

Blu-ray  - jmorin007
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=335

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mechanical_fish
Good post. I have always been of the same opinion: high-def DVDs are doomed to
the same fate as the high-end audio formats. I assure you that HDCD and DVD-
Audio discs sound really great on a high-end stereo system, but they don't
sound great enough for the mass market to actually give a damn.

 _I can’t even guess what mass movie downloading would do to the internet’s
overall structure, but I’m sure it will adapt._

It is just not that big a problem. There are only so many movies in the world
-- the good ones take time and money to make -- and 1TB hard drives are now
cheap. Let's see... Netflix claims to have 90k titles. An HD-encoded movie
seems to average 20-25GB. Let's call it 25GB. By my calculations, that means I
need something like 2200 TB to hold the entire Netflix library in HD form.
That's like $200k worth of drives, and shrinking fast... and that's for one
copy of _every film in Netflix_. I don't think the idea of putting one such
server in every city, or even every few city blocks, is particularly radical
at this point, and it will seem even less radical in six years when the cost
is down to $13k (with, one hopes, concurrent shrinkage in energy usage and
support costs).

We'd have done this already if it weren't for the licensing issues. The
BitTorrent hobbyists have been pretty darned successful already, considering
that using BitTorrent to swap commercial movies is not only kind of
complicated (relative to, say, TiVO) but also illegal.

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mattmaroon
I do love some DVD-Audio, but the selection is so limited. Makes me wish I was
a bigger Bjork fan.

The Gorillaz concert DVD is great. I realize it's not the same, but listening
to Ibrahim Ferrer sing Latin Simone in 5.1 is pretty awesome.

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ghiotion
> I personally own one DVD, because there’s only one movie that I sometimes
> suddenly feel like re-watching without having to drive to Blockbuster or
> wait a few days to get from Netflix.

I'm almost paralyzed by my desire to know what that one movie is. Totally
irrational, but I MUST know. I've discovered my purpose in life. I suppose
there's a little Asperger's in all of us.

~~~
rms
Either intuition or a memory of a previous Matt Maroon article makes me pretty
confident that it is the Big Lebowski.

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ghiotion
Lebowski seems like a pretty safe bet: <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=52>

I guess if you only own one movie, that's a pretty good one.

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hobbs
I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the
other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I
can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more
quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine,
Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.

...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.

~~~
mattmaroon
I've seen all of those. Maybe we just have much different conversations,
because I never find anything from Ghostbusters to be apropos.

Pulp Fiction and Napoleon Dynamite are pretty high up my list for sure. Pulp
Fiction might actually be number 2.

~~~
hobbs
Ghostbusters has many good quotes (e.g., no dick), but here's a few that I've
actually used in conversation:

"Don't cross the streams"

"It would be bad"

"Yes, have some."

"I don't have any Tylenol, but I do have some acetylsalicylic acid."

"Listen... do you smell something?"

"Where do the stairs go?" "They go up"

The last one usually isn't quoted directly. Rather some variation, such as "I
wonder what's behind that door." "A room."

~~~
mattmaroon
It seems a little too generous to attribute "It would be bad." to
Ghostbusters. Or the last one, which is basically Vaudeville. You might as
well say you're quoting Earth Girls Are Easy every time you say the word
"the", because it's in that movie at least once.

~~~
hobbs
Vaudeville: True enough. In fact, I can only use that around close friends who
are already familiar with the original quote. If I said something like that to
anyone else, they'd think I'm being an ass.

It would be bad: You have to use it in the proper context as a gross
understatement. As in every atom in your body exploding at the speed of light
would be bad. True, the same line has been used as an understatement in other
movies, but the Ghostbusters instance sticks out for some reason.

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jan_g
I would not say, that PS3 was a flop. Sale numbers are in the millions. And,
since we are talking about high-def video, as high-def player PS3 whoops ass
(in sales) compared to any other high-def player.

I also do not agree completely about irrelevance of high-def format. If it's
not that important, then why were Toshiba and Microsoft pushing with their own
format ?

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RyanGWU82
Great post.

