Hi everyone,

I attended a friend's party last night and there was this guy talking about how not to purchase a blu-ray player nor PS3 because blu-ray is apparently dead......huh?

I ask him why he supports this claim and he says its because of HD streaming, stuff like what Netflix is doing.

For me, I just purchased a PS3 last week and I have no regrets. The picture quality of my blu-ray movies are astonishing and I have to say, I will not go back to standard DVD because I see a significant difference in picture quality. I told the guy and I have one and loved it and he told me to return it ASAP because I just wasted my money.

I am a bit skeptical at his argument but can all of you hardcore home theater enthusiast englightened me on this guy's opinion? Me, I have no regrets. I love my PS3 and LG 32LH40 that I purchased for my bedroom.

Thank you all for the inputs.

Asicsrunner

Everything you know, some day, will die.

Blu Ray will be replaced by streaming, but for the next 10-15 years, you gotta have something, don't you?

Cars will be replaced some day too - should I not buy one?

You could probably search online and find the article he skimmed in the airport.

To follow this logic there is never a reason to own more than one suit because thats all they can bury you in.

WOW, no offense, but you're friend does not make a shred of sense. So like the poster above, why buy a car now, when hovercrafts will be readily available in 20 years, or why still buy a traditional car when a gasoline-free car will be ready and safe to use in 10 years.

You should educate your friend about the value of tangible media, something that most movie lovers will always appreciate and pay a premium for.

You should also send him this link....

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Joshua_Zyber/Product_Review:_VUDU_Movie_Download_Service/2709

The article proves time and time again tha digital movie downloads will only affect the movie RENTING business like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Pay per view, Netflix...etc. It's not going to affect movie buying because if you want to own a movie, you will always buy it, not rent it. Most of the movie streaming services offer highly compressed HD downloads of movies for $4-$6 per rental. I would much rather pay $10-$20 to own a movie if I know I like it. And for that purpose, streaming services are not able to offer significant savings for movie ownership over yout typical traditional disc-based ownership. I personally dont care if it is bluray or another format, as long as I can buy it, hold it, shelve it, and play it whenever I want on however many disc players I own.

I guess part of this is how net savy you are and where and how you find your video content and what format it either arrives in or how you choose to either transcode or encode it to suit you as you store it on your home server or servers.

I still use discs - standard dvd because as Image Processors/Scaling continue to get better and better I become less likely to buy into a fixed quality format like B.Ray - specially at current prices.

However my son - the computer genius - and his associates - all network engineers - scoff at discs as sort of horse and buggy video entertainment format regardless of file image resolution quality/format or standard.

They seem to obtain their video files online, mostly, store it in varying high res VERY HD file formats of their choice and then transport it to display or projector via their home wired or wireless networks.

Based on what I am being told and have personally seen I don't think the evolution from disc to other sources (legal or otherwise) will take anywhere near 10 to 15 years so maybe this "friend" mentioned in this Thread's post of origin is just at the upper edge of the curve and savy beyond the herd. Who Knows??? I ain't there at all but I have seen that future on tv displays and projection screens TODAY and talked to very sharp people that have apparently moved beyond the lowly video/media disc. for their personal home video entertainment.

Best to All!!!

For the life of me, I cannot understand this argument that physical media will die anytime in the near future. Maybe with the next, next generation of the population, but thats it. First of all, many people, myself included, love the idea of actually having a disc and box.

Second, and this is the real killer to this argument, are these usage caps that the ISPs are falling in love with. Time Warner actually wanted to put a cap of 40gigs on Roadrunner. They decided against it but they will come back again with the idea. Once that happens, and it will with them and others ISPs, this whole idea of wasting 8gigs of bandwidth to download one HD movie will end pretty fast.

Blu Ray will eventually fall to something else, just like everything has. I just dont think that downloads are the end-all, be-all that some people are making it out to be. Until DRM dies for good and ISPs stop trying to gouge us for more money, I'll stick with my good ol' physical disc.

