This Blu-Ray Forum is not as active as it used to be..... - Page 4

I'm in the camp that none of this has anything to do with the popularity of A/V in general declining or everyone being saturated or the existence of other sites. I place the decline chiefly on the site redesign.

I frequent several other message boards, and most of them use vBulletin these days. I'm used to that format, I know how subscriptions work, I know how to find posts and search and do basic forum functions. I can also expect all the buttons and icons and figures and features to be the same across all of them. It was the same years ago when everyone was using phpBB. But when they switched over to this format, I got lost. It took me a long time to figure out how subscriptions worked (figured it out eventually), and I didn't like the navigation. I slowly started posting less and less. Eventually it got to the point where if a thread wasn't in my subscriptions, I never saw it because I wasn't checking the actual boards. I still don't, really. I found this thread because I didn't have any activity in my feed and wanted something new to discuss.

I post in several threads across all of the subforums, and it's the same everywhere. AVS site traffic is just down in general. I have not noticed this decline at any other messageboard that I post at.

I grew tired of his BS also. Too many of the insiders embraced their rock star status and got used to handing out their spin and even believing it as fact. If you were to believe one side you would have thought that Toshiba was a poor little guy company going up Goliath when the fact was that it was nothing more than several large billion dollar corporations playing a PR game at the expense of enthusiasts.

Both formats were made better by the competition. BD was going to MPEG2 only... HD DVD was initially pitched as using a DVD9 disc with H264/VC-1. And I'll still never get why some were arguing for a format that had less space available and a lower bandwidth. If it wasn't for those I doubt 3D would have been an easy add for the BD format.

At first navigating through it was a bit of trial and error now its easy. It's not that difficult. There mobile site is awesome, very easy to use.

I don't recall the site knew he was a pretender....I thought they were suckered too.

I'm dense here....how is that a conflict of interest?

See post# 87.

Never used it....I don't "mobile" anything.

I have to admit, I don't visit this site much anymore. Years ago I'd check in every day...
Now I rarely bother, nothing seems to be happening, especially on the Blu-ray forum...
But what drove me away initially? I'm REALLY sorry to say this guys, but it was the downright nastyness, condescending attitudes and arguing taking place here. It just didn't seem a friendly, welcoming place anymore... :-(

I tend to agree. Personally, I haven't lost any interest in movies or my Home Theater system. I tend to spend a lot more time with my music system, but that's always been the case.

I don't come to AVS as much as I used to, though I do come by as often as I can. The main reason is that even with cable modem, it now takes 15 seconds min. to load a page and all the ads, etc. And then oft times three clicks for the back button. It's just annoying and old. And I've only felt this way since the Hubble change. I don't think it should be on me to figure out the magic combination of hardware and software to make the best of the changes.

The easiest way any more is for me to just check threads I've posted in from my profile page. But I miss out on a lot of stuff that I used to just surf endlessly otherwise. It's kind of like if I don't have a nice block of time to do nothing else, I don't get too deep into the forums like I used to.

I love AVS....but it is what it is now.

A true gentleman and the heart of AVS Forum IMHO ,yes Elvis has left the building........................... Certainly one of the factors he saw the writing.

Art

Jeez, when you guys were initially talking about "The Insider", I thought it was Amir.

I do remember Penton-Man.
Personally he struck me as a total wanna-be and never paid him much credence.

To Art's post about his Michigan theater group of friends, I think that is totally normal.
For most people the novelty, coolness wears off and it just becomes another appliance so to speak.

For me? I still get jazzed by my theater room.
It would be nice if I didn't do so much viewing alone.
Not to be pathetic, but in reality the passion for music and movies is not widely shared.

While tons of people have flat screens now, the real cinephiles are few and far between.
Edited by Milt99 - 3/8/13 at 6:18pm

The only things that anyone from the HD DVD camp ever gave me were a T-shirt and a pen, the same that anyone who attended their public preview event received. I got much the same from the Blu-ray side. I wish somebody would've told me about these free laptops.

