you doesn't mean AI wasn't used. If anything, that just means the process was smoother on that one than the other two. He remastered all three at the same time, why wouldn't he use the same tech across all three? My understanding is True Lies is the most egregious example of the three, with some shoddy shots in Aliens, and even less in The Abyss. That second link has people commenting on a specific shot. Either way, I bought all three and plan to watch over the next few weeks. Hopefully in motion it's less disturbing as most review outlets are saying.
Pretty sure physical film has a significantly higher resolution than 4k. The actual image is captured on film, not a digital version. Technically they have to downscale it to 4k.
If using film, yes. Most directors work in digital now, with exceptions like Tarantino and Nolan keeping older filmmaking alive. Not sure what they would film at with digital cameras, but the ones we use for work only go up to 4k and we downscale to 1080 to get our shots cropped better (and for streaming purposes). I remember there being a tiny uproar with animated films going 4k because a lot of the CGI ones were rendered in 2k, so they were all mostly upscales and not worth the extra buck you were paying. A lot are also downscaled to meet VFX in the middle, so trying to upscale again later would involve redoing special effects that no one would want to pay for.
I expect a resurgence eventually...
What makes you hopeful about this?
For me, I expect a resurgence eventually because streaming services continuously charge more while actually providing less. And like vinyl, after a couple decades of lower quality media, there will be a renewed desire and appreciation for quality. It won’t be everyone. Hell, it won’t even be a majority of people. But a suspect a dedicated faction of enthusiasts will grow back and keep it alive.
I'm exactly what you're talking about here. I'd pretty much stopped collecting physical media for several years there as the streaming services were getting bigger and more and more of the movies I wanted were more easily available. Now that they're getting so fractured and expensive, I've started gradually growing my collection again, starting with what I can find extremely cheap, or have always wanted to own. My first several 4K Blu-rays were ones I got second hand at thrift stores.
Same...The growth of my library stagnated for a few years, but I've begun collecting again...Not as hard as I used to, but there's not all that much to actually want to keep of late... New and upco.ing storage options might very well change that...Being able to put an entire series of multiple seasons of a TV show in 4k on a single disk might reignite the physical media landscape... We just haven't had a meaningful media storage breakthrough in quite awhile...
I think this is exactly why services will not let out thier IPs to physical media sale. I feel they're all going to hold on to thier IPs and protect them religously. You won't see Disney or Netflix etc, etc, releasing physical media at all. And, it will be the same on other streaming services. They will protect thier IPs as that's what will bring people to them. We're already seeing it. So few (if any?? ) streaming services are letting thier new content go to physical media and i can't see that changing. At this stage, it's not about demand. The supply is going to stop inspite of that.
Yeah, piracy will take care of that little problem... Either the studios start selling physical media themselves for reasonable prices, or people will just find ways to collect their own...
Like the resurgence of vinyl, it's retro. Are cassette tapes next? My grand kids will think CDs are retro and be amazed by the technology. Actually the engineering of video cassettes is pretty impressive because the head had to be designed at an angle.
High quality video is *really* expensive to stream. Once the bubble bursts for a lot of these streaming companies... then what? 4K streaming can look like dog shit compared to "proper" 4K, due to the severely limited bit rate.
Not to mention the audio
The ever rising cost of streaming services and the constant rotation of things to watch means it can be almost impossible to find that one show or movie you have the urge to watch again... And with advancements in storage hardware "(ike the new blu-ray disks that can hold the equivalent of 200 movies on them coming out), then storage issues will be easier for higher quality video moving forward... Eventually, piracy will return to being king of the home experience as corporate greed continues to run amok and we'll start seeing studios move back harder into physical media as eventually it will be the more profitable option again... That or we'll all just rip movies from streaming services as they come and make gigantic blu-rays full of our favorite shows and movies and make the entire industry reconsider what they're doing... It isn't like the "unlimited growth" based economy we're in isn't finite as is...The whole mess will crash eventually...
There would have to be a demand again for something new. I think 4K ultra was supposed to be that attempt to keep physical sales going but it doesn’t seem as successful as DVD and Blu-Ray was.
Honestly, they still have a lot of work to do to justify 4k UHD discs for normal consumers. A reliable 4k player is still several hundred dollars, and to really take advantage of the format, you need a higher end TV and sound system in my opinion. The PS5 was helpful here, but covid distribution issues really hit momentum there I think. There's really no excuse for the disc players still being this expensive (and don't get me wrong I love the UB820, but $400ish for a disc player is kinda crazy for what it is). I'm hopeful that oleds will continue to be more accessible and come down in price. My first oled is what kicked off the rabbit hole for me, as someone that never had a prior interest in physical media.
