Is Blu-Ray going down for the third time?

[Tyler Purcell]

Physical media is dead for all but the most die hard collectors. Good riddance, I say.

I think you missed the point of my statement... A film print or a hard drive with a file on it, those are also "physical media". So no... web streaming will never surpass the quality of physical media.

 

Also, quality doesn't seem to matter at home. People watch movies on their iPads with 5mbps .h264 streaming without knowing any better. We are moving away from a "TV" dominated world, to one dominated by "devices". Were so use to watching shitty youtube video's and horrible Cable/Satellite MPEG streams, we've actually come accustom to lower quality.

 

As stated earlier, the reason why we will never see web streaming get even remotely close to physical media is quite a simple one... the cost of bandwidth to the provider. This may sound stupid and infinitesimal, but bandwidth is a HUGE problem when you're streaming 20GB per second on each rack, with 100's of racks around the country. Most streaming services are between 1 and 5Mbps, which means they can stream a lot of content without much cost. However, when you increase the bandwidth to lets say 25Mbps, the cost for 10,000 people streaming that video has gone up quite substantially.

 

Now, .h265 is changing some of this, it's MUCH more efficient then .h264, but it still takes up quite a bit of space. Real UHD movies bandwidth will be in the 100Mbps range, that ain't gonna be streaming over the interwebs anytime soon.

 

Then you add the fact that internet speeds in the US have been stagnant for a decade. We average around 35Mbps in this country and the internet providers aren't doing anything about it. Google's fiber system was cancled before it got up and running. I've had 100Mbps service for over 15 years and I live in the media capitol of the world, yet that's pretty much the best I can get. Until that changes, we won't see anything change on the "quality" front, outsides of experiments like Netflix's 4k service, which we tested and was meh... not very good.

[Keith Walters]

Ehh, .h264 is still an 8 bit 4:2:0 compression format. It's also very challenging to encode and decode properly. Efficient yes, but still an antique technology that even when BluRay first came out, was long in the tooth.

 

4:2:0 just means the chrominance signals have the same resolution vertically as well as horizontally. That's perfectly fine for a delivery format, which is all Blu-Ray was ever intended for. Not so hot if you want to use the Blu-Ray for source material for editing, but even then in most cases it doesn't make all that much difference. Depends on what you want to do/\.

 

"I don't make BluRay's, nobody has ever requested one."

 

I first got a Blu-Ray burner about 8 years ago, and I still haven't used up the pack of 5 blank discs that came with it! Everything I've made fits fine on a single-layer DVD using AVCHD, and nobody can tell that from Blu-Ray.

[Perry Paolantonio]

I think you missed the point of my statement... A film print or a hard drive with a file on it, those are also "physical media". So no... web streaming will never surpass the quality of physical media.

 

Nope. I know exactly what you meant. And I stand by my assertion that your point is wrong.

 

 

 

As stated earlier, the reason why we will never see web streaming get even remotely close to physical media is quite a simple one... the cost of bandwidth to the provider.

This is wrong, because...

Now, .h265 is changing some of this, it's MUCH more efficient then .h264, but it still takes up quite a bit of space. Real UHD movies bandwidth will be in the 100Mbps range, that ain't gonna be streaming over the interwebs anytime soon.

...Wherein you make the exact point I've been making in this thread. Codecs change. Encoders change. Bandwidth requirements change. In 1995 you couldn't get decent looking Standard Def video for less than about 40MBps (mega BYTES per second). With H.264 you can get fantastic SD video for under 1Mbps (mega BITS per second). That's a factor of 8 difference in bandwidth. With H.265, though I haven't tried it, I'd be surprised if you couldn't get equal quality in half that bandwidth.

Also, when making your comparisons, you should compare the same resolution in different codecs. Comparing H.264 for Blu-ray (HD) to H.265 for Blu-ray (4k) is an unfair comparison. The efficiency of the codecs is only seen when you look at the same resolution footage encoded in the different formats. So compare HD MPEG2, AVC, HEVC but not HD AVC to 4k HEVC. That's a meaningless comparison.

Then you add the fact that internet speeds in the US have been stagnant for a decade. We average around 35Mbps in this country and the internet providers aren't doing anything about it. Google's fiber system was cancled before it got up and running. I've had 100Mbps service for over 15 years and I live in the media capitol of the world, yet that's pretty much the best I can get. Until that changes, we won't see anything change on the "quality" front, outsides of experiments like Netflix's 4k service, which we tested and was meh... not very good.

