The End of Blu-ray

The biggest joke is that DVd will last longer than Blue ray. I have never owned a Blue ray player, neither a Blue ray writer. This technology was too late. I think HD-DVD might have had better luck, since DVD writers are still a thing and even DVD players.
 
It actually was born on life support. It was way too expensive when new with movie prices often over $30. And by the time the price became normalized physical media was been made obsolete by digital.
I refuse to buy physical releases, if it isn't available for buy and download then it doesn't exist to me.

I purchased a blu-ray writer about 6 or 8 years ago. I've used it to write exactly zero discs.

I have a bluray player the playstation. And I purchased one product on bluray a boxset of BSG, that I never watched, because it is more convenient to just torrent the entire show and watch it as individual files as opposed to having to jiggle two dozen discs and sit trough unskippable logos.
 
So many blurays looked like shit anyway... ( 2 players i used... Well now 3) then 4k Blu-ray on 4k tv, again looked like shit most of them.
Yes its dead, as well as it should, promises delivered too late for still too much money.
Blu ray or 4k bluray matters little, if its mastered with your ass. Garbage in, 1080p or 4k garbage out. Wasted my money on shit... Just now there is some attention of doing things a bit better quality.. sometimes. The only movie I have seen, that looks like I wished most 4k bluray looked is the meg.
For a very long time 1080p blurays looked like poorly upscaled dvds. I think juuuust now blurays are getting a touch better, and 4k are mostly no better than blurays...
Plus media is too expensive.. i don't buy ( very rare) mostly rent or borrow. So 24 to 29 for bluray or 4k,.yeah you can shove it.
 
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Next physical media standard (if there is one ever again) should come with image quality standard certification. However they certify it, don't care. But it should be yes, this is an 8k uvray disc, certified. If something is not certified or they don't a want to have it certified, so be it, then mandatory non- certified label on the disc and the box.
 
Uvaman2 said:
So many blurays looked like shit anyway... ( 2 players i used... Well now 3) then 4k Blu-ray on 4k tv, again looked like shit most of them.
Yes its dead, as well as it should, promises delivered too late for still too much money.
Blu ray or 4k bluray matters little, if its mastered with your ass. Garbage in, 1080p or 4k garbage out. Wasted my money on shit... Just now there is some attention of doing things a bit better quality.. sometimes. The only movie I have seen, that looks like I wished most 4k bluray looked is the meg.
For a very long time 1080p blurays looked like poorly upscaled dvds. I think juuuust now blurays are getting a touch better, and 4k are mostly no better than blurays...
Plus media is too expensive.. i don't buy ( very rare) mostly rent or borrow. So 24 to 29 for bluray or 4k,.yeah you can shove it.
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Yeah, mastering is what's important and some companies don't give a shit. I think the biggest shit-show was Buffy; It's either cropped at damn near 100% (yay nosehairs!) or so wide you can see the sound guy trying to hide behind the couch. Fucking infuriating.
 
nilepez said:
I don't know what you're looking at, but my 4k MKVs range from roughly 50GB to 80GB, which is the same size as the file on the disk.
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If you're just ripping files exactly as-is. There are ways to save space without dramtic quality loss. There are 4K rips out there with Atmos soundtracks clocking in at 8-12GB. Unless you have a VERY specific setup you'd be none the wiser. Especially with film grain involved.
 
Uvaman2 said:
For a very long time 1080p blurays looked like poorly upscaled dvds.
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They were, the one I remember was the Fifth Element, I remember seeing it demoed in store and thinking "why does it look so bad" a couple of weeks later it was in the news, Sony had released the first batch of Blu Ray films as standard definition upscales, they then a year or two later Stealth Released the real HD films in there place.

I can find very little news on that now, I did find a review from back then:https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/894/fifthelement_remastered.html
 
If you have the space in your lan you can buy the blurays and rip them 1:1 in an iso and play them on something like a shield tv at your leisure so there is no opportunity for spouses, children, or guests to damage discs. Then you're streaming but 1:1 over your hardwired lan. It's made of win. We're firmly into the 21st century, there is no reason to screw with the disc if you have flexible morals and if you don't have flexible ones then you can only manipulate the disc twice when you put it in to rip and again when you take it out and store it somewhere.
 
Uvaman2 said:
For a very long time 1080p blurays looked like poorly upscaled dvds.
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Yeah, it took the industry a while to get the formula right. At first I am convinced they just upscaled, betting that no one would ever notice.

Then they actually included re-scans of the film releases in 1080p, but failed to do any kind of processing resulting ins some terrible film grain on many titles.

Eventually once a critical mass of users started getting true 1080p TV's and started calling them out when the quality was bad, they got their acts in order.