Hey - please don't misunderstand my previous post - yeah, my kid and his bleeding edge friends scoff at the disc - standard or B.Ray or whatever.

I'm very happily stuck in standard dvd disc mode and will be for years and years. I get a great (to me) image with a 120 inch diagonal image watching standard dvds in an Up Converting player - heck, "shrunk" (heavily compressed movie backup copies) look (to me) just fine even stretched on that big projection screen.

As posted earlier I sincerely believe that image processors and associated software will continue to improve allowing a video player to one day Up Convert/Scale most ANY resolution video file to whatever the latest Hi Def happens to be making specific formats - like B.Ray - obsolete.

Gotta agree that movie discs will be around for a LOOOOONG time but at the same time really savy techno-people are already moving beyond them and are not looking back - LOL.

I'm sure one day streaming will be the defacto standard, but that won't be here for awhile. I personally like owning a physical disc that I can store in a safe place, can lend to friends,can resell, won't randomly die, etc. The idea of "buying" a movie, and have it reside on a hard drive that I can never sell or lend out, will one day die and I'll lose all my movies, is not appealing in the slightest. Not the movies you buy online (from iTunes or whatever) are much inferior in picture and audio quality.

I personally believe the future will be an "all you can eat" mode, where you pay a fixed amount of money a month and that gets you the ability to watch any movie from any movie in your house. Netflix has this currently, but the selection is slim, the picture quality is inferior, and their are technological issues. You'll never own anything, but there's also no issues with losing movies, etc. Right now the technology is too new, the MPAA's business models are too short-sighted and backwards to do this, and the infrastructure simply isn't ready. But in time I think you will see this.

HD netflix and the like are still lower quality the BluRay is.



one word.... Bitrate.

Netflix HD streams also don't have multichannel surround, only 2.0 (from what I've read/heard).

While Blu-Ray may never become a mainstream media format we have a very long way to go before physical media is replaced by streaming. High resolution video and audio require a large amount of bandwidth, HDMI 1.3 offers 10.2 Gbit/s. As the video resolutions increase the bandwidth requirements will continue to increase.

On the other hand right now content providers, Cable and Satellite, are even unable to offer the bandwidth to provide HD content without serious video and audio degradation. With Internet use rising and the amount of bandwidth people are using increasing the Internet is currently running out of bandwidth as a whole. ISPs are trying to cope with this by imposing bandwidth throttling, etc.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518405,00.html

So currently there is not enough overall bandwidth out there to support streaming as a solution. Even if you are willing to accept the serious video and audio shortcomings that streaming offers.

Now lets say that instead of streaming you download the entire content before playing. Once again we hit the same issue. HD content requires too much bandwidth to transfer without degrading the quality of the content and our Internet infrastructure is not designed to handle the load we would require. Thats not to say I myself do not download media from the Internet, I do. There are movies out there that I consider 'download' grade and I accept the degraded video and audio while viewing. Then there are movies I consider worth sticking to physical media with in order to get the best viewing experience possible.

Until there is a great breakthrough in terms of the Internet infrastructure or media compression I do not see physical media going away.

On the other hand right now content providers, Cable and Satellite, are even unable to offer the bandwidth to provide HD content without serious video and audio degradation. With Internet use rising and the amount of bandwidth people are using increasing the Internet is currently running out of bandwidth as a whole. ISPs are trying to cope with this by imposing bandwidth throttling, etc.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518405,00.html



This is what the ISP's would like to be true, and are therefore saying it, but it is infact completely the opposite.

the BIG transit providers (not ISP's, but the companies that connect ISP's to other ISP's to actually form the internet) are selling bandwidth at an all time low. As with any supply and demand market, the price is low because there is more supply than demand.

It is financially benificial for ISP's to make everyone think the tap has run dry and charge a premium for extra bandwidth, limit the amt you can use w/o extra costs, throttling, etc. Their goal = revenue, nothing more.

If there are any bandwidth bottlenecks it's within the ISP's internal networks and only there because they failed to invest in futureproofing / upgrading technology. Verizon and Comcast (i'm in Canada by the way so no bias there) are the two scrambling to invest in next gen technologies (FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0).

