Discs are less convenient so people have slowly moved to digital sales. This worked even better for console manufacturers, cheaper to drop that disc reader, and the second hand market is effectively dead which increases new game sales.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
Most people really don't care, which is a shame. The sheer quality difference between a 4k digital movie and a 4k bluray is astounding. Hell, oftentimes a standard bluray looks better despite the lower resolution since it isn't being compressed
A 4K movie uncompressed would be something like two or three terabytes depending on the format. I think Arri are the only cinema cameras that can even shoot uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the rest shoot lossy compressed video in their native raw formats.
Uncompressed 24-bit 1080p running at 24 FPS requires 1.192 Gbit/s, or 0.149 GByte/s. So a 25 GB (single-layer) blu-ray has enough space for a whopping 167.8 seconds of uncompressed 1080p video running at 24 FPS. You can double that with a dual-layer blu-ray, and there are more corners you can cut, but I don't think you'll fit your movie in there.
Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.
HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.
I don’t think that you guys should be debating compressed vs uncompressed, but lossy compression vs lossless compression. Your math seems to derive from a naive storage format.
Blu-ray is lossy too. All video codecs of note that aren't for professionals are lossy, so the point mostly still stands. Lossless compression doesn't go very far when it comes to video.
An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.
Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.
I just looked up the compression rate of FFV1 because I never thought about this. It’s apparently 4x. More would be possible, but increase computational requirements.
Another use cases seems to be archival of historical footage.
Theres no technical reason one should look better than the other.
Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering
What's kind of an annoying side effect of this is that you have all this fancy new display tech, like quantum dot LED (marketing term, but w/e), or OLED, but it's all pointless because you're just watching it with crappy compression, negating the quality gains.
The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.
The TV channel broadcast was 50Hz, 1080p and used image compression. They did not broadcast the master stream directly. That would have cost too much money.
It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.
So your local TV provider's limitations should limit the advertising for all TVs sold?
This actually made me look up some of the specs related to the feeds. Quite an interesting read. They apparently are delivering the main feeds in 2160p.
It’s the national government channel broadcasting the matches in that quality, the local TV providers are just passing it on. Everyone in the country is watching at a low quality feed.
Video looks better on streaming platforms at higher resolutions, even when the pixels are just interpolated, because it increases the compressed bitrate.
i'm proud my country (italy) pionereed dct-based digital transmission during the 1990 world cup, i wish we lived in a present were europe was still ahead (or at least on par with) the rest of the world
> The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy.
This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.
It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.
One of the EU's backstop "Fuck Trump" options is to stop enforcing America's IP rights.
Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic
In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.
This is hilarious. Should we stop criticizing all politicians because we don't know them personally? These are not just some guys, you know. These are the most powerful people in the world. You will be affected - everyone has a 'real stake' in what they do. Frankly, the amount of scrutiny and consequences of said scrutiny that powerful people receive are at all-time lows - there should be more.
For Trump specifically, almost everyone is affected. Even if you're not an American, all the war-starting, economy-wrecking, relationship-souring, international-meddling 'work' of the US is affecting you. Unless maybe if you're from North Korea.
There's nothing that better exemplifies the way how Trump supporters specifically and Americans in general have checked out from everyone else's reality than this comment. In the eyes of most of the Western world, the time for debate was 10 years ago. We're no longer in a land of hypotheticals and 'virtue signaling' that far-rightists smugly talked about back then. They are already ruling us - the world has already tasted the far-right's medicine, and many people are enraged as things keep becoming more bleak. Suggesting that countries stop enforcing US IP would be a ludicrous suggestion in 2016 that would be laughed out of the room as terminally online daydreaming. In 2026, this starts seeming like a real source of possible leverage, exerting power over a nation that thinks it can dictate the rules of the world in perpetuity. I suggest you update your worldview a bit before this or something equally extreme lands on some actual politician's desk. A few more years of this and there will no longer be any good will left from the rest of the world.
Discs are way more convenient. You can store how many multi hundred gb games on your internal storage before you have to start triaging. Also, want to play a game you haven’t played in a while after work? Sorry, 3 hour forced update.
In the old disc era you’d just pop in the disk and start playing in minutes. You could have as many disks as would fit in your house.
Oh no, you have to stand up and walk 10ft to put it in. What a great inconvenience.
People get tired of trying to push back a tsunami with their bare hands. Other people were born into the tsunami and just accept that everything is underwater.
It's from a 2016 essay. I'm not sure it was ever only a joke. I didn't even perceive it as a joke back then (unless you wanted to joke about companies being knobheads). It was already clear by then that that was the direction they wanted to go.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.