Uvaman2 said:
I think juuuust now blurays are getting a touch better, and 4k are mostly no better than blurays...
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Most of my 1080p Bluray rips wind up being in the high 20's GB's per film. My handful of 4K rips tend to be in the low 40's GB's.

Lets - for the sake of argument - use 27 and 42 respectively. That's 4 times more pixels, with only a 55% higher bitrate.

The lack of quality really shouldn't be a surprise. They are quite simply overcompressed.
 
Walmart has 3 disks usually for one movie a Blue Ray and 4k version and a 1080P version this will cut down confusion new movies actually sell pretty well if.
Only AAA movie I watched last year was SOLO.
 
DVD to blu-ray isn't a huge difference if you are watching on a 55" screen from 12' away. It looks like shit on a 120" 2.40 ratio screen when zoomed to fit, worse than SD TV.

4K for me would be a significant upgrade in visual quality for 21:9 movies it just costs too damn much.

Playing Hellblade in their was pretty cool although I wish they had done more with the surround as it's really focused for headphones.
 
Domingo said:
If you're just ripping files exactly as-is. There are ways to save space without dramtic quality loss. There are 4K rips out there with Atmos soundtracks clocking in at 8-12GB. Unless you have a VERY specific setup you'd be none the wiser. Especially with film grain involved.
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OK, let's be clear. I can already see the difference between Blu Ray/4k Blu Ray and Netflix. What you're describing is 1/2 the size of a 4K Netflix movie. Fine for a tablet, not for 65" TV.
 
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Wade88 said:
If you have the space in your lan you can buy the blurays and rip them 1:1 in an iso and play them on something like a shield tv at your leisure so there is no opportunity for spouses, children, or guests to damage discs. Then you're streaming but 1:1 over your hardwired lan. It's made of win. We're firmly into the 21st century, there is no reason to screw with the disc if you have flexible morals and if you don't have flexible ones then you can only manipulate the disc twice when you put it in to rip and again when you take it out and store it somewhere.
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Can it do that with 4k blu ray? For now I'm using MKV, but you can't get dolby vision with that.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, it took the industry a while to get the formula right. At first I am convinced they just upscaled, betting that no one would ever notice.
Then they actually included re-scans of the film releases in 1080p, but failed to do any kind of processing resulting ins some terrible film grain on many titles.
Eventually once a critical mass of users started getting true 1080p TV's and started calling them out when the quality was bad, they got their acts in order.

Most of my 1080p Bluray rips wind up being in the high 20's GB's per film. My handful of 4K rips tend to be in the low 40's GB's.
Lets - for the sake of argument - use 27 and 42 respectively. That's 4 times more pixels, with only a 55% higher bitrate.
The lack of quality really shouldn't be a surprise. They are quite simply overcompressed.
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I see a lot of 50-70GB 4k movies, but that aside, you can't compare the size of blu ray vs 4k. The former is h.264 the later is h.265/hevc, a far more efficient compression.
 
nilepez said:
Can it do that with 4k blu ray? For now I'm using MKV, but you can't get dolby vision with that.
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Yes but you need to straight rip as it is on the disc as in the folders you see on the disc and play the m2ts. I do it on an oppo bluray player from a synology nas. for non dolbyvision stuff i use a shield tv because it's way faster and the gui is slicker. Drilling down to the right file (the biggest one) is not very wife or nieces friendly. Plex on the shield tv is very wife and nieces friendly.
 
I've yet to see good quality high bitrate video AND audio on anything streaming. Most streaming I have to turn the receiver up to hear properly then I pop in a movie or game and BWAAAA.. gotta turn it back down. It's because the codec's used for audio and video suck so they strip out the depth of the sound to make for a less fuzzy sound so to get the sound you expect you have to turn it up more.

That's the best laymans term I can come up for it.

Ok this is on netflix now. Stream and watch terminator two on a nice system. Now take your THX disk Of Terminator 2 (Dvd even) and give that a play. Notice a difference in the quality of the audio?
 
Wade88 said:
Yes but you need to straight rip as it is on the disc as in the folders you see on the disc and play the m2ts. I do it on an oppo bluray player from a synology nas. for non dolbyvision stuff i use a shield tv because it's way faster and the gui is slicker. Drilling down to the right file (the biggest one) is not very wife or nieces friendly. Plex on the shield tv is very wife and nieces friendly.
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I'm confused: does the shield do Dolby vision (it sounds like it doesn't).

Thanks
 
Samsung effectively said they cannot compete with the cheap players and since everyone is price sensitive, they are correct.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
Samsung effectively said they cannot compete with the cheap players and since everyone is price sensitive, they are correct.
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I love Blurays. They are my favorite form of video distribution. I don't even own a Bluray player though. When I get them I pop them in a USB bluray reader on my computer, and dip them to my NAS for later viewing.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I love Blurays. They are my favorite form of video distribution. I don't even own a Bluray player though. When I get them I pop them in a USB bluray reader on my computer, and dip them to my NAS for later viewing.
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Sounds mostly like me (though my XBone has a blu ray player. I would like to be able to play with Dolby Vision, and unless Wade comes back and tells me the Shield can do it, with M2TS files, I'm stuck with HDR10 (not bad, but it'd be nice to have it all.
 