Proof of this. I visited St. Maarten last april and met a bartender who was from Canada. He commented that in that small island where living standards are lower than North America (US/Canada) he can get 50mbps internet for $40US/month.

I'm sure most of us pay more than that for ~10mbps. Proof they are behind the times and greedy.


back on topic now... another piece to this puzzle is storage and retention time. How many of you watch the same movie more than once? Want to do that with downloaded media, expect to invest in a huge hard drive. But what if the hard drive fails? it's gone forever. While for physical media you pay for it once and its yours forever, nothing more needed.

The ultimate solution? Buy the BluRay and make an electronic copy on a server for HTPC usage.

For one thing, you bought a PS3 which does things other than play BD discs. So, it is not a waste. The BD player is a side effect of the gaming system you bought. The audio/video quality of BD is better than anything else out there. Some people will wait forever for the next best thing and never stop and enjoy what currently exists.

I use netflix streaming and the quality for the non-HD streams (the vast majority) is below DVD quality when blown up to a large screen. Its a great service, but far from perfect. I expect that the HD ones are better, but there are very few of those. I haven't watched any of those yet, not sure if my internet service can handle that rate. They are undoubtedly working on this, but it will take awhile.

Imagine the storage size and bandwidth required of a netflix-server farm capable of storing 100,000+ 30-50G movies and serve them to 100,000's (or millions??) of simultaneous users. Even if they use some sort of peer technology to help with the bandwidth, it is still a big project. The technology will eventually get there, it always does, but not next year.

I think BD will have a lifespan at least as long as DVD did before alternatives appeared. Have you ever tried to download 20Gig?

I doubt Netflix is streaming 1080P...:p

This is what the ISP's would like to be true, and are therefore saying it, but it is infact completely the opposite.

the BIG transit providers (not ISP's, but the companies that connect ISP's to other ISP's to actually form the internet) are selling bandwidth at an all time low. As with any supply and demand market, the price is low because there is more supply than demand.

Tier 1 providers are the people I deal with. They are the ones who are running into bandwidth issues. A shared burstable 10 mb/s connection which relies on local ISP caching for $40 a month is a lot different than a dedicated 10 mb/s connection on a tier 1 Internet connection that will cost you ~ 2k a month.

The big issue is that residential providers have over sold and over promised bandwidth and rely on the fact that only a small portion of users will utilize the bandwidth promised at one time. The issues they are running into are that people are growing beyond to short random bursts of usage and the bandwidth to accommodate this is just not there. The load issue is reverse from what you are thinking. Yes, there are issues with overloaded internal networks, mainly due to promising 10 mb/s connections for $40, but that is just from false advertising and over selling to lower the price and this issue is easy to resolve. The more critical issue is that the peering between ISPs cannot handle the increased loads being placed on them that it the hard part to solve and will be the biggest bottleneck we need to overcome.

The name Blu-ray is derived from the underlying technology, which utilizes a blue-violet laser to read and write data. The name is a combination of "Blue" (blue-violet laser) and "Ray" (optical ray). According to the Blu-ray Disc Association the spelling of "Blu-ray" is not a mistake, the character "e" was intentionally left out so the term could be registered as a trademark.

Tier 1 providers are the people I deal with. They are the ones who are running into bandwidth issues. A shared burstable 10 mb/s connection which relies on local ISP caching for $40 a month is a lot different than a dedicated 10 mb/s connection on a tier 1 Internet connection that will cost you ~ 2k a month.

The big issue is that residential providers have over sold and over promised bandwidth and rely on the fact that only a small portion of users will utilize the bandwidth promised at one time. The issues they are running into are that people are growing beyond to short random bursts of usage and the bandwidth to accommodate this is just not there. The load issue is reverse from what you are thinking. Yes, there are issues with overloaded internal networks, mainly due to promising 10 mb/s connections for $40, but that is just from false advertising and over selling to lower the price and this issue is easy to resolve. The more critical issue is that the peering between ISPs cannot handle the increased loads being placed on them that it the hard part to solve and will be the biggest bottleneck we need to overcome.