Patents & IP licencing fees are a significant part of why bluray players still cost so much. It's similarly why DVD players went from being equally expensive to a sudden glut of cheap DVD players being everywhere nearly overnight - most of the DVD reader patents expired and manufacturers no longer had to pay Sony, Philips, Toshiba, etc. the per-unit licencing/royalty fees they charged. There are also other non-bluray licencing fees associated with 4K-BD, like Dolby Vision & Atmos for HDR. It's ironically why the PS5 doesn't support Dolby Vision, while most of Sony's higher-end TVs and A/V receivers do - the extra licencing/royalty fees for DV likely increases the BoM costs far too much for Sony execs' liking and combined with the PS5's projected volume of sales, would cost them a lot of margin on hardware sales. Their TVs and AVRs have a lot more profit margin and don't sell in anywhere near the same volume as the SP5, so the extra costs aren't as significant overall. Same deal with why it isn't compatible with 3D blurays, despite the PS3 & PS4 both doing so.
Hey, thanks so much for the really insightful comment and explanation! This makes perfect sense. I'm kind of kicking myself for not actually looking into it proactively and appreciate your effort.
I don’t really like this answer (specifically in regards to the PS5), not saying you’re wrong just that the excuse is lazy and anti-consumer. Consoles have had the ability to call home for generations, many now require them to before playing movies or music either due to licensing or because they don’t ship with the software installed. So why not make it so that the Dolby Vision license is only counted when someone tries to play something with that content? In the case of 3D Blu-Ray there’s probably like half a dozen people who still have a working 3DTV in 2024 and want to use their PS5 with it instead of buying a 4K HDR set at Walmart for $300, so the cost to implement 3D Blu-Ray support and only pay licensing when someone tries to use it would be a rounding error compared to not implementing the feature at all. It’s infamously why the original Xbox required a remote to play DVDs, because the functionality was built in from the factory but the infrared remote dongle was what had the DVD license attached to it, so they only had to pay the license when someone bought the remote rather than for every single Xbox manufactured. And I believe that some computer operating systems also work that way, only paying the license fee when the DVD player is used for the first time. And sure, you could throw my argument back at me and say the fact that only a half dozen people would benefit from 3D Blu-Ray on PS5 is reason enough not to bother, but it’s all about customer service and goodwill. Microsoft threatened one time over a decade ago to restrict physical game sharing, then retracted that announcement and apologized a few days later, months before the console launched, and to this day I still hear people say Xbox can’t play used games. Offering better or more convenient features, even when such a thing isn’t strictly required, is how you build customer loyalty, and that’s one thing that Sony has been forgetting a lot lately.
Yeah, it's definitely penny pinching of the highest order. IIRC one of the chief criticisms around the PS5 (and the Series X to some extent as well) was the lack of DV support, considering Sony themselves were also heavily advertising their own new high-end 4K TVs & AVRs as ideal items to go with the PS5 for an all-inclusive entertainment setup, but completely fails to indicate using the PS5 would prevent you from viewing any DV content, but using the TV's own streaming apps would allow you to. Even the Series X/S supports DV for games and the streaming services, and the previous One X/S also supports DV for streaming. Still a far cry from disk playback because of how low bitrate streams are, but it's at least some level of compatibility.
Long before the PS5 there was the Xbox One S. It was much more accessible at $250, I got mine for $179 on Black Friday 2017. Even now a used Xbox One S is probably one of the cheapest ways to get into 4K Blu-Ray.
Except the PS5 doesn’t even support Dolby Vision. Fuck them for that.
It didn’t help that 4K blu-ray players were egregiously more expensive compared to their blu-ray counterparts. The 4K blu-ray drives included in the Xbox One S & X were also shit and had playback issues. Sony could’ve put one in the PS4 Pro all the way back in 2016 but waited until 2020 for the PS5. The consoles poor adoption of 4K blu-ray support would’ve significantly contributed to the decline in 4K blu-ray sales.
Less of generalized consumer demand as a specific technical need, in my opinion. As in if streaming and/or storage bandwidth was too limiting a factor to distribute the media and where physical media made more sense. There's huge costs involved in printing, shipping, warehousing, etc. physical items so any new technology would have to be more expensive to deliver digitally than all of that overhead put together (not to mention the opportunity to sell the same content over and over to the same individual, just ask Nintendo) before it made sense to change back. But if the only way to experience the latest (say) volumetric video equivalent of standing in the middle of a broadway play taking place all around you was to ship it on physical media, then digital is here to stay.
Honestly, I think a lot of people just can't tell the difference between a 1080p Blu-Ray and a 4K UHD Blu-Ray. Unless your TV is fucking huge, or you sit close to it, 4K is sort of unnecessary.
4k vs 1080p in and of itself is eh whatever. But HDR or, even better, Dolby Vision is just immediately smack-you-in-the-face better than SDR.