 

Where are you getting your numbers? I will speak anecdotally here at first, then show you actual data. In 2007, I had 15mbps internet from Comcast at home. I think the fastest you could get back then was around 35, maybe 40mbps and it was very expensive. I now have 25mbps at home. Comcast is now offering gigabit here in Boston and in many other major cities. Multi-gig speeds are coming. We hate Comcast (it's our only choice in Boston), and are considering Verizon FIOS when they're done with the rollout in my neighborhood this fall.

 

At our office, in 2007 we had 35Mbps cable business internet through RCN. In 2017 we have 155Mbps business cable internet. RCN is now offering gigabit, including here.

 

This is definitively not "the media capital of the world" yet we have pretty decent options once you get past the Comcast monopoly.

 

That said: let me show you some actual numbers:

 

Wireless (mobile) broadband speeds, US nationwide average, Q1/Q2 2017: 22.69Mbps

Wired (Cable/Fiber, etc) broadband, US nationwide average, Q1/Q2 2017: 64.17Mbps

 

Source: http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/

 

So that's about double what you're saying the average is. And it's been that high for a while. See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/03/average-broadband-speed-in-us-rises-above-50-megabits-for-the-first-time/

 

That's from August 2016, a year ago. US broadband speeds are neither slow nor stagnant. Are we behind other countries? Yup. Are rural areas underserved? Yup. But demographics have also changed and more and more people live in cities with faster wired broadband. And with wireless speeds at 22Mbps, that's rapidly catching up. Verizon is rolling out FIOS in my neighborhood, but rumor has it, it's not fiber to the home, it's fiber to a pole outside your house or in your neighborhood, with a wireless bridge to an access point inside your house. Because wireless can be damned fast.

 

The assertion that streaming can never achieve the quality of physical media is utterly ridiculous. I mean, come on man. Don't you see the way technology evolves and adapts?

Edited September 8, 2017 by Perry Paolantonio

[Tyler Purcell]

Where are you getting your numbers?

Federal websites over the last few years. It was part of my job in the IT industry to report such information back to our business partners.

 

Speedtest.net is not a source for tests.

 

I had 50Mbps cable in 2002 when I moved out of Boston. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I started on 35Mbps and upgraded to 100Mbps pretty quickly.

 

The assertion that streaming can never achieve the quality of physical media is utterly ridiculous. I mean, come on man. Don't you see the way technology evolves and adapts?

Sure, but physical media will always have the upper hand. If I hand you a hard drive with an 8k original camera file on it, no matter what, it will have higher quality then the same file "streamed" online.

[Perry Paolantonio]

Speedtest.net is not a source for tests.

 

And why not? Their Q1/Q2 2017 data is based on 26 million tests (for wired internet) and 3 million for wireless. Those are massive sample sizes spread over a broad geographic range. Did you even look at the web site I linked to?

 

If anyone is in a position to gather and report this kind of information it's them, because they're testing actual speeds, not nominal speeds (I pay for 25Mbps at home, but rarely get that much, so data about who pays for what tiers of service isn't really useful when the service quality fluctuates). And most importantly, they're not the internet providers, so there's no incentive to fudge or pad the data to make the service look better than it is.

 

The TechCruch article, which is from a year ago and references the ongoing Speedtest reports is a far more reliable source than your anecdotal evidence.

 

 

 

Sure, but physical media will always have the upper hand. If I hand you a hard drive with an 8k original camera file on it, no matter what, it will have higher quality then the same file "streamed" online.

 

Nobody is arguing that. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/special-pleading

 

Streaming services will never be able to deliver physical media quality, it's just not gonna happen. The studios will always want restrictions [...]

 

These are your words, and the context *you* are using here is clearly end user consumption, which is the scope of this whole thread. Obviously an end user isn't going to be watching an 8k DPX or camera raw sequence. That's not what we're talking about here.

[Tyler Purcell]

And why not? Their Q1/Q2 2017 data is based on 26 million tests (for wired internet) and 3 million for wireless. Those are massive sample sizes spread over a broad geographic range. Did you even look at the web site I linked to?

Yes, I did look at the data. There are 286 million people who use the internet in the US. People who use speedtest.net, are generally IT people like myself, who use it to figure out how fast their spanky new internet connection is. If you're a grandmother in Alabama, you aren't going to Speedtest.net.

 

The government's speed data is based on internet providers records. Considering I've traveled all over this country and been to dozens of post production facilities to deal with IT support, I can attest to how horrible internet speeds are

 

These are your words, and the context *you* are using here is clearly end user consumption, which is the scope of this whole thread. Obviously an end user isn't going to be watching an 8k DPX or camera raw sequence. That's not what we're talking about here.

