DVD or Blu Ray?

King By-Tor wrote: Marty McFly wrote: King By-Tor wrote: rpe9p wrote: Maybe he meant do you buy DVD or Blu Ray, or do you think the slight increase in quality is worth it Slight increase? There's almost 3 time the pixels! Maybe I just prefer it because I'm the visual equivalent to an audiophile. In a few years you'll all have blu ray players anyways, maybe you'll just be watching your crappy old DVDs on them I'm not sure here, but is every Blu Ray (stupid name by the way, it should have been named Blue if you ask me) in this resolution, or are some in lower ? Second thing - I can convert 100x100 video to 1900x1000 px big monster too, but result quality will be terrible. What I'm trying to say that with many DVD's, you have quality as good as possible (and you know how let's say pre 70's films can be terrible in quality), but it is still bad. I remember having one old cartoon on dvd - it was almost flashing with brightness, like in waves of dark and bright picture quality. It was corny, but it was the best it could be. But many people bought it because they saw it was on DVD and expected quality. Yeah, paper cover for DVD was nicely done, but what was inside was good old cartoon, not good in quality of picture. Now let's apply this on Blu Ray So many things wrong with this. A good blu ray transfer sees someone going back to the 35 or 16mm master reels and reproducing it from there. 35mm film is far superior to HD 1080x1920, it just can't be shown on a digital medium uncompressed. even 16mm is "bigger" than HD. The Hurt Locker was shot on 16mm for god's sake and it looks fantastic on blu ray! You can't say that "movies from the 70s" look crappy because last time I checked Bladerunner (yes, 80s, I know) and Star Wars or The Shining or Full Metal Jacket look a f**kload better in HD. The only difference between DVD and HD when it comes to film is how much you're compressing it.

God, I wanted just to explain how this works, not to start World Post War III.

I don't understand much how "classic" films works, but when I buy a DVD and want to convert it to lower quality (and size), I rip it with certain programs. I can choose bitrate of both video and audio and the result file, be it .avi or .mkv or .mp4, whatever, looks good or bad. It depends on quality selected.

This is theory and I was talking about this. I didn't experience VHS much, when I was watching VHS I was too young and was just consuming films / movies / cartoons, not thinking about them. But I know that some of them (we still have VHS from late 80's) are in crappy quality.

In my thinking, it depends on few factors. Original quality, when it was shot, edited, cut, how it was stored.

Please, try not to concentrate on thing in my post that irritates you the most and try to see reasoning in it. Main purpose why I have posted it. I'm not saying that 70's films looks crappy and nowadays films looks perfect. I am not. All I am saying is that today, technique used is better, therefore, resulting quality MAY be better. Or may not, it depends on director.

Few questions:

1)Let's move backwards then. Films from 1920's looks worse than films 00's. Why ? Because of what I've just said - they didn't have technology to make picture quality better. Do I take these films as bad ? Nope.
So the question is - do they look worse ?

2)Take for example videos you could record on crappy mobile phones let's say 5 years ago. 176x133 px resulting video, something like that, right ? So I can use some program and transform it to 1900x1000. It will be stretched, it will be terrible to look at, but I can do that, right ? See what I'm trying to tell ?

3)I won't repeat it. This thing about this old cartoon, this happened. DVD we bought for my little sister was in terrible quality, but it's probably because it never was in good quality. It was 720x480, but the quality itself was terrible.

On archive.org I downloaded some black'n'white movies from 1910's, 1920's. Their resolution (measured in pixels) wasn't bad. But quality of picture was.

So, the question is, you can get poor quality picture with 1900x1000 pixels movie.

Second question - Are pixels guarantee of quality or are they not ? 

By the way, I know about Blade Runner (it was close to my 70's, nevermind it), I like the book, I like original book "Does Androids...", I like Philip K. Dick's work at all (I've read most of them), I saw few different endings of this movie and was stunned in each case, be it book or movie.

Also consider remastering

Mike, two issues here.  Everyone agrees with you that BR is clearer.  Whether its worth the hassle and money to upgrade is more personal, and there is nothing wrong with people who are content with what they have.  There's lots of cars out there better than my Civic, doesn't mean I'm "leaving reality" if I don't feel driven to upgrade to one of them.   

Marty McFly wrote: King By-Tor wrote: rpe9p wrote: Maybe he meant do you buy DVD or Blu Ray, or do you think the slight increase in quality is worth it Slight increase? There's almost 3 time the pixels! Maybe I just prefer it because I'm the visual equivalent to an audiophile. In a few years you'll all have blu ray players anyways, maybe you'll just be watching your crappy old DVDs on them I'm not sure here, but is every Blu Ray (stupid name by the way, it should have been named Blue if you ask me) in this resolution, or are some in lower ? Second thing - I can convert 100x100 video to 1900x1000 px big monster too, but result quality will be terrible. What I'm trying to say that with many DVD's, you have quality as good as possible (and you know how let's say pre 70's films can be terrible in quality), but it is still bad. I remember having one old cartoon on dvd - it was almost flashing with brightness, like in waves of dark and bright picture quality. It was corny, but it was the best it could be. But many people bought it because they saw it was on DVD and expected quality. Yeah, paper cover for DVD was nicely done, but what was inside was good old cartoon, not good in quality of picture. Now let's apply this on Blu Ray

So many things wrong with this.

