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Blu-ray Licensing to Get Easier and Cheaper

Tallest Skil said:
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.
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So let me get this straight Super Hi-Vision>Blu Ray>Digital Downloads>DVD and you are a proponent of Digital Downloads at the present? So you back something that looks worse than what is really available now until a future format becomes viable? Please explain your thought process and reasoning because it truly makes no sense unless your just on the hatting blu ray bandwagon which would explain everything.
 
nickane said:
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.
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The CD has been on the market since October 1982 and it still offers better sound quality then any digital download. Why? Because it is a lossless encode. Digital downloads are still not lossless because of the huge amount of data that would have to be transferred. I can't imagine the space required not only on the server, but on the end users computers. Now if it is impractical to sell lossless music imagine what happens when someone tries to sell 1080p movies? It could be done using very low bit rates, but just like the digital download still can't match a CD for sound quality, neither could the video.

With all of that said I am satisfied with the quality of iTunes for music, but I have never been satisfied with the quality of movies that I have received from downloading. The standard downloads never look as good as a DVD and the HD downloads are not even close to the same quality in picture and sound as a Blu-ray is.
 
actripxl said:
So let me get this straight Super Hi-Vision>Blu Ray>Digital Downloads>DVD and you are a proponent of Digital Downloads at the present? So you back something that looks worse than what is really available now until a future format becomes viable? Please explain your thought process and reasoning because it truly makes no sense unless your just on the hatting blu ray bandwagon which would explain everything.
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"Digital" downloads are not their own resolution type.

I support Super Hi-Vision downloads. Until such time as these are possible, I support 1080p or 2160p downloads.
 
Tallest Skil said:
"Digital" downloads are not their own resolution type.

I support Super Hi-Vision downloads. Until such time as these are possible, I support 1080p or 2160p downloads.
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I think we all here know that "digital" is not a resolution type, and we all know "digital" looks worse than blu ray because of compression.
 
actripxl said:
I think we all here know that "digital" is not a resolution type, and we all know "digital" looks worse than blu ray because of compression.
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Then why did you list it in such a way that it looked to be one?

And why is it compressed?

No, honestly, why do they compress it. Do you really think that downloaded movie files will look "worse" than Blu-ray for all time?
 
Tallest Skil said:
Then why did you list it in such a way that it looked to be one?

And why is it compressed?

No, honestly, why do they compress it. Do you really think that downloaded movie files will look "worse" than Blu-ray for all time?
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Because this discussion is about now the present and the next five years not 20 years from now. If there is no logical time limit then I say screw it we should all just hold out until the PS9 goes up our noses and play in true virtual reality. We're all talking about the immediate future and once again, the digital proponents dismiss that notion and bring up things that are at least a decade away after blu ray has run its course.

To your answer yes they do look worse not to the point that I'm going to jump out the window, but not good enough to pay the same price with less features and less value.
 
kastenbrust said:
Why would anyone care how much energy a 50GB disk takes to download? So what if it takes 40 pints of water? :p
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.
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Precisely. There are plenty of statistics you can look up telling you just how many baby seals were clubbed to bring you your cappuccino or whatever, but only a very very small amount of people care. Welcome to modern life.

kastenbrust said:
when nuclear fusion becomes a reality in 3 years
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Tell me that you left a zero or two off of that number... Nowhere is anywhere close to achieving a commercially viable fusion reactor for a LONG time. After plenty of research I am thinking that if you want "green" energy, you're going to have to go Nuclear > Breeder/Fast Reactor Nuclear > Fusion.
 
actripxl said:
We're all talking about the immediate future and once again, the digital proponents dismiss that notion and bring up things that are at least a decade away after blu ray has run its course.
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Blu-ray will be around for about ten more years.

Super Hi-Vision will first be on Blu-ray; around 2015 or 16.

