
Subtraction.com: Blu-Ray Blues - atularora
http://www.subtraction.com/2011/01/10/blu-ray-blues
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tobtoh
The only advantage I see in blu-ray discs is the image quality - everything
else is a severe letdown - the glacial load times, the unskippable trailers
and warnings etc. I'm actually less inclined to purchase blu-ray discs than
DVDs - I used to buy DVDs for all sorts of movies - comedy, drama, action.
However, I find the user experience of blu-ray discs so annoying that I now
only limit my purchases to action movies.

I feel that the image below perfectly sums up how the movie industry has done
more to encourage movie piracy than anyone else:

[http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/02/why-p...](http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/02/why-people-pirate-movies-steps-to-watching-video.jpg)

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ams6110
Mirrors my experiences with conventional DVDs. I have vowed I will never buy a
Blu-Ray DVD or player because of that. I have constant problems with DVDs,
they seem to require clean-room storage and handling to avoid skips and
freezes, and forget about letting your kids try to use them. I might as well
set $20 bills on fire and save myself the time, than to hand my kid a DVD to
play.

I have not bought a DVD in several years. I sometimes rent them from RedBox
but have moved almost completely to NetFlix.

As far as physical media, video cassette was the best medium for the consumer,
picture quality aside (and for most purposes, the picture quality was good
enough). I never had one problem with a VHS tape. I could fast-forward over
the ads and trailers easily. If I couldn't finish a movie in one sitting, I
could pop the tape out and resume it a day, or a week later exactly where I
left off.

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WillyF
You never had your VCR eat a VHS tape? Definitely happened to me a few times.
And the whole having to rewind thing was kind of annoying too. I'd take a DVD
over a VHS any day, even if the picture quality was the same.

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pohl
I'm glad I'm not alone in being frustrated by blu-ray. This post could have
easily been about my own experiences. I wonder if the phrase "bag of hurt" was
hinting at inherent problems in the spec that give rise to bad user
experiences.

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carterschonwald
I thought it was well known by now that the PS3 is the only set top sized
device to have the computational power to properly handle all that the blu-ray
media can throw at it.

After all, media playback is a streaming decoding problem, and the PS3 is
(in)famous for how the Cell Architecture is well adapted to that problem!

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kin
I would be curious to know which two Blu-Ray players the author purchased.
Personally, having a PS3 has made my Blu-Ray experience rather flawless. I
haven't had a single issue. Great picture quality from Blu-rated films on the
AVS forums. Bonus-material is more or less the exact same as DVD with the
interactive ones being mostly a waste of time.

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aditya
Between iTunes and Netflix, why are people still using physical media?

* Cost? (Not all of Netflix is streaming and non-streaming iTunes content is between $0.99 and $4.99 on an AppleTV that's $99)

* Convenience? (I can't imagine anything being more convenient than the AppleTV setup, especially now that 1mil+ devices have been sold)

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mikeryan
No one can stream with Blu-Ray quality yet. Consider most blu-ray encoding
bitrates are at between 25-45Mbps. Netflix's best HD Streams I think are about
3Mbps, maybe slightly higher. Even if you're streaming at 1080p (which Roku
now supports) that stream is going to be smashed to bits to get that
resolution out of it.

Also no one is streaming 5.1 surround sound yet either. You'd chew up your
whole bandwidth allotment on audio.

Blu-Ray is still a considerably better format for video then streaming.

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barclay
> Also no one is streaming 5.1 surround sound yet either.

While NF streaming is great, this is one thing that it's really missing.

