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And also quality.

I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.

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Most people really don't care, which is a shame. The sheer quality difference between a 4k digital movie and a 4k bluray is astounding. Hell, oftentimes a standard bluray looks better despite the lower resolution since it isn't being compressed
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A 4K movie uncompressed would be something like two or three terabytes depending on the format. I think Arri are the only cinema cameras that can even shoot uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the rest shoot lossy compressed video in their native raw formats.
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Theres no technical reason one should look better than the other.

Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering

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> since it isn't being compressed

Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.

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Huh, I always thought they were uncompressed. That's why people preferred it over hd-dvd
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Uncompressed 24-bit 1080p running at 24 FPS requires 1.192 Gbit/s, or 0.149 GByte/s. So a 25 GB (single-layer) blu-ray has enough space for a whopping 167.8 seconds of uncompressed 1080p video running at 24 FPS. You can double that with a dual-layer blu-ray, and there are more corners you can cut, but I don't think you'll fit your movie in there.

Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.

HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.

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I don’t think that you guys should be debating compressed vs uncompressed, but lossy compression vs lossless compression. Your math seems to derive from a naive storage format.
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Blu-ray is lossy too. All video codecs of note that aren't for professionals are lossy, so the point mostly still stands. Lossless compression doesn't go very far when it comes to video.

An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.

Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.

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I just looked up the compression rate of FFV1 because I never thought about this. It’s apparently 4x. More would be possible, but increase computational requirements.

Another use cases seems to be archival of historical footage.

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Ah, that's what it was. I'm still half asleep, I didn't drink enough caffeine this morning haha
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Even a well-mastered DVD can look better than online streaming.
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What's kind of an annoying side effect of this is that you have all this fancy new display tech, like quantum dot LED (marketing term, but w/e), or OLED, but it's all pointless because you're just watching it with crappy compression, negating the quality gains.
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The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.
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It looks great on youtube at 4k, at least if you are somewhere where they are transmitting it through youtube.
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Supposedly the master stream from FIFA is in HDR, so if the colors are washed out its probably a bad conversion with your TV provider or TV.

I do agree its insane to me we're still not at 4K coverage for world major level sporting events.

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The TV channel broadcast was 50Hz, 1080p and used image compression. They did not broadcast the master stream directly. That would have cost too much money.

It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.

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> The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy.

This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.

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> And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy.

EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.

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Or they’ll just stop “selling” copies in those territories and only allow short-term rentals or monthly subscription services.
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One of the EU's backstop "Fuck Trump" options is to stop enforcing America's IP rights.

Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic

In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.

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Imagine having TDS this bad in the year of our lord 2026, as a European no less. Lol.
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"The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy."

I understand that this is the reality we live in, but I don't know how we have accepted it.

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It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.
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I remember joke “you will own nothing and will be happy”, it is less of a joke now.
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It's from a 2016 essay. I'm not sure it was ever only a joke. I didn't even perceive it as a joke back then (unless you wanted to joke about companies being knobheads). It was already clear by then that that was the direction they wanted to go.

Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.

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