How in the world can you have a discussion about DVD packaging and special features without mentioning the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition box sets? Not only did the movies come in beautiful collector’s cases with two DVDs per movie, they were also completely packed with special features, the run time of which exceeded that of the movies themselves. Hours and hours of in-depth making-of documentaries. I used to watch the special features for all the movies in a row when I was home from college during the holidays. Probably because before the advent of streaming, this was the longest, highest-quality content I had access to.
But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.
I can hardly sit through The Two Towers, extended or otherwise, without cringing constantly at nonsensical plot changes.
No, Faramir was not a moody nihilistic relativist who changes his entire outlook without any character development.
No, there was no alliance, and getting from Lothlorien to Helm's Deep in the span of a few weeks, with a full army, is physically impossible even if the army were already assembled. (This was only in the movie after a last-minute cancelled attempt to turn Arwen into a warrior; seriously.)
No, Treebeard didn't spend 2/3s of the book stalling.
No, Frodo did not offer a wringwraith the ring, even for a second. And if he did, there's no way he would've survived afterwards.
Treebeard did spend what seemed to Merry and Pippin an interminable amount of time deliberating, including a full three days in agonizingly plodding discussion with other ents, and it is emphasized that this is THE defining character trait of ents. The shape of the interaction between the hobbits and the ents was of the hobbits becoming extremely bored and impatient. It is more important in a film adaptation to capture the feel rather than slavishly copy the book blow by blow. There is only so much screen time to go around, and the character trait has to be conveyed somehow while still moving the plot along. If the movie faithfully compressed the entire ent episode into its runtime, including the 3 day entmoot, it would be both incredibly boring, and spiritually less accurate because it would feel rushed and cramped.
There's a difference between adaptation; and retelling the story in a way that damages the integrity of the original. Many of the above changes don't make sense even within the movie's own material. Even if the books didn't exist, Faramir's filmic story arc (as just one example) would be a badly executed example of character development.
That's the real problem - nobody really cares about Arwen at the Ford vs Glorfindel; it doesn't change the story much at all.
And even changing characters somewhat but still having a development or purpose is arguably fine - it's the changes that aren't good in the context of the movie that are most baffling, especially considering the dedication shown in other areas of the films.
The retelling of a story can never damage the integrity of the original, and it is very foolish of you to even suggest that it could. The original is always the original, and is unimpacted by anything that comes after...
This is as silly as suggesting that Tolkien's work somehow tarnishes or damages nordic/germanic mythology. utterly ridiculous.
I get what you're saying but art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Newer works can add context and alter our perceptions of older works. Especially when people's first exposure to a work is an adaptation. Someone who has never read the lord of the rings, but has seen the movies several times will never be able to read the book without picturing Elijah Wood.
Strong feelings for an adaptation or a sequel can taint or enhance how someone feels about the source material even if the original was experienced first. For example, it's understandable if someone who really loved star wars before the prequels and disney acquisition found that they can't help but experience a sense of loss and disappointment while revisiting those original films knowing about midi-chlorians and how the franchise ended up.
The original works are unchanged, but in many cases the way we view and experience them isn't.
I also dislike the way Faramir was adapted but it makes sense. It puts a greater emphasis on the exceptionality of Aragorn by removing the complexity of the Faramir character and basically making him a second Boromir. Considering that the movie is necessarily a more condense experience than a book, it's a good choice.
A general one. And if you think about that its sad that a story has to be rewritten in order to ensure maximal appeal to generate maximal profit. The story isn't rewritten for the screen, it's rewritten for the investors polluting the story with money.
But on the flip side the story reaches a large audience, perhaps larger than the books might have, though not in true form. Double edged sword really.
That is how Hollywood does movies. Other film traditions will more accurately adapt the source material. For example, many animes are a shot-for-shot recreation of manga.
>For example, many animes are a shot-for-shot recreation of manga.
This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform. Osamu Tezuka, one of the founding fathers of the modern anime industry, notably created the filler-heavy formats of yesteryear that were the dominant form of popular televised anime well into the 21st century. There are notable early outliers like Yu Yu Hakusho and Death Note, but most of the popular anime had their runtimes padded all to hell in order to continually cash in on the unpredictable zeitgeist popularity of their source material. This trend of creating manga-accurate adaptations was largely spawned during the mid-80's OVA boom (wherein many one-shot OVAs were functionally made as high-production-value advertisements for their corresponding manga), but it largely didn't make the leap to TV anime until well after the turn of the century.
> This is something of a newer phenomenon in the grander history of anime as an artform
It's hard to argue about 'a newer phenomenon' which is now closer to Astro Boy than our current time.
> most of the popular anime had their runtimes padded all to hell in order to continually cash in on the unpredictable zeitgeist popularity of their source material
You can't 'faithfully recreate shot-for-shot' an ongoing title, you would be out of the material way earlier than out of the runtime.
This is not even diving on the differences between the manga and the manga eiga.
>It's hard to argue about 'a newer phenomenon' which is now closer to Astro Boy than our current time.
Last I checked, the 2010s are closer to now than to the 1960s. This didn't become the norm until the 2010s. I called out Death Note and Yu Yu Hakusho as notable exceptions and did note the initial start of it in smaller OVAs. I guess if you're going from the earliest OVA that did this then your comment does make sense. I was thinking more in terms of when the trend to do so became dominant.
>You can't 'faithfully recreate shot-for-shot' an ongoing title, you would be out of the material way earlier than out of the runtime.
Right. The modern trend is to wait until a series is done, or at least until it has enough plot/action in the manga to cover a full season before entering production. Chainsaw Man was over before the first season of the anime came out. Demon Slayer finished around the time the anime started. This is a new-ish trend among big popular TV anime. So as I said, it used to be that anime would be produced while the manga was still ongoing and popular, which lead to filler as a much more common phenomenon.
>This is not even diving on the differences between the manga and the manga eiga.
By all means, feel free to split hairs. I was just trying to give newcomers a more zoomed-out view of the history of anime, but if you'd like to delve into details, have at it.
> Last I checked, the 2010s are closer to now than to the 1960
That was a quip to "trend of creating manga-accurate adaptations was largely spawned during the mid-80's OVA boom"[0]
> until it has enough plot/action in the manga to cover a full season before entering production
Yes, though this is still not universal and still things go south with anime-original titles (WEP is 10/13, sadly)
> it used to be that anime would be produced while the manga was still ongoing and popular, which lead to filler as a much more common phenomenon.
> By all means, feel free to split hairs
Yes, I don't object this, though I was thinking more in how the media does not/translate. I even re-read Kaji/Akagi first story from Tsuredzure Children as this is the one best examples of a media adaptation.
[0] Gokushufudō would be an extreme modern 1:1, btw
PS:
ah, read the sibling comment
imma in the bar RN, if you want a hear an opinion on that sweet cash - drop a note
In some cases, the runtime being padded with filler was less about cashing in and more about trying to not catch up to the manga too quickly.
FMA (2003) is a fun example of this not happening, where they basically wound up creating a custom ending to the series because they got ahead of the manga.
>In some cases, the runtime being padded with filler was less about cashing in and more about trying to not catch up to the manga too quickly.
Right, so rather than stopping production on the anime until the manga had time to get ahead, most anime created filler to cash in on the popularity of the ongoing manga, rather than to try to make the most faithful adaptation. Nowadays it's more common for anime to halt production and release a follow-up season years later when the manga has gotten farther ahead.
shot-for-shot recreations are a waste of time. a robot or algorithm could copy. we watch adaptations to see a new perspective on an old tale. if you want a copy, just read the original.
I'm also swiftly bored by interminably long epic "battle sequences" - I usually find the choreography to be bland and uninspired, which I think partially stems from a childhood of golden harvest Hong Kong cinema.
I want something that is small, May be Mini-CD size but with TeraByte of storage. That is able to fit that whole LOTR and all the Extra, in 4K Ultra High Quality in one disc.
It took a really really long time for Vinyl to make a come back. I hope we could one day innovate enough and bring physical media to the market again.
Most of the people I know who talk about LOTR movies are women who watched them once, but mainly rewatch the making of parts, because they don't care about the story as much as they care about seeing a group of dirty-looking men be friends with each other in ways that sort of look homoerotic but aren't explicitly.
Should be familiar if you know any anime fangirls.
I think this was the point where they started looking not at ticket sales, but overall lifetime earnings per family...sure, it's the ticket, then the DVD, then the BluRay, then the Extended BlueRay, then the Criterion Edition (with Sting)
- they do not allow anonymous usage (you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information)
- stupid geographical restrictions
- they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
As an intermediate result, a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video (social media, especially for mobile platforms, use even worse compression). And new Apple headphones seem to use lossy compression as well, so we have a codec compressing another codec's artifacts.
> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video
It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream uncompressed PCM audio at 64 kbps and the rest was analog; calls often sounded better back then than they do today. Once we accepted the heavy compression necessary to make early digital mobile phone networks work at 10 kbps or so, we never got the quality back, even though devices have a thousand times more bandwidth available now.
