A Comparison of Skyfall on iTunes, Vudu, and Blu-ray - Page 3

Maybe for iTunes, definitely not for VUDU HDX. They are all similarly priced, $5-6, which is quite reasonable for rentals.

I'd rather wait for another month and buy used title for $6 and get the full quality AND I own the disc. That's what I've been doing for the past couple of years and I've been averaging in buying about 2 movies for every 3 days.

No need to pay (the same amount), eat up my bandwidth AND getting inferior quality on my 96" 21:9 screen.

Where are you getting used Blu-Rays for $6?

DVD Wave in Pickering (Ontario, Canada).

I agree and it will never happen as long as there are people out there like you and me. I rarely watch movies on anything other than blu-ray and almost never stream or download movies.

I want to know as well!

I usually pick up a few at gohastings

Really?

What I get from this comparison is that you can see difference when pixel-peeping, but it is unlikely that on common screen sizes and at average distances a viewer would be able to tell much of a difference between sources.

This has been my experience as well in general, on a 60" fairly well-calibrated Kuro viewed from about 9 feet.

Physical media is dead, IMO, but so is pay-per-view as far as I am concerned. Flat monthly fee for all you can eat (like Netflix) is the future, IMO, just like it is happening with music.

Really? You need to pixel peep for such blatant lack of quality?

You may be right...but I hope not! I think there are enough people out there who will always still want the physical product. Maybe this isn't true for all content but for much of my movies and music I still demand the quality of the actual blu-ray/cd. There is still nothing like it.

Until I have 100mbps internet speed, and services like Netflix, Vudu, Amazon etc that can stream true 1080p material with DTS-MA at 20-30mbps without interruption, then blu-ray disc it is.

People that spend $$$$$ of cash on their audio/video system wouldn't be satisfy with anything less.

Would I use streaming? Of course, I like it on my desktop and 50" Plasma but would I have it in my batcave? No way.

I don't "get" that people in the audio-video hobbyist forum would settle for craptastic PQ and AQ especially when the better version can be obtained with the same amount of $$. Weird. Especially after spending multi thousands of dollars in gears, tweaking the audio, calibrating the display, etc, etc, etc... What a joke.

Not everyone wants to be a maximalist about PQ and IQ.? Hmmmm.... are you sure in the right forum?

Meanwhile, you've said a couple of times here that your "time is worth more than____" fill in the blank. Yet the amount of time you spent (I won't say wasted) going through this exercise only to arrive at the conclusion that Blu-ray is the best... well... anyone here could have told you that before you started and saved you a lot of trouble.

And time.

You didn't say whether the itunes version was 720p or 1080p.

It's worth renting online to save a lot of $$$ over buying the blu-ray, when it is much more convenient, or you wouldn't otherwise get to watch the movie, and when you can't tell the difference anyways. Maybe my calibrated Sharp 60" 3D LED-LCD Smart TV with a DVDO EDGE is too simple and low-quality to see the difference?

Well, your equipment has nothing to do with this discussion. The lack of caring about PQ and AQ is the thing that baffles me.

In my mind, wasting 3 minutes in pressing skip and/or fast forward is so small compared to wasting 90-minute or so watching garbage quality presentation. I would have not spent $20k plus in building, furnishing and equipped my dedicated HT just watch something that is soft, blocky, filled with colour banding.

Like I said before, renting a blu-ray is only $2, buying a used blu-ray is only (approx) $6. In the grand scheme of things, those expenses are nothing compared to the investment I've already made.

That's interesting. From my experience the 1080p itunes usually looks worse/has less detail than the 720p for anything besides animation because of the minimal bitrate increase (4000 vs. 5000 kbps).

720p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/b5bcee215520174
1080p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/ae08cc215520152

720p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/48d4ab213690873
1080p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/7f14ae213690893

720p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/d41c6d213690831
1080p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/9109dc213690853

720p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/1712ef215183213
1080p
http://www.imagebam.com/image/151ba4215183203

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/8096/picture:1
Edited by StinDaWg - 2/16/13 at 6:14pm

+10000000000000000000000

And don't forget the audio quality can differ too.

Plus, WHY are we using up and wasting like 90% of the internet bandwith in the US on streaming movies at inferior quality instead of saving the bandwidth for non-bluray purposes??????!!?

It's a terrible waste of a resource.... to end up with greatly inferior results! It's part of the reason some people claim that their new HDTV looks no better than their old SD CRT did.

And forget commentary tracks or extras.

People keep spending ever more on larger and larger and fancier screens and then feeding them ever more and more utter junk as signal. It makes no sense!

You must be joking. It trivial to tell it apart on 55". Heck it's east even on my 1920x1200 24" PC monitor!

Yeah as most people struggle to get even a consistent 8Mbps internet (and a year ago before they upgraded yet again, many places in my area were often hitting only 1.5Mbps at peak hours!).
The codecs are pretty darn optimized as it is at this point.

Andyet the same people then brag about their new 65" 4k set hah.

So you can afford a 60" set and equipment and then you can't spring $15-18 a month for blockbuster online blu-ray rentals or $2 on a local blu-ray rental?? Streaming isn't free anyway, I mean isn't netflix like $15 or so bucks a months, etc.?
You'd be better off using low end TVs and blu-ray.

What I doubt is the ability of anyone to actually notice the difference between VUDU HDX and Blu-ray. I'm well aware that there is data loss in the compression system, and I hate compression that looks like sh*t. The PBS special about satellites was an AMAZING special, but every time that had a fast moving satellite animation, there was macro blocking all over it. However, VUDU HDX, to the human eye, gives the same experience that Blu-rays do. Physical media is dying. It will linger on for a while, but a tiny minority of extreme HT geeks can't keep it alive forever, just because it theoretically would look better, if anyone could actually tell the difference. Plus, when you're looking at an 8mbps stream, like VUDU HDX users, move forward a few years, and throw 9mbps at HEVC, and you're looking at the equivalent of triple the bitrates commonly used in cable, satellite, and streaming media today.

"It's a series of tubes. It's not a truck, it's not something you dump something on." Clearly, bandwidth is such a limited resource that we need to preserve. The internet has a finite amount and will never grow, because it's a series of tubes. BTW, the airport named for him has the world's slowest wifi. It's pretty amusing.

Pretty sure HD streaming is not the reason people can't see the difference between HD and SD. People are just blind. While DVDs look 75% as good as HDTV on cable because of compression (and sometimes less annoying because of artifacts), when you compare apples to apples (DVD to Blu-Ray, SD stream to HD stream, SDTV to HDTV), the difference is huge.

You need to move out into the 'burbs where they have 75mbps rock solid. Too bad Verizon didn't whip Comcast's butt in the city itself.

It would be like $30 to buy a new Blu-ray vs. $6 to rent on VUDU. And it's much more convenient to just hit the button, and get Blu-ray quality streamed to my TV. And when I'm done with it, there's no physical copy to deal with, it's all digital. I don't mind paying a little bit for good picture quality (i.e. VUDU HDX), but renting and returning Blu-rays is a hassle that I don't need. Honestly, 90% of what I watch on it is over-compressed Comcast or video podcasts or shows from Amazon or iTunes anyways. I don't have any choice with Comcast, other than moving 20 minutes away to RI to get FIOS.

Wait what film grain? The whole thing was shot digitally on Arri Alexas.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1074638/technical?ref_=tt_dt_spec

BiggAW, if you can't EASiLY tell the difference between HDX and Blu-ray, then there is something absolutely wrong with either your display calibration or your eyesight.

Look, if YOU can't tell the difference, more power to you, but DON'T you claim that the difference between HDX and Blu-ray is negligible, because it's NOT