Pleading The Case for Blu-Ray

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Lately there have been more and more posts touting streaming of content over ownership of specifically DVDs. While I completely believe that streaming is a viable option I also believe a fair apples to oranges comparison should be had.

With 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.

No Netflix On Android. Amazon Has You Covered

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I admit I'm slow to discover things on occasion but so far no one else has mentioned this that I am aware of so hopefully it's not just a case of me being uninformed. I have a co-worker that won't shell out for Netflix but he does rent from the oft overlooked Amazon Streaming service. Now I don't recall what brought it up but he pointed out that Amazon Prime members get 5000 free streaming movies. Some of these movies are pretty solid. The likes of Dirty Hairy, Doctor Who(1-4) and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest are present. As luck would have it Amazon uses a flash based player for these movies. What this means is that if you have an Android device and you have the flash player installed(free from the market) then you can watch streaming video. Thats a whole new wealth of content for the viewing on your phone or tablet.

I tested this on my Droid Incredible connected to nothing but 3G. I ran in to a few hitches but once they were worked out it seems to work flawlessly. First navigating the video store is done more easily on a laptop or tablet and since I was testing on my phone I browsed for my movie on my laptop. Chrome has a nice plugin called Chrome to phone which I used to shoot the chosen video page to my phone. No browsing necessary. The first time I sent the link it automatically took me to the mobile version of the site which does not feature the actual player. I had to scroll to the bottom of the page and choose "full site" to get the full blown website with player to load. The other hurdle I came to was that I was not previously logged in to the site so I had to log in to ensure I had access to the free movies. Once you get past those two things the movie fires right up. Double tap the player to go full screen and sit back and enjoy!

On the 3G connection the compression was noticeably high but still watchable and on occasion I was seeing a short 1-2 second hitch every once in a while. Very usable all in all and I imagine flawless over Wifi.