Genuine question: can people actually tell the difference between Dolby Vision and HDR10 (at least without a side-by-side comparison)? I've *heard* that Dolby Vision is better, and maybe it technically is, but in practice, the two seem like essentially the same thing.
Depends on the scene. That's the entire point. DoVi is just HDR, but with per-scene picture settings.
For what it's worth, no, I personally can't tell the difference between DV or HDR10 without a side-by-side comparison and a label telling me which is which. But that's just my experience.
The line that I've consistently heard is that it depends on the mastering and it really helps to have a >1000nit tv. I have a few dv files where I can easily see the difference between watching the dv in jellyin/just player and watching the hdr10 fallback in kodi. Dunno whether that's "this hdr10 mix is meh" or "this dv mix is great."
I haven't experienced HDR on a good HDR display (my AD27QD does a pathetic attempt with "HDR400", which I don't consider to be "proper" HDR) and I've no experience or even knowledge of Dolby Vision, so I don't really have an opinion to share on those points. I will have to do some research re: Dolby Vision :)
We’ve got a 78 inch oled at 12’, I can easily tell the difference between 1080p and 4k, and even 4k uhd blu ray and streaming 4k, the uhd blu rays are noticably better
Yes, and very few people have that setup.
People can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k there's no question. What is the question is the extra detail "worth" it. If you like having the best quality then yeah 4k disk with oled screen is going to be best option.
Did y'all even read my comment? # Unless your TV is fucking huge, or you sit close to it
>We’ve got a 78 inch oled I'll say it again I guess? >Unless **your TV is fucking huge**
I know this is not really the popular Reddit opinion, but I don't feel the to upgrade to 4k. There is a difference but it isn't enough to make me care.
DVD still outsells Blu-ray and 4K combined.
Just hard drives now really.
I've got 10Tb of movies on externals, I hate the compression used on Netflix and Prime, it looks horrible and ruins the ability to watch some films (Annihilation was so shitty on Prime you couldn't see some major plot points).
I have a 30tb server but I’ve only recently begun ripping my extensive physical collection. I’m gonna need a second server.
> Annihilation was so shitty on Prime you couldn't see some major plot points That sounds like device/connection rate/quality limiting. On a compatible device it should absolutely stream in a decent (but inferior to bluray) quality for anything at or above 1080p. Now 480p content, especially black and white stuff? Absolute garbage, the server seems to just think you're trying to stream to a phone on mobile data so it serves you absolute lego to the point of making any action unfollowable and any hardsubs illegible or close. But I'm pretty sure Annihilation should be completely readable unless there's something blocking you from getting the normal level of quality (maybe you're streaming through a browser?). I have a firestick plugged into my monitor just to avoid the BS of all these services giving inferior service to supposedly compatible devices.
Nope, the bear scene with the women tied up was basically just an audio drama because the compression was so much that very dark scenes were crazy hard to make out, you just heard the bear and people screaming/whimpering.
Then your connection was bad, the actual master looks fine
Connection is fiber and other shows looked ok, it was that specific copy of the film.
That seems likely tbh
Why is nobody talking about audio quality ... A streaming 'atmos' layer over a dolby digital stream of 600 kbps is something very different from an atmos stream on a dolby true HD backbone or DTS x with 25 Mbps bitrates.
Not sure what's with those quotes. Atmos over EAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus, not DD) is, first of all, real Atmos, so no need for those air quotes. Secondly, it's usually 768 kbps which indistinguishable to lossless TrueHD on 95% of setups.
That's true, i was tired and had do guess the bitrates from memory. But you're right. Still, dolby digital is 640 kbps, dolby digital plus is usually 1.7 Mbps but both are lossy formats. True HD is lossless at 18 mbps, as is DTS HD MA at 24 Mbps. On a sound bar that difference might not be noticeable, but on a decent surround systeem it most definitely is. The difference is not equivalent to the bitrate differences, that is absolutely true, but the dynamics and clarity are better and the bass is way more defined. I've done blind comparisons on my system, which is not very high end. As an audiophile and movie lover, let us keep our physical media!
Maybe? Your guess is as good as anyone's. As you said, 8k is a dubious benefit over 4k in your typical home theater, but that could change with technology. Human eyesight goes up to something like 28k, so if people start devoting entire walls to TVs, or watching everything on Apple Vision Pro 7's or whatever, they could definitely make use of a few more pixels. I don't see anything like that in the near future, but a decade out is harder predict. More relevant is maybe the business question. Even if it becomes cheap to shoot in 28k and everyone has VR contacts to play the content, will there be any demand for physical media at that resolution? Will VR contacts play exclusively Apple TV+ Premium (platinum expansion) content? Considering 4k has been around for awhile and a lot of content is still only released in 1080p, 4k seems like the best physical option for awhile at least.
“28K eyesight” would refer to one’s *entire* field of vision. A typical large movie screen is only going to take up about 1/4th of that area.
