Physical Media: Down, But Maybe Not Out 116
jfruh writes: "For many tech-savvy folks, it may come as surprise that physical media like DVD and Blu-Ray still generate more movie revenue than streaming services. But PriceWaterhouse Coopers is predicting that the the lines will cross in 2017 as physical media sales and rentals decline; already, fully half of those revenues come from supermarket Redbox kiosks. Still, there are signs that physical media won't vanish entirely, including the obsessive needs of collectors and the music industry's increasing suspicions of digital sales."
Re:stupid premise (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly this. Cheap bastards torrent (understandable if you're broke), but if you have money? You rip the physical media. Personally, I rip it into a "visually lossless" format since I'm sure players and disk capacity will catch up to file sizes and formats over time, but that's obsession not convenience. There's just no beating the convenience of a normal filesystem with normal media files.
But then, I tend to watch stuff more than once. DRMed streams are fine, really, if you never plan to watch something again.
Re:Streaming still not an option in many places (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. I can name numerous friends and family in rural spots where internet is either Excede, Hughes, or 4G stick. Without exception, they all have a physical-disc NetFlix subscription.
Re:stupid premise (Score:4, Informative)
What "visually lossless" format are you using? Does it have any actual benefits over re-encoding with a recent build of x264, given that quite a lot of DVDs available were apparently encoded with some shitty h262 codec from 1998, given the artifacts all over them?
Yes, DVDs are in MPEG2... because DVD discs have to maintain compatibility with DVD players, even older ones, and back in 1998 MPEG2 was the type of video playback hardware chips could handle. Btw, digital cable streams in the U.S. are still generally done in MPEG2 as well. There are some newer models of converters the last couple years that can handle h264, but to maintain compatibility with all the already deployed equipment providers are still feeding them the older, less efficient format.
Genuine question, I tend to rip my DVDs to 1000kbs video...
If you're encoding at a constant bitrate you're doing it like it's still 2005. Should be using a constant quality (variable bitrate) encoding setting to get more bandwidth when it's needed in high-action shots or grainy footage, and less in stark black/white screens and low movement footage.
which is approximately half the bitrate...
No, DVD's go quite a bit higher than 2000 kbps. Try 6-9000 kbps.
It also means I can deinterlace the fuckers at the same time. I utterly loathe interlacing and it's all over UK DVDs, particularly TV shows from the early 00s and before.
Most DVDs I see nowadays are progressively encoded, but okay.