Future of Home Video — Page 2

I suppose that could be seen as an advantage of digital downloads -- you can always redownload the content onto another device if one gets damaged (iPhone thrown in the lake by your baby? Download it again on your iPad and keep watching!). 

Speaking of Blu Ray compression artifacts, generally I don't notice them. Some of my Blu Rays are obvious. Especially in dark scenes or desert landscapes. I'd sacrifice extras on the same disc if it meant a higher bit rate encode to help with the compression.  I have The Lord of the Rings extended editions and they spaced the movies over 2 Blu Rays. I welcomed that slight inconvenience as opposed to tons of compression artifacts.

EDIT: I'm also anxious to see if Blu Ray will become the standard format like DVD did, or if it will go the way of Laserdisc.  I'm tired of buying combo packs, I usually sell my DVD and digital copies. Just give me the single disc Blu Ray for cheap 

Two points:

One, digital files are much, much easier to use for kids and for parents of small kids. There's no disc to have to find or get lost, and you'll watch the same thing over and over and over so the convenience really adds up.

Two, though I can't substantiate this, I don't think the high school and college kids are spending much on movies (or music) anymore. Where I accumulated tons of DVDs after I got out of college, 20-somethings now are using Netflix mostly and aren't buying physical media much at all. This was once a huge market for entertainment companies that's drying up over time.

Unfortunately, we are in deeper trouble than we think.

"And, brother, when it disintegrates ... it disintegrates!"

"Well, wha-da-ya know ... it disintegrated."

Almost everything that we do here is from commercial distribution media. It is a throw-away. It was never meant to be archival (or archive-able). Worse, in the digital world, information once gone is gone instantly and forever. Not so with analogue media, which is partially recoverable from it's slower and piecemeal deterioration.

All the rest that we do here is not restoration or preservation, but rather further damage ... but a damage that is more pleasing to the eye. Every time anything is changed from it's original state, the original suffers damage -- whether to destroy it or to "fix it up". That's the creed of the archivist.

And this is not just in our little corner of the universe. Paper records (books) are a bigger preservation problem. When books were being printed for greater distribution, cheaper acid-bath paper was used with the same disregard for survivability as in today's media distribution. As a result, these books literal crumble to dust when touched (both copies and originals) despite massive preservation efforts. Only something like 5% or 10% of all history's books can be rescued, tops. The rest will be gone forever without any other record of their existence.

And forget on-demand digital. (Obviously.)

Proposals for new media/formats don't remedy or completely ignore this this ticking time-bomb.

Welcome to the real world ...

My uncle is a fairly high-up physicist at NASA. Years ago he was asked to come to a meeting with some of their directors to discuss what to do about their aging archive of data on tape. They knew the tape would start to corrode and wanted his opinion on what format would have a longer life. His response was the we know if they inscribe it on papyrus and lock it in a pyramid in a desert, it'll last thousands of years. "Everything else is just conjecture."

SilverWook said:

Sojourn said:

I suppose that could be seen as an advantage of digital downloads -- you can always redownload the content onto another device if one gets damaged (iPhone thrown in the lake by your baby? Download it again on your iPad and keep watching!). 

And pay for it again. ;)

At least with iTunes purchases, redownloading is free. :-)

My guess is that the future of video is split. On the one hand you'll have collectors and videophiles who will continue to buy physical media for its superior quality (both in terms of picture quality and in terms of available extras like commentaries, extra documentaries and other stuff not usually found in online releases) and so that they'll have stuff to show off on their shelves. This will probably be a fairly small bit of the market, sort of like Laserdisc was, but it will probably be better stocked with titles as production costs for BluRay discs (and probably whatever will come next after them) are much lower than LD production costs were. On the other hand, the "normal" people who just want to watch their movies and TV reruns and who don't care much about picture quality once it gets to the "good enough" stage will move to streaming and digital downloads.

Harmy had made a point about 4k at home, saying that at the size of home televisions the extra resolution doesn't help all that much and that we'd be better off focusing on 1080p with less compression. For whatever it's worth, Apple's definition of a "retina display" bears this out. You can play with numbers here:

http://isthisretina.com/

The general notion being that at most TV sizes and a typical viewing distance the pixels are smaller than your eye's ability to pick them out already. A 1080p TV viewed from seven feet away qualifies as a retina display (again using Apple's definition which is mostly marketing but does make some degree of sense).

I'm not too sure we'll see TVs get much larger than 50-something inches for a while. Bigger than that and they become very imposing pieces of furniture. Maybe as panels get thin enough it'll be more feasible to cover large portions of walls with them, but that still rules out diagonal placements and you start talking about something much more like home theaters.

Harmy said:

No, what I said was we don't need 4K content - I have a 27" 1080p monitor and I can see the pixels on that sometimes, so for a 50+ inch display, 4K would certainly be preferable. So, in other word, if you play the same movie at 1080p on a 50" 1080p screen and a 50" 4K screen, it will likely look better on the 4K screen, because you won't see the pixels. But if you play on that 4K display a movie in 1080p lossless, it will likely look better than the same movie in compressed 4K on that 4K screen and won't likely look discernibly worse than the same movie in 4K lossless on that screen.

Well get this....

I was asking about 4k adoption and when will it be more reasonably priced for the home market to a person who works in the professional large screen industry...and was a little shocked by his response.

Apparently 4k will largely be dropped and 8k will be made available at more reasonable prices and presented as the go to format.

Although this may sound ridiculous it is all about bringing the price of components down and being very little difference in the cost of actual materials.

I don't know how much truth to this there is but this is what I heard... Wait and see I am certainly not rushing out to buy a 4k screen yet anyway.

AntcuFaalb said:

Even if we can get a lossless compression algorithm that reduces the size by a factor of three, then we still need a medium on which to store ~222GB movies!

Compression ratios are higher for HD than SD. I've done YUY2 720p and 1080i video game captures with lossless compression ratios of 4:1.

If there are ever 8-layer Blu-rays Discs...