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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

did you know that every movie that comes out is still pressed on DVD? at this point you can get virtually everything (as long as the license isn't in limbo) on DVD, from the beginning of cinema to the latest releases. i do not think this will ever change, I think DVD is here to stay, forever.


If you don't think too hard about it, it seems obvious that blu-ray is the successor to DVD and that, eventually, DVDs will trail off and be replaced by it. But there's really no reason this would ever happen, because DVD is the rare case of a perfect technology. Its designers could have really done it dirty - it could have been nothing more than "laserdisc, but small"; or, if you like, "VCD, but full resolution." Instead, they thought of everything that anyone could conceivably want out of a new video format, every single improvement over VHS that had been driving people to buy Laserdiscs and a lot more, and put it all on the pizza.

Jiggle-free pause, rewind and fast forward; chapters; subtitles; alternate audio and subtitle tracks; anamorphic support for 16:9; everything you could imagine is there. Blu-ray added, what, higher resolution and more complex menus? I think that's it, I don't think there are any other features that aren't completely enthusiast-targeted - and I'd argue that higher resolution is itself an enthusiast feature. The majority of people can't even tell that motion smoothing is enabled; if you can't see that the movie is obviously surging forward at 2x speed every three seconds, I doubt you can tell the difference between 480 and 1080, let alone 4k.

And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that. 480 was Good Enough for nearly a century, and if you're watching a 42" or smaller set, from more than a few feet away, it's likely that your eyes can't even resolve well enough to spot that difference.

Had DVD's designers skimped on anything, perhaps BD would have a strong argument for replacing it. But instead they went way above and beyond the call of duty and made a format that was, by the standards of 1997, astonishingly forward-thinking. As a result there was no reason not to convert everything under the sun to DVD, and every reason in the world to do it.

VHS was unbelievably complex. I mean, it's been stated many times, but it bears repeating: it's astonishing we ever got it to work. The bandwidth of video just exceeds that of tape, and this is an ironclad fact that we never worked around, so we had to do this fucked up helical scan nonsense that required players to have hundreds of parts, even after decades of simplification. Even the cassettes were far more complex than industry wanted; every single one contains a dozen injection molded components made of three or four different plastics, including a pair of bearings, and it all has to be assembled with metal hardware. then you have to pack it full of miles and miles of high-test mylar tape with incredibly precisely made oxide particulate coatings. ugh! horrible!

DVDs are two pieces of injection molded plastic. They take no time to make, they have no moving parts, and the machinery is... basically the same thing we were using for CDs and are now using for BDs, so it really isn't much of a hardship for manufacturers to continue making presses and replacement parts, which is probably the same reason that CD shows no signs of going away. It's no skin off anyone's back to make a variety of discs of the same size and shape that simply have different sized grooves. There's multilayer discs to consider but I'm sure once they nailed that once for DVD, over 20 years ago, it was pretty much a solved problem.

The pressure to move away from VHS was monumental from every single side. The pressure to move away from DVD... is nonexistent. Even if streaming hadn't happened, I don't think we would see a change here. The install base of DVD players is essentially 100%, probably better than was ever achieved even at the height of VHS' popularity, they're incredibly reliable, and manufacturers have no real reason to stop making them and force people to upgrade their machines, yet the enthusiasts aren't getting shafted by this because the manufacturers also have no reason to not make higher quality formats for those who want them. It's very close to an ideal state of affairs, an incredibly rare phenomenon under our economic system.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

the best blu-rays are basically just the DVD of a thing but with the main feature at higher resolution / nicer encoding (shout out to menus that you can actually interact with using a PC mouse!!), so I think everything you're saying here checks out

Like, I've long thought that the winners in the so-called HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war were actually either DVD or nothing so I'm glad to see other people argue such that my opinion probably isn't a symptom of me being insane

DVD is solid but the reason bluray market penetration isn't higher is that computers don't come ready to play bluray out of the box like they did with DVD for a long time. The most popular DVD players were game consoles and that still holds true for Bluray, but you could also watch them on your windows PC after a point painlessly. And also streaming has largely dominated the HD video market.

i mean... among 1% of 1% of the market perhaps, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Normal Person playing a DVD in their computer. i'm pretty sure 99.99% of the market just owns hardware players plugged into their TV and doesn't even know this was ever an option.