The difference between him and Penton was he was company shill and deliberately put out disinformation about BD, while most of what Penton said turned out to be true.
How Penton came by this information and who he passed himself off as is another story.

A lot of tech writers for websites and at the time newspapers were comped free HD DVD players. The HD DVD group was trying to buy free PR. Most tech writers can't afford the stuff they write about so they paid back the gift by hyping HD DVD over BD.
Edited by Toknowshita - 3/9/13 at 1:10pm

Don't feel bad, there were many that were passed over by MS. Old news here. I only post this so folks will not think I am making this stuff up

Same here.

Other A/V sites have not been declining in traffic nearly as drastically as this site has. In fact it's the opposite - sites like the Blu Ray forum are more popular than they've ever been (regardless of how you feel personally about other forums, that's irrelevant).

This site is laid out poorly. It's so cluttered and scattered - even finding this subsection is not intuitive.
The Search function is horrendous.
Moderation is far too strict.

Also, this site's community became far, far too obsessed over certain minor imperfections in any given release to the point where that was seemingly ALL that was discussed (and I include myself in this too, unfortunately.) If a title didn't have slight DNR overuse or any other imperfection it was not widely discussed in general, if it did that was ALL that was discussed. Pages upon pages upon pages of it. It got... old and predictable - I think everyone just sort of burned out on it.
Edited by Stinky-Dinkins - 3/9/13 at 1:58pm

Not sure if anyone has identified who “Club Penton” really was and how he came by his info. I only posted a few questions in that thread and the answers proved to be correct. So he was privy to inside info and/or was being fed the info. My main reads were insiders drmpeg (AVS dr1394), kjack, paidgeek and Talkstr8t.

The story I heard is he was a jogging partner or a neighbor of a Sony exec.
Supposedly he was drawing out information from the guy and then posting in on the net.

Heh- I'd half forgotten all of the "insider info" cloak-and-dagger stuff while the format wars were going on.

I found Facebook was taking a lot of my movie watching for fun time (I ended up deleting my FB account back in December) and I'm more likely nowadays to watch something from the DVD library (I still have way more DVDs than Blu-rays). Real-life stuff has kept me from upgrading things (unless something is broken and unfixable I'm still using it) so I don't have much to say hardware-wise either.

I didn't know Alan left :-(

Well he was last online 3 Days 23 hours ago. He must be still visiting AVS.

Yep, it looks like he stops by but I'm gonna trust Art on this one. :-)
Edited by deeann - 3/9/13 at 7:20pm

 

Talk about Elvis leaving the building...

 

You haven't been showing yourself around here for a long time as well I think.

 

Welcome back!  How's Lurch?

Hi Deeann!

Are you still rockin' a Panny plasma?

I'm still using my original Panny 4UY as our TV (though now we have a Samsung LCD in the basement for the boys). Though I watch barely any TV. One reason I didn't upgrade is that I watch very little TV. When I have free time it's almost always a movie (I went with a projector for my main viewing room). I know I'm purportedly missing out on the new golden age of TV, but there are too many movies I have to get to in my collection.

As for deleting FB accounts, when work is heavy I unplug my modem. Forums like this are the biggest time-thieves for me.

Not looking to debate as we are all entitled to an opinion. When Amir and Kevin did the HD DVD tour, they did an outstanding job. I shot a bit of footage the night they were in L.A. Good times they were.

Since this can of worms has been re-opend i'll throw in my 2 cents.... both had a personal agenda and uber egos to boot, yet amir made no qualms about it and everyone with 1/2 a brain cell knew his ties to Microsoft & HD DVD whereas Pentoman was more often than not sly & sneaky about provin his affiliations with Sony, and as a poster was more vengeful than others.

Btw, our beloved AVS jumped the shark after the Cjplay/TaledegaNights/PaidGeek/"avs memeber leek"/Sony fiasco, which IMHO brought the format war & insider's thread to a new and untouched since low.

