[TheOrator]

Let me begin by saying I love movies. Movies are probably my favorite thing. Whenever I have a very good day, I'll break out a Henry Weinhard's root beer and watch one of my favorites. I believe not only that watching movies alone is a potentially enlightening experience, but also that watching movies with friends is a good bonding experience. I am, in a word, pro-movie. I'm a classic movie snob, too, entirely against pan-n-scan, I stopped watching VHS tapes a long time ago, all that stuff.

However.

When I watch a movie, all I need is the movie (preferably DVD, but I'll still do VHS if I'm desperate), something to play the movie, a TV with speakers, and, begrudgingly, a remote control.

Blu-ray discs. Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Flat-panel Hi-Definiton TVs with 1080p. This all seems a little...decadent to me.

Am I alone?

[Spoon Poetic]

Not sure how this belongs in the Debate Club. I guess we can try it for a bit and see if a debate comes from it somehow? If not it'll have to be moved to the proper forum.

Anyway, while it can be fun to have big booming sound and a giant screen to watch, I certainly am not going to pay for all of that. I am just fine with a regular ol' tv and what-not.

I think there is a lot more than just movie-watching that is overly decadent these days, personally.

[civilian_number_two]

I'd love to weigh in on this but first I need some clarification. Orator, do you own Blu-Ray, 5.1, and a flat-panel monitor with 1080p? And even while owning an enjoying it, you are often just as happy with the alternate experience? Or are you comparing the home theatre experience disfavourably because you can't afford it?

This is important information.

[TheOrator]

We've got a PS3, which plays Blu-Ray discs, and in fact I began wondering this because of the new flat-panel TV we got at dad's house yesterday. I also wondered because as my dad and I began to watch Alien last night, he tried for a while to get our Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound to work, which he never succeeded at. While he did this, I began to wonder if it was worth the effort, and, by extension, worth the money.

At my mom's house, I have a smaller, round-screen TV with a built-in DVD player and VCR on a stand next to my computer desk. I usually put in a disc, plug in some headphones and turn off the lights and I'm set.

And make some popcorn.


In hindsight, I should have given the back story.

Thanks, Civ.

[Gobbler]

All depends on whether you're really enough of a selftitled audio-/videophile.

We're seeing less than favourable adoption rates for new standards like Blu-Ray, IPTV and HD euqipment at the moment, since they lack the concrete unique-selling-propositions for an immediate switch. At the same time, customers who already switched are generally very pleased with the improvements in quality (except for IPTV, which is somewhat behind since it heavily relies on broadband connections and quality of service routines that aren't thoroughly implemented yet).

Personally, I have to say that 1080p televisions combined with a nice surround-sound system really improve the experience, but obviously only for movies which support them.

From what I've seen in practice so far, setting up the surround-sound really is the most difficult task there right now. Make some ill-adjustments and you're completely ruining it all.

There's also the thing that you don't really get to appreciate the possibilites until the movie producers decide to really go nuts on the effects. Most movies make very subtle use of the multi-channel capabilities, so most of the time you won't really notice a difference to stereo. It's only when they extract some specific sounds, like... uhh... I think in one of the early scenes of Gladiator, someone threw an axe and they really pushed that little bit, making it seem as if something really was coming at you from behind.

[civilian_number_two]

Well Orator, if the issue is that you haven't got the sound system set up right, I can assure you that you haven't yet completed the A/B testing necessary to make the decision. Your dad will only have to get the sound and picture right once; after that you can watch thousands of movies and tv shows without any further tinkering. Yes, it will be worth the effort.

While romantically I like the idea that the film is the thing, transport to a world of imagination and all that crap, a giant screen with great sound is the reason I will be seeing the new Bond film in the theatre rather than waiting for the DVD.

I am not a huge fan of Blu Ray yet because I think they tinker too much with the colour and the contrast. So in effect everything looks too sharp, which isn't natural, and there are no degrees of black, which is impossible. Ultimately when they get their shit together and start making discs that look like the actual movies, its larger file size will allow for broadcasrting movies on bigger screens without artifacting. Then I may give it another look.

For now I would only bother with High Def DVDs or at least an upconverting player and tv. And yeah, flat screen is preferable because what you see is what you get. The rounded screen is just a lens to magnify a smaller image. So naturally the resolution won't be as good.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 13 November 2008 - 10:36 PM

[TheOrator]

The 5.1's been set up properly for years. The problem is the disc. The setting changed nothing, presumably because it was a pirated copy I got at Goodwill because the title said "Allen."

