hd downloads or is a blu ray drive worth it?

IMHO, I like having the original discs. Although there are some good quality HD downloads out there, you have some loss of information when they are encoded using lower bit-rates. Plus you lose audio options, etc.... but that's just my opinion.

most of the distributions I've seen on the net lose some quality from the disc since they are re-encoded and you often loose the high-quaility audio track (back to dolby digital).

Some are whole, many are not.

Network provided clips ie ABC are only 2 channel audio as well.

True HD version's tend to be 6+GB and not that many seeds (relatively). I download them when I can. But honestly, on my 55A3000, it's hard to tell the difference between a 6gig HD movie vs a 700mb xvid ecode.

I'm not an audiophile or videophile though. I'd rather download the smaller file sized movie and watch it and get it over with.

I would say that it depends on your display device. If you have several thousand dollars in A/V equipment then the $169 for a blu-ray/HDDVD drive is well worth it. HDDVD and BluRay use a very high bitrate and the picture can be stunning!

But if you only watch on a 19" computer monitor, you may not appreciate the difference.

~Jay

I would wait a little longer to get a BluRay drive until the price drops below $100. Personally I am waiting for them to be ~$50. Until then, download away.

You poor thing. Glasses?

Downloading's nice assuming you aren't afraid of the gestapo coming after you, but you also have to remember that the content is getting compressed and therefore isn't going to look as nice as the full 40gb or whatever movie. BR drives are pretty cheap these days, so you might as well. A combination of the two methods is probably most peoples' choice.

A downresed, overcompressed download will never look as good as the original disc. Get a $140 BD drive and rent discs.

There's something pretty badly wrong with your HTPC setup then, because that's a terrific TV. It should be night and day - a 640*352 xvid at 55" looks utterly horrible, blocky with no detail at all.

Really depends on the viewing distance...

Getting back on track, I'm a strong proponent for the future of electronic delivery of movies, it has huge potential. That said, current options aren't a substitute for buying discs if you want to own movies.

iTunes, Xbox Live, Vudu, etc are probably viable options if you don't need to own movies, but since they're pay-per-view models, and due to the technical limitations (read bandwidth/buffering) they're not a real substitute if you want your own library.

As far as a Blu-ray drive goes, assuming you've got, or are building an HTPC capable of HD playback (specifically 1080p H.264) the cost of adding BD playback is marginal ($130 or so I think). I don't see why you wouldn't add BD capabilities.

Those are really the only options for getting HD movies on your PC. Anything else isn't good for anybody.

"get it over with"? Yikes. Sounds like watching movies is painful or a chore for you? I like movies as means of escape, no hurry to "get it over with", so I go for Blu-Ray and the best audio/video experience I can afford.

Depends on your Internet access. 42 minutes of HDTV episodes are between 4 and 6+ Gig. BD discs are between 25 and 48 Gig. If your ISP does not mind you registering 1 TB in up and download go for the download option and sort the legalities according to your liking.

Another factor is the time it takes to store, catalog and possibly repair or make the downloaded content playable. Buy disc shove disc in player then watch versus wait for download to finish, copy to drive for storing/playing. Get error or jerky playback, remux BD stream then hopefully have a decent entertaining session.

the probelm I have with hd downloads is that they tend to corrupt, or have other errors. The few that are good are really good though. Much better than the dvd

I still think we're a long ways away from HD downloads that are of the same quality as a BR disc, and practical. I'd say get the drive. Heck, I'd get the drive regardless. I don't think you have to worry about Blu-Ray discs becoming obsolete any time soon. I mean, I still buy music CDs even though it's super easy for me to (legally) download music.

Several top Bluray discs have managed to fit the video into 17mbit average or so, and it's probably possible with less. Also, compressed lossless audio takes very little (1.5mbit for 16/48). Thus, say 8GB/hour at Bluray quality, down to around 6GB if they really optimise things. If you go for 720p you can half those figures.

Thus, streaming 1080p won't be easy, because most DSL connections can't reach the speeds needed (unless you go the German route of fibre to local cabinets, then vdsl2 50mbit to the home), although cable obviously can manage that. 720p at 6-7mbit is very viable with most countries' DSL setups right now - in Europe most DSL lines can go faster than that.

Downloads, even 1080p, look to be technically possible right now - after all Usenet is stuffed with files of this sort of size. The problem will be convincing the studios, and that frankly seems unlikely.

Think about why you bought into Hi-Def and then think about downloaded content vs. Blu-Ray. While downloaded content may sometimes look OK, it doesn't hold a candle to the original Blu-Ray disc. If downloaded movies seem OK to you then why did you bother wasting your money on an HDTV? You probably would have been perfectly content with a standard def TV.