Wade88 said:
I don't know, the TV it's connected to only does hdr10.
upon googling here is 8 pages and 2 posts of consternation over this. it doesn't.
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/1093476/shield-tv/shield-tv-is-not-getting-dolby-vision-/1/
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Thanks Wade. That's what I thought. I think the only way to do it is the Oppo, though I've heard some rumors that maybe you could convert to TS files and my LG could do it, but my guts says it won't. TV MFGs just need to support M2TS files (cuz from what I've read there's pretty much no chance that MKV will ever support Dolby Vision (or if it does, then no ATMOS, though I don't have an ATMOS receiver at this point and don't plan on getting on for at least another year or 2).
 
Blu ray is where it's at for home theater. Resolutions that start at 1080p (for most films - yes there are the oddballs out there that are lower res), video compression scheme that doesn't suck, great sound. Pop that puppy on a good JVC D-ILA projector with a blacked out theater room and you have a picture that surpasses most commercial cinemas.

EDIT: 4K blu ray just seals the deal in terms of resolution (supposedly 4K can fully resolve 35mm).
 
HAL_404 said:
$6 to $10 (for used) on eBay
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You can also rent them from your local library for free.

On another note:

I seen it mentioned several times that Samsung Blu-Ray players suck, so what is a good Blu Ray player?
 
I don't stream much, but wouldn't it be very hard to get quality 4K via streaming? If so I don't see streaming qualify approaching 4K Blu Ray anytime soon. As such I don't see physical media movies going away anytime soon. Yes the average person is probably okay with mediocre bitrate via Amazon Prime, but there will always be those with nice setups who can't stand the black pixel mess of streaming.
 
Flogger23m said:
wouldn't it be very hard to get quality 4K via streaming?
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Depends on what you mean by 'hard'. Technically, not very hard; while still data-intense, available broadband connections can handle the full UHD Blu-ray stream.

However, the resources on the side of the stream provider would be pretty intensive on a per-stream basis and hard to make a business argument for. Netflix and Amazon Prime have the best streaming in the business and can up the quality at any time, but there really isn't much demand for it that I can see.
 
Boggles my mind all the people here saying BLuray is dead, evidently no one has told Walmart yet.

If you look at the lowest common denominator, people streaming low res shit, to low Rez shit tv’s with shit audio, doesn’t look good, but the average quality of displays are creeping up, every year the average resolution increases, and enough people are wanting quality content To keep Blu-ray a money maker for distributors. Streaming with data caps isn’t a viable thing with 4K, the only other option is a Blu-ray
 
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They have tried hard, give it a whirl. If you don't like it send it back.
 
motomonkey said:
Boggles my mind all the people here saying BLuray is dead, evidently no one has told Walmart yet.

If you look at the lowest common denominator, people streaming low res shit, to low Rez shit tv’s with shit audio, doesn’t look good, but the average quality of displays are creeping up, every year the average resolution increases, and enough people are wanting quality content To keep Blu-ray a money maker for distributors. Streaming with data caps isn’t a viable thing with 4K, the only other option is a Blu-ray
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The lowest common denominator doesn't really care about quality. So many care about price and size of a TV. It is like the bigger the better the TV is. Same thing with audio. People are content with streaming low quality of Spotify and Apple music. Hell using YouTube for their music is very common with the kids these days. While also using shitty Beat headphones over Bluetooth.
 
Vinyl is still alive and kicking.

Movie collectors are no less fanatical than the vinyl guys (I know this because I own a home theater / movie discussion forum). It will last as long as the niche labels keep churning out discs, and given the increasingly lower costs of authoring Blu-ray discs, the chances are that the manufacturing runs will shrink but not go away for quite some time.
 
M76 said:
It actually was born on life support. It was way too expensive when new with movie prices often over $30. And by the time the price became normalized physical media was been made obsolete by digital.
I refuse to buy physical releases, if it isn't available for buy and download then it doesn't exist to me.

I purchased a blu-ray writer about 6 or 8 years ago. I've used it to write exactly zero discs.

I have a bluray player the playstation. And I purchased one product on bluray a boxset of BSG, that I never watched, because it is more convenient to just torrent the entire show and watch it as individual files as opposed to having to jiggle two dozen discs and sit trough unskippable logos.
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Blu-ray movies were actually $40-$60 when they were first released, which many people have forgotten. HD-DVD were in the $30-$40 range.
Dodge245 said:
They were, the one I remember was the Fifth Element, I remember seeing it demoed in store and thinking "why does it look so bad" a couple of weeks later it was in the news, Sony had released the first batch of Blu Ray films as standard definition upscales, they then a year or two later Stealth Released the real HD films in there place.