EDIT: That's exactly my argument. Certainly seeing a movie in a theater is a different can of beans than watching one at home, and I too will be seeing Bond in a theater, but it is most definitely the filmmaker's job to make the movie worth watching in any situation.

I suppose if someone could convince me that such stuff is needed to provide the full experience and not just a better experience I could rethink it.

This post has been edited by TheOrator: 12 November 2008 - 04:53 PM

[Spoon Poetic]

Personally I am not a fan of HD in most settings. The argument I always get for HD is "look at this here baseball game! You can see every blade of grass!" *flip channel* "Look at this, you can see the pores on his face!"
Personally, those are not things I am interested in seeing. And beyond those little minute details that I don't care to see, HD doesn't really offer anything to justify the money for it.

I do have an HD television because I got it for Christmas, but if I were the one spending the money, and I I needed a tv, and I could get a non-HD tv for cheaper, that's the way I'd go.

And Blu-Ray sucks for all the reasons Civ mentioned. The colours are just plain awful. But there is potential there, I will give it that.

Surround sound can be fun for certain movies, but again, not something I think is worth spending a lot of money on.

No movie should be dependent on these effects - surround sound, high def, etc - to be worth watching.

[Gobbler]

I respectfully disagree with that very last statement. Movies that practically live on CGI, extreme colours and sound effects (like, for example, Iron Man) are very much worth it. I just love to see fireworks and extreme detail of futuristic design and mechanics and all that, but maybe that's just me.

And what's that about the colours? Blu-ray is just the storage medium, the thing that would affect the colours should be the used video codec which is h.264 for most movies... or the displaying screen... or are movie producers using a special film format for Blu-ray releases today?

This post has been edited by Gobbler: 13 November 2008 - 03:30 AM

[Spoon Poetic]

All I know is all of the Blu-Rays I've seen are all wacky on the colours. Like civ2 described. That's on several different tv sets, and the owners told me it was the Blu-Ray, not the tv. *shrug*

And I like seeing special effects, but I don't believe any movie should depend on them. The Star Wars prequels, for instance...

[civilian_number_two]

Yeah, Gobbler, correct me if I'm wrong, but the storage medium is not alone in this. They're not transferring the same information is the thing. Let's go back a bit. I have the CAV laserdisc of the special edition of ALIENS. That disc has every frame of the movie, with no digital approximation. In order to make 24 fps transfer to the 30 fps world of video, they repeat every fifth frame. But the summary is that you are essentially looking at a photograph of every single frame of the movie. You can't get more faithful than that. I also have the DVD of the same special edition. I have performed A/B testing with these films, to show people the difference in video quality from one to the other. The DVD is significantly bluer. This isn't a function of the tv, since I am playing both discs on the same set, and flipping between the two while playing the same scene. This isn't the player either, because this is common to all of the DVDs produced and to all of the players I have seen it on (pretty much everyone I know owns the special edition of ALIENS on DVD, and they all use different players). So the point is, the DVD image contains less information, so they cut corners, and I'm sure, Lucas-like, Cameron wanted to "fix" his movie by tweaking the image. So a lot of the red is gone, because it doesn't look as nice in digital, and also the blue look throughout looks more sanitized and futuristic, I guess.

Blu Ray took this idea and went to hell with it. So far in every blu ray disc I have seen, if something is black then it is in complete absence of colour. I am curious what they would do with THE GODFATHER or better yet, CITIZEN KANE, famous for their use of contrast. The Blu Ray displays in stores always show animation, because with their high-contrast worlds, cartoons look great when they are really really sharp. But the real world, and hence films of it, son't look that good when the contrast is too high. Everything is perfectly separated from everything else, and this is not how the real world looks. And everything black simply has no colour at all. There are no degrees of shadow, which again is great for a cartoon but not for BLADERUNNER.

I haven't looked at Blu Ray in quite some time though, so maybe that was a problem in its infancy? I'd like to see the Blu Ray of the special edition of ALIENS.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 13 November 2008 - 10:35 PM

[Gobbler]

Blu-ray's infancy was merely marked by the usage of the old MPEG-2 standard that was also used for DVDs, not much more there.

I've tried to do some research but it's all pretty vague... maybe I'll ask some of our gadget-freaks here if they heard of those problems before.

[Dr Lecter]

The fact is, the only difference between DVD and Blu-ray is: resolution. If you can watch a DVD while thinking "I wish this was at a higher resolution": You should be shot. If you survive, you should buy blu-ray. If you're sane/don't have money that needs to be thrown off a bridge: stick to DVD. Anymore questions?