If you're downloading a TV show in mkv format then you're probably not going to notice as drastic a difference from the original HD broadcast as you would with the same show in avi format. An mkv download still isn't as good as the original but they look surprisingly decent and many of them retain the Dolby Digital audio. Avi files look absolutely horrible, especially when you consider they have lower resolution and detail than standard def broadcasts.

Considering that a 1-hour HDTV broadcast is about 6-8GB and the avi file is about 350MB, it's no wonder there's a serious loss in quality. It boggles my mind how anyone can even consider downloading crap like that to view on an HDTV. They may be fine to view on a laptop or small TV or iPod but they flat out suck for a big screen HDTV. I download shows as a last resort but some people do it all the time and are perfectly satisfied with what they're watching. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Hyperbolic much?

I guess it depends on what sort of downloaded movies you're talking about here. Let's just say that some of the "sample" MKV rips look pretty fantastic. HD audio is missing (but a lot fewer folks have HD audio capable receivers than they do TV so DD/DTS still suffice).

ETA:

Let me just say that if there were a legal means to download higher bitrate h264 movies (that range from 9-12 gigs, usually), I'd be all over it. Of course, becoming widely accepted may lead to bandwidth issues given the size, but 9-12gigs is around a 3 hour wait for a 6mb cable connection, just not sure the cable companies could handle the traffic.

If we are talking about mkv rips of HDDVD and BR, then I think it would be dependent on the video bitrate whether the quality is comparable. You can get 720p rips that are in the 6000 range, and the 1080p rips can be as high as 15k. I'm curious, is there some way of knowing the bitrate of a given movie in its optical format. This way you could compare your "questionably" obtained rip vs. that.

PS. A 1 hour (42 minutes) HDTV episode ripped and encoded in an mkv container is no where near 6gb. We're talking about not much over 1bg w/5.1. That compared to a 700mb xvid w/5.1 can sometimes be hard to distinguish. I was also going to make a comment about the "just get it over with" post above, made me chuckle.

There are, iTunes, Xbox Live, Vudu, all offer HD movies distributed over the internet.


They're quite often a lot higher than that:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=760714

Pirates of the Caribbean are about 20Mbps or better AVC
Spider-Man 3 is 26Mbps AVC
The Fifth Element (Remastered) is 28Mbps AVC

That's average, not peak.

the biggest flaw to BD for me is the post-processing

I like my HD movies with EVR/Reclock and sharpening.

you can force Reclock in PDVD, also EVR it seems......but no sharpening ?!

I'm quite hooked to the "unsharp mask" sharpening of ffdshow to say the truth....it increases the contrast ratio and makes everything so enjoyable to look at.

if only they would allow forcing ffdshow video in PDVD

I'll keep on waiting until we get a MPC HD

720p rips look amazing You honestly aren't going to see as big a difference between rips and the original source as some people are making it out. Compression has come so far these days.

I would qualify that as propery encoded 720p rips. I have downloaded a few that are marked as "720p" and "720p optimized" that are pure garbage. You have to be very discerning - and in my experience, the reasonable quality 720p 2+ hour movies usually take 4.5-6gb, and those generally do not have many seeds. I would rather not have to wait a week to get an HD movie.

Private sites

Um, how about:

Buy it.

Rent it.

I feel exactly like I need glasses when I watch an upconverted movie... like the items are all there but the detail's fuzzy! The Apple TV stuff looks just like this to me.

I don't think that the Blu Ray vs. download is a complete either/or argument. I can have it both ways if I buy a CD or mp3s off of Amazon. One way or the other they end up in my VMC library or on my Zune.

Right now, ripping Blu Rays works, but the files are rather large when you have even several of them. I see the discs as being a bit of a hold over until I have enough storage to store all of my movies on drive.

If I bought the disc, I still have the content, in its best format available right now, which is what's really the most important thing to me.

boy some of the ideas you guys have about downloads are a few years behind.
More recent 1080p mkv files with dts audio are for all intents and purposes identical to the quality on the discs. These files average 8-14 gigs.

There are some downloads of the full media files with menu structure and extras intact. These can be as large as 40gigs when uncompressed.

Imo the only reason to have a htpc is to play the contents off the hardrive, whether you create those files yourself or download. Of course I'm speaking about media you own already.

QFT

Except I also use my HTPC for playing games.

The bitrate on those 1080p mkv rips are usually signifigantly lower than those of their blu-ray sources. Whether we can notice a difference is another story.