I have a dedicated 30mbps/30mbps download/upload fiber optic connection that never, ever, ever dips below 29.7mbps download, even for hours on end. I pay $29.99 from Cincinnati Bell, and the technician told me that if Verizon FIOS moves into the area to compete, they have the capacity to flip a switch and up the speed to 100mbps for each user.

If I was so inclined, I can obtain bluray iso's which are bit perfect in about 35-40minutes, or about the time it takes to go to the store and rent it and come back.

No usage caps. I've downloaded over a terrabyte in a single month between streaming 1080p video, getting all of my television online, etc.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Blu-Ray is dead, but quite literally the ONLY two reasons for me to get a blu-ray player at the moment (which I am in the market for) is ease of use for friends, visitors, and the girlfriend, and legality. I can't afford a $2000 bluray player, and a powerful HTPC can get me picture quality just as good as the $300-400 models that I am in the market for, with bit perfect downloads that only take 30 minutes. Plus, I don't have to deal with BS 90 second load times or discs not playing.

Again, if I was so inclined, I could log onto usenet via newsbin (takes 2 seconds), use the search feature to locate a bit perfect blu-ray rip (10 seconds to find a good one) and have the download started in 25% of the time it takes just to get a disc to load on a player! I could be watching the download before the previews and menus are over!

I'm old fashioned, and I enjoy the ritual of browsing through physical discs and selecting one to watch. I enjoy the shiny physical player in my rack, and the bragging rights it gives me. Hell, I will openly admit that part of the reason I'm buying a player is because there's one more empty shelf on my rack and I'd love to put a slab of good looking medal on it. But the next generation of HT enthusiasts have been brought up not even knowing what a physical media collection is, and have also been brought up to not realize that downloading media illegally is a form of theft.

Bluray will exist because of our generation, as well as because of those those who aren't technologically savvy. For the next generation though, it doesn't have a chance.

Hard copies will always be around. I for one would be very weary of keeping all of my information on a hard drive. There is just to much risk of losing things. I would much rather have a copy of the disk. That along with the fact that people are finally realizing how good audio can be with BluRay and I think this will also keep the format around for quite some time.

On top of those two things many Americans don't have the quality internet to download large HD movies and even if you do it can still take several hours to download.

IMO, don't worry about streaming media outdating BluRay until there are some very big improvements in the internet

Hard copies will always be around. I for one would be very weary of keeping all of my information on a hard drive. There is just to much risk of losing things. I would much rather have a copy of the disk. That along with the fact that people are finally realizing how good audio can be with BluRay and I think this will also keep the format around for quite some time.


I felt very strongly this way when I started collecting DVD's. I had to clean out my shelves when re-doing my TV room and realized I had probably 200 DVD's that I had viewed exactly once, or worse, never.

(confession: I have copies of at least two movies in VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, superbit DVD, and Blu-Ray. I don't have a problem. I can stop any time I want. Really. Worse, I also have one of the titles in both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD)

There *is* something very nice about having a copy of a movie, even if I don't really plan to watch it again. But Blu-Ray is more like DIVX (the failed DVD alternative, not the codec) in that you "rent" the movie, even if you own the disc. Forced firmware upgrades (please don't let it brick my player again!) to play a new movie might stop you from playing an older title.

There is nothing that causes Video Rage better than buying a new title, tossing it in your multi-thousand-dollar setup, and being rewarded with a blank screen which, five hours later, turns out to be a problem with the order in which you powered on your HDMI devices. In the meantime, the family and friends you gathered to watch the movie have lost interest and left.

DVD was, to me, the pinnacle of friendly video technology. The media was small enough to keep handy, fairly durable, and it WORKED. I have never, ever, had a store-bought DVD fail to play in any hardware, and it plays consistently, without a million "gotchas".