VoLTE-HD has been a thing for many years and the reason people haven't noticed is that most personal voice calls have transitioned to messaging apps and most of what's left are to or from businesses who have the cheapest VoIP setup they can get away with.
Two handsets connected with EVS/VoLTE-HD sound superior to two analog phones on the same circuit, talking to each other.
If I call my parents' iPhone using my iPhone the call connects using a high-bitrate EVS codec, crystal clear.
Mobile voice call compression sucks so much that about a decade ago, in order to play a live drum audition remotely, I once had to find a space with a landline and printer that would also let me play loudly drums to do it.
As a student I had none of those things.
In the end I concocted a successful scheme where I would buy a series of phone extension cables, convince my university bar to allow me use their landline for a while, book a drum practice room and wire the cables in a long chain carefully to it, using duct tape to keep the cables safe and above door frames etc.
Then I had to join the call, and when it was sight reading time run to the library to print out the sheet music, run back down and play it down the phone.
It was intense, but I got the gig and flew off and sailed around the Baltic gigging for a few months in the orchestra/show band which was awesome.
I really wish that a mobile phone would have worked, it would have saved me a huge amount of stress.
Digital phone audio, which was μ-law [1] rather than linear PCM, was not exactly uncompressed. However, the compression involved was very simple, and was designed to offer the 8-bit samples a higher dynamic range than linear PCM would be capable of at the same bitrate (linear PCM would need 14 bits to represent the full dynamic range of 8-bit μ-law). It resulted, by design, in quite clear audio for human voice, as compared to the more aggressive compression used today, but couldn't handle non-voice audio like music as well.
[1] μ-law was used in North America and Japan, but a similar encoding called A-law was used elsewhere
A significant percentage of people alive today have never made an analog phone call, or know just how good (and low latency!) it was to literally have two copper wires connecting two phones thousands of miles apart.
Analog copper signals are TERRIBLE. A big reason telecom was one of the first to embrace digital transmissions was due to all the quality issues of copper.
Yes, latency was low, but that was about the only thing going for it.
To get a clear signal over copper you NEED a very large amount of insulation, and that insulation needs to be through the entire circuit. Just one section with frayed plastic, ran too close to a powerline, or is passing under a thunderstorm would introduce all sorts of noise onto the line. The longer the distance, the bigger a problem this was.
Sure, some calls might have been clear, but a lot were utterly terrible.
I wonder if some areas/countries had better quality phone lines. I'm not doubting you, but I didn't have this experience at all. Could have just been luck - I probably didn't call that many different people.
Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.
Long distance pretty quickly adopted digital transmission. Unless you made calls in the 70s there's a pretty good chance you were just using digital calls which is why they were so clear.
If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't be heard. Sending out a really strong vocal signal made it easier to hear that over the noise and pops.
Plenty of long distance circuits remained analog into the 90s, particularly the microwave relay tower networks in rural areas. They used all sorts of techniques to produce rather good results.
As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 70s would play is stacking very long lines back and forth. Route a call across the country, then back, then back again. You could do NY - SF four or five times with a circuit length of like 10,000 miles sometimes before the channel was unusable.
You are otherwise totally right about the potential distortion of a long distance analog circuit. Other times filters would be out of tune and you would hear the hundreds of other analog channels just murmuring in the background not quite discernible, and calling the next town over was almost impossible.
Screaming into the phone was more the pre-electronics era with carbon microphones. The original analog phone systems had no active amplification at all. Voice powered microphones were typical in the military until quite late - I think they still use them as backups on ships.
Digitization started quite early (1960s) but it did not finish until decades later. The first transatlantic fibre optic cable was only laid in 1988. Before that communication between North America and Europe was analog. The Internet and other networks of that time linked over the Atlantic with modems over satellite or voice channels on the analog coaxial submarine cables.
TAT-7 - 4000 analog 3 kHz channels over coaxial, laid 1983
I'm skeptical there's anyone alive who made an analog phone call over thousands of miles. Local calls yes, but even so I'm pretty old and I never made one because I had no friends on the same CO as my parents' house.
His point is that the long-distance connection has been digital for many decades now, even back in the 1980s according to one comment here.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.
I also miss reliable decent quality phone calls. I sometimes give up on Facetime/Whatsapp/Signal and switch to standard mobile call, or vice-versa, and I can hear that the calls through apps have much richer sound quality, when it's working. The voices are much less tinny, but the delays, echos and periods with just no connection, don't seem much better than standard mobile calls. And the delays and reliability of both is worse than analogue landline calls used to be.
I suppose that's to be expected moving to wireless tech, but local analogue landline calls used to be so fast that they had lower latency than a conversation across a room. I know we've gained a lot and I wouldn't trade VOIP for going back to only mobile, or giving up both to going back to landline, but it is a shame quality isn't higher.
I know effectively nothing about these topics but I recall having that thought the other day.
With Apple users FaceTime audio has far higher audio quality than a "typical" phone call
Wondering what accounts for the difference. I assumed, if anything, audio compression would be more "aggressive" on web-service based calling than "traditional" calling.
FaceTime's audio quality is both higher data rate and better audio codecs. FaceTime uses AAC audio and samples at close to the full audible audio band. It also uses a relatively high data rate compared to typical voice calls.
LTE and 5G has the option of higher quality voice codecs (EVS) than older cellular networks when using VoLTE or VoNR. They support wider band sampling and higher data rates for better quality audio. Why most voice calls sound bad is inter-carrier compatibility still sucks. Typically calls will downgrade to AMR-WB or AMR-NB (8KHz and 4kHz sampling respectively).
FaceTime calls, or any other pure IP voice services, don't need to downgrade codecs to interoperate. They might have to change encoded bitrates based on network conditions but never go with some lowest common denominator codec because another user is on a different network.
I don't think this follows, because the function of a telephone call is more utilitarian than anything else.
People call for leisure of course, but the phone's part of that leisure activity is still just to convey information not art. The kids all switched completely to txt for the same non-utilitarian conversations once it became available.
For all it's low fidelity, it was actually quite high fidelity, in that it was actually very good at conveying all the "voice body language" information besides merely the words. It was just highly optimized for one job and that job was not music.
Fewer people care about anything any more. We are in a period of decline. Society is collapsing in slow motion, in particular any and all social contracts.
i dont think its that people dont care about quality but they simply have never experienced a better alternative.
an example would be i game on my computer and for years i had a 60Hz monitor and it wasnt til 2020 i upgraded to 144Hz monitor. it is night and day difference in feel that i can never go back to a monitor under 120Hz
You're not wrong, but DVDs were also region-locked.
I think at the time this was both less annoying and more easily circumvented. I think it only came up if you bought DVDs internationally, were moving between regions, or wanted to bring DVDs but no player on such a trip.
DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today, although a lot of older works need the lower resolution because special effects and the like weren't intended to be scrutinized at 4k.
But region coding granularity was very course, just a few big regions, unlike geofencing today.
And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.)
Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just not as bad as todays streaming geofences.
As well as DVD regions, there were/are TV encoding 'regions': NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.
In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC.
We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe.
Similarly, it was reasonably practical to import obscure American or Japanese movies to Europe, but less so the other way round.
Region encoding yes, but countries had their own versions. So the version in Belgium for example did not come with English subtitles, only Dutch, French and German.
My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)
Go on vacation and we could not access that show.
It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.
(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)
A lot of later players didn't care though and were region-free.
> DVDs also have less-than-stellar image quality by comparison to today
Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
> Some DVDs have less-than-stellar image quality even compared to other DVDs. The format doesn't mandate some fixed bitrate numbers, so it can be truly atrocious.
No kidding. Recently replaced my copy of war games. The DVD was 'ok'. But the later bluray transfers are much nicer.
Some of the early stuff was literally throw it on a telecine machine, encoded it, and ship it. With lots of film wobble and poor color especially in the red channel (due to a bug in early software). Plus poor encoding noise that didnt have a clue what to do with film grain.
Later on they actually physically clean the film first and scan a 4/8k rate first. Then the better ones a light touch on digital correction. Though some are very heavy handed and create poor a reproduction and you are better off with the previous DVD.
> they tend to limit quality, both for copyright and traffic saving purposes
This is the killer for me. I've worked on both video compression and graphics in my career and those projects involved a lot of pixel peeping. The compression artifacts in streaming video are sometimes really distracting now. I keep contemplating switching to bluray but apparently an increasing number of 4K HD releases there are being ruined by questionable use of AI upscaling. It's really sad to me that there's no way to watch many movies in the same quality you would have experienced at a movie theatre.
If you're worried about Aliens, I can confirm that it's gorgeous in 4k UHD and the color accuracy is much better than the prior (manually frame-by-frame denoised) 1080p blu-ray release
I liked it more than I thought I would, but the "AI fake" effect was a bit noticeable here and there. After watching the 4k UHD, I put in my Blu-ray from 10 years ago or whatever, sort of thinking I was going to prefer it's "less digital" graininess, but nope. Definitely found it more distracting than I'd remembered.