Our first DVD player was a Compaq desktop in maybe 1999. None of us in the house were really computer nerds at the time, and I'm not sure if my dad went out of his way to get one of these new DVD drives assuming it'd be important or if it just happened to come with the desktop he wanted. But I remember all of us gathering around and watching The Sixth Sense on that thing and being impressed with the clarity. That said, we'd only occasionally rent something for that, since the family computer wasn't ideal for watching a film, and we stopped bothering once we got a proper DVD player or a PS2 (I forget which was first).

I also feel like watching a DVD on your laptop was a relatively normal thing when I was in college (2004-2008). It was probably never really the most popular way to do it, but I feel like it was more than just nerds.

Anecdotal, but my parents are resolutely normal people and their first contact with watching film/TV at home was DVD: they didn't have a television, so when we got a computer with a DVD player it suddenly meant they could use the local library's DVDs to revisit films they remembered from their childhoods &c. If I had to guess, I'd guess that you're not wrong about it being a small proportion of the population who used computer drives to play DVDs, but perhaps more than 1%.

yeah, I'm thinking about it more and, given the full court marketing press that DVD playback on PC's got, and the fact that you could just pop a disc in the drive and there was a 95% chance it would simply work on any computer made after like 2002, I guess I can believe that non-enthusiasts realized this was possible.

From like 2000-2015 it was pretty common. Not your first choice if there was a better set up available, but it was a workable option. Netflix streaming in 2007 and the Macbook Air with no drive in 2008 started the trends that would really eat into the physical media market.

Yeah, up until my family upgraded from a 2007 Mac Mini to a 2014 Mac Mini (which has no disc drive), the family computer was our primary DVD player (DVD duties got taken over by the PS2 after that). My parents have always just kept their computer plugged straight into the TV though, so I have no idea how common that really was.

That's part of a (still ongoing) research and collection project that I have been working on for several years. Some early DVDs actually included very basic playback software that required... Internet Explorer. And decoding capabilities, either via a software decoding card or built in codecs later on. A few even included games that played along with the DVD!

Unfortunately for the company that made these (PCFriendly / Interactual Technologies)... Microsoft realized that the things they did to get that working were also insane security vulnerabilities, so AFAIK, they eventually blocked them via patches (probably unintentionally?) And so they stopped including DVD playback features and just included boring websites or links to external sites.

Nope, sandwiches all the way down. That's why certain brands and runs of writable media get disc rot while others don't, they weren't sealed as well as they should be and a bit of oxygen sneaks in and starts damaging the metal layer which is just an incredibly thin film.

another benefit of DVDs being eternal is that occasionally PS2 games get repressed and it bring a tear to my eye every time.

genuinely think more companies should do a light repress of their games more. Just order the minimum quantity, throw em on amazon. You can buy a new in box copy of SMT: Digital Devil Saga 2 for 30 bucks. And I'm 100% fine with paying 30 bucks for a new copy of a 20 year old game any day over paying some retro collector dipshit 100 bucks on ebay. (to be fair I'm never gonna do that, I'm just gonna get the iso.)

Don't see how companies don't see how dumb the retro game market is and just do a quick reprint to undercut it. I know its because there isn't billions of dollars in it, but still! Its free money, its free real estate!

Yeah, wrt HD being an "enthusiast feature" still, I'm thinking about how the only companies I've seen drop DVD to go Blu-Ray only have been anime companies and other enthusiast companies. They can count on 95% of their customers having BD players and not needing to split their releases across two platforms. But that's because they're in a niche of a niche.

The actual only reason I've considered upgrading to Blu-Ray is because I've seen fewer and fewer box sets of shows pressing to DVD,
And I keep getting so frustrated that it's for so little actual utility that I end up ditching the whole idea for months at a time and kicking thar can further down the road, haha!

Here's something: the people who still buy and watch DVDs don't know what bluray is.

It looks like a DVD but someone told them it won't work in their dvd player, and it's more expensive too. So they just look confused and think it’s weird and put it back on the shelf.

Perfect clueless grandma format