On top of those two things many Americans don't have the quality internet to download large HD movies and even if you do it can still take several hours to download.


I keep hearing this one. The reality is, the US is second only to the EU in broadband, maybe 3% slower, and it's getting to be quite rare that 6-8mb/s isn't available virtually in any residential location, and our costs are lower than average.

IMO, don't worry about streaming media outdating BluRay until there are some very big improvements in the internet

I think the back-end services will be more of a limitation than the transport. Upgrading a 400,000-subscriber VOD system is a big ticket, and you only do it when you've got an assurance of revenue. VOD is still very iffy, and I think the stream-store-play model works a million times better than the real-time streaming required by traditional VOD. The death of consumer network streaming equipment seems to agree with this. Question is, how do the cable companies feel about becoming just a pipe rather than the media hub? Most of them make a lot of revenue selling ads, which isn't possible if they're just the transport.

I can understand the apprehension of the content owners, but they need to take a long hard look at why DAT and DIVX failed, and why VHS and DVD were huge successes: Consumers just want something that works, with a known price tag, and very simple rules for use. Blu-Ray is still selling at "novelty/early adopter" numbers. It doesn't face any serious competition, but it must kill off DVD decisively, or slowly wither into the niche with my CAV Laserdisc collection.

I can rent any recent DVD title for a buck two blocks from my house. At that price, copyright infringement fades into the "why bother?" category, which should have the studios sitting up and taking COPIOUS NOTES rather than making me learn the arcane rules of public-key encryption, HDCP-over-HDMI and why my $1,800 name-brand display won't play a lot of titles without elaborate work-arounds.

Anyone find it a bit...odd...that more internet companies are looking to limit what we download yet it seems more and more and more things are being streamed to us?

Such as demos, movies, etc....

Now, I know WHY they are doing it....to get more $$$ but I just find it so odd that as the internet dependence seems to be growing VERY fast, the internet companies are doing the exact opposite of that and trying to limit what we download

Streaming is not going to happen any time soon. Blu will exist for a long time (but not as long as say DVD).

The internet backbone will not support even 1080p downloads in bulk for anytime soon.


by the time it does, the industry will probably have moved to 2160p and either multi-layer Blu's or the next version of physical medium.


Some time down the road it may catch up... but don't hold your breath for a while.


Storage capacity available in homes has just about hit the point where you can store a good 500 DVD quality movies for streaming with redundancy for under $1000. that would be about 40 Blu's.

Anyone find it a bit...odd...that more internet companies are looking to limit what we download yet it seems more and more and more things are being streamed to us?

Such as demos, movies, etc....

Now, I know WHY they are doing it....to get more $$$ but I just find it so odd that as the internet dependence seems to be growing VERY fast, the internet companies are doing the exact opposite of that and trying to limit what we download


They are doing that because video downloading my replace TV. Basically if they don't limit their bandwidth they start letting other companies canalize their own business. Comcast wont mind if you stream all the movies you want from their system but they do if you start pulling from netflix.

I personally dont care if it is bluray or another format, as long as I can buy it, hold it, shelve it, and play it whenever I want on however many disc players I own.

+1 Hard media only in my household, preferably without usage restrictions.

+1 Hard media only in my household, preferably without usage restrictions.

+1 but for me add locally stored digital formats that are immediately available at any time to play. At least DVD quality for movie titles that it doesn't really matter if they are DVD quality over HS (such as movies 10+ years old or movies that it really doesnt matter (like the wife's chick flicks).

Storage capacity available in homes has just about hit the point where you can store a good 500 DVD quality movies for streaming with redundancy for under $1000. that would be about 40 Blu's.

What are you talking about? IF it's redundancy you want, get 4 identical 1TB hard drives for $75 shipped each. That's $300 for 500 lossless DVD rips or 50 lossless blu-ray rips averaging 40GB each. If you are smart and do 15gb mkv's, that's 133 blurays (or about 1000 DVD's).

And that's for TWO copies of everything with 100% redundancy.