So of the two, I'd take the new AI version, though it's not perfect. But the happy medium might be the new AI release on regular Bluray. The lower 1080p image toned down the fakeness a bit I thought.
This is how I feel about it as well. It's not perfect, but it is the best, prettiest version of Aliens, hands down. James Cameron is notoriously picky about the quality of the re-releases of his films and I honestly think this was the best outcome here. Yes, a "grindhouse" style 4K HDR transfer of the original film negative would also be nice in order to get that classic film grain for those who are in the mood for it, but as it is, the release we got was exceptionally high quality even with its imperfections.
> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video
I have to point out that DVDs are in fact digitally compressed audio and video. The last mass market video media that wasn't compressed was VHS.
DVDs use MPEG-2 and AC3 for their compression algorithms (both lossy).
The algorithms that streaming services use for compression are leaps and bounds better than what DVDs can do. Further, there's been a lot of research dumped into optimizing perceptual quality at a given bitrate.
As a hobby, I've recompressed DVDs and blurays. With modern compression algorithms and codecs, for me a 1080p stream with AV1 compression and Opus codec is transparent at about 1500kbps. (Depending on the media, Cartoons can go much lower and live action might need more bits).
You're right that vertical resolution is just one factor, but streaming uses radically more efficient codecs than DVD, so at typical broadband speeds, streaming 480P on YouTube will look far better than DVD did.
I encourage you to try it. Because I wasn't sure, I already had (using the new 28 Years Later trailer) before I posted. You can use yt-dlp to see that the 480P YouTube version is AV1 at 572 Kbps, which is notably better than a DVD Video-compliant MPEG-2 encode from the highest quality source available.
Wikipedia say that "Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s" [1] which is much more than 572 Kbit/s. The Youtube quality issues are easy to spot on highly dynamic clips (with fireworks, flashing lights etc).
That's too simple a comparison, against something that's a little more complicated. A 720p stream without adequate bandwidth can have terrible artifacts, mostly showing up during fast motion/panning/action. They can look objectively worse than DVDs.
However you also needed to physically buy a copy of every movie you want to watch, instead of signing up for one service and having access to thousandsd immediately.
>Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.
Major downsides to that alternative. My 80-year old friend started borrowing DVDs from the local library 6 months ago as a personal protest against Amazon Prime adding ads to their streaming.
So far, made 3 trips to borrow DVDs and all had various issues:
1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.
2) then checked out a British tv series with 10 seasons. The 10th season had 3 discs and the middle disc was so scratched up by a previous borrower that it was unplayable. (The library doesn't have a bunch of duplicate DVDs like Blockbuster Video rentals.)
3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
On top of those problems, the library has a very small selection in comparison to streaming. She estimates she'll exhaust the DVDs sitting on the library's shelves in a few months and have nothing to watch.
Another huge negative to DVDs is that she can't play them (directly) on her iPad. Her exercise bike had a mount for an iPad and she used it to watch video streams from Amazon Prime.
She was spoiled by the conveniences of streaming and does not look back on DVDs with any romantic nostalgia at all. The only reason she doesn't just subscribe to Netflix or HBO streaming to get back that convenience was she didn't think she could afford it on her Social Security income. On the other hand, the Amazon Prime Video streaming (without ads) was already part of her Amazon subscription.
I used to use netflix DVD as a great supplement to a few streaming services. For awhile they had just about everything and were pretty reliable, which meant the occasional extra media didn't require a separate service just a bit of waiting. But then they let it rot and stopped replacing disks before finally shutting it down. I wish they'd just sold it and let some one else run it for maintenance costs but I guess it was probably also a competitor to their more profitable streaming service.
Yeah. I subscribed to Netflix DVD latterly but they increasingly didn't have a lot of stuff (after having driven Blockbuster out of business). So, now there's basically not much alternative--at least discounting a la carte streaming which a lot of people do--other than actually buying discs which people still do to some degree.
> 1) checked out White Collar tv seasons but library only had seasons 1 to 3. Library didn't have last 3 seasons at all.
It's the same problem with streaming services. There are several shows at Netflix and other services that doesn't have the latest seasons (at least in my EU country).
> 3) then checked out another series that has 8 discs but only got 6 because 2 of them are already checked out by another patron. Now this means repeatedly checking the library if the other 2 finally got returned so she can borrow them.
There's no guarantee that a season will be available in a streaming service either. They sometimes only have shows for a limited time, so you could start watching a series but then it is removed before you finish, often without warning.
Most libraries want to know if the media is damaged so they can replace it. Your friend can also put holds on things. Some library services also have streaming services, and there are free streaming services as well. PBS has a free streaming service, although I think parts of it are ad supported
... and don't you all have interlibrary borrowing too? This system is 50+ years old [1], surely it can't be the only one around. Request a title from your local library website and it shows up at your local library a few days later regardless of which library actually holds it. Return at any library, it will always find its way back to the right place.
We also have reciprocal borrowing privileges at many libraries that aren't in the network. You can always find a DVD you want!
Even back when Netflix had a DVD rental service the media quality was kind of crap. I frequently got halfway through a movie only to have it skip and refuse to play due to scratches.
You can still rent movies for a couple of bucks from Amazon, almost everything is on there... but you have to pay a few bucks _on the internet_ which somehow seems more painful than handing a credit card to a cashier at a physical rental store.
You could manage that with only one drive, where you would just store the image on the HD temporarily. You could save space by removing unwanted content, such as foreign sound tracks, subtitles and extras. Sometimes I would even skip the end credits.
When DVDs were new, a new release around me would often be more like $25-30. Boxed sets would often be $50+. Of late 90s/early 2000's money, so $30 back then is like $55+ today.
I own lots of DVD's. DVD day was my jam. Most new releases were 20. Sometimes if they were some sort of special collectors edition they would be 25. Then usually after a few months on the shelf they would come down to 15-18. After that the bargain bin. Bluray/HD started around 25-30 when they came out. Box sets were usually like you say 50+ some as much as 200.
How many of those dvds are too scratched though? That would be like half of the blockbuster dvds we’d get. Even tried playing a dvd again at my folks and hit an unskippable scratch I couldn’t even see on the disc.
Streaming services are generally still more cost-effective, but the multiple subscriptions and different interfaces are an annoyance, as are differences between services in how easily you can circumvent regional restrictions. Physical media are more straightforward and consistent.
Furthermore, once you own a disc you can use it “forever”, whereas with streaming services you don’t know what will or won’t be available in a few years. Many movies and series that are available on physical media are not available on streaming, though for newer productions that also goes in the other direction.
1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost.
2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force.
3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.
> you need to provide a visa application worth amount of personal information
I think you can pay for Apple TV subscriptions and purchases with iTunes gift cards.
What annoys me most about streaming is how impermanent the collections are. Multiple times I've started watching a series only to have it vanish from the streaming service. Other times I go back to my "to watch" list only to find that the thing I wanted to watch is no longer available on the service where I was planning to watch it.
When I grew up during the DVD era we were still watching and listening to lossy content. Heck I remember trying to shove as much low bitrate .mp3 music files I could into my small 128mb MP3 player.
Watching a 4k movie over Netflix is a better experience than watching the same movie in DVD.
DVDs and Blu-rays also have stupid geographical restrictions. They come marked with region codes, and DVD players will only play discs from their home region. You have to go all the way back to VHS to be free of that particular corporate "innovation."
> Try watching a European VHS cassette in North America (or vice versa).
That's not a georestriction, but a difference in media protocols. You could easily buy a compatible VCR. Heck, in some countries, Japan marketed VCRs that supported both PAL and NTSC (I had one of those) because those countries would have a significant influx of VHSs from both Europe and America.
It's like saying the choice of 110 vs 220V (or 120 vs 240V) is a "georestriction".
This would actually be a plausible excuse for region locking. If the MPEG stream were somehow optimized for NTSC/PAL.
If course the most likely reason is corporate greed, but it's also fun to consider other possibilities. Another hypothetical reason would be for sales in Islamic nations where certain content is prohibited. They could show the government censors that there is some level enforcement to prevent "illegal media" from being easily watched. Whereas without it, the government could have potentially made DVDs illegal in their entire nation. I'm trying to see this through the lens of the design committee back in the early 90s.
This is no longer the case with 4k UHD Blu-ray. They CAN be region locked in a technical sense, but I believe that there have only been two ever released that utilized that functionality. For the most part you can just buy one without worry.
The flipside is they just price the discs so high that nobody wants to buy them in the first place. DVD boomed because they were reasonably priced, notably being cheaper than the VHS tapes they were replacing. Blu-Ray discs still tend to be priced as a "premium" product, even though the competition isn't an even more expensive physical medium but much cheaper streaming. There is really no mystery why the entire industry segment is dying. It is the same reason S-VHS and Laserdisc were flops while cheap DVDs sold in the billions.
