300 Hd On Xbox Marketplace

[modey]

Where are you getting the price of £30 for hd dvd/blu rays from?

 

You can pick up most films for under £20

[Plectrum Infusion]

I love these pointless circular arguments where the protagonists have already decided exactly that they think and will never change their minds, but hey ho, it passes the day on I suppose

 

Meh, using a £30 Blu-Ray disc is a bit of a disingenuous example. You can walk into HMV any day of the year and they'll have some kind of "three for £20" offer on DVDs, and you can get them even cheaper than that online, I can't remember the last time I paid more than seven or eight quid for a DVD.

 

We're not comparing dvd's, we're talking about HD content. For low def content, the downloads are even cheaper. Let's at least talk like for like? HD DVD/BD disks are £30. A rental, download is £3 off xbox live. That's a pretty good deal in my book. It's not perfect, the lineup currently is wank, but for me, the price is right, the formats good, I don't want another disk clogging up my life and I don't want to pay £30 for a movie. If you're a hoarding clepto type, fine, I feel sorry for you, but you carry on buying into the collectathon and buying every movie again every 5 years, but don't call downloads a rip off.

 

How many thousands of DVDs do you have, exactly? A standard DVD case is a pretty compact affair, you can get hundreds of them into a relatively small amount of space. Either you have sixty five billion DVDs, or you're exaggerating the significance of "all the space" they take up.

 

As for VHS, I have kept VHS tapes of stuff that's never turned up on any other format, or for stuff I'm not really that bothered about getting hold of again on a new format, but in some cases I have bought DVDs where I previously had the VHS tapes (The Day Today and Brasseye, for example), and dumped the tapes.

 

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (and indeed, the whole HD scam) don't interest me at all, a well encoded DVD played through a good upscaling DVD player onto a decent HD set, looks virtually indistinguishable from a hi-def signal.

 

Moreover, in your example, whereby an entire film has been compressed down to 5.1GB, it isn't going to be anything like HD in the true sense of the word, 'cause there's clearly some hardcore compression going on to get the filesize so small. Yeah it might supposedly be 720p, but you don't get a 720p film into 5.1GB without losing a lot of information, however good your codec is.

 

The point here isn't necessarily that you'll never watch the same film three times or five times or ten times or whatever, it's that you'll always have the option to watch it again.

 

Sure you will, you just buy it again. In the case of the example on this thread, it's 80p on Live, and £22.28 on amazon. I'd have to watch that disk 28 times to break even. Will you watch 300 28 times?

 

You're running on the assumption it'll be available to buy again, and stop using 300 as the benchmark for how much HD downloads are going to cost, because it's a one-time special offer deal. And stop comparing it with a HD disc, because at 5.1GB it's been compressed 300% more (at least) than the disc Amazon are selling.

 

If you surrender to renting off Sky or XBL, then you're basically agreeing to only ever watch what they're prepared to show you.

 

We're not talking about scheduled broadcasting here, we're talking downloads. The libraries can be as big as any shop.

 

They "can" be, yes, but what's the betting they won't be? Even Sky is limited in what it can show and how many times it shows it based on all sorts of contractual nonsense and copyright issues, now just multiply that by every film in the world.....

 

You'll probably be alright for your mainstream big studio blockbusters, but when you start going off the beaten track a bit, it's a fantasy to think any download service will ever match being able to get hold of a real physical disc.

 

(Case in point is a band called "Trees" who did a couple of albums in the seventies, not one single download service in the world had their stuff available (including Napster and iTunes) - in the end I bought the CDs directly from an eBay seller, if I relied on downloads to get them, I'd have died of old age before I'd ever get to hear them again. Same goes for even slightly obscure movies.)

 

Let's say in ten years time you want to sit down and watch a film with your children, if you've got a VHS tape or DVD or DIVX file on a PC, then you "own" that film and you can watch it when and how you like, what chance the film you're after seeing will be on Sky HD or XBL in ten years time?

 

Far better chance than rooting out some video tape in an obscure format to be honest. I'd far rather pick it from a menu than have to root it out of the loft.

 

I don't think VHS and DVD will be "obscure formats" for an awfully long time, moreover, if you own the original media, you'll ALWAYS be able to digitally preserve them using your own PC, and the file will be yours to do what you want with, you can then bin the original tape or disc if you want to. You concede yourself that the selection of films available from download/pay services is wank, I'm betting that it's a situation which won't improve a massive amount in the years to come, because the money isn't in making as big a library of films as possible available to as wide an audience as possible, it's in selling exactly what they want us to have, with the most mainstream appeal possible, for the highest price possible.

