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I've read a few articles over the past few months predicting (or even pointing out signs of) a mild recovery in the physical media market, possibly just due to collectors but possibly a reaction to the fact that streaming is kind of collapsing into a pile of filth as every single company wants to have its own service even harder than before or randomly pulling content people thought they'd have forever (or just having less content), all while adding adverts and increasing prices. Personally I've actually increased my physical media purchases over the past year, but that's partially just because I backed up my entire collection into Jellyfin so I could hide the disks from our toddler and realised there were gaps with movies I wanted. Also I bought some Star Trek: Lower Decks as I wanted to watch it and I didn't want to give Paramount+ any streaming money, and it was cheaper on disk than "buying the series digitally". The funny thing about "niche Bluray publishing companies" is it's not that dissimilar to the experience as it's always been. Missed out buying that random '80s movie you liked when that DVD came out? Good luck finding it because they only made a few back in 2009 when you hadn't even thought about it and now you need to deal with Amazon, eBay, or a local used media shop. (I do kind of hope the "physical media makes a comeback" thing works out to be true solely because it'd be really funny for that to happen right after Best Buy/etc. get out of the market)
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Feb 27, 2024 00:01
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Yeah I’ve actually started hoarding blu rays and DVDs myself so despite my cynicism earlier I really do hope they hang on.
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Feb 27, 2024 00:03
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I've done the best of all worlds: get a friend with a ridiculous Plex server and buy him a big-rear end hard drive every once in a while. Digital hoarding, but I don't have to curate anything.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:04
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I recently got a 75" TV and started downloading 4k movies. I have learnt it doesn't take a big HDD to carry all the 4K contents, if you don't court the Marvel crap. You can literally search 4k <year> in the usual places and you can download all the good ones in no time. In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I am watching the 90s version of Tintin show with my son, way better than the movie (and the video games) and very faithful to the comic.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:23
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?? UHD Blu-Ray discs can store over 100GB of data, which is needed for the highest quality 4K films. What you're downloading will almost certainly be compressed to gently caress.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:38
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Good thing I can't tell the difference or it might bother me enough to dig out all my physical media, get a new player, etc A 20 GB copy of Apollo 11 in 4k looks pretty great to my eyes on the TV I'm using
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Feb 27, 2024 01:44
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Yeah 20gb wouldn't be native 4k.
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Feb 27, 2024 01:47
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I have been happy to have had things in my DVD/BR/4K collection that I later could not find on streaming (or would have had to have signed up for more services). Physical media is not an obsolete or failed technology. As far as its future, I agree that it's likely to become a collector-only thing, unfortunately. As many issues as streaming services present, they are very convenient and physical media is expensive to acquire (almost entirely because of licensing, but that's not going to change). It is really annoying how much stuff is out of print or only available as a DVD rather than blu-ray. I bought an all-region player so I could get blu-rays that were still in print in Europe... I am not sure that is really worth doing, though. Sir Mat of Dickie has a new favorite as of 02:30 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 02:26
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I have a hard time telling the difference between a solid 1080p copy and some of my 4k discs.
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Feb 27, 2024 03:26
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100GB UHD disc collectors are the people who gawk at the 4K Lucy movie because apparently it has the best transfer. You couldn't pay me enough to watch it again.
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Feb 27, 2024 03:32
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You could find some charts, I think at common TV viewing distances, the difference in resolution is barely perceptible. I have not done the math myself and would be happy to be corrected. Personally, with my unexceptional TV and sound setup, I wouldn't upgrade a blu-ray to a 4K unless there are other factors at play (e.g., a new restoration). Definitely worth upgrading DVDs.
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Feb 27, 2024 03:38
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Anything more than 1080p is opulence. You don't need anything more than 1080. 720 is fine for most things. Edit: And I'm talking a youtube 720, not even a real 720.
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Feb 27, 2024 07:45
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The General posted:Anything more than 1080p is opulence. You don't need anything more than 1080. 720 is fine for most things. I recently-ish upgraded to a 1440p screen, and don't think I've ever felt like 1080p wasn't enough. 720, eh, okay, serviceable, but I see no need to worry about even 2K
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Feb 27, 2024 14:54
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I don't quite know there is more to it. I can't find it now. Could have been PC Tools instead of Symantec. You had a floppy with bad sectors because of visible damage, run the tool on it and the drive would go nuh-uh-nuh-uh-nuh-uh and occasionally the disk might come out working again.
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Feb 27, 2024 15:10
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The General posted:Anything more than 1080p is opulence. You don't need anything more than 1080. 720 is fine for most things. I use a pair of cheapass TCL TVs (40" and a 43") for my desktop monitors (including gaming); they're both 4k, but I only run them at 1080p, and they look great, have good speakers, and the refresh rate is fine.