I wish there were a way to just pay for a movie on a site and download it as an mp4 in 1080P or 4K. I hate streaming because I only want to watch 1-2 movies per month and they are very specific (like a specific martial arts movie or action movie). Streaming interfaces often have DRM and horrible interfaces and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something I'll rarely use. Don't understand the DRM because pirates get a better copy anyway.
Right now, there is no better and more convenient interface than piracy and I wish that weren't the case.
Edit: there is such an interface for classical music, e.g. Hyperion. DRM free and one-time payment, and I've used it a lot.
For some of the movies I have bought I have ended up also torrenting a copy to have and be sure I can play it. Really tempted to get a bluray player and go back to disks.
yeah...I just want to pay for a DRM-free copy so I can play it and own it forever. That's it. No streaming accoounts, no tracking, no plastic packaging, just the file in exchange for money. I paid for Sublime text that way and it's a great model.
I'm currently setting up a Plex in my home to play our families "most popular" movies and I genuinely want to buy these movies, pay for them, and just have them but I can't do that so I have to pirate them.
I wonder how many others are in the same camp as me, I used to be a pirate back when I was a teenager but now I can genuinely afford this stuff and always prefer to pay versus pirate, but in the case of home movies I just can't do that.
I think the studios will be very surprised if they just opened the floodgates and let folks pay for and download movies, because I think a large chunk of us are like me, only pirating because there's no other avenue to acquire the movie.
For me, I check my used bookstores for movies that aren't easy to find anymore. I've had good luck so far. Most used movies including Blu-Ray are around $6 USD.
Are there truly that many movies which aren't released on physical media? I've also recently set up Plex, and just rip blu-ray copies to my NAS for it. Haven't failed to find any movies I've looked for.
> I'm currently setting up a Plex in my home to play our families "most popular" movies and I genuinely want to buy these movies, pay for them, and just have them but I can't do that so I have to pirate them.
I couldn't agree more. I use Bandcamp a lot to buy and download music in the form of DRM-free, lossless files, and GOG to buy and download DRM-free games. I wish this model was more widespread, and available for other types of media, movies and shows in particular.
Often the problem is misrepresented as "streaming vs. physical media", wrongly implying that streaming is the only means of purely digital distribution. However, it is actually a question of whether you actually own media vs. only renting them.
> Sounds great, how do you propose stopping people from sharing that mp4 with the world?
You don't.
Regardless of what DRM is applied to official releases, every single mainstream movie gets released through pirate channels the same day as and often even before the official release. There may be a couple of obscure titles that slip through the cracks because no one in the pirate community noticed they existed but the stuff the industry actually cares about has never been successfully protected.
The DRM only stops people who are trying to stay "legit" from doing things they should be able to do like store it on a NAS, play it on whatever device they want, etc. It has never and will never stop pirates.
If I can go to a pirate site and locate a "REMUX" or "COMPLETE" rip of a movie, which is the case for the vast majority of movies ever released to digital formats, an official DRM-free release would change nothing for pirates and only make the experience better for people trying to stay legal.
Not to mention if I physically own the media, I'm legally allowed to make as many backups as I want as long as I don't share them. Streaming conveniently removed this feature.
Well yes, but actually no (at least if you're in the USA). The DMCA prevents the circumvention of copy protection measures, which means that by ripping a blu-ray or DVD, you're committing a crime. This is doubly bullshit in that before the DMCA was passed, copying your physical media was always legal and if you were caught distributing unauthorized copies without being paid for them, you were not a criminal but only potentially vulnerable to a civil suit from the copyright holder(s).
Same way that you stop them from sharing MP3 files: you don’t. Some people share them, but most don’t bother because there are convenient ways to pay for them, and those ways offer better value than scouring the internet for pirate downloads. So there is still a reason to hunt down pirate sites, as the copyright holder doesn’t want piracy to be too convenient, but locking down files with DRM ultimately just isn’t a great solution.
Many people no longer pirate because of how inconvenient and risky it is. It's not so simple to find a private tracker invite that you trust, use a VPN, find the quality you want, etc. One email from your ISP threatening to cancel your service is enough to scare people off. I think you greatly underestimate how much effort has gone into to anti-piracy, and how well it has worked.
I used to borrow my friends' VHS tapes. Trying to stop people from sharing is barking up the wrong tree, just make it easy enough for people to do the right thing that sending a large file around and getting it to play on their TV seems like a pain in comparison.
Sharing a physical product is not even close to the same as sharing a digital file. If you share a book/VHS/DVD, that physical item is no longer usable by the original person until it is returned. A digital file shared means the both people now have a file for as long as they want it and now each can share as much as they want.
The vast majority of people can't make copies of books. Just because you could make a copy of something doesn't mean you had the right to. In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it. If you bought a CD but only had a cassette player in your car, nobody cared that you made a tape for your own use. If you gave that cassette away, then that's in the no-go zone.
All you need to make a copy of a physical book these days is a scanner or camera. Even a smartphone is usable. The only thing stopping people from making copies of physical books these days is that it's time consuming. That's it.
And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.
ohmuhgawd becky, look at the pedantry on this one.
this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a
edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive scale that they were beyond the law, and archive.com didn't
It's not difficult and involves basically no skill set. There's a billion apps to help you scan documents and output a PDF. It's even built into mobile OSs at this point. It's just time consuming,that's it!
>In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it.
Prior to the DMCA this was only a civil matter. A question of whether you were vulnerable to a lawsuit.
Now it is a federal crime to circumvent any digital copy protection measures, no matter how feeble they are. Metaphorically, if the MPAA leaves a locked door standing in nothing but a bare doorframe in the middle of an open field on their digital distribution methods, the US federal government considers it a crime to walk around that locked door.
Analog copies had to deal with generation loss and were orders of magnitude slower than a digital copy, plus you subsequently had to physically transport/mail/… those copies around.
So what you're saying is that the internet sped up people's communications and improved our ability to transmit information with minimal entropy... and we as a society decided that this was a problem because people need to be allowed to own ideas as property under capitalist hegemony or else there's no reward for creativity (besides fame and influence, which also doesn't count for much under capitalism unless you can monetize it).
It really does feel like the capitalist system that we as a society locked in during the industrial revolution is just running on hotfixes and fumes at this point, I gotta say.
Eg - fundraise to cover the cost of producing the movie and paying the salaries of everyone involved, because physically making a movie costs money. Then give the mp4 away for free because copying a digital file costs nothing. Piracy is only a problem because companies are trying to charge money for copying a file, which is fundamentally free.
Fundraise does not mean what you think it means. Asking your mom for money to make a student film is not the same as making an actual film. People raise funds for movies from investors. Investors want their money back. Nobody goes to the theater any more, so how else are they going to pay back the investors if they can't sell the product they made. This isn't Uber just burning investors cash. Why does nobody expect to get free rides from Uber, yet expect free videos?
Fundraising doesn't mean what you think it means. Investors aren't looking for their money back. They're looking to make additional money. Fundraising is saying that the money goes towards the creation of that end product and that's it.
Kinda true but I definitely do not want to purchase a Blu ray because I don't want to purchase and keep a drive around either...also I have to transcode it and save it. Just want a 1080P copy. Glad to pay $5 for one.
Many games get their DRM removed from official distribution after a cracked copy is found circulating online. Sounds like that model would make sense for movies too.
You wish it weren’t the case, but it is the case. Play the hand you are dealt and go and get your clean copies. The market isn’t catering to you but that doesn’t mean you should then cater to the market if you don’t have to.
Nowhere can one pay a fee and receive a legal digital copy of a movie. YouTube allows people to pay for the privilege of being allowed to stream a movie for and indefinite period of time. YouTube retains the right to revoke all movie "purchases" at any time.
GP is asking why we can't actually buy digital copies of the movies like we could with music in the iTunes era.
Vimeo does offer downloadable DRM-free paid videos, I used it a couple of times for crowd-funded movies and comedians releasing their shows. But yeah, it's pretty rarely used unfortunately.
I wish there were ready-made hosted Plex servers that could accept a file transfer. Buy a movie online and give them your server "address" and they send the movie to your Plex server.
We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.
Write your local congressman (depending on where you live this position may have a different name). Go to the local political party of your choice and make it known that this is an important issue. Remember votes are more important than money in politics - money can buy votes but only when voters don't care about issues. So if many many people make this an issue things will change.
Copyright itself isn't what's stopping that, but the legal apparatuses and laws surrounding the distribution of digital copyrighted information and the industry protectionism that spawned said laws and legal apparatuses is what's stopping it.
Implementation details. At checkout put in a public key or something similar, at the receiving end accept a dialog to accept film <x> from <y> movie buying site.
I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions.
By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.
When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.
I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...
> When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality,
That wouldn't work for such a mass market product made by many manufacturers, many of them cutting every corner that they can. Newer codecs often require a bit more power or memory to run so even if there was an upgrade path many players would be locked out of newer discs or disc makers would be forced to put two formas on the disc, one for better players and one for those capable of only the baseline, reducing the amount of space available for actual content.
