With this and a couple of other releases recently from apple I think they may actually be listening to the customers again, if they put a bit more into the pro side of things over the next year I'll say good work for turning things around so swiftly.
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Blu-ray Licensing to Get Easier and Cheaper
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You need to remember how many people still NEED to have the vain experience of going to the candy store and buying the new flashy, shiny piece of candy in front of any one else. Some people need that for their sense of satisfaction.
There is no similar satisfaction from clicking once to purchase.
Guess that will be reserved for those of us who don't need that, corporate materialistic environment to spend in.
It takes as much energy to do a Google search as it does to boil 1/2 a pint of water. Just think how much energy a 50GB disc would take to download.
kastenbrust
macrumors 68030
Why would anyone care how much energy a 50GB disk takes to download? So what if it takes 40 pints of water? 😛
Thats my governments fault for not providing clean enough sources of energy, and when nuclear fusion becomes a reality in 3 years everyone will have forgotten about global warming like we forgot about the oil running out 30 years ago, or the coal running out 50 years ago, or the gas pipes carrying gas to our homes were going to blow up the world, or the polar bears were all going to be dead by 2007, or the acid rain was going to dissolve all our statues by 2020, or we were all going to die of the SARS virus 2 years ago that was traveling on planes, or we were all going to die of bird-flu in Summer 2008....
Hey guess what?!?! Im still alive.
About time. I guess the negative votes came from the moronic zealots like kastenbrust who honestly think that the video world will let itunes do to movies what it did to music without substantial advances in broadband infrastructure taking place first. By which I mean peddle an inferior, heavily compressed product at slight only reductions which are never subject to discount. If the lot of you could stop trying to align the bold decision to sign the death warrant of the floppy disk drive with its omission from the imac with the not-remotely-bold decision to drop the optical drive so as to make the thinnest laptop ever, then maybe we can stop pretending steve jobs made some announcement about the death of optical media that many of the ppl on this forum seem to have dreamt up in their fanboi further.
When the itunes store sells albums at lossless quality for the same price they cost in the january sales or 1080p movies which look as good as BRs and don't cost anymore to rent/buy, and I can reasonably afford the vast amounts of HD space it'll take to hold all of them, then maybe you fools will begin to have a point. But even then, I don't see anybody distributing their home movies, wedding videos and the various specialist videos for which distribution through the iTunes store makes NO SENSE, by any other means than burning disks and sending them out to clients/friends/family on the macs those semi-professionals have been using for their post-production work since long before the halo effect suckered you zealots in.
I dread to think how many ppl have posted such supposedly progressive claptrap throughout this thread, despite the fact that this article is actually very GOOD news for the mac platform and for mac fans alike.
When the itunes store sells albums at lossless quality for the same price they cost in the january sales or 1080p movies which look as good as BRs and don't cost anymore to rent/buy, and I can reasonably afford the vast amounts of HD space it'll take to hold all of them, then maybe you fools will begin to have a point. But even then, I don't see anybody distributing their home movies, wedding videos and the various specialist videos for which distribution through the iTunes store makes NO SENSE, by any other means than burning disks and sending them out to clients/friends/family on the macs those semi-professionals have been using for their post-production work since long before the halo effect suckered you zealots in.
I dread to think how many ppl have posted such supposedly progressive claptrap throughout this thread, despite the fact that this article is actually very GOOD news for the mac platform and for mac fans alike.
MrCrowbar
macrumors 68020
There's a simple reason why some BluRays have the video in MPEG2:
It's hard and expensive to keep uncompressed high definition master files around. Hollywood people are used to keep the final cut on film rolls and then stored somewhere it won't degrade that much over time. Then came DVD and the studios had to dig out those film rolls, scan them in the highest available (but still affordable) resolution at the time to make a DVD out of it. Those high resolution scans (2100 x 1050 pixels was common for a while) would have taken hundreds of Gigabytes which would be fine nowadays, but not feasible at the time. So they got stored with compression (done while scanning) in a way so it looks very close to the uncompressed one, but takes substantially less space.
This MPEG2 1050p master was then downscaled for DVD authoring. Now the stuff needs to be released on BluRay, so the studios dig out the old film rolls, which by now have degraded a bit and look worse than the MPEG2 scan. There's a small company out there that drives to the studios and re-scans those film rolls and restores them digitally for a large amount of money and it takes months to do. The easiest and cheapest way for the studio is to take that digital master instead to make the BluRay version. It's usually resized to fit within 1920x1080, where you'd get thin letterboxes on the top and bottom (2:1 ratio to 16:8, BluRay can't do anamorphic video, i.e. non-square pixels unlike DVD).