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Feb 27, 2024 18:04
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I use a 27" 4k monitor, and there's a definite difference for computer graphics. Text, UI, even games look way sharper at 4k. Real life video much less so: The best 4k content has a very distinct crispness, but 1080 is fine most of the time. I tend to watch youtube at 1440, it feels like a good compromise at that specific size/distance.
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Feb 27, 2024 18:37
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I could afford more storage but I like keeping my little curated museum of saved video content on a 1TB drive. Add some stuff, remove some stuff.
doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 00:15 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 00:07
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Butterfly Valley posted:They were like floppy discs in that they had a window in the protective shell to expose the media The very first CD drive I had (1995?) required the CDs to be put into caddies to read them. I'd completely forgotten about this until your post jogged my memory
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Feb 28, 2024 00:42
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I remember CD caddies. They were crazy, like the manufacturers didn't trust their own machines to read CDs.
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Feb 28, 2024 00:50
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doctorfrog posted:remove some stuff. You’ve lost me
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Feb 28, 2024 00:55
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doctorfrog posted:I could afford more storage but I like keeping my little curated museum of saved video content on a 1TB drive. Add some stuff, remove some stuff. Same. If my 8TB array gets too full, I just start deleting movies and seasons of TV that I’ll probably never watch again to make room for new stuff.
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Feb 28, 2024 02:09
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Flipperwaldt posted:I don't quite know there is more to it. I can't find it now. Could have been PC Tools instead of Symantec. You had a floppy with bad sectors because of visible damage, run the tool on it and the drive would go nuh-uh-nuh-uh-nuh-uh and occasionally the disk might come out working again. You might be thinking of that crazy old tool called Spinrite from GRC.com.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:01
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Grumio posted:The very first CD drive I had (1995?) required the CDs to be put into caddies to read them. I'd completely forgotten about this until your post jogged my memory The first CD drives we had in our elementary school (1995, too?) were external, caddy loaded machines. I guess we either broke the caddies pretty quickly or the school was very stingy on buying extras, but to change CDs during a class we had to flag down the librarian to swap disks into the caddy at our workstation. That poor woman. Very little computer training, no teaching experience, put in charge of a bunch of little ones and a motley collection of word processors, ancient Apples, 386s and 486s festooned with add on drives. If anything went wrong, her first instinct was to exclaim, "WHAT DID YOU PUSH?!", because she sure as poo poo couldn't troubleshoot but the most basic things. I got sent to the principal's office after school one day because I, "Broke one of the computers." Dad came in, asked to see the comp lab, and found the problem: "Ah! The power cord for the monitor seems to have come out of it's socket. It works again." I swear now, as then, that I didn't unplug it (not that that helped). That was a good lesson for everyone. I've carried it close to my heart ever since. Car doesn't have electrical power? Check the battery wires. Trailer lights not coming on? Is the pigtail really in there? Computer won't turn on? Is it plugged in? Phone dead after charging overnight? Is it plugged in and did you remember to charge the powerbank just in case, you fallible person, you? Then again, I remember going to work at Parsons Technology with my dad and him very angrily updating drivers and reconfiguring poo poo so I could play games on one of the empty PCs. Eventually, dad would give up and go get his buddy Tom to unfuck the situation. Good guy, Tom. Old school software engineer, sometime light aircraft pilot, rarer-time Huey Cobra pilot in the National Guard. Patient, thorough, able to deconstruct a problem into it's smallest parts. Good lesson there, too. Find someone who knows what they're doing before you actually break things. Also, listen to them and follow directions. We're never as helpless as our frustration makes us feel.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:09
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Kwyndig posted:I remember CD caddies. They were crazy, like the manufacturers didn't trust their own machines to read CDs. The caddy took up less space inside the drive than a tray and eject mechanism, so in the early days of CDs when mechanisms weren't yet standardised and miniaturised it left more space in the drive for the other components.
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Feb 28, 2024 12:27
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madeintaipei posted:That was a good lesson for everyone. I've carried it close to my heart ever since. Car doesn't have electrical power? Check the battery wires. Trailer lights not coming on? Is the pigtail really in there? Computer won't turn on? Is it plugged in? Phone dead after charging overnight? Is it plugged in and did you remember to charge the powerbank just in case, you fallible person, you? I have to help people troubleshoot a lot of weird issues with our equipment before we ship it. I always tell people to start with the dumbest problems first (is it plugged in? Is it turned on? etc.) and step up from there. The worst people are the ones who have an idea of what they think is wrong and keep trying to come back to it even after that's been eliminated.