And I agree with cinema123, my 14 and 12 year old are equally as happy and satisfied to watch BD or HiDef content with earplugs on their Macs, iPads & even iPhones as they are on a calibrated flat panel w/decent surround sound in the family room.... gives us "old f^%$ks" food for thought about the upcoming generation and their interaction with HD.

I too prefer the "old" style AVS software/layout interface, made it way easier for me to stay on top of all that was happening.

G

That may have been true later but even after AVS started requiring insiders to indicate their affiliation in a signature line Amir did not. I know because I sent him a PM with step by step instructions on how to do it and even then he took several days to comply. Besides, in the early days Amir insisted that MS was “neutral” in the HD disc format war. I for one never believed it for one μs. Then I just stopped visiting the HD Media section because hip waders were not sufficient to keep out the BS there. I did return on 1-4-2008.

Almost all tech publications receive hardware on loan from the manufacturers for evaluation. This is standard industry practice, and there's nothing unethical about it. They are expected to return it or purchase it afterwards, however.

I can only speak from my own experience. I had close contact with both camps during the format war. Neither ever offered me hardware to keep for free. I had to purchase every HD DVD player and Blu-ray player that I reviewed. I was offered professional discounts on some of it. But, again, this is standard industry practice and not unethical. I was never once put in a "quid pro quo" situation where I was asked to write positive things about any product in exchange for a reward.

That's not to say that nothing shady went on during the format war. Frankly, both sides engaged in their share of dubious behavior. Let's not forget that the BDA threw parties in Vegas for allegedly "impartial" bloggers, and then hired them to write for an offical Blu-ray promotional web site. That's a huge conflict of interest and violation of journalistic ethics.

The format war was a crazy time, but it's long since over. Do we really need to dredge up these old arguments again?

No, IMO we should move on to anamorphic Blu-ray and 4K. I would love to see a comparison of a standard 2.35 lettered boxed BD to a true anamorphic BD. Well I probably would not be able to ever see the comparison in my neck of the woods but I would like to hear what you, Deering, Spears and others have to say about it.

Anamorphic Bluray will only be useful for displays with optical expansion mechanisms or for displays with higher than Bluray native resolutions: that's going to be a very niche market for some time, but then perhaps that is what AVS Forum is becoming.

Unfortunately it will count me out as my ability to be an early adopter of the bleeding edge expired some while ago.

I would still be interested in maximising the presentation of existing Bluray standards (and I believe a lot more can be done in that area such as 4K displays, OLED, CMS, grain adders, Bluray authoring and DRM, frame interpolation within players, etc), so any discussions of that nature will still be a draw card.

However, since this sub-forum is about Bluray software and the discussion is going off-topic, I will close by saying that the quality of Bluray software is unfortunately in the hands of the studios who sadly do not hold it in high esteem.
Edited by IanD - 3/10/13 at 8:54pm

No one ever said it would appeal to the DVD only crowd. 2.35 projector screens have become readily available now we need a good anamorphic lens that is priced to appeal to a broader market. Some folks zoom their projectors and are quite happy with the results.

BTW, it is Blu-ray not Bluray

Thank you! Lurch is fine and says "Hi!"!



Sure am! Same 4UY here too. It's still a great TV! Overdue for a screen cleaning though :-p

We have a projector we're using for public screenings but no good place in our living room for one of our smaller screens (and I've gotta keep the bulb hours down on the PJ). I'm finding stuff on the shelf we've picked up along the way but haven't watched either.

Unplugging the modem sounds like a really good idea. There was one project I had that was getting tight on time so I set the email to "vacation" and deactivated the social networking accounts (which actually made later deletion easier).

For TV show TV we're just making the rounds back though our DVD sets usually (our local library has season sets too which is pretty cool). Or Hulu. Our old Voom box still pretty much works as a tuner (with some issues) but I'm thinking of getting an HDHomerun at some point (missed the holiday sales) and hooking that into the htpc when a good deal comes up.


It's kinda like walking into an AVS time machine.

History is history and that was that.

Let's move on....

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.