DVD players, and consumer devices like them, are intended to be “black boxes” to the user, not something that they need to service by applying updates, and there wasn't the connectivity available back then that there is now for that to be done automatically – people would have had to bring something to the machine incurring a distribution cost. This couldn't be “just download and stick it on a USB drive” because many people didn't have much by way of Internet access at all at home, or often didn't even have a computer (or had one that wasn't recent enough to have the fancy new fangled USB thingies, and USB drives weren't the cheap throw-away trinkets they've since become). Remember: the standard was invented in 1995, first available to the public in 1996, and rose to significant adoption in the early 2000s.
You could include the update on the DVDs themselves, but that adds two problems. First there is security/stability: something could accidentally (or maliciously) brick the user device. Second is compatibility: they would have to constrain the hardware options considerably, rather than it being “anything that can run this codec” many more implementation details would need to be fixed in the standard. You also run into the earlier problem: there is a limit imposed by the lowest common denominator in hardware, either you have to dictate better hardware in the standard which makes things more expensive for the public (that would have massively slowed the early adoption) or you are only adding a little flexibility not enough for the process to be worthwhile.
It is perfectly sensible to consider data and medium to be single product when you cannot update the software running on products that read it. It was not great sell to tell people to go get new player each time new codec was released. Or tell that these new movies do not work anymore. Have to remember that DVD was released in pre-always-connected world.
When the DVD format was new, a 300MHz Pentium II CPU could just barely decode the MPEG-2 stream. And that CPU cost almost two thousand dollars at launch:
In other words, there was simply no way to ship affordable DVD players that would use a general purpose CPU for video decoding. It needed to be in hardware.
Well yes, on other hand there is also hardware acceleration case which make lot of sense when you are manufacturing devices at scale.
And with codec. What code it is in? For what architecture or operating system? What is system constraints it has to operate in? Do you have some specification? Do you need to due something beyond it for new codec.
And from security viewpoint running some arbitrary code from disk sounds like questionable idea. Specially for say pc or console...
> Well yes, on other hand there is also hardware acceleration case which make lot of sense when you are manufacturing devices at scale.
This. In those days any general-purpose CPU with enough grunt to do realtime software decoding of MPEG2 and hypothetical newer codecs would have needed a fan - which would have been a dealbreaker for a living-room appliance.
Easy: ship source code and the whole compiler toolchain, also in source form, with bootstrapping instructions for a generic machine that future archaeologists will trivially port to whatever architecture is in vogue in year 32768 !
Joke aside, this question is close to the file format obsolescence problem in long term digital preservation: the longer the term, the closer to bootstrapping the answer is.
In the shorter term, detailed metadata, widely used containers and choice of codecs that have well-known open source implementations is a good start.
That Java runs on the SIM, not on the AP. The DVD equivalent would be the Java running on the DVD itself, but a DVD is an inert plastic and aluminium sandwich. And even if it looks portable, it’s not. In practice there’s just enough quirks that code written for one Java Card won’t reliably install and run on all others. Actually portable Java Card that would work like DVD codecs would need to work didn’t come until eSIMs, which is decades later.
>You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs.
Consumer DVD players have (cheaper) ASICs for hardware-decoding of MPEG. The algorithm to decode is literally burned into the chip. It wouldn't have made economic sense for manufacturers to pay extra for general-purpose CPUs such as x86/ARM/MIPS to enable future scenarios of loading & executing arbitrary code from discs.
At least in the earlier years, DVD players had dedicated decoder chips (and often still have now I believe), because general-purpose CPUs weren’t powerful enough or else too expensive at the time. So there wasn’t a software codec you could upgrade.
>could have been accommodated by putting executable codec files ON the DVD
You probably don't want that kind of capability since it ends up being used for nefarious purposes by the rights holders and media companies.
For example the keys on your BluRay player can be revoked just by playing a BluRay disc, as the drive first reads the code on the disc and executes the appropriate code to "update" your player according to the wishes of the DRM overlords. It's a very anti-consumer feature. Sony was also distributing their music CDs with rootkits to try to prevent piracy.
I think VHS and Laserdisc were better since they had little DRM and you could freely rewind and view whatever parts you want at your own discretion. The advent of tech also meant the advent of anti-user DRM that dictate how the (paying!) user must enjoy the content.
> For example the keys on your BluRay player can be revoked just by playing a BluRay disc, as the drive first reads the code on the disc and executes the appropriate code to "update" your player according to the wishes of the DRM overlords. It's a very anti-consumer feature.
Thanks for mentioning this. The LibreDrive firmware is specifically designed to address this and other issues.
> A good brand would buffer compute and memory capacity by a decent factor at time of sale in order to support future codecs needs...
The problem is a physical media format absolutely cannot afford to gain a reputation for not playing.
You see, if stores accept returns for opened DVDs? People can buy a DVD movie, watch it, then return it for a refund.
But if stores don't accept returns for opened DVDs? If I paid two hours' wages for that DVD, it doesn't play, and they won't give me a refund? I'm going to be mad about being ripped off, and I'm going to complain a lot.
How would that work? DVDs are playable on hundreds of devices with different architectures and capabilities. You could play a DVD on your MIPS based PS2, x86 based Xbox, PowerPC based Mac etc. And early on a hardware card was necessary for many devices because they weren't fast enough to decode in software.
Also, DVD is still a standard in medical imaging, which baffles me, because many people do not own drives anymore, but I think this is as close to "owning your own test results" as possible. I cannot imagine someone saying "sorry, you have not extended your subscription to our health-cloud and your results are gone"
It makes complete sense. It's literally pennies for them, esp. when bought in bulk, it's read-only (more or less), and most importantly it absolves them of any responsibility regarding handing you some very sensitive personal data. No credentials, cloud service, hacking, leak, etc etc. They hand you a physical object and that's it. It's your problem now.
A pendrive would work almost as well but too many people likely would accidentally reformat them, add data and mix them up, claim they got a virus from them (which they maybe did, when their 8yo nephew clicked everything looking for big boobs online, not because of the doctor. But now the doctor has to prove the virus on the pendrive was added later? Just hand the patient a DVD really).
Depending on the jurisdiction, the minimum required storage time for medical data varies - but it needs to be kept around usually. Patients can, within that time frame, request that data to be provided, but may be required to pay some fee to cover the material costs. In my jurisdiction, this time frame is 10 years, and radiology data is usually provided as a paper slip with a link and password, valid for 1-2 years, or DVDs on request.
Keeping that data around and managing requests for it is a part of why older physicians are so keen to sell their practices to younger doctors here - they can pass on the duty of keeping up with storing the data that way.
FWIW, I'm in a jurisdiction with a 10 year retention requirement, and also have had no issues getting imaging data from beyond that (on DVD, of course - one department even had a side hustle selling external DVD drives for $50 on the side; they even offered to drop the files onto a USB drive for free).
There is some utility unique to the dvd imo. It seems way more secure to me if another practitioner is just being handed a dvd direct from the imaging dept by the patient, compared to an emailed link that could be cloned in phishing attempts hospitals get. Anyone who expects to look at these images probably has a disk drive. It is kind of better than a thumb drive because its cheaper to make for the hospital but also can sit in a folder with other paperwork nicer than any thumb drive.
When I was 15 I discovered that my local doctor lost all of my medical records. Poof, all gone. Whoops, next patient please. My last doctor no longer had a copy of my files, either.
I had to receive all of my vaccinations again over two sessions before attending public school.
Offsite backup needs to always be the answer. Fires have always been a concern in any human situation. Plus lots of other accidents.
Of course the real hard part is how do you mark a record as do not restore anymore. In a medical context this isn't much a problem, but in other cases it is an issue.
How would that realistically work? Because "just use a new codec" would mean you'd end up with old DVD players not being able to play newer DVDs, and a very frustrating transition period.
They would be different incompatible discs. That is: a different standard.
Call it blu-ray because that is what it is. If you just want a new codec with the same media you need some DVD2 label and get DVD player manufacturers onboard with the new spec so that players are common before the first disc. Also because consumers are not happy about replacing their DVD players all the time you have to not create new specs too often. (or perhaps you can have a standard decoder cartridge which can be put into your existing DVD players and sells for $5 thus making upgrading to DVD3 not a big deal). there are lots of options, but the point is always don't make it too hard for consumers to know their DVDs and drives are compatible.
There were TVs made that you could upgrade the processor on, they were more expensive and never took off.
People want cheap, they'll forgo the better product if they can get one that's on sale cheap. Consumer choice says that an upgradable product sells worse and the company that makes the upgradeable models will get the lowest market share.
You'd have to legislate modularity and then you get people complaining about government over reach.
It's looking like it's going to be harder and harder to find a physical DVD _player_, though. When the one you have breaks down, you may not be able to buy a replacement.