I can find very little news on that now, I did find a review from back then:https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/894/fifthelement_remastered.html
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They're doing the same shit now with 4K Blu-ray: upscaling the standard 1080p Blu-ray video to 4K. I have to do the same thing I was doing when Blu-ray was first released and research places like the Blu-ray.com forums to see if the encode is worth the purchase or not.
IdiotInCharge said:
Depends on what you mean by 'hard'. Technically, not very hard; while still data-intense, available broadband connections can handle the full UHD Blu-ray stream.

However, the resources on the side of the stream provider would be pretty intensive on a per-stream basis and hard to make a business argument for. Netflix and Amazon Prime have the best streaming in the business and can up the quality at any time, but there really isn't much demand for it that I can see.
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All streaming providers use 25 Mbps for their 4K streams, which is shit. Many people have tested and confirmed that most "4K" streams are actually 15-18 Mbps. It doesn't matter if you have a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps connection, it's still going to look and sound like shit.
 
M76 said:
It actually was born on life support. It was way too expensive when new with movie prices often over $30. And by the time the price became normalized physical media was been made obsolete by digital.
I refuse to buy physical releases, if it isn't available for buy and download then it doesn't exist to me.

I purchased a blu-ray writer about 6 or 8 years ago. I've used it to write exactly zero discs.

I have a bluray player the playstation. And I purchased one product on bluray a boxset of BSG, that I never watched, because it is more convenient to just torrent the entire show and watch it as individual files as opposed to having to jiggle two dozen discs and sit trough unskippable logos.
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Well child. you see when DVD came out they also where over $30 compared to cheap VHS movies. Over time the price came down. Just like they did with Blu-Ray.
 
Exavior said:
Well child. you see when DVD came out they also where over $30 compared to cheap VHS movies. Over time the price came down. Just like they did with Blu-Ray.
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Except by the time bluray prices came down nobody was interested in buying them, me included.

Besides the first movie I purchased on dvd was twister. It cost $20 with the 25% VAT we had here. In 98. BRs starterd out at $60
 
M76 said:
Except by the time bluray prices came down nobody was interested in buying them, me included.

Besides the first movie I purchased on dvd was twister. It cost $20 with the 25% VAT we had here. In 98. BRs starterd out at $60
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Wrong, I've always been interested in buying them. Shows what you (don't) know.
 
M76 said:
Except by the time bluray prices came down nobody was interested in buying them, me included.

Besides the first movie I purchased on dvd was twister. It cost $20 with the 25% VAT we had here. In 98. BRs starterd out at $60
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That's obviously wrong. like I said, places like Walmart don't stock shit if it doesn't sell. total numbers for the top 10 Blu ray movies in 2018 were over 20 million units. while perhaps not huge numbers compared to how many people streamed those titles, its far from "nobody was interested"
 
motomonkey said:
That's obviously wrong. like I said, places like Walmart don't stock shit if it doesn't sell. total numbers for the top 10 Blu ray movies in 2018 were over 20 million units. while perhaps not huge numbers compared to how many people streamed those titles, its far from "nobody was interested"
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They don't even sell BR discs were I live any longer. And there was very little selection even when they sold them. So obviously your local wallmart is not representative of the general interest in physical sales. Geez obviously I didn't mean literally nobody. There are always stragglers.

ZodaEX said:
Wrong, I've always been interested in buying them. Shows what you (don't) know.
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I know that there hasn't been BR titles in the stores I go to for years. They probably replaced all BR stands with discount DVDs and magazines because they sold so well.
 
M76 said:
They don't even sell BR discs were I live any longer. And there was very little selection even when they sold them. So obviously your local wallmart is not representative of the general interest in physical sales. Geez obviously I didn't mean literally nobody. There are always stragglers.


I know that there hasn't been BR titles in the stores I go to for years. They probably replaced all BR stands with discount DVDs and magazines because they sold so well.
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I've been in a lot of Walmarts, Targets and Best buys in the midwest and they all have Blu ray's for sale. could be it's you and your area that are the "odd" one?
 
xinco said:
The death of a physical medium would really be bad news. The quality of streaming vs a Blu-ray is just no comparison.

Maybe the masses just have a cheap flat screen and a soundbar. Or just a mobile phone or a tablet. But for anyone with good equipment, it matters.
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The masses never care about quality. That's why plasma died, Vizio TVs became a thing, VHS survived, TN monitors are still around, 1366x768 laptops were the norm for over a decade, super MegaPixel cameraphones exist and there are 8K screens on phones.
 
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