[reiner]

The fact is, the only difference between DVD and Blu-ray is: resolution. If you can watch a DVD while thinking "I wish this was at a higher resolution": You should be shot. If you survive, you should buy blu-ray. If you're sane/don't have money that needs to be thrown off a bridge: stick to DVD. Anymore questions?

Thanks Lecter. This shit always annoys me whenever people ask why Blu Ray is so much better.

Well of course it's better because blu ray discs are priced so much higher.

The logical answer is that it's not. Most people still have an infantile concept of blu ray thinking it has some sort of magic in it that makes it better, however you'd be hard pressed to find someone who could readily tell the difference between "DVD quality" and "Blu Ray quality". I've answered this enough for a number of friends and they almost don't believe me for some reason when I tell them that blu ray is essentially the same tech as dvd, which is the same tech as cd. It's just storage capacity. The easiest thing I can explain is that the 1s and 0s on a Blu Ray are the same 1s and 0s on anything else.

It's definitely not affordable yet (for media, PS3 price range is about right now).

As far as sound goes, 5.1 is a little much. I think a nice 2.1 tower setup is better in a home theater environment and more affordable.

For 1080p resolution though, this is awesome. The only caveat is finding things that support this high of a resolution. Most HD television signals broadcast 720i/720p/1080i. A lot of programming is still being upscaled (meaning it's the same resolution but it doesn't look shrunk, aka "bigger pixels") and DVDs are still using old resolutions due to their initial recording. You can't make a film look any better than what it was originally recorded in (Sorry! Blazing Saddles will never be a true 1080p movie). However, newer formats (like Blu Ray) have the capacity to store feature length movies with high resolution and are now beginning to do so. I think the real winner for HD are games. Playing MGS4 on my 1080p television was an eye opener. It looked incredibly cleaner than on my 720p television.

Either way, for your money, a nice sized, flat screen, high res television (with a high tolerance for ambient light) is a good investment. The biggest part of a movie experience is the visual aspect and it's better when you and all of your friends can watch and enjoy it together.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

And to what Civ said in his post about Blu Ray imaging. This is more on a playback difference because of the amount of data they can store and what they want to tweak. Think of how many "remastered" movies of old came back on DVD with different colorations and whatnot. This even occured on VHS.

It's even more silly because of stuff kind of like this: http://www.tomshardw...abyte,3924.html

I remember hearing a couple years back about some guys out of Berkeley I believe (I need to find the source again) that simply reduced the space between valleys on a normal dvd, modified a normal dvd-rom and stored 3TB of data on it. We learn to compress and be more precise, but the technology leaps are always years between.

This post has been edited by reiner: 28 November 2008 - 04:57 PM

[Gobbler]

I've answered this enough for a number of friends and they almost don't believe me for some reason when I tell them that blu ray is essentially the same tech as dvd, which is the same tech as cd.

Yes...

It's just storage capacity.

No. The other thing about Blu-Ray is the codec used for encoding, which is h.264, also known as MPEG-4 AVC. Now while you're right about it essentially being the same as the good ol' MPEG-2, the enthusiasts will tell you that MPEG-4 is capable of registering higher color depth and precision information, along some other small (also hardly perceivable) improvements.

A lot of programming is still being upscaled (meaning it's the same resolution but it doesn't look shrunk, aka "bigger pixels") and DVDs are still using old resolutions due to their initial recording. You can't make a film look any better than what it was originally recorded in (Sorry! Blazing Saddles will never be a true 1080p movie).

Ahh, that really depends. You see, most movies aren't recorded digitally yet. From what I've read and heard so far it's only slowly becoming the fashion since the technology is either too costly, or unable to process the required data in the given time, or consumes too much space, or consumes too much virtual storage space - or all of the above. But I'm trailing off.

The nice thing about old movies is that they've been recorded with analogue technology. Ever been to your local photo-shop with some of your old small photographs and had them digitized? You might be surprised about the outcome's resolution and precision.
It's not always possible, but for a lot of movies it can actually turn out pretty well - I've seen it work out brilliantly with Lawrence of Arabia, though I don't know about Blazing Saddles. IMDB tells me that the former was recorder in 65mm while the latter's only 35mm. (Then again, even Iron Man was still filmed in 35mm.)

This post has been edited by Gobbler: 28 November 2008 - 05:23 PM