Not mentioning the non-skippable anti piracy noise that ironically made the legit product worse than the pirated one poisoned the well for interactive features later on Blu Ray. Who cares about getting extras if they are hidden behind obnoxious menus and abusive junk when the Internet will tell you anyway?
That said I remember that era fondly because of things like the Tartan output. In the UK if you had a multi region player (and many did) you could get stuff from all over the place, on top of the local but now forgotten play dot com.
your question appears facetious in nature, but it's interesting to think about what the answer might be. I'd guesstimate 30 - 50 years before manufacturing technology reaches that point, but once it does, how long will it take to clear the regulatory hurdles? i bet it would take at least as long as the time from viable drone deliveries -> legal drone deliveries.
Experience matters, especially for consumer goods like media. Unskippable notices about piracy that are only shown to people who have pirated is silly and clunky. You can probably tell this by the fact that none of the streaming services show something similar.
This will sound very silly, but one of my favorite features of my Tesla Model 3 is that it doesn't stall the screen for 5-10 seconds every. single. time. you get in the car reminding you to drive safely and to pay attention to the road.
I had the 5-10 second safe driving message on an old car. I spent the time making sure myself and all of my passengers were buckled, that my mirrors were adjusted correctly, that my car was sounding normal and gauges looked healthy, etc. It was never annoying because you shouldn't just turn the key and immediately operate a motor vehicle.
Slightly annoying everyone watching a movie in exchange for putting out their little bit of propaganda, doesn’t make it useless but it does make it worse.
Enshitificstion isn’t about companies making products worse because they don’t like their customers it’s just they have different interests. Thus shelf life is generally favored over taste etc.
It's funny ... I'm old enough to have a HUGE collection of DVDs and BluRays (many still in their original shrink-wrap lol).
But these days, if I feel like watching a movie that I own physically... sometimes I still look to see if it's on a streaming service that I'm subscribed to, or will even pirate it ... just because it's more convenient than having to turn on the BluRay player and then navigate those awful menus with un-skippable ads (you forgot those) and copyright screens.
The copyright notices were especially egregious and annoying to me BECAUSE I PAID FOR IT! Don't punish your paying customers because of the people you don't like... people that are not reading your annoying message.
I like watching movies, and thus, I have watched a lot. When I try to find a movie to watch on HBO/Netflix (I'm from Scandinavia - not the same selection as in the US), I have a hard time finding something to watch. A lot of newer movies doesn't cater to my taste.
On the other hand, I can find a lot of classics from the 80s/90s/00s and even 10s in thriftstores for as little as 1-3$. I then get to keep the movies, that I often end up rewatching, and I get the added features mentioned in the article.
I'm not to nostalgic about the cases, which I often just dump (I have considered keeping the fact-sheets though, just not the plastic casing).
I'll soon cancel my remaining subscriptions, and only purchase them a month at a time when something I truly want to watch arrives...
I started buying Bluray/UHDs as a replacement for going to the theatre and purchasing/renting digital copies and streaming.
I was spending the money anyways, why not own a copy?
Streaming is primarily just for specific TV shows, subscribe, immediately cancel, watch the series, then resubscribe when something worthwhile exists. I can't stand the bugs, slow interfaces, forced ads in ad free tiers, bad audio quality, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
For a while the cheat code for cheap Blu-ray Discs was to buy them from RedBox. Now, I’m struggling for a decent place to buy discs from. When I was a student and had far less cash I had no problem spending $20 on a DVD of a new release. Now that I have the cash, it seems like I’m always looking for those great sales where you can grab a BluRay or UHD for $10.
I started doing it as well. Not only is the quality great (4k, HDR 10+ or Dolby Vision, uncompressed audio) but equally important is that it cannot be taken away.
If I love a movie on X streaming service and they have some licensing problem or decide it's not worth what they're paying to host it, they can remove it at any time. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of what's available changing on a daily basis, and constantly getting split among more and more services that charge more and more monthly.
I've been ramping up on UHD Blueray lately, especially since I upgraded to an OLED TV. It's a massive picture quality upgrade. I think I have like 6 discs, all ~$10. A mix of newer movies I haven't seen, and 80s-90s movies I want to show the kids in a few years. It's been fun.
It seems to me that the extra features on DVD were originally part of the marketing benefits driving people to adopt the format because the studios preferred it to VHS because of CSS and region-locking. Then they found they had painted themselves into a corner making all these extra features that people came to expect, until finally streaming let them get back to “just the movie”.
It was a good investment to get a modded player that ignored UOP and let you easily skip stuff. As for menus, most DVD remote controls had a button to directly start the movie without having to figure out the menu.
Region locking was more that US videos were 60hz ntsc and most of the rest of world was 50hz pal, and multi-region hardware was fairly rare
Throw in the difficulties in buying non-local things in the first place and it simply wasn't a problem, they could market-segment to their hearts content
Many VHS were subbed instead. Sometimes two versions of a popular film were released, one dubbed and one with baked-in subs. This did limit the desire to copy between regions a bit, though not as much as you might think given how many people speak one of a few languages as a second language.
I suspect the cost of physical distribution and good copying equipment was the key issue until fairly late on in the life cycle of VHS as a common tech. Region locking just wasn't thought of because by the time it might have made significant difference other limitations of tape based media format were readily apparent and new systems were being designed and implemented.
Region locking stops (or is designed to stop) someone, for example, in the USA buying a DVD sold in the UK market. The localization of the product on sale isn't relevant to the decision not to sell the product.
Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.
Only if trying to learn the language of Lithuania, or is an immigrant from Lithuania. I'm not sure how common those are, I expect the total market is around 10... This is a real problem for the language learning community - they are too small for the studios to worry about, but the studios are making a lot of content that would be very useful for learning if only someone could get it.
This article is focused on mainstream cinema and I tend to agree with it; I miss the days when major studios were releasing DVDs packed with extras. Simultaneously, we're in the middle of a major boutique Blu-ray boom. I am not intimately familiar with the economics of this, but it's demonstrably true that it's possible to license and produce high quality Blu-rays with a lot of interesting extras in batches of 2-3K and make a living at it.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.
Those user-hostile abominations were a great reason to have DVDs. They were slow, made starting to watch a movie more complicated than it need be, and frequently committed the cardinal sin of showing spoilers.
Did the cinephiles even like all of those "extra features" that the rest of us ignored? All of that stuff is (as it should be) free on the internet for anybody who cares.
Yeah these articles are all written by people who owned hundreds of movies.
I was thinking about this. Normal people bought maybe one or two Disney movies a year? Now Disney Plus cashes in 20 eurodollars per month and they don't have to share it with anyone.
since when is the "general public" arbiter of wisdom? The masses will embrace anything that smacks of short term convenience and will tolerate enormous amount of abuse because caring for anything actually requires effort. This starts with thinking, collecting objective information among the torrents of marketing and misinformation, agitating for your rights and (horror, horror) even sacrificing immediate gratification.
Because the general public "doesnt care" we are in a world you can own nothing, control nothing, repair nothing, keep nothing a secret, do nothing without going through gatekeepers. In short, idiocracy.
On the flip side, this is one of the best times for people who enjoy movies/media. I can purchase near almost any movie to my hearts content. Streaming is super convenient, I don't have to think about how to store the digital media. I don't need the physical media taking up space. Heck I even love to pay for a 24-48hour digital rental. I can spend $3-4 and get a movie to watch instantly. I don't care about DRM. Its of course not all rosy, there is some nostalgia from living in a world of constraints, having to go to the Blockbuster on a Friday to pick out a movie, looking back there was something nice about it, it built a ritual. DRM is not great and you run the risk that the vendor you purchased the media from might go out of business. I will take those and enjoy my near limitless potential library.
I already acknowledged that your at risk of the vendor going out of business or any other way, losing access to the content. Except for the outlier movie fanatic, its never been better for the consumer imo. I enjoy movies and watch quite a few and I think its fantastic how easy it is for me to rent and stream what I watch. I have no desire to buy a film. Even physical media, the cost of purchase and storing it is too high for me. I recognize that some people enjoy it but I don't believe the majority of the market does and I don't believe its fair to effectively call them sheep for believing that.
Unlike practically every example you provide, I am typically watching a film once. I may revisit it years later but I am not consuming it on a frequent basis.
Anything streamed could also be delived as physical media at marginal extra cost, indeed for those that want it and can afford these few extra bucks. Actually on a lifetime basis and taking into account multiple viewings within family etc. it may even be advantageous. One can think many other use cases where having the media locally makes a difference. You are saying "it doesn't apply to me", which is fine, but it is hard to understand how not having an extra option is somehow better for everybody.
The marginal cost would be quite large because there are very few customers that want a physical disc.
I am not arguing that there should not be alternatives but rather customers don’t want those alternatives so the cost to make a dvd/Blu-ray for less than .1% of your market can be quite expensive.
They're not the arbiter of wisdom, they're the arbiter of commercial success & market viability, which is always a bell curve to the bottom (see Stanley Cups and cupcake, boba, and dumpling retail [in the US]).