Now why is it still MPEG2 you ask? There's ways to resize and crop videos without having to re-compress them. For example, on standard H.264 files, you can remove 16x16 pixels blocks on the edges without re-encoding, because the codec thinks in 16x16 squares (at least on default settings). If the resized and cropped MPEG2 file just fits on a BluRay disc, it's better to use that instead of re-compressing it. I guess there are some discs where the main feature is MPEG2 for maximum quality and the end credits (15 minutes) are H.264 to make it fit on the disc. Scrolling white on black text can be compressed a lot with H.264 without notable artifacts. So the key here is to get the highest available quality that barely fits on the disc. If you have a 20 minute long short film, you could theoretically put the uncompressed film on there. I say theoretically because the bandwidth would probably b higher than the BluRay standard allows and the format/codec would be unknown to the players.
Also, some grainy movies look better in MPEG2 than in H.264. H.264 tends to blur out fine, high contrast textures like hair, gravel, bushes, film grain etc. and it doesn't get much better if you're using a very high data rate. There's a reason why scene releases (i.e. stuff you get from peer to peer networks) are still DivX and not H.264; the latter just doesn't look that good with the same file size. People are more familiar with older codecs so they know how to set the codec parameters to look best with the given material.
Bubba Satori
Suspended
bruinsrme
macrumors 604
I agree
I wish I had the time to generate suchs posts.
I have spend a decent amount of money on my HT set up. You can sit in my HT and you will not be able to tell where the subs are positioned.
My channel seperation is awesome.
Yes the amount of time setting it up is disgusting but its a hobby. Can I hear when something is unbalanced or if my friend purposely crosses the surround speakers to mess with me, absolutely. Can I pick out anomolies in the colors on the screen yes. Does it suck to watch a movie with me, absolutely. do I ever enjoy the HT set up for what it is, all the time.
there are many people out there far more attentive to the audio and video than I am.
If your brain can't discern channel seperation or video color anomolies, that is great because you won't try to achieve perfection.
I wish I had a 1080p screen...
Bubba Satori
Suspended
My store has lots of Blu-ray movies in the $10-$12 range. They and the players are flying off the shelves.
Yes, the convenience of popping a disc into a player or computer and watching a movie instantly at the highest possible quality versus waiting a loooooooooooong time for a mediocre quality download. Yeah, that's convenient. 🙄
kastenbrust
macrumors 68030
With fast optic internet you can download one quicker than the time it would take you to get to the store, choose one, queue, buy it, and get back.
I guess both sides of this debate have their + and - points, but one thing we can be sure of is that in 20 years noone is going to watch blu-ray DVD's, and very few people are going to have the capability to play them, just like VHS tapes now, however a digital copy on your hard drive will still be able to be watched.
iPie
macrumors regular
too bad there is no "bored" smilie
Marginal...
Unless apple plans to incorporate this into a home entertainment Mac Mini, I really can't start jumping up and down at the prospect.
Maybe it's just me - I don't have the time for this to make any significant impact on the quality of my life.
Marginal...
Unless apple plans to incorporate this into a home entertainment Mac Mini, I really can't start jumping up and down at the prospect.
Maybe it's just me - I don't have the time for this to make any significant impact on the quality of my life.
SactoGuy18
macrumors 603
I do think that Jobs may rethink his position of no Blu-ray support, especially now with monthly download capacity limits on broadband by many ISP's. With the licensing costs of Blu-ray technology now dropping rapidly, we will see Blu-ray support on higher-end iMacs and might even be standard on the Mac Pro when these machines are "refreshed" by the end of this month.
actripxl
macrumors 6502
You truly are thick in the the skull aren't you, I've been reading your posts and you change from 5 to now 20 years into the future just to get your point across. The argument isn't if digital downloads will become viable its when, and most think it will be at least 10 and even then that's being optimistic. You and some others here are throwing around 5 as if all of a sudden everyone is just going to agree to spending a lot of money to set up an infrastructure for this to be possible. This is easy for Korea that is probably the size of one medium sized state its another to pull it of in the biggest market which is the U.S. who doesn't receive subsidized internet like in Europe.
People do not care about convenience as much as about value and since I can't take my purchase to my friends and families home there is less value and in turn less convenience that you so like to bring up. People will always shop at stores and big stores like Walmart, Target, Carefour because they offer that convenience and value of buying physical media in one stop. Unless Digital Downloads offer the exact same quality as physical for LESS than it will take that much longer to convince the AVERAGE person to switch over.
OOOOOH... Look at how cool and anti-establishment you are. You don't care what the corporate machine wants you to think, you think for yourself. You're an icon of individuality, shining across the hordes of cheeto crunching, lite beer swilling dregs of humanity that make up this country.
Something you people need to get through your head: Downloads suck. That isn't to say they always will, but they suck right now and that's enough for me:
1) Too slow to download a 50 GB disc currently. Maybe when we all have fiber, and maybe when the stupid Comcasts/AT&Ts of the world stop capping downloads at 250 GB per month will this make sense.