A good blu ray transfer sees someone going back to the 35 or 16mm master reels and reproducing it from there. 35mm film is far superior to HD 1080x1920, it just can't be shown on a digital medium uncompressed. even 16mm is "bigger" than HD. The Hurt Locker was shot on 16mm for god's sake and it looks fantastic on blu ray! You can't say that "movies from the 70s" look crappy because last time I checked Bladerunner (yes, 80s, I know) and Star Wars or The Shining or Full Metal Jacket look a f**kload better in HD. The only difference between DVD and HD when it comes to film is how much you're compressing it.

The T wrote: WalterDigsTunes wrote: The T wrote: Finnforest wrote: Epignosis wrote: Finnforest wrote: WalterDigsTunes wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: Well, actually it's not surprising that DVD is winning here ... after all this is a prog forum, and prog fans are usually nostalgic. "The grass was greener" ... applied to every technology.  That or people see little point in buying new hardware to play movies they've been forced to re-purchase. Exactly.  I'm not anti-BluRay, I just don't care enough to run out and buy the newest thing.  DVDs and CDs look and sound good enough IMO.  Are they *as* good?  No.  Do I care?  No Absolutely right Jim. How clear can a picture be?  Who wants to see each bead of sweat on Chris Squire's face anyway?  Unless we're talking about erotic films, then I suppose I see the BluRay case For every music fan who wants to listen to 20 minute songs about purple clouds there is another one with a passion for the best possible picture in their movies... I guess the existence of both makes the same sense... And for every one of those there's a few million people who could care less about blowing cash on something with more pixels. You're probably still with a betamax since you are stuck in 1989 so of course this doesn't make sense to you...

Wasting money never makes sense.

WalterDigsTunes wrote: The T wrote: Finnforest wrote: Epignosis wrote: Finnforest wrote: WalterDigsTunes wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: Well, actually it's not surprising that DVD is winning here ... after all this is a prog forum, and prog fans are usually nostalgic. "The grass was greener" ... applied to every technology.  That or people see little point in buying new hardware to play movies they've been forced to re-purchase. Exactly.  I'm not anti-BluRay, I just don't care enough to run out and buy the newest thing.  DVDs and CDs look and sound good enough IMO.  Are they *as* good?  No.  Do I care?  No Absolutely right Jim. How clear can a picture be?  Who wants to see each bead of sweat on Chris Squire's face anyway?  Unless we're talking about erotic films, then I suppose I see the BluRay case For every music fan who wants to listen to 20 minute songs about purple clouds there is another one with a passion for the best possible picture in their movies... I guess the existence of both makes the same sense... And for every one of those there's a few million people who could care less about blowing cash on something with more pixels.

Finnforest wrote: Epignosis wrote: Finnforest wrote: WalterDigsTunes wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: Well, actually it's not surprising that DVD is winning here ... after all this is a prog forum, and prog fans are usually nostalgic. "The grass was greener" ... applied to every technology.  That or people see little point in buying new hardware to play movies they've been forced to re-purchase. Exactly.  I'm not anti-BluRay, I just don't care enough to run out and buy the newest thing.  DVDs and CDs look and sound good enough IMO.  Are they *as* good?  No.  Do I care?  No Absolutely right Jim. How clear can a picture be?  Who wants to see each bead of sweat on Chris Squire's face anyway?  Unless we're talking about erotic films, then I suppose I see the BluRay case

Finnforest wrote: WalterDigsTunes wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: Well, actually it's not surprising that DVD is winning here ... after all this is a prog forum, and prog fans are usually nostalgic. "The grass was greener" ... applied to every technology.  That or people see little point in buying new hardware to play movies they've been forced to re-purchase. Exactly.  I'm not anti-BluRay, I just don't care enough to run out and buy the newest thing.  DVDs and CDs look and sound good enough IMO.  Are they *as* good?  No.  Do I care?  No

Absolutely right Jim.

How clear can a picture be? 

Who wants to see each bead of sweat on Chris Squire's face anyway? 

gottagetintogetout wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: ^ that's why I'm renting most of my movies. Through Lovefilm (a company that allows you to rent dvds and blu-rays by mail) I only pay 1-2 EUR per disk.  Sounds like our Netflix (I don't know if you can rent Blu-Rays, though), except that you pay monthly. As for the question, I prefer DVD.  I'm not much a videophile, if there is such a thing.

With Lovefilm you also pay monthly ... I pay about 25 EUR for a 3 disk flatrate, and I usually rent more than ten disks per month. Ok, I pay more like 2-3 EUR per disk now (they increased the fee a few months ago).

I still think it's much better than buying the disks. Why watch the same set of disks over and over again, when you can watch new movies and series every month. In that regard movies are totally different from music albums IMO.

 

Mr ProgFreak wrote: Blu-Ray is definitely worth the effort of upgrading your gear.

I disagree. I'm sure it's very nice, but a HDTV that is large enough to actually make a difference is $500-1000 dollars, and then the Blu Ray player is another $200, plus the extra cost of the Blu Ray discs. And the only thing I actually want to watch in Blu Ray is David Attenborough documentaries, but that's a lot of money for one thing.

- Earth (AMAZING - but please only watch on a truly 1080p capable set)

That's lame, either I listen to David Attenborough over Planet Earth footage or I don't watch it at all.

wow, you people are backwards.