I’m staying with DVD since I don’t need the clarity of Blu-Ray. That is, I don’t feel the need to see the actors’ skin problems, moles, makeup base and so forth.
Same here.
The thing about a Blu-Ray player is that it also works as a DVD player. So it isn’t like you need to have two devices for your TV, one to play DVDs and one to play Blu-Rays. If you buy a DVD player nowadays you probably get a Blu-Ray player because it’s just as cheap. And then if you buy or rent a disc and the price is exactly the same you get the Blu-ray disc. But you don’t throw out your DVD collection and only watch Blu-ray from now on, like people did with VCRs.
Nobody is going to upgrade to a new physical medium just because the new medium is superior.
If your new player can support DVDs and Blu-Rays, then people might buy the new player, even if they don’t ever buy a disc for the new player. I have a blue-ray player and only have two or three blue-ray discs. But it doesn’t matter because I can play DVDs on it, the main reason we got it is that it has wireless streaming built in and we can watch Netflix easily with it.
HVD is dead in the water. It is never going to happen. Forget you ever heard of it.
SDXC is just the latest generation of flash memory cards. They can hold anything. Not necessarily media. A modern computer with an SD slot or add-on can read it. This would be a good thing to distribute movies on, especially to allow people to download a movie onto it at a Redbox-type kiosk. (But the waiting time might be a problem. Ahem.) Assuming that the customer doesn’t have a decent bandwidth ISP connection. But of course the DRM thing gets in the way of even dreaming about that.
The next big thing is “4k” video. Not expected to be more than a niche market and it won’t dominate like DVDs did. Most people don’t need that level of resolution. Note that this is a physical media independent concept.
Given the small sales of 3D and 4-color sets, most “next big things” are just hype.
Streaming 4K is happening already.
But how do you feel about the difference between basic cable and HD channels for sports?
Well, it’s so left-leaning, it was going to fall over eventually.
Just kidding.
I don’t know anyone who has a large-screen HDTV who DOESN’T have a Blu-Ray player.
If you count 50" as large then everyone I know has a large-screen HDTV and none of them have a Blu-Ray
On a related note - Netflix has started streaming 3D. My spouse was thrilled.
We only have a blu-ray player because my boyfriend’s PS3 came with one. We stream everything on our 1-5Mb/s internet connection without difficulty. I don’t know what the bitrate is to stream 4k, but I can’t really tell the difference between DVDs and blu-ray anyway. A videophile I’m not!
Netflix’ higher of two 4k data rates is 15.6 mbp/s plus a trivial amount extra for audio. That’s 7GB (big ‘B’ bytes) per hour of 4k video. 15.6mbps is a heavy lift to stream live, but doable for a folks with a big connection (I have one that could do it). And for downloading and watching offline, 7gigs/hour isn’t at all prohibitive. No special media required
Note that 4k isn’t really all that huge. It’s 4 x HD 1080. Big whoop. If you can stream 1080, you can, with more display hardware and internet bandwidth, stream, and definitely download, 4k. And this will presumably use HEVC, the successor to h.264, which has the same quality as h.264 at half the bandwidth, which makes 4k potentially only twice as much bandwidth to stream as HD 1080.
HD is alright, easier to watch the puck I’d guess, but not a necessity.
Yeah, not a movie-specific media, but I own LPs released last year. Heck, my band is releasing a vinyl EP later this year, and we’re about to be included on the label’s compilation tape (yes, a cassette tape release, they apparently sold out of the previous runs). If I really like something, I buy it. If I’m going to buy it, I want a physical copy of it. Vinyl holds up, and most of my collection appreciates in value as long as I take care of it.
This chump demands physical media! Strangely, there seems to be a valley in there somewhere, very old music formats seem to be making a come-back, and the newer ones aren’t doing so well. I am surprised to say it, but it doesn’t really look like either the vinyl LP or the cassette tape are going to actually go extinct too terribly fast. There’s enough consumers and producers that they seem to fit in their niche and survive. I’m even more surprised to say that mass-produced CDs seem to be going the way of the dodo. It’s harder to find a new release on CD (at least the ones I’ve been looking for) than vinyl or tape.
But then again, I literally bought my first blu-ray player the day before yesterday. So, I’m probably not the world’s earliest adopter.
Blu-Ray discs have regions just as DVDs do. If you look at the back of most Blu-Ray boxes, you’ll see one or more hexagons with letters on them - A, B, C; these are Blu-Ray regions. While a number can play in all three regions (the equivalent of DVD Region 0), I have some that are “Region A only”.
Unless by “region free”, you mean they don’t have the 25-vs-30-fps problem. (IIRC, Blu-Ray discs of movies are at 24 fps and the player itself does the converting, if necessary, to the appropriate TV standard.) I have a PAL Region 0 DVD (25 fps) lying around somewhere; I wonder if any of my Blu-Ray players can play it.
As for holographic discs, I assume these will require special hardware to broadcast the signal; the images won’t just pop up out of existing TVs. This will probably result in the technology taking quite a while to get established, and even this assumes it won’t end up being a “fad” like early attempts at 3D. I always assumed that the next step after Blu-Ray won’t be a disc, but more along the lines of an SDHC card, which has an advantage over a disc in that you can’t scratch it.
And I own a Blu-Ray player - in fact, three of them. Then again, I have a collection of discs that I watch over and over; I’m a “fan” of bonus features, which usually you can’t get with downloading / streaming.
“region free” meaning I could play UK DVD’s in the US. I needed it for some DVD’s my wife had bought, but the region free Blu Ray was the same price (or very close) so we got that instead.
I have not used another region’s Blu Ray disk and I think we bought just one movie in Blu Ray, which fortunately came with a DVD as my daughter likes watching films in her room and has a little DVD player/screen combo thing.
Cassettes have been dead for decades. The only companies that put out cassettes anymore are doing it for the kitsch factor.
Maxwell, Sony & TDK still put out various flavors (standard, high fidelity, ultra, etc) of cassette tapes and sell them through your usual department and electronics stores according to Google Shopping. I don’t know who’s using them but it seems to be a greater demand than a couple hipsters sending each other mix tapes.
I’ve heard that those cassette recorder decks are still popular in some business settings but I have no direct experience with them in an office setting.
The disc uses holographic technology to store data, but the image could be flat or 3D.
Not just the kitsch, it’s also incredibly cheap. Less than a buck a tape, if you get enough. Print the digital download info on the cassette case, and you’ve got a package that’s cheap enough to hand out as a promotion, and almost everyone can play it easily.
Here’s an article with the pros/cons of the formats, written for recent times.