Comments on: The price of Blu-ray dropping rapidly, but is it enough?

By: DaveBG

DaveBG — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:11:47 +0000

I have both the large HD TV and the necessary high-end audio equipment (which you need to even hear lossless audio).
I find the idea that some want to push that ‘blu-ray is just so amazing’ laughable.

Some Blu-ray is.
Just like some HD TV broadcasts are and some .mkv encodes are.

But unfortunately more than a few Blu-ray movies are little better than DVD, just like some bad encodes don’t look great and low-bit-rate HD TV can be very poor.

At the end of the day it’s all just TV and movies – and besides myself and a couple of others I don’t know anyone who ‘collects’ movies.
Most people I know just say ‘what for, why watch the same movie so many more times’?
They watch a film once when it’s fresh and maybe catch it years later on TV.

Collectors seem to be in the minority, for most streaming or downloading seems perfectly acceptable.
It seems to me to be missing the point more than a bit to watches a movie and get excited about being able to make out the stitching pattern on an actors jacket.

By: ncaissie

ncaissie — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:45:28 +0000

The only way I would download movies is for free. No way would I pay to download a movie. I want a hard copy I can re-sell. And my ISP says if you use more than this much bandwidth we will charge you $5 a gig after that! 8Gig movie would cost me $40 just for my ISP!

Not a chance.

By: JQQQ

JQQQ — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:08:53 +0000

Blu ray is not going away guys dont be mad that you dont own a player or cant afford one. These guys that say blu ray sucks and downloading is way better obviously have never seen a blu ray movie. Downloading movies sucks, it takes forever, its not cheap enough to buy, and you cant take it with you and watch it at a friends house, and the case is nice and i like to display my blurays on the shelf next to my ps3. The only thing i do download on the Playstation video store is tv show, thats about it. Its a prefrence thing,dont get me wrong i mean i like the idea that we have a choice, hard copy or digital copy, but i think hard copies are the way to go and blu ray aint going anywhere. My friend brings over his 360 to stream movies on netflix sometimes and he calls me a bluray snob because once your used to the picture quality of blu ray, you wont go back to dvd trust me. And if you want to rewind or fast forward when streaming movies on netflix it sucks the whole thing starts over. At least on my friends 360 id ont know how it is for everyone else. If anyone reading this is curious about blu ray, come on take the risk go buy a blu ray player or ps3 (get a ps3 way better) you will be satisfied and dont argue about paying a couple dollars more for every blu ray its worth it with all the features and picture quality your getting. Plus who the hell doesnt have an HDTV, come on guys were living in the present, get rid of those tube tv’s and get an HDTV

By: WitWolfyZA

WitWolfyZA — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:43:45 +0000

Okay heres something for you to chew on skavvy.

first. Netflix is only PRO USA. The rest of the world cant get Netflix prior to bandwidth limitations. Or so they say.

second. IF i pay like $5 or whatever to download a movie to watch it should give me a choice to pay $7 extra or whatever to buy and save it to another meduim aswel. Im not gonna download something that took u like 5-7hours of my day just to delete it when im done.

third. HD might be high up in 1st world countries now. but i dont know alot of people in my country (South Africa) who actaully own HD tvs let alone Full HD tvs.

Face it people fly to high and think, every country are on the same standards as them. Im not prepared to go and replace every freaking movie i bought in the past and replace it with a Blu-ray disc. Blu Ray will take 7 years to get in the market properly anyways. Even our local video stores have blu ray movies . 10 at most . But most movies are like I robot, Knights tale and those old movies… FAIL

By: potedude

potedude — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:07:58 +0000

Downloads wont be a probability in most countries, even many areas in the US. Plus most people want a hard copy, not something on a hard drive that could crash. Plus you can have it in a bookcase or lining the wall so it looks good. People want that. Downloads will be more for youtube and stuff…

By: LADY

LADY — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:41:09 +0000

WILL YOU JOURNALISTS GET A FUCKING LIKE ALREADY?

BLURAY IS HERE TO STAY. ACCEPT IT ALREADY.

By: DaveBG

DaveBG — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:04:03 +0000

Sjaak

You don’t need 50gb or 25gb (and in some cases at that size the results were crap).

Go check out some of the .mkv encodes.
Once you strip out all the unnecessary crap you can easily have a very nice 720p image in 4.5gb or if you really must have 1080p it can easily be done in a 8.5gb size (sometimes a little more, say 12gb).

All with DTS 5.1 @ 1.5mbps.

That’s more than enough for the mass market.

It’s also worth pointing out that that is the work of talented amatuer encoders, professionals using professional equipment can be certain to do better.

If people don’t fancy waiting on downloading they can always stream (which is all about the buffer size, not necessarily the speed of the connection).

I know some of you want to pretend really hard that streaming/downloading can’t happen but it already is in so many places.
Almost every new HD TV (and even those Blu-ray players) are coming Netflix equipped or with LAN/wireless connections.

No point denying it, even if you live in some backwoods backwater it’s happening all around us right now in the cities and towns.

By: Sjaak

Sjaak — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:02:14 +0000

It’s great and all that broadband speeds are increasing, but the majority of the population still has a pretty low speed at their connection, and that’s not set to change in the coming years. Besides that, even though broadband is getting faster, video file sizes are ever increasing, and by the time broadband would be capable to download a 25GB bluray movie in reasonable time, and people would have enough storage on their hard drives to ever consider downloading them, the movies would have a far greater resolution already, as would the TVs. I don’t think Digital Download will ever be able to replace physical mediums, since the consumer doesn’t want to have to wait for many days before being able to watch a movie, while instead they could’ve picked it up at a nearby videostore in 5-10 minutes.

By: lee mitchell

lee mitchell — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:18:46 +0000

i understand your point about blu ray but to be frank its simply a higher quality disc for those wish to truly enjoy their movies…i doubt it was ever meant to be enjoyed by everyone…not until a new technology comes out,which is said to be crystal format…but i have a playstation 3 and i completely love blu ray

By: DaveBG

DaveBG — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:16:18 +0000

Guys who are you trying to kid?

Netflix alone proves digital downloading is happening, growing and will become a major force in future.

Blu-ray is getting cheaper, that’s true and paradoxically this ensures it’s going to die soon.
The margins in it are vanishing.
This means the movie industry will leap to switch to a format where the customer carries all the overhead.

Blu-ray (like the guy dfrom Samsung said) has about 5yrs left in it……and because of the global economy tanking all of it will be as a small niche & pretty much ignored by the mass market.

Too few will bother with the huge HD TV or the high-end audio equipment needed to make the most of Blu-ray.