I'm merely stating that physical media will always trump streaming media. There is no way you can take a 4k Pro Res XQ 12 bit 444 file and stream it over the internet in exactly the same quality. Yet, I can get that file from my friend on a hard drive and watch it in real time no problem.

 

We can't yet stream .h265 4k UHD 10 bit 444 content over the internet or over broadcast. We're still stuck using 8 bit 4:2:0 streaming and that's been the same way for over 10 years now. I don't see anything coming down the pipe to change that.

[George Ebersole]

A couple of weeks back I discovered something I thought had gone extinct: A fully functional video library, that's not a vending machine and has people serving and a back catalogue of DVDs and so on.

As was typical when other libraries were active, when all the latest releases on DVD were out, you could often find a Blu-Ray copy still on the shelf. When my second Blu-Ray player bit the dust a couple of years back, that was roughly about the time of a "mass extinction" of video libraries also occurred, and I hadn't bothered with Blu-Ray since.

Anyway there was a Target store just down the road, and they are currently selling basic DVD players for A$35 (currently about US$28) or Blu-Ray with HDMI for S$59 (about US$47). Since the cheapest DVD player with HDMI also costs about $60, I thought that was a pretty good buy. Basically, that was my only real reason for buying a Blu-Ray player: to increase my chances of finding a disk to rent.

I was absolutely astonished at how good the picture is, and how easy this cheapo model is to operate, compared with the over-designed monstrosities I'd had before.

But economically, what exactly is the point of Blu-Ray? Yeah, yeah the original idea was that it would be the "Top Shelf" item, with BD discs and players costing about twice their DVD equivalents. That hasn't happened; currently Blu-Ray discs cost the same or close enough to the same as DVDs to buy or rent, and the price gap between DVD and Blu-Ray players is rapidly narrowing.

 

As far as quality goes, even though the other members of my household can readily appreciate the difference in image sharpness between DVD and Blu-Ray, for normal viewing, they just don't care!

 

The idea is to give you higher visual fidelity. Blurays are better than DVDs, and DVDs were better than VHS, and Beta was better than VHS but lost out because of cost and restrictive content.

 

I still prefer bluray over streaming. There's no information loss. The picture is just clearer, and when I stream from Amazon or Vimeo it's always a little soft, or softer than anything bluray can offer.

 

I didn't buy a bluray play until last year, and shelled out something like $50 for a small Sony. I remember when they were hundreds of dollars if not a thousand or more for a single player. The idea is to milk the novelty of the technology by pricing it high.

 

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area broadcast looks pretty crisp. Much better than analog. It'll always be around, and has caught up and surpassed home video technology. But I'm not sure blurays are pointless.

 

I've heard that some in the younger generations are migrating to all online content, but to me a DVD or bluray is like having a book on your shelf, and I still find it easier to pop in a disk than to hunt around on Amazon or some other website for a movie I really want to see.

 

I think bluray is just superior media. That may change, but like I say, when I compare my streaming from a marquis website like Amazon or Vimeo to the image quality of the same film I have on bluray, the bluray, or even sometimes the DVD, wins out every time.

 

Just me.

 

p.s. I remember getting SONY's first Walkman ages ago in the early 80s, and the sound quality there still beats Apple's iPod. The fact is, however, you can access more with a tiny HD than an audio casette or CD, but I prefer quality of portability or accessibility. Most people go the other way assuming the technology is affordable.

[Perry Paolantonio]

Yes, I did look at the data. There are 286 million people who use the internet in the US. People who use speedtest.net, are generally IT people like myself, who use it to figure out how fast their spanky new internet connection is. If you're a grandmother in Alabama, you aren't going to Speedtest.net.

 

The government's speed data is based on internet providers records. Considering I've traveled all over this country and been to dozens of post production facilities to deal with IT support, I can attest to how horrible internet speeds are

 

While I don't have any data to back this up, I think your assertion that only IT people use speedtest is ridiculous. I also don't think you have any data to prove that it's just IT people. If you do, please provide it. Otherwise, please stop using your personal experience to try to quash all argument on a subject.

 

I'm merely stating that physical media will always trump streaming media. There is no way you can take a 4k Pro Res XQ 12 bit 444 file and stream it over the internet in exactly the same quality. Yet, I can get that file from my friend on a hard drive and watch it in real time no problem.