By that time, 1080p downloads will be the norm.
 
illegallydead said:
Precisely. There are plenty of statistics you can look up telling you just how many baby seals were clubbed to bring you your cappuccino or whatever, but only a very very small amount of people care. Welcome to modern life.



Tell me that you left a zero or two off of that number... Nowhere is anywhere close to achieving a commercially viable fusion reactor for a LONG time. After plenty of research I am thinking that if you want "green" energy, you're going to have to go Nuclear > Breeder/Fast Reactor Nuclear > Fusion.
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Thank you for calling him on the Fusion energy point, I completely forgot to do that myself.
 
Abercrombieboy said:
The CD has been on the market since October 1982 and it still offers better sound quality then any digital download. Why? Because it is a lossless encode. Digital downloads are still not lossless because of the huge amount of data that would have to be transferred. I can't imagine the space required not only on the server, but on the end users computers. Now if it is impractical to sell lossless music imagine what happens when someone tries to sell 1080p movies? It could be done using very low bit rates, but just like the digital download still can't match a CD for sound quality, neither could the video.

With all of that said I am satisfied with the quality of iTunes for music, but I have never been satisfied with the quality of movies that I have received from downloading. The standard downloads never look as good as a DVD and the HD downloads are not even close to the same quality in picture and sound as a Blu-ray is.
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I've never bought any music online, but there must be some companies selling lossless audio now? If they are/when they do I might be tempted to change my buying habits - assuming 'lossless' isn't the latest buzzword and is just (realtime?) reencoded mp3s etc with a price premium.

I don't think storage or bandwidth is an excuse for itunes/etc not to offer this. Assuming we're talking about a lossless source equivalent to a cd, we're only talking a file size increase of a few times. Hard disks and bandwidth hardly cost much, a couple of hundred megs for an album is completely feasible now for all online retailers and virtually all customers.

I'd love to be able to 'buy the right' to watch/listen to media once and be able to choose and change the quality/size ratio myself and always have access to it. I don't like paying an unesscessary premium for quality, I don't mind researching different ways of consuming this media, I don't even mind paying for dedicated playback machines (like blu ray), assuming it's not locked, or at least I can still get at and use the same media how I want to.

When the 'best' quality media is also the most convenient and also completely free (apart from your morals - unless you already bought the cassette/vhs/cd/dvd/etcetc?), it's no wonder the situation is as it is now.
 
Tallest Skil said:
Then why did you list it in such a way that it looked to be one?

And why is it compressed?

No, honestly, why do they compress it. Do you really think that downloaded movie files will look "worse" than Blu-ray for all time?
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I have a feeling that digital downloads will, at least for the foreseeable future, always lag behind the leading physical medium at that time. Simply because, at least in the U.S., the broadband infrastructure is so massively huge that it takes a LONG time to upgrade with each new advance in communications technology, meaning that it will take ~2-3 years to roll out a new physical storage medium and player with ridiculously huge bandwidth to your TV, while it will take anywhere from 5 to 30 years to get the nations broadband up to where it can keep up.

And that is exactly why things are compressed. Easier / quicker to send 4GB than 8...
 
Tallest Skil said:
Blu-ray will be around for about ten more years.

Super Hi-Vision will first be on Blu-ray; around 2015 or 16.

By that time, 1080p downloads will be the norm.
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So let me get this straight, by what your saying Blu Ray will have a cycle equal to DVD and yet your going to wait until 2015 because you hate blu ray? I'm obviously making a childish remark to point out how silly your position is. You may want to wait that long, but the majority of people won't and that is why blu ray will succeed and you'll be in the corner convincing your friends to hold out because blu ray sucks.
 
actripxl said:
So let me get this straight, by what your saying Blu Ray will have a cycle equal to DVD and yet your going to wait until 2015 because you hate blu ray? I'm obviously making a childish remark to point out how silly your position is. You may want to wait that long, but the majority of people won't and that is why blu ray will succeed and you'll be in the corner convincing your friends to hold out because blu ray sucks.
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I'm curious why you turned this into an argument of mockery. At no point did I say that I was going to wait until 2015 to get 1080p digital movies.

