Pleading The Case for Blu-Ray

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Just Got to Mention The Game Show

I got two mentions during the live recording of "The Game Show" on TheStream.tv and Revision 3. Only one made the cut on Revision 3 at about 26:35. Watch the entire show it's a lot of fun. Definitely some of the most animated and interesting hosts on the Internet.