Again, you keep changing the goalpost here. Of course a master format won't look the same as an end-user format, and of course you won't be streaming ProRes 4k 4444XQ. Nobody ever said it would. This thread is about end user formats. It's not about master formats.

 

You're comparing apples to oranges. Please stop.

 

We can't yet stream .h265 4k UHD 10 bit 444 content over the internet or over broadcast. We're still stuck using 8 bit 4:2:0 streaming and that's been the same way for over 10 years now. I don't see anything coming down the pipe to change that.

And as has been pointed out already, 4:2:0 color subsampling is perfectly fine for a consumer delivery format. But again, broadband speeds are rapidly increasing worldwide. Rollout of >100Mbps internet is accelerating in most major cities, and this is at the consumer level. It's only a matter of time before it's possible to do this.

My point here is that you keep insisting that streaming will *NEVER* (your word) have the bandwidth of physical media, in the context of home delivery. You're wrong.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Perry Paolantonio

[Perry Paolantonio]

My point here is that you keep insisting that streaming will *NEVER* (your word) have the bandwidth of physical media, in the context of home delivery. You're wrong.

 

I should have more coffee before posting because this is really unclear. What I meant to say here is that you keep saying that streaming video quality will never look good as video delivered on physical media. In the context of end user consumer formats, you're wrong. Streaming will continue to speed up, codecs will continue to evolve, and in the very near future, you will find that what could only be done on physical media is perfectly viable via streaming.

 

Again, the context is consumer formats. Not master formats.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Perry Paolantonio

[Tyler Purcell]

While I don't have any data to back this up.

Well, I do!

 

Here is the Akamai "state of the internet" report for Q1 2017

 

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf

 

If you scroll down to page 12, you will see the US sits #10th at 18Mbps average. If you visit Akamai's website and download other "state of the internet" reports, you will see, the speed has increased 9% over last quarter... yet it's still 18Mbps...

 

Also, Akamai says there are only 142,764,621 unique ipv4 ID's on the internet in the US, but that's not "devices" that's modem's. If you look at the device data, the number I gave earlier is more realistic.

 

I think your assertion that only IT people use speedtest is ridiculous.

The data doesn't lie... Speedtest's data, doesn't even get close to matching Akamai's data.

 

If all 142 million unique ipv4's pinged speedtest's website, their data would match Akamai's, but it doesn't which shows the huge discrepancy.

 

Again, you keep changing the goalpost here. Of course a master format won't look the same as an end-user format, and of course you won't be streaming ProRes 4k 4444XQ. Nobody ever said it would. This thread is about end user formats. It's not about master formats.

I get your point... that discs will die and the only way to get stuff will be streaming, so it will get better then it is today. I just don't see that happening for many reasons... internet speeds being one of them.

 

HDTV has been around for a few years, yet cable and satellite broadcasts still look like poop. We've dumbed down the consumer to accept the shitty signal because they have no choice and in some cases, like for sports, the bandwidth is increased enough to compensate. So most people don't complain, they just suffer with poop quality.

 

This is exactly what's going to happen with home media. When disc's die, we will be forced to watch shitty MPEG files just like TV because that will be the only thing available to the general public. Content providers are not going to pay for the bandwidth to cover you downloading a 38GB file to watch a movie from iTunes in the best quality, it's just not going to happen. Better encoding methods like .h265 help, but to crunch a movie down to the size necessary for "streaming" even at 100Mbps, looses A LOT of quality over UHD BluRay... which can hold 100GB! YIKES

 

So my point still stands... the record so far says streaming is far inferior to physical media. Nobody has done anything even remotely close and the fact that television still sucks balls, just proves that they don't give two shits anyway.

 

And as has been pointed out already, 4:2:0 color subsampling is perfectly fine for a consumer delivery format.

Wait, so your completely in agreement that 8 bit 4:2:0 is "perfectly fine", yet quite a few UHD disks are 10 bit 444 color space.

 

I don't care what's "perfectly fine", my point is that streaming won't exceed the quality of physical media in our lifetime. So for streaming to be of the same quality of as you put it "consumer" media, then it would also have to be UHD 10 bit 444, which is not gonna happen.

 

But again, broadband speeds are rapidly increasing worldwide.

It has been... but not to the point it needs to be to compete with UHD BluRay.

 

 

Rollout of >100Mbps internet is accelerating in most major cities, and this is at the consumer level. It's only a matter of time before it's possible to do this.

 

My point here is that you keep insisting that streaming will *NEVER* (your word) have the bandwidth of physical media, in the context of home delivery. You're wrong.