What's the deal with DVD?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m a person who opposes pointless progress. I think inventions and new technology should be created out of a genuine need. Inventions and technology created for other reasons must have a hell of a good application, or they’re useless.

I think DVD falls into the latter category.

People, it’s movies! We’ve had them since the late 19th century! It’s not revolutionary! We’ve had VCRs for decades and TVs for over half a century. It’s nothing new. What does DVD give us that we didn’t have already?

Usually, the answer is picture and sound quality. Well, to quote a neophile I know, “you don’t know how bad quality your old TV had until you see a new one”. If I don’t know, it doesn’t hurt me. I don’t think anybody sat in front of their TV and said “God I wish the picture had better resolution”.

And then we have the entire cult around it. DVD clubs, DVD magazines, DVD, DVD, DVD. All for a form of entertainment that’s been around for decades. It’s nothing new. It’s nothing special. Why the obsession? CDs didn’t have this kind of obsession when they came.

Because people fall for this and so happily pump their money into other people’s pockets for the privilege of being able to do something they could already do much cheaper, I am going to have to get a DVD player sooner or later and buy a bunch of DVD movies just to be able to see the movies I already own. One day my VCR will crash and there will be no more VCRs to buy and no-one to repair my old one, and there goes my film library. I’m pissed.

Even here, where the average intelligence is presumably considerably higher than that of Joe Heatseeker, DVDs are mentioned in every other Cafe Society thread. “I wonder when they’ll release the original Star Wars on DVD.” “I bought The Flintstones on DVD.” By the way, why bother mentioning the “on DVD” part?

So, DVD lovers, what’s the deal? Seriously.

2

There are some movies which I love and want to own a copy of. VCR tapes take up a lot of space, and repeated viewing degrades the tape. DVDs take half as much space and can be viewed over and over without degredation.

Actually it’s not that the actual degredation that’s the probem, it’s the thought that you are paying money for something with a very finite lifetime.

Also, image quality is important. I have sat in front of the TV and wished that the quality were better.

3

What can I say, you obviously don’t care about movies much if you really think there’s no difference between a widescreen DVD and a pan-and-scan VHS. You don’t have to be an AV freak to appreciate the difference. VHS is not a format for anyone who likes a movie or TV show enough to keep it around to watch it again.

4

Storage space and medium lifetime are significant issues, enough, in my opinion, to make DVD a definite step forward.

And, although I’m not a fanatic about image quality, there is a notable improvement in that area. I’m reasonably happy to live with pan-and-scan VHS, but the difference between that and DVD is something even I notice.

Also, there’s room on the DVD discs for cool toys. Again, I’m not, myself, a big fan of the commentary tracks and “making of” documentaries and little “easter eggs”. But some people are, and I can see how they could get enthused over them.

All told, DVD is not the coming of the new millennium, but it is a step forward. If you accept there’s a need for home entertainment at all, DVD is a worthwhile invention.

5

How often has it actually happened to you that a video tape became unwatchable? To me, it’s happened exactly never. I have tapes I’ve owned for years and years and watched 50+ times at least, some of them recorded off television to start with, and a tape has never gone broke on me.

No, I take that back. I recorded The Big Lebowski on a cheap-ass no-name tape, which had already been recorded on several times, and the physical tape snapped after 10 viewings or so. But here comes the fun part: I repaired it with sellotape, and I’ve been watching it problem-free ever since. Luckily, the sellotaped bit was at the very beginning; that bit is obviously of very poor quality, but the rest of the movie has run fine.

Before you knew there was something better? If so, OK then. I think you’re in the minority, but OK.

I care extremely much about movies, am a confessed cinephile and think that motion pictures is the greatest art form ever created. Widescreen is not a DVD feature, it exists on VHS as well, and so has nothing to do with the discussion.

There’s plenty of room on VHS as well. Four-hour tapes are at the low end of the scale these days, are you telling me we can’t fit a movie and some extra stuff into that?

6

You’re right. I think it was bigger with CDs.