I worked in the film industry, in DVDs, at the height of that market. Sales of DVDs tumbled. End of story. There was nothing for the studios to do because the ROI was dead, and their previous efforts (which were terrible natch) to manipulate the DVD market (cheaper, limited play product) were dumb.
DVDs were great, streaming ate their lunch.
Calling capitalism's market economics an idiocracy is.. tautological.
> Calling capitalism's market economics an idiocracy is.. tautological.
Thats definitely not true. The most ardent and smart defender of markets argued that they operate and optimize within the boundaries that society decides. If you legislate that people should be able to repair, own, exchange etc. stuff then markets will deliver exactly that. If you let them race to the bottom thats also exactly what you will get.
My biggest gripe with DVDs is how loud they are. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a quiet scene in a movie and hearing the drive spin up.
I wish Kaleidescape[1] was more affordable. It's a download rather than streaming service, with a comprehensive movie library (12,000+ titles) and you buy movies individually rather than a monthly subscription. But then you can watch the movies as many times as you want and they don't disappear from your library if Kaleidescape stops carrying them. I don't know if they include the extra content typically available on discs or not.
You have to buy their player ($4,000) and their media server ($5,000 for 8TB up to $27,000 for 96TB). Then buy movies (about $9 - $30 depending on how new they are).
If you have the money, you can buy a pre-loaded system for $98,000 which includes their entire 4k library (only about 2000 movies), two 96TB storage arrays and a 4k player.
If the player was around $2,000 and I could use my own storage, I'd have bought one already and ditched all the streaming platforms.
Edit: looking through their library, some titles do include extra content (special features, deleted scenes, music videos, etc).
That's really cool that it exists / is possible. Maybe someone will create a similar service that undercuts them - but I would imagine the licensing agreements somewhat require them to do drm with the player / media server. 9k entry cost is going to keep essentially everyone out of the market - and much of that sounds like total bs costs, in no way related to the cost of the components.
Don't you get the majority of that with buying movies from Apple? You can get 4K and Dolby Atmos. If there's DRM anyway, it seems like the difference isn't worth it.
I really enjoy the process of ripping a disc to my hard drive, especially the process of finding the right combination of VapourSynth filters to clear up and fix any issues done in the mastering process. I also have discovered some interesting extra features.
An interesting DVD set was the first season of The IT Crowd, which has base64 encoded subtitles. It was a fun little project to OCR those, combine them together, and then decode them.
In terms of interesting DVD commentaries, Goodfellas and Catch Me if You Can have commentaries with the actual criminals who are the subject of the film, which gives an interesting perspective. There was also a hidden commentary track on one of The Simpsons episodes where the writers go into details about why there was a drop off in quality on the show. Actually the commentary tracks on The Simpsons episodes are generally excellent.
That fact that all the bonus material on DVDs (documentaries, audio commentaries, story board drawings etc) was hardly appreciated at the time until it went away in the Netflix era is something that also reminds me of movie awards.
Many film classics were only really appreciated years later, and we are left to wonder why they didn't won an Academy Award at the time while some other totally unremarkable movie took it instead. I think it's this: Often we assume that certain things (e.g. certain types of movies, DVD extras) just will be as good or better in the future, and often they do, but if they unexpectedly get worse, we realize that we did hit a high water mark in the past without noticing at the time.
It is DRM, it was just cracked a long time ago and they couldn’t apply a fix since the discs and players aren’t internet-connected or meant to be patched.
Funny to see movie people going through the same pain PC gamers did (lamenting the loss of "big box" retail games - the reasoning is much the same), especially the complaints around the loss of things like booklets etc.
I remember building a computer 8 years ago that for the first time I didn't need an optical drive. Not needing to dig around for 3-4 separate disks or worry if they were scratched was very handy.
Yes the ownership piece is one thing, but I have yet to play a game in over a decade that was eventually taken away from me.
Why do I want the booklets when there are other incredible sources of game info online, from Youtube tutorials though to subreddits and wiki articles.
weirdly I'm more in favor of it with steam - I guess there's not a really great equivalent for movies and music? I mean band camp is pretty close to gog but it's a little bit of a hassle to manage your library still, and easier to keep CDs in the car.
Steam works great while the benevolent dictator (Gabe) is still alive and in direct control.
What happens to the company and its services once he dies is extremely concerning to me given depth of my own investment now in game licences on the platform. Things may not be so rosy if/when Steam is sold to a publicly traded parent and has to do boring things like deliver quarterly growth for shareholders etc.
Would a Steam/Valve owned and run by Microsoft be as good? It might not be Microsoft in the end of course, but that question is going to come up a lot sooner than a lot of Steam fans probably realise, especially as Gabe ages out.
Big box games generally had very little of these types of concerns.
People still haven't quantified the value of compilation and curation. Putting a bunch of related things together results in something that is a product of its parts, not the sum. You'd think that LLMs would have drilled that into our heads by now.
Still, somehow, online archives are just document databases of mixed content. Just bags of crap and treasure that can be picked through using search engines if you can guess the correct magical incantation and the engine hasn't been told to selectively ignore what you've said. Archive.org and books.google.com are said to be valuable archives (and they are), but try to find all four volumes of a four volume set, or all of the works of an author in chronological order. I'll give you an hour.
This could be solved by giving users the ability to add those connections, and providing a deliberative system to edit and cultivate those added connections. They'll do it for free. It mostly works on wikipedia, even when as they dramatically fail in other ways.
Let people add links to content, and come up with deliberative procedures to avoid problems such as spam. "Community Notes" is a good attempt on Twitter. Wikipedia has a process for auditing references and links.
Instead of using public deliberation, we have random drones or execs hardcoding "Jonathan Turley" into secret LLM prompts because somebody saw him on TV complaining about LLMs libeling him. Ad hoc authoritarianism is not the answer, but somehow it's the only solution we ever use because deliberation is hard and requires relinquishing a bit of control.
Stange that the article opens with a picture of the The Matrix DVD, but then doesn't mention it in the text. This was actually the first DVD I bought (even though back then I didn't have a DVD player, just a DVD drive for my PC) and spent hours exploring the extras. Looks like I wasn't the only one who was impressed: https://theextras.buzzsprout.com/1781599/episodes/9714540
Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” had extra menus that I couldn’t reach with a remote but could click with a mouse. I genuinely thought it was a bit unkind to fans who couldn’t access them on a tv.
Same experience; I recall being disappointed with the extremely greeniness of the Matrix on DVD, to the point I thought my monitor or computer were busted.
Not to mention streaming/digital media is going to kill off actually good movies and content. This isn't the technology's fault mind you, but the streamers' business model, but you could rely upon residuals via DVD sales for movies back in the day and that money is gone, which eliminates the safety margin required to take risks.
It's why I can't stand the 'information wants to be free' argument. Where the hell do you think that intellectual labor required comes from, the aether?
> It's why I can't stand the 'information wants to be free' argument. Where the hell do you think that intellectual labor required comes from, the aether?
Assuming your goal is to understand - yes, that thinking is a product of time when people were altruistically publishing very high quality content on the web. The time before adspam, blogspam, llmspam, etc. You could punch queries into search engines and find no-nonsense sites with detailed information, not trying to sell you anything but rather just wanting to be the most complete resource about a certain topic.
I'm not saying that ethos works for million dollar movie production. But on the other hand the ethos of people needing to be paid evidently doesn't work for high quality informational content, given that it has all but disappeared in the torrent of commercialized/intermediated spam.
This wasn't meant to be a moral argument. It's not the information yearns for liberation and we ought to provide it. It's a physics analogy. Like a ball 'wants' to roll downhill. Free is the lowest entropy state of information.
I did not take it for granted at all. My DVDs can not be cancelled, do not require internet or streaming accounts. Most of them have bonus features that the streaming providers do not always offer. Solar power and a portable player means I am not restricted to books during a prolonged power outage. Please do bring back a greater DVD boom but do not bring in any physical media that requires checking for a license.
What I don't like about DVDs (I have a lot of them) is it's always a crapshoot if they play, or if they play for a while and halfway through the movie it sputters and hangs. The disk is pristine. Sometimes taking it out and putting it back in will get it to work, trying it in a different player will work, arggh.
Unless anyone else in the house is doing anything at all on the internet. Then the stream has weird hitches and pauses, it buffers occasionally, and it'll "seamlessly" switch between glorious 4k and half-baked potato quality at random.
Sorry did I suggest other people in the house were a requirement? Nah, it just does that anyway. Too many points of failure between the endpoint and the provider, and way too much distrust that the user may try to capture the footage once they have it, to solve all of the above problems, because the license holders don't like that.
Bearing in mind I only live with one person, and I'm lucky enough to live in a place with ample internet options, but this just isn't a problem for me.
I've got gigabit fiber now, but in my last place I had 76mbps (but in practice it was more like 60 or so). We were able to watch two streams, with my wife's instagram and my reddit scrolling comfortably. The only reason we upgraded was when we moved 1) fiber was cheaper, and 2) I changed jobs and all of a sudden needed to download far more build files (hundreds of gigabytes a week)
If we had 4 people streaming different things we might have struggled.