Of course Blu-ray will succeed. It's a disk. I shouldn't have to justify any more why it will succeed, so I won't bother.

Blu-ray will be the only viable means of getting the highest-resolution content to people for about 4-5 more years. After that, sales will decrease in favor of downloads. When Super Hi-Vision becomes a mainstream resolution, Blu-ray sales will pick up again until downloads catch up.

Granted, I can't even put a timeframe on mainstream Super Hi-Vision downloads (okay, how about 2030?), but nowhere did I say that Blu-ray wouldn't succeed.
 
Also kiosk rentals like Redbox are now offering BluRay movies or $1 dollar a night. I don't care how much you claim that Digital Downloads are convenient, when the average person goes grocery shopping as see's movies for rent in Blu for that price downloading will be the lasting on their mind.
 
Tallest Skil said:
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.
Click to expand...

Do you remember VHS? I mean DVD unconverted is just fine. I mean I've never seen this Super Hi-Vision that you speak of, but Blue ray or 1080p is almost to clear. When I can count the little hairs on actress' faces when watching a movie that's good enough. At least till we get hologram t.v.(true 3D). :rolleyes:
 
Tallest Skil said:
I'm curious why you turned this into an argument of mockery. At no point did I say that I was going to wait until 2015 to get 1080p digital movies.

Of course Blu-ray will succeed. It's a disk. I shouldn't have to justify any more why it will succeed, so I won't bother.

Blu-ray will be the only viable means of getting the highest-resolution content to people for about 4-5 more years. After that, sales will decrease in favor of downloads. When Super Hi-Vision becomes a mainstream resolution, Blu-ray sales will pick up again until downloads catch up.

Granted, I can't even put a timeframe on mainstream Super Hi-Vision downloads (okay, how about 2030?), but nowhere did I say that Blu-ray wouldn't succeed.
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The fatal flaw in you argument is that your assuming blu ray prices will still be at inflated when in reality they will most likely drop in price to today's dvd levels. At 5-10 dollars for a purchase, renting at $1 a night a redbox for something I can take anywhere, over something that is tied to one machine or one account I don't see it happening unless Digital can offer superior quality for an inferior price.
 
guzhogi said:
Plus, aren't DVDs & Blu-Ray already in digital format? Just the video formats/compression & physical media being different?
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DVD would be 480p, Blu-ray is 1080p. They're digital.

actripxl said:
The fatal flaw in you argument is that your assuming blu ray prices will still be at inflated when in reality they will most likely drop in price to today's dvd levels. At 5-10 dollars for a purchase, renting at $1 a night a redbox for something I can take anywhere, over something that is tied to one machine or one account I don't see it happening unless Digital can offer superior quality for an inferior price.
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The fatal flaw in your assuming that I am assuming that is that I am not assuming that.

Doy, current Blu-ray disks will be cheaper by then.

And then we'll have a price jump again when they put out the 400GB and 1TB disks.
 
RyanR. said:
Do you remember VHS? I mean DVD unconverted is just fine. I mean I've never seen this Super Hi-Vision that you speak of, but Blue ray or 1080p is almost to clear. When I can count the little hairs on actress' faces when watching a movie that's good enough. At least till we get hologram t.v.(true 3D). :rolleyes:
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Precisely. While I agree with Tallest that Super Hi-Vision is cool and will eventually take over, you really need a screen in excess of 50" to start seeing the benefits at all over something 2160p or even 1080p. When OLED's are finally cheap enough, and they can print out a 4320p screen the size of your wall on the cheap, then it will achieve mass market. Until then, people are still transitioning to HD period, and that switch won't be complete for AT LEAST 5-10 years I'm thinking...
 
I'm not sure blu-ray is going to be able to hold enough data for 4K video... of course, I don't know if it can't. Anyone know the theoretical maximum?
 
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