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Comment by Arbalest | Hacker News Reader

DVD was also popular around the time that Plasmas were being introduced, which also had burn in issues.

Yeah, those were mad expensive. I remember complaints about the logo "bugs" on TV stations that were fixed parts of the display.

Yeah the BBC News DOG was got burned in to our plasma TV pretty bad when I was a kid

Aren’t DVDs popular anymore?

Blu-ray has been around for a good while now.

And broadband adoption. I think streaming actually killed it, not a higher resolution format.

Doesn't Blu-ray still have better quality than most streaming services?

It does. I’m sure most people don’t think the quality difference is worth the hassle of storing physical discs and paying for them. Compressed 1080 is good enough.

A decent number of streaming services have very good 4K and all you need is a Chromecast Ultra with a $200 TV to make it all work.

True, except now in EU, the bitrate of 4k streaming is low because the EC asked companies to reduce it. This because of the COVID-19 pandemic leading to everyone [who can] being required to work from home.

Yeah, if you buy a new TV and sit close to it you can tell the difference. But I think for most people 1080p at a distance was acceptable where a fullscreen VHS picture would have been illegible, and the convenience became the next biggest factor. The leap from VHS to DVD was a lot larger than the leap from DVD to Blu-ray, in terms of the perceived quality IMO.

Yes. Streaming services provide 1080p or 4k resolution images but it doesn't matter because they apply heavy compression in order to save bandwidth. In my experience, even 100% black frames have artifacts. No wonder people turn to copyright infringement.

My local supermarket has 2-3 times more DVDs than Blu-Rays.

The population of devices in the field is heavily dominated by DVD. Old people and immigrants use a whole lot more DVDs because the video they watch is not available online. Fidelity matters way less than the message.

DVD might also be "good enough".

No, they’re low resolution and bulky. Do many people even own an old DVD player anymore?

I still buy DVDs because I like classic movies and for those movies it doesn't matter whether you watch in dvd quality or Blu-ray. Plus DVD rips are significantly smaller in size and even though I have Blu-rays for some movies I don't have a Blu-ray player on my computer to rip them. So effectively my preference is to buy DVD, unless it's a relatively modern movie (post 90s)

Not true. Movies were of course shot on film, which has way higher resolution than DVD.

Even old TV shows look better than ever, as long as they were scanned from film. Look at the original Star Trek or Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray.

You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't. Plus, we lost immense amounts (most) of cinema that was produced before ~1950s when better film started being used.

> You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't.

How are you watching a film on DVD if it hasn't been transferred to digital?

DVDs have been around for over twenty years. There are plenty of things that were released on DVD but now hang in license limbo due to a publisher going out of business or whatever. There may have been a transfer done for a DVD release that would need to be re-done for HD, and that all takes time, money, usually personal interest of some sort, and of course the physical items still have to exist (2008 Universal Studios vault fire, anyone?)

As far as I know lots of TV shows were not shot on film but rather on tape, which naturally limits quality to PAL/NTSC, since that's what gets recorded on tape. Similarly the archives of broadcasters are/used to be tape.

Why classical films look great at 2K/4K (21:39): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpABCxiDaU

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