7

I’ll freely concede that I was too uninterested to care much and so may have missed the CD obsession, but I cannot remember anything like this. I cannot remember CD-swapping clubs popping up spontaneously where no cassette-swapping clubs had been before. I cannot remember people saying “on CD” in every other sentence. I cannot remember special CD magazines (dozens of them) devoted to all things CD.

As I say, I may have missed it. If I did, the CD obsession sucked too.

8

I already explained that it’s not the actual degredation, but the idea and possibility of it. Also, I have had tapes get jammed in the player and destroyed.

9

What if you’re in the mood to watch the “making of” segment and your tape has been rewound? You have to queue the tape to the right place (and do you have the position written down?). With a DVD you just go to the menu and choose what you want to watch. Or you might want to see a particular scene (say, you’re on a message board and you want to grab a quick quote). With a DVD you just go to it. With a VHS tape you again need to know where it is on the tape and then go there using the winder (which is often a slow process). And then there’s the whole rewinding business. Sure, it only takes a couple of minutes; but a DVD needs only be ejected.

And quality is better on DVD. I’ll often still-frame to see a particular detail, and DVDs do that better than VHS.

DVDs also have switchable subtitles. If a scene is quiet and the neighbours are making noise, or if I can’t quite make out what an actor is saying, there is usually a subtitle that I can select. Languages, too. Sometimes I’ll like to watch a film in the original (foreign) language with the subtitles on; other times I’ll like to watch the dubbed version.

10

I forgot to mention one major reason I love DVDs: it can contain multiple subtitles, and multiple language sounds all in stereo, not to mention commentary. With foreign movies on VHS, you had to choose between a dubbed tape and a subtitled tape.

11

WHAT SCR4 SAID. You cannot overestimate what DVD has done for people who like foreign films.

Also, come on, let’s not kid ourselves, widescreen EXISTS on VHS but it is far, far from standard and I would say it exists for only a very small number of titles. Even in my favorite video store where they do their best to stock widescreen if available I’d estimate it’s available for one in five films at best.

To be honest, I think you’re just being resistant because you don’t want to buy new hardware. Go spend 100 bucks on a DVD player and then see if you can honestly say the advantages over VHS are negligible. You might be able to shrug them all off individually, but put them together and I think there’s really no argument to be had. Even my generally technophobic parents admit VHS is pretty crap since I gave them a DVD player for Christmas.

12

Well, I have to pipe in here, somewhere. I’ve had three VHS tapes “go bad” on me (that I know of…I have some I haven’t played in years…could be fine; could be ruined). I’ve had one eaten by a berserk VCR. And, most tapes are worse quality than broadcast TV so, yes, I wanted better quality than I had, even before DVD came along.

That said, while I like DVDs, there are some downsides. For one thing, I hate the fact that the studio decides when I can fast forward and when I can’t. I hate that some discs don’t allow you to skip the lame-ass animated menus. And, I have absolutely no interest in the “extras”.

But, the quality, theoretical durability, and size are definite pluses, in my book. Plus, DVD players should have much longer usable lifespans, given their relative mechanical simplicity. But, I don’t think you need to worry about not being able to buy a new VCR, in the future. You can still by a turntable on which to play vinyl records.

13

No, but there was a similar “cult” around laserdiscs. It was much smaller, since LDs were much more expensive and less widely available, but there were collectors, magazines, and clubs. Now that we have something even better, and easily afforable to boot, there’s a new, bigger cult around DVDs.

Before DVDs, if I wanted to buy a new release on home video, I would have to pay around $100 for a pan-and-scan, linear access, movie-only VHS tape. Now I can pay around $20 for a widescreen, random-access, feature-laden DVD. Can’t you see why this is a big deal for some people?

VHS could be cheap, it could be widescreen, it could be full of special features, it could be a lot of things. But it wasn’t.

14

I can. Especially people saying “on CD” in every other sentence. By around 1990-1991 if you didn’t have a CD play then, well, you just weren’t cool.

I was in several CD clubs.

I used to get a magazine that sold nothing but CD players, CD Cabinets, CD cases…etc. No idea what the magazine was called though. I think they got my name off a list from one of those CD clubs :).

