Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The argument given makes ZERO sense.

> For now, the physical media releases and touring Ghibli Fest screenings remain the only ways for fans to see these films. “Studio Ghibli does not make their films available digitally, whether for download or streaming, anywhere in the world,” a GKids representative told Polygon over email. “They continue to believe that presentation is vital and particularly appreciate opportunities for audiences to experience the films together in a theatrical setting.”

Huh? Physical media releases are digital and not watched in a theatrical setting.

There's zero difference in watching a DVD or Blu-Ray vs. streaming on your screen.

View on HN

>There’s zero difference in watching a DVD or Blu-Ray vs. streaming on your screen.

God bless whatever first world country with top-tier ISP you live in. Even purchased content I get from iTunes, which I naively thought was downloaded to my Apple TV before I watched it, suffers artifacts from streaming.

I have non-fiber Gigabit in The Capital of Silicon Valley.

That could very possibly be the video encoding used by Apple or the 3rd party that might doing their bitrate specific video encoding. There are some incredible anime specific codec's out there that do a great job and I would want them run instead of a standard encoder you might use for non-anime movies. There's a reason why dvd ripped and compressed anime looks so good.

The big difference between DVD/Blu-Ray vs streaming, is that I haven't owned a physical media player since 2006 or so. I would imagine there are a lot of families who don't own physical media players anymore.

We've looked at renting/streaming a Ghibli movie several times before but were unable to. I suspect that they are missing out on a pretty big market.

> There's zero difference in watching a DVD or Blu-Ray vs. streaming on your screen.

There's definitely more ceremony with putting a disc in the player or going to the theater.

They must be talking about now because I know I've watched Spirited Away, Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies and Ponyo on streaming services in the past.

> There's zero difference in watching a DVD or Blu-Ray vs. streaming on your screen.

I agree with DVDs... but physical Bluray still looks better than streaming specially 4K HDR.

Ghibli films aren't available in 4K HDR.

In Japan they are, but I was also referring to 1080p.

I am almost certain that they aren't; the number of actual native 4K anime can probably be counted on both hands. Even native 1080p isn't really "the norm" yet for TV series (but we're talking about movies here).

I don't know about all anime (I'm not a fan) but here's a Ghibli movie in 4K HDR: https://www.amazon.co.jp/Lupin-III-The-Castle-of-Cagliostro-...

Akira is coming in 4K HDR too.

> For now, the physical media releases and touring Ghibli Fest screenings remain the only ways for fans to see these films.

TIL Anime fans are extremely law-abiding.

the theatrical setting is going out of the house and having something physical to turn in and get a show in return

Reply on news.ycombinator.com