Comment by NathanielK

1 day ago

My local library never made the jump to Blu-Ray and still only has DVDs. They have physical copies of video games too though.

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NathanielK

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runarberg  21 hours ago

I don’t know the stats but I would guess more people have DVD players then Blu-Ray, so it makes sense for libraries to rather offer DVDs. DVDs is also one of these things that is good enough. The jump in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is very unnoticeable (when fully immersed) compared to e.g. between VHS and DVD (or even between vinyl and CD).

  • account42  2 hours ago

    That is very much not true and even less true when the blu-ray release comes from a new master that isn't limited by older technology.

  • bigstrat2003  19 hours ago

    The jump in quality from DVD to Blu-ray is huge, as much as it was from VHS to DVD. Going to 4k from there isn't noticeable, but going to HD in the first place is massive.

    • account42  2 hours ago

      4K is still a noticeable increase but, yes, much less so than going from NTSC/PAL resolutions (sometimes even halved horizontally due to interlacing) to 1080p.

    • NathanielK  12 hours ago

      DVDs have pretty good bitrate, just lower res and old codecs. HD would be nice, but as long as you aren't using an old DVD player with composite, they look ok.

      Much better than 480p youtube these days.

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    • runarberg  18 hours ago

      VHS was bad quality, DVD had good enough. The jump from bad to good enough has a much better impact then from good enough to amazing. While most people will make the switch to go from bad to good enough, not many will make the effort to switch from good enough to amazing, unless they are pushed in that direction.

      The jump between vinyl and CD was also massive, but vinyl was still good enough. what CDs had though over the massive sound quality improvements was the added convenience of playing specific songs, not needing to turn it over, or play on the move in your car/walkman/etc, and added features such as easy skipping, shuffle, ripping, etc.

      I would wager that it were those extra features + added convenience (and the cheaper price) which got people to switch to CDs over the massive improvements of sound quality. Blu-Ray had exactly the same features as DVDs (until publishers artificially decided to skip adding extra content on their DVD releases), were exactly as convenient to playing DVDs, but were more expensive. So I think for most people it simply wasn’t worth their time to upgrade from if all they got was to bump their picture quality from good enough to amazing.

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