Image via WikipediaWith out digging to deep in to the technical aspects of streaming some things should be understood. The HD resolutions are just that. A height by width measure of number of pixels with no accounting for the quality of those pixels. The higher the compression the worse the picture quality. Services like Netflix vary the image quality to fit your internet bandwidth in order to maintain that HD pixel number. There is no way your home internet bandwidth can match the bandwidth available to the internal components of a Blu-ray player. To be clear most internet connections are between 3 and 50Mbits. "BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s". So until fiber and gigabit to the home is ubiquitous a streamed video will never match the quality of a Blu-ray disc.
As I mentioned I believe streaming is good for most cases but for those couple of treasured movies that you watch over and over Blu-ray is the way to go. This constant preaching that physical discs should not be owned at all is selling both quality and control of content up the river to the giant corporations. Don't let it happen.
the problem with blu ray is the content holders / movie industry. they have failed to make BD as ubiquitous as dvd thus far. if a disc is gonna cost me 30 bucks then I damn well better be able to put the video on any personal device. you can't, at least not legally. you might be able to resell it, at least for now. they've tried what the pc games are doing now, poison the system so it can't be resold. or at least put a tax on the resales that goes back to them... they are going about this all the wrong way. for $30, I can watch whatever, whenever on almost whichever device I have that supports Netflix, for 3 months, unlimited.
ReplyDeleteIs blu ray superior quality? sure, but for the most part that doesn't matter to 99% of the population unfortunately. also with the data rate argument, the human eye can only discern so much resolution, the rest just becomes overkill. SD dvds, if done properly, you could compress it, cut the data rate by 50%-75% & it's gonna be pretty hard to tell.
when every drive shipping in computers & set top boxes supports at least bluray playback, imo it's not gonna catch on anymore than it already has. I'm a little upset with companies like apple that don't even offer it as an option, but truth be told, you are playing ball with an industry that has their head in the sand.
& forgot to mention that it was going to cost me considerable money to author a BD movie of my own. $100 for the software, about $200 for the drive, & don't get me started on the cost of the media! at this point, they may as well put it on flash media / memory cards.
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