Demoscene Blu-ray finally available after five years | Hacker News Reader

Demoscene Blu-ray finally available after five years

trixter.oldskool.org

75 pointsTrixter15 comments

I just received my copy of this blu-ray last week and am _very_ impressed! The audio and video quality is amazing on blu-ray. There's also a ton of good content beyond the demos, like talks from scene parties and commentaries for almost all the demos. If you're at all curious about demos buy this immediately.

Thanks Trixter for all the work put into the 3 Mind Candy releases. I own all 3 volumes and am incredibly impressed with the quality of each. These are seriously some of the most treasured discs I own.

Trixter, you and the production team need medals for the MindCandy series. To preserve any historial software is a vast undertaking, let alone productions as ethereal and finicky as demos. These are as important in their own right as archive.org and the BBS preservation projects.

I don't have any medals on hand but I'll be buying #3 to help a little.

Buying a copy is like handing out a medal for us, since we have yet to break even on this release :-)

Thanks for the kind words. Getting the commentary from all the different authors was like trying to juggle cats, but with more cats.

For some background on the demoscene, I liked this article from 1995: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/democoders_pr.html

Here's another take on the origins of the demoscene and why it's still exciting: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096

Congratulations Trixter! I own #1 and I might pick this one up as well. Thank you for preserving these demos.

I know you've said this would be the final installment, but, any chance of a MC4 with 64ks? :)

No, I'm afraid this is it. Ignoring the gigantic irony of filling a Blu-ray with 64k intro output, I am moving on after three great volumes over the past decade. Time to code some demos again!

> Time to code some demos again!

Even better ;)

I think this is the first Blu-Ray I've seen that has only 720p. On the other hand, 10 hours of content is a lot. Did you consider doing a multidisc release?

The main demo feature and intros featurette are 720p, but it's important to note they're 60p. 720@60p is the only 60 frame-per-second progressive format Blu-ray supports, so that's why we went with it (because demos at 30fps or lower don't have the same impact). At that size and framerate, 720@60 uses 88% of the bandwidth of 1080@30. I explain all this to illustrate that we didn't go with 720@60 for size reasons -- it was intentional, to match the full quality of the source material.

All the other special features (NVScene talks, production notes, etc.) are 1080@24 or 1080@30i.

We didn't consider a multi-disc release since we were already doing a Blu-ray+DVD combo pack. Trying to do a second disc of both would have increased the cost 50%, and we really wanted to keep it at the $20 mark, because who wants to spend more than that on a Blu-ray?

Makes me wonder about BD-J (A J2ME-derived Java runtime available on every commercial Blu-ray player) and the potential for writing demos that actually execute from a Blu-ray disk.

Funny you mention that -- I coded a few effects (starfield, plasma, nothing amazing) to be used as the background for the menus around 2009. Unfortunately, the only production toolchain we could use (due to cost) didn't support authoring BD-J, so we dropped the idea. I know of at least one other group working on a Blu-ray BD-J demo...

I'm buying this even though I've no way to play blurays.

Skrebbel! No worries, that's why there's a DVD in the pack as well. The DVD doesn't have the special features, but the main 3.5 hours of demos are there plus commentary and subtitles.

Blu-ray penetration is only 15% (in the USA, not sure about the rest of the world) so we didn't want to leave anyone behind. In five years when blu-ray players cost as much as a nice meal, you'll be set :)

> In five years when blu-ray players cost as much as a nice meal, you'll be set :)

I've seen $35 blu ray players and (based on DVD), don't expect blu ray to stay below $25 for long.

http://www.frys.com/product/6902547?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT... is a $50 blu ray player.

http://www.frys.com/product/5892973?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT... is a $28 dvd player.

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