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Feb 28, 2024 16:04
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The best I've seen in a television set manual was PROBLEM: no picture PROPOSED SOLUTION #1: turn around so that you are facing the television screen
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Feb 28, 2024 16:07
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Kwyndig posted:I remember CD caddies. They were crazy, like the manufacturers didn't trust their own machines to read CDs. Only place I remember seeing them was in public school, and I'd be willing to bet it was so 12 year olds wouldn't handle the CDs directly.
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Feb 29, 2024 02:33
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The General posted:Only place I remember seeing them was in public school, and I'd be willing to bet it was so 12 year olds wouldn't handle the CDs directly. Except there was only one caddy per computer so you had to handle the CDs to put them in the caddy. Reasonable guess though.
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Feb 29, 2024 02:45
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In my school at least, the librarian was in charge of CD swapping. Or there was just enough caddies to go around. Memory is spotty though, so I could be making poo poo up.
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Feb 29, 2024 02:56
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Or maybe my school was too cheap to buy extras. All possible.
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Feb 29, 2024 03:03
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Yeah, in the heyday of the CD caddie the expectation was that you'd have several. Very early on the CDs themselves were expensive, so the target market tended to be for professional poo poo or crazy high-end enthusiast poo poo. So you'd just have a handful of CDs that you were using at any given time, and you'd just have however many caddies to cover that. Like when OSes started being distributed on CDs a computer lab would have things like stacks of color-coded caddies for SunOS, IRIX, and whatever. When the unit price of a CD came down and CD drives became ubiquitous this obviously didn't make sense, and the caddie more or less disappeared.
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Feb 29, 2024 03:08
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I had a Sony SCSI CD-ROM drive that came with an old Sun SPARCStation IPC I had, but sadly I lost it all in a move. It was actually a mildly handy thing to have if you like playing with retro computers because it was all so interchangeable and there's still ways to burn new CD-Rs that would work in it, though you could just buy a SCSI2SD at this point. I also mentioned it in my V-2000 post but that Philips CD player my dad owned was pretty early, 1986 or so. It didn't need a caddy (since it was meant for music, after all) and had the normal front loading mechanism that CD-ROM drives would eventually settle on, but it was pretty weird otherwise. Also, if you stuck a CD-ROM in it, it did actually know what it was and would just show "dAtA" on the screen. From what I recall it would also play the data, if you wanted. Want a remote control? It's an optional extra, involving an obtrusive pyramid you were meant to tastefully leave on top of the unit. My dad hated this, took them both apart and embedded the receiver PCB inside the main unit, only having to make a little hole on the front for the IR dome. He also worked for Philips at the time, so he had the maintenance manuals from them, including full schematics. The maintenance manuals turned out to be useful because when he first received it, it didn't work. He had something like 6 CDs, and only one of them played, and even then it was just like half a track before it failed. At the time Philips had a major presence in the town I grew up in, so there was actually some onsite support available and he dropped it off personally with the repair guys. They returned it saying everything seemed fine...so he just opened the maintenance manual himself and started doing the troubleshooting steps as described. A few steps into the "laser pickup assembly" diagnostic steps the manual found the problem - the focus lens was installed upside down. He flipped it over and it worked perfectly, and it seemed pretty clear the guys at the repair department hadn't even tried to fix it. Last time I saw it my brother was still using it in his hifi.
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Feb 29, 2024 07:51
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Charles Ford posted:Want a remote control? It's an optional extra, involving an obtrusive pyramid you were meant to tastefully leave on top of the unit. That pyramid is amazing! edit: since caddy chat was upthread, stumbled across a listing for one of these amazing cassette carriers:  
Trabant has a new favorite as of 15:13 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 15:10
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I remember a friend in college was using a giant tower with a CD caddy style CD drive up to about 2003. And it wasn't an old one from the mid 90's, he purchased it sometime in 1999 or 2000.
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Feb 29, 2024 15:12
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Flipperwaldt posted:We used to have a software from norton that would rub the drive's heads over the floppy to flatten out creases. PC Help? PC Health? Something like that. Lmao. There's physical media, and then there's physical media.
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Feb 29, 2024 15:53
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I was taking groceries out of my car trunk and noticed that the two storage bags I keep in there are made by Case Logic, and for a moment my mind flashed back to the CD era and how I bought so many binders and caddies from them. I can't separate that brand name from my memories of that time.
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Feb 29, 2024 15:57
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Trabant posted:That pyramid is amazing! Hey it's the same texture and color as the interior plastic on my old Datsun 280ZX! I assume it's absolutely permeated with cigarette smoke
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Feb 29, 2024 19:14
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I had a cassette carousel.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:29
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TotalLossBrain posted:I had a cassette carousel. I had one of these. I also had some stackable magazines that had the same mechanics as that carrier thing (from what I can see).
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Feb 29, 2024 19:49
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 https://twitter.com/KariLawler/status/1763998311160152463?s=20
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Mar 2, 2024 20:48
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