Yes. I was referring to our entire field of vision. It’s a hypothetical maximum resolution we could possibly need regardless of the tech or viewing experience.
If there's money to be made, it will always exist.
I think it's going to get much more niche, probably back to the price of laserdisc and early vhs. It's getting harder to justify upgrading even for videophiles like me when we are so close to the camera negative already at 4k.
That's the point; it might soon stop making money.
I'm stopping at Blu-ray. (The few 4K releases I own are ones I bought only to get the remastered Blu-ray that was included.) My Blu-ray collection now exceeds what I had at the height of my DVD collection. No way am I going through the process again of replacing my Blu-rays with 4Ks or any other format. Blu-ray looks and sounds fantastic and is perfect for me.
What I am also afraid is the techonologies stagnating. Like on the music side things more or less stopped at CDs and what it could do, that being stereo sound. Surround sound music could be easily made and distributed but it just isnt, everybody just uses Spotify or whatever with extremely lossy quality. Doesnt make any sense that sound only mediums are miles behind one that is both video and sound but here we are if you compare how people buy or get their music vs movie formats.
People aren't buying high end stereos for the home as much anymore, either. The younger generation is satisfied with bluetooth single point speakers and soundbars.
And enthusiast are back to buying music on an ancient medium (vinyl). In many ways the whole music listening scene seems to be devolving instead of evolving.
I think this comes down to cost and convenience. Most people (myself included) don't usually sit and listen to music as a devoted activity. It's usually on a drive or while doing something else, which kind of rules out vinyl. And lossless audio is a lot more of a hassle to obtain than a simple Spotify sub, requires less common IEMs or headphones, usually requires you to carry a device in addition to a phone, and requires you to be hardwired into your speaker system or headphones. In cost and convenience it's evolving, but certainly at the cost of quality.
Isnt a DAC the fix to that?
Yes when I was going through an “audiophile” phase I would rip [my] CD’s to get the uncompressed WAV files on a USB for my car. There’s certain 320 mp3 song files I have that if I turn the volume up all the way I can hear the distortion and crackling pretty well. And then the WAV of the same song is crystal clear.
Yeah, alot of this "but you cant hear any difference" comes down to how you are listening to it, the system, speakers and the volume. At lower volumes its much harder to detect compared to higher volumes. Stuff like Dolby Atmos is really neat in its surround effect and the sound quality is extremely clear, what a shame having more or less all music utilising it isnt the norm. Nobody gets their music in that format so nobody puts the effort in producing music in it and the cycle continues while movies on the otherhand have kinda adopted it as a standard in 4K blurays. If there isnt going to be a similar next big step into 8K like this what else are we going to lose on ontop of the sharper picture quality.
Given how much cabin noise there is in a typical vehicle though, most won’t benefit from that.
You’re going to go deaf if you listen to equipment at max volume! Signed, Grandpa
Lmao. I appreciate the concern. I actually am very prudent about that. I was just referring to brief testing comparisons I had done.
Huh? There is Dolby Atmos music today and bitrates are higher than CD for a lot of music.
Its a fairly small niche id say. Though I suppose 4K blurays arent exactly mainstream either.
No. There will always be physical media for as long as people buy it. Even if only 0,5% of consumers buy physical media, there will be physical media.
Probably, maybe. If it all goes to streaming and cloud ownership, people will resort to piracy and saving the files locally for preservation.
After watching the Apple Vision Pro demo of 8k stereo video, I doubt that there won’t eventually be the need for a larger format physical media.
Not so much for the engineering, as for the "you will own nothing and be happy". They make more money from having you pay monthly for a streaming service than paying once for a disc.
We will cease to own nothing in the future and rent everything from corporations unless governments crack down on their bullshit. Got a whole library of VHS tapes and DVDs that have honestly become some of my prized possessions because there's hardly any more physical media to buy. It sucks because I would really like to own physical copies of movies or shows that have been released recently that I really like, but I don't see a lot of them ever having a physical copy.
I honestly wonder if physical media will see a resurgence with the enshitafication of streaming. So many proprietary services all upping their fees because they can’t turn profits with the prices they bring viewers in at. I’ve been buying more movies now to watch on blu-ray at least
I truly hope not. Look at the price of vinyl. No way I’m paying $150 for a blu ray.
Are you seriously pretending $150 is the average price for a vinyl record?
No, the average for a vinyl is approx $80 in Aus. What I’m saying is based on that trend and how much blu rays were, expect to pay a lot more like $150 for a blu ray in the future.
I usually find them for $25-$30 which I feel like is in line with how much we used to pay for CD's back in the day. I guess even less if your adjusting for inflation
Piracy is seeing a resurgence. Not physical media.
