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Comment by illwrks | Hacker News Reader

Most people I know have bluray players and streaming services, but almost always stream now.

I prefer Blu-ray for quality reasons, and also I find some comfort in owning a physical disc

When I sometimes buy BDs (mostly foreign titles from my native country, not available for streaming from usual sources), I'll rip them raw with MakeMKV[0] decrypting the video TS files in the process. Then I use MKVtoolnix[1] to wrap original video/audio/subtitles to MKV. Generated .mkv goes to a local NAS from where I can play them with Xbox using Kodi or VLC (storage requirement is ~10GB and up / movie - you're essentially grabbing the movie as is from the BD).

This has the benefit that they are now available without having to find the disc, and also this process gets rid of annoying menus and extras and just gets you to the movie. This will also prevent kids from using your BD discs as frisbees.. ;-)

Only downsides I can think of are that last time I checked, VLC/Kodi didn't support Dolby Atmos soundtracks on Xbox and some amount of time that goes into extracting them.

I haven't tried archiving any UHD titles yet, so don't know if this would work for them. I'll hazard it would. Only take more storage.

[0] https://www.makemkv.com/ [1] https://mkvtoolnix.download/

"Most people I know have bluray players and streaming services, but almost always stream now. I prefer Blu-ray for quality reasons, and also I find some comfort in owning a physical disc"

Many years ago it was accepted wisdom that the very best blu-ray player you could buy was actually the PS3.

I am mildy interested in a blu-ray player and I wonder if, in 2018, the PS4 is the best option - in the same way that the PS3 was at that earlier time ?

The PS4/PS4 Pro isn't quite as good a bluray player as the PS3 AFAIK, but it's fine. The main issue is that it doesn't play 4k bluray. The Xbox One S & Xbox One X do, though, and the S is one of the most affordable 4k bluray players.

I don’t understand how a 4K Blu-ray movie with 4x the pixel data can fit on a disc that’s only 2x a 1080 Blu-ray. They must compromise the bitrate? HDR must add overhead also?

The codec moved from h.264 to h.265, which is a big boost in efficiency, plus the extra pixels don't require as much information to describe as the original ones. 128mbit seems pretty good given that

Wow. Mind blown. I never thought of the extra pixel density as carrying less marginal data.

It's a great option, but definitely get the proper remote control for it— navigating the menus and stuff with a game controller is really not great.

OTOH, you can get a regular old dirt cheap blu-ray player for <$100 now.

Now there's 4K Blu-ray (which even the PS4 Pro doesn't support). I'm a big fan of the PS3 media remote but the PS4 remote is much worse.

All Blu-ray players have the same problem because there is only a single source for the transports. The transports are all really loud! Kinda ruins the experience for me.

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