Hell, my thinkpad laptop has over 50 blu-rays on it right now ripped to MKV's.

What are you talking about? IF it's redundancy you want, get 4 identical 1TB hard drives for $75 shipped each. That's $300 for 500 lossless DVD rips or 50 lossless blu-ray rips averaging 40GB each. If you are smart and do 15gb mkv's, that's 133 blurays (or about 1000 DVD's).

And that's for TWO copies of everything with 100% redundancy.

Hell, my thinkpad laptop has over 50 blu-rays on it right now ripped to MKV's.

"Computer pro"

You must have magic hard drives. all 4 can sit on a desk and self raid, self power and self stream the data like a media server!!!

In a real world case like my setup that I put together 1.5 years ago:

24x7 100% up time flawless use streaming:

4 x 750 gig good raid spec drives: $400
Good Adaptec raid card: $350

Good spec PC that can handle streaming.

In my case I have a Dell Precision workstation (pretty much a server) that has windows sever 2008 enterprise installed, 8 gigs of ram and 2x4 core Intel Zeon procs and a 64 gig high speed Samsung SSD for the OS drive. that all ran about $4000 and it might be over kill but I have yet to have a problem yet streaming 24X7 using TVersity.

That gives me 2TB of storage.


I currently have 300 movies of full quality non compressed dvd's averaging about 4-8gig each which fill up about a total of 1.4 TB. Viewing them on my 133" screen looks no different then a standard DVD.


So yes, I think my claim of $1000 for a proper trouble free storage solution sticks pretty good.

"Computer pro"

You must have magic hard drives. all 4 can sit on a desk and self raid, self power and self stream the data like a media server!!!

Actually, it's this magic thing called a $100 network attached storage device.

In my case I have a Dell Precision workstation (pretty much a server) that has windows sever 2008 enterprise installed, 8 gigs of ram and 2x4 core Intel Zeon procs and a 64 gig high speed Samsung SSD for the OS drive. that all ran about $4000 and it might be over kill but I have yet to have a problem yet streaming 24X7 using TVersity.

That's nice. Too bad a pentium 3 is just as capable of raiding a couple of drives and sending 1's and 0's over a network at 3-4 megabytes per second (the rate of 1080P video). Also, I would love to know the details of this mythical "Zeon" processor you speak of ;)

I currently have 300 movies of full quality non compressed dvd's averaging about 4-8gig each which fill up about a total of 1.4 TB. Viewing them on my 133" screen looks no different then a standard DVD.

Your point? Did you expect them to? :confused:


So yes, I think my claim of $1000 for a proper trouble free storage solution sticks pretty good.

Not even close. You realize that you can get a raid-capable NAS for $100 and a network-attached WDTV for $90, right? Or, if you already have a computer (as do 99% of people), you don't even need the nas! Just plug in the hard drives and share them over the network! You can even raid external USB docks and enclosures in windows (no fancy adaptec card needed). One of the hundreds of receivers/DVD players/Blu-ray Players/DVR Devices/Network Attached Media Players will be able to read right off of it! And most importantly, you can use your existing computer to do this no matter how slow it is.

Basically, I can accomplish exactly what you did for about $300-400 total investment instead of $5000 (assuming that a router and network is already in place).

Basically, I can accomplish exactly what you did for about $300-400 total investment instead of $5000 (assuming that a router and network is already in place).


"Computer Pro"

I said $1000.

Nope, you want to go the NAS route??

Of course as you say you are *trying* to stream it from a Pentium 3 of course (running what Win 98??)... come on... that's silly.

Good 3tb (raid 5) decent reliable NAS models still run:

Western Digital WDA4NC: $700
Seagate St340005sha10G: $1200
Buffalo LS-H4.0TGL/R5: $1400
Iomega 34320: $1120
Netgear RNDX4410: $1800


Most are those are more then my $1000 I suggested building one yourself.


when I think about how silly your $300 route is I think.. why not at that point just go buy a 2 TB WD USB drive and connect it directly to your PS3 directly instead of putting together a Walmart streaming system?