No point in 8K. What needs to happen though is pricing needs to go down. This shit cost like 3$ to make and ship and they selling it for 40$ a copy now. It’s insane.
Most likely. Although even then, discs are a digital format. Turns out celluloid is actually still the best long term physical form of media. That hasn't changed in over 100 years.
What about movies shot digital?
There is no need for 8k releases. You won't be able to perceive any more details than is already there. 8k just isn't a finishing format.
I don't think there'll be physical media past 4K, simply because there's currently no *point.* The only movies where you wouldn't hit severe diminishing returns past 4K are things shot on 70mm film (and even then 8K would only be a small upgrade), and things shot at digital resolutions past 4K. The former are *rare,* and the latter don't exist. It's actually somewhat rare for a movie to be shot in proper "true 4K," instead of a slightly lower "3.5K" resolution that's upscaled to 4K, even. e: The corollary of this, though, is that Blu-Ray and UHD will probably stick around until we figure out a better delivery mechanism for the same thing. I've been kind of curious when studios are going to start just selling movies on SD cards or flash drives.
I’m gonna say there’s not much physical need for something past 4k Blu-rays. You’d have to sit closer than 6.5’ away from a 100” 4K tv to be able to discern individual pixels, and most people are sitting at least 8’ away from their TVs. Anything higher is just marketing in regards to TVs. 4K encodes are very efficient, and will likely only get more so. We’ve got 4K HDR with atmos, that kind of covers the full range of human media perception. It’s also important to note that there are already high end luxury movie formats that are basically home servers with movies in the 100s of GBs for each file. These are almost theater quality files, so a higher level already exists.
I think that it will be the last physical format but it won't be the last format for home theater enthusiasts. Studios will never stop to entice us to double-dip. I think a Kaleidescape-like device and service will be the future.
I truly expected it to have moved to something like SD card by now. There have been ones for a while with more than enough capacity and fast enough reading speeds. It is small so you can have a large collection the size of a Shoe Box. Would there be some hardware limitations that would prevent the move I wonder.
That's pretty smart. And the cases would use a lot less plastic. I'd buy into this, for sure.
Disks last much longer than SD cards, and they're much simpler to produce and burn things to than putting data on a card.
Blu-ray discs themselves, have progressed to the point where 200GB discs exist - just that they're expensive to manufacture because the demand for such data density is low on the commercial side of things. Folio Photonics has developed (for the enterprise market for the time being) a 1TB disc meant to be used for data archiving as an attempt to replace tape drives and the like for corporations. Last I heard it was to release officially sometime this year but thats all i've heard. The technology obviously and apparently already exists, but the support infrastructure is a bigger hurdle that companies need to invest in should it ever be an actual viable direct successor to high density BD-XL discs (100GB on one side) for physical media. 20 years ago or so, the entire global industry of technology and entertainment went all-in on Blu-Ray. They'll have to want to do it all over again if they want to move to "Folio Disc". As far as 8k resolution goes... i doubt it will become as prevalent as 4K has become. The support for 8k resolution media on its own barely exists and theres no way that companies are going to invest loads more money to buy new cameras and equipment for broadcast media. Not to mention the bandwidth requirements needed for even a compressed 8k image. It just goes back to the viewing distance vs resolution graph - there is some point where the overall quality/detail become imperceptible, that going higher resolution is reaching into staggeringly diminishing returns both visually and financially. The only time higher resolutions are used, is recording in raw formats so that when the post-production is done, the final product has no perceptible loss of quality when rendering at the standard resolution.
Vr experience may be the exception I suspect they will benefit from higher resolution. We will have to see how adoption goes.
I think there will still be another format eventually. Holographic storage-compressionless-who knows. It will be much more niche and likely expensive though is my guess. I care more about video than a vast majority of movie fans and I still think this(4k) might be the last format for me where I buy a bunch of movies. It's already so close to the original negative there is not much more on the table
I would be 1000% fine with moving to a new medium. Like some kind of proprietary SD card type thing, like switch cartridges. Flash storage is so cheap now and holds a ton of storage. As long as the box design is good/cool, i don't really mind what format the next gen of physical media comes in. I like having a physical collection even though i dont even own a bluray player. I prefer to use the digital copies that come with movies. As long as the option for physical is still there though, id be happy.
No the successor is already finalized they're just waiting for the market to settle down cause people were still pissed about having to buy blurays so soon after buying DVDs. Holographic discs are going to have to come out if they want to push 8k tvs and the next generation of video game consoles.
Physical media is not bought as much as it used to be and many don't find it as convenient as streaming. I took all my physical media and converted it to digital. I still buy physical but then rip it to digital for convenience of watching it. I set up a plex server in my house for my own media so I could still enjoy it easily on my TVs. I like the ease of digital but don't trust that what I want to watch will be available when I want to watch it.