15

Me too.

Same with audio; I can’t bear to listen to music on degraded cassette now, sometimes even AM radio annoys me.

16

I agree with all the other reasons people have given as to why DVD is better than VHS.

But if ALL those reasons went away, if DVD=VHS in all ways but one, and that one way was NETFLIX, that would be enough for me!

NETFLIX rules. I don’t see how they could do it with VHS tapes - they’re simply too big and bulky to mail well. I love my Netflix.

17

But, as Johnny L.A. points out, you can’t play with the extra stuff on a video tape. Not effectively, anyway. I mean, some of my DVDs offer commentary tracks, branching in deleted scenes, links to web content, PDFs of the scripts … how would you do any of those on a video tape? OK, it’s technically achievable, but it would take time and effort and money to put together a video tape that could match a DVD for special-feature content, you would need a specialized player to use it (or a computer that plays VHS tapes … yeah, right) and at the end of the day, the video tape is still bigger and clunkier and more damage-prone than a DVD. DVD lets you have cool toys. And, boy, is there a market for that …

18

There is an “idea and possibility” of DVDs getting destroyed too. As for tapes getting jammed, if that’s a problem it’s time to make better players, not replace the technology.

It’s not that slow. Besides, if your VCR doesn’t have a time counter, I can’t imagine where you got it. I’ve heard DVD aficionados bitch about rewinding tapes before, and my response remains: watch your blood pressures, people.

Sure, if you need to still-frame. This can hardly be the reason for DVD’s popularity.

Since I think dubbing movies is doing the work of the devil, I won’t comment on that. But fine, the switchable subtitles is something you genuinely can’t do on VHS, without enormous amounts of tape space.

Of course I’m being resistant because I don’t want to buy new hardware (and huge amounts of new movies). If I got a DVD player and all the DVDs I wanted for free, do you think I’d be bitching?

So I’m going to spend $100 to get something I don’t want, just in case I might want it after I bought it? I’ll pass.

And besides, if it were only the DVD player, then fine. But do you have any idea how many movies I own on VHS? Are all of them even available on DVD? I doubt it. How much money am I going to have to spend to be able to watch the movies I could have watched for free if some marketroid hadn’t decided to push the DVD on the world?

You wrote $100. Either this is what you meant to write, in which case you must be living in Expensiveland, or you meant $10, in which case the DVD is twice as expensive, which can hardly be an argument in favor of DVDs. It can also be a more exotic typo, of course. If it is, please clarify.

For starters, VHS is already widescreen. It may be different in different parts of the world, but I rarely have to look around until I find a widescreen version of a movie I want.

But if VHS could be cheap, widescreen, full of special features and lots of things, but isn’t right now, do you really think the correct move is to invent a whole new technology rather than fix the little problems in the old one and shaft all the people who just happen to like the movies they already have?

19

I do think DVDs are better. Though I’m not sure if that justifies the price. And I can’t be bothered with features (you could make interesting features, I just haven’t seen any yet.)

As it happens, I’m at university, and don’t want to cart a TV and videa home every holiday, so I watch DVDs on my laptop.

20

What exactly was the point of this thread, Priceguy? You don’t seem like you’re going to change your mind on DVD, and the finer points of the format seem to be lost on(or useless to)you.
So why even get into this argument? The format won’t be going away. Its already begun to kill VHS, but you’ll have D-VHS to fall back on if that format takes off. Why disparage DVD at all, then?

For me though, DVD is worth it for the picture quality - this includes widescreen. While widescreen VHS exists, it in no way improves PQ. VHS widescreen takes even more lines of resolution out of a low-res format to begin with. Widescreen DVD(shown on a widescreen set or one with a widescreen squeeze function) uses the entire raster for usable picture. If you watch a widescreen VHS on a widescreen set, you’ll get a square box with grey on the sides and the tape’s black bars top and bottom. Pop in a widescreen DVD on this same set, and you’ll get a screen-filling picture.
You’ve already dismissed all that though, because its not ‘necessary invention’.