2) I like having a physical disc I can rip, store, and copy. What's that, blu-ray has DRM? I don't care. Many blu-ray releases come with a digital copy, and those that don't will see the DMCA violated. It's unconstitutional anyway.
3) I like having a physical disc I can RESELL. Contrary to what you think our consumer based, corporate overlords want... they want you to buy the same thing many times. They want to charge you per viewing. They want you to rent, they want you to have a 48 hour window, and they want you to pay again and again. They want it to be illegal to buy/sell used media.
Tallest Skil
macrumors P6
kastenbrust
macrumors 68030
First of all, theres no need to get rude and personally insulting just because your upset, thats a very childish way of arguing.
Whats your point? Your saying the world, especially first world countries like the US wont transfer over to optic broadband anytime soon? Haha thats cute but not true, websites are requiring ever demanding internet speeds, streaming TV, Ajax websites such as Google Docs etc, and even online Ajax games, there will come a point where if the First world countries dont want to get left behind we'll simply be forced to transfer over to optic broadband.
And whats this about?!? "the U.S. who doesn't receive subsidized internet like in Europe." Where do you think we get the money from? Growing on trees? No! of course we pay for it ourselves, from our taxes etc. Its not my fault your countries hyper-capitalist if you want to make this a political argument, which would frankly be silly. You have the right the vote... oh well maybe not, your probably some kid.
It seems to me im not the one who's "truly thick in the the skull"... Just because someone else has a different point of view, doesn't mean you have to get all rude and insulting about it.
DakotaGuy
macrumors 601
Wow aren't you going to be surprised to find out that almost 30% of Blu-ray releases use VC-1 for their video encoding!
I'm not arguing about bit rate, because Blu-ray is superior, but if you think that all movies use AVC your wrong.
As far as VC-1 being inferior? That is only because of people having a bias against Microsoft. At the same bit rate there is virtually no quality difference between AVC (h.264) and VC-1. When I play a BD movie the only time that I can tell a quality difference is if it is a mpeg-2 encode. If it is an AVC or VC-1 I have to go to my information display on my player to check because I can't tell the difference.
If your trying to slam Microsoft at least pick out their inferior products and go after those. I don't really care what the encode is as long as whoever encoded it does a good job. I have seen some pretty good mpeg-2 BD's too, but usually AVC or VC-1 provides a better picture in my experience.
techfreak85
macrumors 68040
actripxl
macrumors 6502
You hit it right on especially with points 2 and 3. I will never buy anything digital if I have the option of physical media because of points 2 and especially 3. I have played a ton of games on my 360 because of the fact that once I'm done I can go to goozez and trade get a new one and repeat. I've done this with the cost of maybe 3 games and yet I have played 15, I'd like to see these digital proponents do that.
Notice how digital proponents are mainly the hardcore PC user, and for some reason should be against being limited more so than physical media yet defend it as if its a step up when in reality its a step back since its usually tied to one machine or one account.
actripxl
macrumors 6502
I'm not sure but weren't some of you posts saying that dvd is good enough and there is no need for blue ray? If that is what you said and we get dvd copies then whats the problem?
actripxl
macrumors 6502
I guess you can add reading comprehension skills to that list of problems you have. I didn't say the U.S. WON'T upgrade their infrastructure its that it won't happen anytime soon. Since the U.S. is the biggest market it makes good business sense to set a viable digital solution once that infrastructure is set up and not before unless said company only plans to be a niche service.
Also look up the word "subsidized" in the dictionary since you don't seem to know what it means by your response. Just in case you won't it means that in this case government pays for part of the cost not the total as your response.
Tallest Skil
macrumors P6
Super Hi-Vision is good enough; meaning that there will be no resolution increases for consumers after Super Hi-Vision.
actripxl
macrumors 6502
Again then what's the problem with getting a dvd digital copy since your response to the previous poster was as if it was a bad thing. You digital proponents should really learn to stick with your original views and not conveniently brush them aside when you think you have the upper hand on someone.
DakotaGuy
macrumors 601
This is a great post. I agree and I like to buy and sell movies and own a physical copy of one that I want to keep forever.
I have no worries about not being able to play my movies in the future since it seems that there has always been a backwards compatibility path kept. The nice thing about disc media is that it since it is the same physical dimensions it is easy to maintain backwards compatibility. If you buy a new BD player you will find that it can play BD, DVD and CD. I would imagine if there is another format that comes in the future that backwards compatibility will still remain.
It's so simple. As far as being bad for the environment and the waste from the discs? Who buys a movie to throw it away? I don't. If I don't want it any longer I sell it to someone who does.
Tallest Skil
macrumors P6
DVD quality sucks, 1080p is passable, Super Hi-Vision is the limit of the resolution of the human eye.
I'd rather have a good quality than a DVD quality, thank you.