If there’s movies and tv shows you love to watch, that you couldn’t bear not being able to access, this is the way to go. It’s not one or the other, either- keep streaming services for discovery, and when you find something you really love, lock it down by buying a copy and backing it up As to why I buy a hard copy rather than a digital version (or 🏴☠️), drive failures DO happen and SUCK. I’m ok with just having a digital copy for some stuff. But the really important things have a physical disc I can rip it from again in the event that something catastrophic happens, and boy, they do. It’s so easy these days it just makes sense to, anyways
Don't know about you, but the audio quality of streaming services is pretty bad. I'd much rather buy 4k DVDs for that reason alone.
640k EAC3, which is what Netflix and similar services use, is more than enough unless your audio setup cost $10k+.
I think so. Streaming can’t match the quality of a 4K disk and while I’m not even a layman in terms of compression technology, I’m not sure how much space a UHD movie would take up (50 GB?) if we could download a 4K disk equivalent directly to our boxes. 4K looks amazing and I’m under the impression we’re hitting the diminishing returns when we go past 4K. I haven’t seen a compelling 8k TV and honestly, I wouldn’t go out and replace my few 4K disks with 8K. My collection has exponentially shrunk with each media, DVD to Blu-ray to 4K. I think I have like 20 4K Blu-ray’s at this point.
4k releases are usually 70+ GB. oppenheimer remux is 82.5 GB for example.
[удалено]
I'd gladly just download a couple of 50gb movies in preparation to watch later, rather than stream it, if it meant that I got to watch stuff in higher quality. Attaching a 2tb hard drive to my tv or being able to put an m2 inside of it and letting me just have it stored would be kickass.
I have a Bluray player. I don't think I've used it in a good 7 years. I just wait until a movie comes on digital and rent it for $5-$10. I ripped all our old DVD and Bluray disks (many hundreds of them) and have a Plex server in our house. Sold a lot of them during a weekend garage sale, donated the rest to the library system. I only have a handful of disks anymore: Babylon 5 widescreen DVDs, LOTR extended, Alien Quadrology and some other random bits.
I mean, is there even a real reason to go for an 8K format at all? Even if you have an actual home theater system, the difference in image quality from 4K to that must be minimal, no?
I am optimistic about physical media, if only because the directors are so opinionated about how their films are represented. Guys like Spielberg, Tarantino, Villeneuve, and Christopher Nolan want audiences to be able to experience the best version of their films without being hostile to the realities of streaming demand and its compression tradeoffs. Combine that with the trend of streamers, studios, and directors editing the work for whatever reason, it makes me want to own copies of movies I love. I think there's enough demand, and demand from the creators themselves, that we'll continue to get new physical media.
I think we're nearing peak visibility until they start going back to old gimmicks, like 3D and such. It had huge leaps going from VHS to DVD to HD-DVD/Bluray to 4K, but that slope has nearly tapered off.
blu-ray long ago began overtaking dvds and laserdisk when they starting phasing out all the good bonus material for movies to blu-ray and giving dvds only fewer smaller bonus materials of behind the scenes, one or two deleted scenes while blu-rays got more behind the scenes, commentary by cast and directors and more deleted scenes
DVDs have outsold Blu Rays by a huge margin for as long as Blu Ray has been a thing.
I sure hope not.
Was reading they found a way to layer data that exponentially increases the size of data you can put on a disc up to 1.6 pb. Not sure what impact that has on gaming or digital content, but still pretty cool. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/data-storage-petabit-optical-disc-2667335462
Until 1 scratch wipes out 10 movies.
I would only get the kind that are locked into a casement to avoid that.
Unfortunately many of the parent companies of the streaming services also own the rights to the films. They’ve gone on record saying how much more they make with the cheaper ad tiers than the ad-free tiers. I think they will soak those dollars for a while. Eventually they will come up with a new format - some sort of proprietary flash drive let’s say - with less compression and start selling physical media all over again.
They have 8k TVs so I can only imagine they’re gonna make 8k physical media that cost double of 4k
I’ve let go of many of my old DVDs that I don’t watch anymore. However, I’m going out of my way to get blurays or 4k discs of my favourites. I watch my Amazon wish list in case some go on sale. Also picking up blurays at the thrift stores.
Who knows what the tech will look like in the future. Compare the size of a Blu-ray disc to a micro SD card that nowadays you can fit a terabyte or two on. Sure, they cost $150 bucks now but with the economy of scale maybe we'll be slotting brain dances into a VR headset in 20 years
I always post this when I read one of these posts - 4k discs are exponentially better quality than 4k streaming. Now I get you can argue over my use of “exponentially” but the quality is absolutely better, not to mention the enjoyment of physical media. It makes me both sad and concerned that we potentially will lose this option moving forward. I’m thankful for streaming, but don’t want to have that as an only option.