You have a bad DVD player and good internet. Lots of people have the opposite: crummy internet where there's no guarantee that they'll get through a streamed movie without buffering issues.
On the article itself: indeed sometimes I enjoyed the directors commentaries as much as the films or shows themselves. In particular Requiem for a Dream, where the director's commentary adds a lot of context.
As I mentioned, I have accumulated several DVD players over the years (different brands, even a blue ray), and all of them exhibit this characteristic.
The only commentary I've enjoyed are the Eddie Mueller ones commenting on film noir. I'll watch the movie, then re-watch it with Eddie. Good stuff!
That’s odd, unless maybe you always bought very cheap players. I owned half a dozen players over the years, played a 4-digit number of discs, and barely ever had any playback issues.
With streaming, on the other hand, I have intermittent hangs and stuttering every few weeks, and navigating the video is worse than with physical discs (no chapter stops, skipping forward/backwards often takes longer to resync/rebuffer the stream), switching subtitles and audio language takes more steps, and other inconveniences.
Unless your provider or server is running low on bandwidth, then it stutters or lowers the quality :D
With both disks and internet my method is to copy the entire content locally before watching it. I do it even for youtube videos (also because the browser doesn't prevent screen dimming but the video player does).
You should have invested in a good quality player. One with lots of buffer memory, and hardware acceleration of formats. People bought the cheapest they could find and then they ranted. At first good players were very expensive but then they became just a little more expensive that bad ones.
My computer illiterate friends use to ask me to download this or that movie for them from torrents. I don't use streaming because I dont like proprietary software, but seems that there is not every movie on those services, also some kinds of censourship use to deplatform the content from time to time. From my experience, licensed CD and DVD plays well, music CD plays excellent even if it looks too scratched to be good, but any self-burned disc from 00s is a lottery and typically requires some error-recovery software to be read.
Maybe your player is going bad. And blu-ray may be more resilient than DVD if memory serves.
My experiences with streaming vary.
- You need multiple services with the accompanying headaches.
- some content will still get yanked
- if you don't subscribe to netflix for 6 months they delete your account and you lose lists you had
- quality can be poor depending on circumstance. Even with something like chromecast 4k, netflix doesn't offer way to enforce 4k quality but seems to decidw by itself. The picture looks bad with no way to tell why.
I have several players, they all behave differently wrt which DVDs make them crash. You're right that the bluray players tend to be more robust, but they still randomly crash.
I just bought the complete Dynasty series, about 200 episodes (so sue me over my bad taste), and so far about 5 of the episodes won't play all the way through.
Buy a $12 DVD drive for a computer, download handbrake, and never care about any media problem ever again.
I have never experienced a problem with DVD playback that wasn't obviously caused by extreme scratches. I don't even understand how a DVD player could "crash" in most cases. They are just a pipe from a DVD drive to an ASIC that hasn't had to change in 20 years. There's nothing to crash. "Bad" data either fails a checksum and skips or will give you weird microblock artifacts.
Are these actual DVD players or some sort of weird computer system that software decodes DVDs?
> There was the rather strange Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, released shortly after the feature film came out in 2004. Essentially, director Adam McKay had shot so much material while making Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, and abandoned so many story ideas (including a whole subplot about a fictional terrorist organisation) that it was cut into a separate 90-minute release. (It wasn’t great, but an interesting curio nonetheless.)
I miss when studios and directors would actually edit movies properly. If Anchorman were released today on Netflix, it would have been a 2 hour 15 minute slog, with 10 minutes of laughs here and there, rather than the sharp and hilarious 90 minute comedy that it was.
have you noticed that the quality of movies has been progressively declining? i think it's because the pirated movie boom ended. there was a theory that DVD movie piracy increases the box office revenue. bring back movie piracy?
I think with the success of streaming series have become more interesting to streaming platforms as their addictive nature can lock people more easily into a platform for a specific period of time.
For this reason budget and revenues of series have increased dramatically and series are more and more produced like movies. This probably created an artistic and talent shift from movies to series.
There were a lot of shitty movies too back in the days but some never even reached the theaters and were only sold on VHS and DVDs.
Movies have historically been stand alone - if you didn't see [random movie]-1 when it was out but now your friends want to go to [random movie]-2 the movie better make sense. However it can still clearly be a follow on. As such movies tend to focus on a plot within the movie.
TV shows have been more a case of you may have missed yesterdays show, but want to see today's show. The format doesn't lend to complex plots because of the limited time to resolve them, and anything long term means people are seeing spoilers. Thus they tend to focus on characters, so you can watch in more or less any order.
The loss of DVD sales has changed the type of movies that are being created.
Matt Damon himself has explained how Good Will Hunting would not get made today because of this.
It is really simple too if you think of yourself as the investor in the film getting pitched.
"Will Hunting, a genius-level IQ but chooses to work as a janitor at MIT. When he solves a difficult graduate-level math problem, his talents are discovered by a professor"
Only an idiot would invest in that in 2024 but we are way past that. I imagine no one would even bother pitching that at all in 2024. Certainly wouldn't get a meeting with anyone.
There was a golden era of film not long ago and that era is gone forever. The Fountain might be the best example though. I love that movie but it lost millions of dollars even at the height of the golden era.
The future is going to be AI Batman vs Superman part 276.
I didn't like DVD. Those screens and advertisements that only made you loose time.
I used those to "learn" French and German and the subtitles never matched what was said. When you are advanced in the language you don't care, but when you are learning it is a big flaw.
The DVD usually only had English (and another one) audio tracks, subtitles in several languages, but not audio. You had to buy another DVD from Amazon.de or something, when it was way harder than today.
I find arcade games or classics like Sonic or Mario, brilliant, even today. Sometimes the emulator is not properly setup: Nobody saw individual pixels on CRT screens.
Subtitles aren't designed to help you learn the language, they're designed to entertain you. They'll often be shortened or translate jokes so locals will understand them, and that's unavoidable.
your hard earned couple dollars made all the difference to hollywood. they absolutely will repay you with even more ads, payment tiers, propaganda and DRM!
FWIW my uncle still runs cinemaparadiso.co.uk - the last DVD rental service in the UK and possibly wider afield, in case anyone would like to explore the catalog.
Aren't small scale / budget movies more available now? I don't need to make a DVD I can just upload it online
They don't need to consider making DVD's and shipping them all around the world in the hope people will buy them.
There is so much content we consume that is made by small productions that likely wouldn't have been seen my many around the world unless they managed to get their hands on the DVD.
The problem there is discovery. When someone local to you made a low budget film or documentary and released it on DVD, you would see that for sale in your local stores and gas stations. Now if people put that stuff on youtube it just gets lost in the noise and rarely will get the local exposure it once would have.
I don't think I necessarily agree with this from my viewpoint.
Back when I used to make digital copies of DVD's to watch on my PC, I used software that would specifically remove all of the menu's and bonus content and just digitise the movie itself to save space.
Killer product would be a physical UHD player with built-in very powerful and accurate AI upscalling
(better than Nvidia Shield)
for all your discs - old and new.
One of the turning points for me was when the extras went from captivating to drivel: Extras used to be based on promo videos that you'd find on 1990s cable TV; for example, a promo that would be on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon to get you into the theater. Later, the extras turned into something that an intern would slap together, with a bunch of people involved with the movie back-slapping each other.
I stopped buying DVDs around 2005-ish: With BluRay coming around, and everyone saying that film was closer to 4k, why would I want to invest in a disk, only to need to rebuy it in BluRay and then 4k every few years? I also realized that most movies I only watch once, so streaming makes a lot more sense.
Now that I have a 4k player I've gone back to buying 4k disks if I think I'll re-watch them.
Honestly not where I expected the article to go, but grateful for it. While I do kinda miss the old, glamorous packaging and pack-ins of yore, the modern media server-focused me appreciates modern releases that are thin on extras as they're easier to rip.
I kind of think that if media ownership remained a priority, and the focus was on an improved home experience instead of increasing consumption via streaming, things would've turned out broadly better. Then again, I look at series that never would've had a chance in the old media environment (Invincible, The Boys, Hasbin Hotel, The Amazing Digital Circus, etc), and I'm reminded that nostalgia for the past is a powerful reality warp.
All that being said, ultimately the strongest voice inside of me is that of the librarian: "Thank f*k all this media uses the same dimensions for a change. All those fancy-pants novelty boxes were a real pain to keep organized and pristine."
But the special features themselves… man. Getting to see the craft of filmmaking and propmaking was one of the biggest inspirations for me in pursuing a career as a maker. That was the first time in my life anyone had pulled back the curtain to that extent on what it took to create something as complex and powerful as Peter Jackson’s LOTR. You could tell the profound love and dedication that went into every inch of that film. To anyone who was involved in creating those special features and deciding to include them in the extended edition box sets, thank you.