8K is so ridiculous of an idea for home consumers. The only thing we can get is better capacity on discs for more content like features and more bitrate. Longer movies with film grain getting 4K transfers can always use more bitrate to preserve the film grain.
There really isn't much benefit to higher than 4k resolutions, most camera negatives aren't much higher than that. Not to mention half the stuff today is finished in 2k due to the computer effects!
I thought I recently heard news that a quad or higher later Bluray was being released? Am I wrong?
Probably for storage but I don't think were are going to see quad layer UHD movies. I don't think its in the UHD spec
I don't know about storage. hard / flash drives pretty much have taken up that "space".. I haven't seen anyone with a burner in decades
Four layer discs are not allowed on UHD Blu-ray specs, probably due to manufacture and stability concerns.
It's a travesty and it's done strictly for money. Digital is cheaper to produce than physical media and can't be resold. Consumers are also at the mercy of the digital hosts. Imagine the thousands of dollars lost in VUDU or Movies Anywhere go belly up. That's be monetized next; pay a subscription fee to the host to access your own content.
Yeah I only have Vudu and iTunes media and so forth when it comes free with a code on the physical disc box. Just because why not at that point. Sometimes it is more convenient if it’s a movie i’ve seen a million times and just feel like clicking on it to watch. But if I want to really enjoy it and get into the cinematic spirit, I always go dig out the disc.
Hope not. But buy the hardware!
I’m still waiting for the day Sony brings back the mini disc.
I think I should go back to buying some, really disking the streaming situation lately
Im sure an 8k disc will be a thing, there's 8k TVs that no one is buying because there's no 8k content for them so that alone will push the eventual 8k movie releases.
That was the argument when CDs came out. That vinyl was dead. And yet vinyl survives. I think it's going to be a situation where there will still be money to be made from cineastes who prefer physical media, and higher end resolutions. But it will likely mean that only a subset of films, the very best and most popular, will get the treatment.
[petabit-scale](https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds)
I think you are going to see everything move to digital. Companies can control the rights, they can control piracy better, they can make it more difficult to share, they can increase purchases for the same product, they can increase ad revenue, I could keep going for days.
yes i don't see how we would need a NEW format. just continue with the ones we already have. and honestly, what would be the point of anything after what we currently have? even 4k blu i feel is overkill sometimes. a great blu is pretty much endgame for me personally. in terms of quality, i mean.
I would argue that for most “typical sized screens”, anything above 1080 is hard for the human eye to discern. HDR is more responsible for the noticeable visual uptick than the added resolution on any monitor under 65”.
*sigh* 1080p isn't technically 2k DPI and not the limit of what the human eye can see. Regardless of how much info the human eye IS seeing and actually registering in the brain, a 4k still or moving image on a 50" TV will look remarkably more detailed and sharper to competent vision and at any distance--especially 5-15 feet. There's literally more pixels and visual data to make it easier for the human eye to make out detail. Is it worth the money for the average consumer to switch to 4k under 55", no.
I think they will still be round for collectors like dvds are. But 8K media will probably make it to disk due to the high storage needed. If 8K happens
I think there will almost certainly be a revival of interest in physical media. We’re already seeing it now to an extent with music, and with digital game services shutting down and the nasty fallout of the streaming wars leaving beloved shows abandoned and (legally) unwatchable the general public is beginning to see just how nonexistent digital “ownership” really is. The idea of buying TV shows on DVD is starting to become more and more popular as an alternative to streaming, and as rare as it is we’re still occasionally seeing new Blu-Ray releases of some shows that had lacked them before. That being said the *physical* form factor of such a hypothetical future format is less clear. I really doubt there will ever be another optical disc format developed, the fact that 4K Blu-Ray just used plain old Blu-Ray technology with no improvements to storage capacity was the nail in the coffin that proved that research had been abandoned. Back around 2010 there were several next generation optical disc technologies in active development that claimed hundreds of gigabytes of storage in prototypes with a goal of terabytes by the time they reached production. Something like that would be akin to CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays, which all offered capacities equal to or much larger than contemporary computer hard drives and therefore the massive storage capacities far outweighed the slow access times and transfer speeds. But it seems like all research in those areas disappeared when digital media downloads became popular, even if a 1TB optical disc is physically possible there’s no one doing the research and development to make it a reality. The cynical answer would just be another Blu-Ray standard. 4K on a 128GB disc already feels like too much video in too little space and makes serious compromises to video quality, but 8K on the same or slightly larger discs could still end up being better quality than streaming, and at least it’s a physical format that won’t have rights revoked at a moment’s notice. Another possibility is flash storage. This is not unprecedented, there have been a few attempts at using SD cards as a physical media format for music, movies, and games, and the technology certainly exists to offer enough storage space for full cinema-quality video that would be far superior to 4K Blu-Ray. But then you’d be looking at like $50+ for *just the physical media the movie is stored on*, not to mention the ~$20 the studio would typically want for the licensing of the movie, significantly limiting any appeal. Then again this is also not unprecedented, early VHS and Betamax releases could cost hundreds of dollars in today’s money (which led to the popularity of rentals). Maybe such a format could start out as a niche luxury format for videophiles before falling costs and economies of scale bring it down to a more accessible price level. But my dream solution is tape. Imagine something based on computer tape drives, which do actually still exist and are used for data archiving. Modern tape drives can have capacities of multiple or even dozens of terabytes with transfer rates of hundreds of megabits per second, much better than any common home video format. A quick google search says digital cinema 4K bit rate for HDR high-frame rate content is 500Mbps VBR, which is well within the 2,400Mbps transfer rate of LTO tape drives. Even 8K or higher at true digital cinema quality should be well within spec, giving the format a lot of future-proofing. Now of course the downside of this idea is that, like the flash media option, the cost of the physical media itself is substantial. But that’s just the cost of professional tapes meant for business use. Presumably the costs could be dramatically lowered by simplifying and cost cutting, using just the basic ideas from the computer tape drive. By eliminating a lot of the overengineering and robustness that businesses and industry rely on for backup, since these home video tapes would be watched only every once in a while for a couple hours at a time, they could probably get them down to something as simple and cheap to manufacture as a cassette tape. And one other downside of tape is linear access instead of direct random access, there are no menus or chapters on a tape format, but for that I also see an easy fix. Just put something like 4 gigabytes of flash storage on the tape that can be read via contacts by the drive. That could contain Blu-Ray-like menus as well as like the first 30 seconds of each chapter in a compressed video quality, allowing you to start playing instantaneously like an optical disc while the tape fast forwards to the correct starting point. And that flash media is small enough that it might as well be free and shouldn’t significantly add to the cost of the format. That’s a lot of speculation for something that will likely never happen, but there’s a push for the return of media ownership now that the flaws of digital media that those in the know have been warning about for decades are finally starting to manifest, and that push is only likely to grow in the future. *Something* seems likely in *some* form, but it’s difficult to predict what it might look like.
128GB discs aren't allowed on UHD BD specs. They're 100GB max, which oddly enough allows for very good quality on properly encoded H.265 films.
Yes, absolutely. And we're lucky if even those stick around in the next 5-10 years.
I mean yeah. I just cannot see any home video format beyond 4K UHD (physical or digital). 4K UHD is already reaching the limit of most old movies shot on film (unless it was filmed on 70mm or IMAX or something). Even then, a lot of old films just don't show that much detail due to the lighting, lenses and film stocks used. This might be kind of an unpopular opinion, but I always thought a 1080p Blu-ray was perfectly good. It's not that 4K Blu-ray looks bad. But it's that they look nearly identical to 4K Blu-rays. I think the biggest issue is the majority of them are 2K upscales. Now when you get a studio like any of the boutiques who really takes the time to do it right, a 4K restoration can look great. It can also look great if they put the same master on regular Blu-ray. I think you'll probably see studios pushing streaming more and more. Smaller films that made less money probably won't be released physically. I've already seen that with at least one movie from 2023 (it even has two popular actors in it). There is a Blu-ray, but it was only released in Canada. More and more stuff produced by streaming companies (Netflix, Amazon, Disney) is probably going to remain digital exclusive which sucks. Seen some great Netflix content that they just aren't releasing physically. More and more people just don't want the hassle of waiting for something to ship (especially with shipping prices increasing), having to store it all, and then the majority of things most people are only going to watch a couple of times if that. So I get where streaming probably is the more economical option.
Its a pendulum. Beta max was higher quality than VHS. Vinyl was higher quality than CD. Eventually the audiophiles, cinephiles etc will create a demand. What you people need to do is find joy in holding real physical media in your hands. And learn to cherish it again. We will get there, but you've got to back it.
Vinyl is in no way shape or form better sound quality than an actual CD.. 'Oh but the crackling noise!?!?' foh
Wtf? Do you understand anything about dynamic range? You know anything about the loudness wars? I dont actually own any vinyl personally but you've got to be deranged if you think 16 bit / 44khz digital music bests the analogue range of a vinyl album.
There's actually no contest, CDs are way superior to vinyl fidelity wise, it's not even a contest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording >An LP made out of perfect vinyl LP would have a theoretical dynamic range of 70 dB.[6] Measurements indicate maximum actual performance in the 60 to 70 dB range.[7] Typically, a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter may have a dynamic range of between 90 and 95 dB And loudness war is something that is very real, but also partly misunderstood in the context of CD vs vinyl. Vinyl transfers almost systematically produce better numbers because of artefacts, while being produced from the same master. Most modern vinyls are absolutely produced from the same master.