 

I agree that downloading is a far better solution than buying discs, but only insofar as "dodgy downloads" are concerned, which leave you with DRM-free films which you can archive out as you see fit, including to disc if you want. I'd happily pay to download films if they'd strip out all the DRM bollocks, but I'll be fucked if I'm handing over my cash for a film that self-destructs in seven days and only lets me watch it once. (I quite often watch a film twice in a short space of time, especially something complicated like Jacob's Ladder (which I mentioned on the "last film you saw" thread a few days ago), if I own it, I pay once and watch it how I like, to watch it twice off XBL I'd have to pay twice (and download it twice as well), they can get knotted for that.)

 

Great, so instead you'll pay 10x more for something you watch twice. You're a hero!

 

Not withstanding your continued insistence on using nonsensical price comparisons, yes I would rather pay £7 for a DVD I can keep forever and archive out in whichever form I see fit (including a simple file on a computer, same as your downloads are, except mine don't get deleted after seven days whether I like it or not), than pay £3 to watch a film once, with no guarantee I'll ever be able to watch it again in the future, whether I'm prepared to pay again or not.

[Plectrum Infusion]

Where are you getting the price of £30 for hd dvd/blu rays from?

 

You can pick up most films for under £20

 

I'm sure that by the time he posts again, Blu-Ray discs will be costing £49.99 and XBL 1080p 25GB movie downloads will be sixteen pence each, with a free handjob from pre-skank Britney Spears.

[Casino Crazy]

Post

 

But the black colours look really black in HD!

[Slim]

Where are you getting the price of £30 for hd dvd/blu rays from?

 

You can pick up most films for under £20

 

I referred to amazon prices in my examples, looking up the equiv items on xbox marketplace.

[Slim]

I love these pointless circular arguments where the protagonists have already decided exactly that they think and will never change their minds, but hey ho, it passes the day on I suppose

 

I remain open minded, but I've yet to see any convincing argument in favour of buying media. Media is dead, it's long dead for business software and has been for a few years. It's pretty much dead in music, it's close to being dead for movies and it'll soon be dead for games too.

 

How many thousands of DVDs do you have, exactly? A standard DVD case is a pretty compact affair, you can get hundreds of them into a relatively small amount of space. Either you have sixty five billion DVDs, or you're exaggerating the significance of "all the space" they take up.

 

I've got a few hundred I'd say. I divx'ed the kids stuff as that's all that gets reused, most of mine have either gone to car boots/charity shops or are up in the loft. I don't care how much is a small amount of space, it's unnecessary, and it's inconvenient. I don't want to find a disk, open it, take it to the dvd player, put it in, play it, feh. I want to pick it off a list, and press play. I don't want to waste any space in my home. I don't want the carbon footprint of un-needed media. The worlds moved on, let go of your collecting habbit.

 

As for VHS, I have kept VHS tapes of stuff that's never turned up on any other format, or for stuff I'm not really that bothered about getting hold of again on a new format, but in some cases I have bought DVDs where I previously had the VHS tapes (The Day Today and Brasseye, for example), and dumped the tapes.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (and indeed, the whole HD scam) don't interest me at all, a well encoded DVD played through a good upscaling DVD player onto a decent HD set, looks virtually indistinguishable from a hi-def signal.

 

Largely depends on your setup. That's true up to 32", beyond that there's a clear difference.

 

Moreover, in your example, whereby an entire film has been compressed down to 5.1GB, it isn't going to be anything like HD in the true sense of the word, 'cause there's clearly some hardcore compression going on to get the filesize so small. Yeah it might supposedly be 720p, but you don't get a 720p film into 5.1GB without losing a lot of information, however good your codec is.

 

DVD's are about 4.5 gb, but quite a bit of that is extras, extra soundtracks, etc. A 'scene' 720p h264 is around that size, and good enough for the very fussy people that approve these things. Take the Blue Ray scene rip of ratatoille in 720p:

 

http://img102.imageshack.us/my.php?image=v...13359389iq6.png

 

4.3gb, quality looks very nice indeed. It's not got all the extras and shit see?

 

You're running on the assumption it'll be available to buy again, and stop using 300 as the benchmark for how much HD downloads are going to cost, because it's a one-time special offer deal. And stop comparing it with a HD disc, because at 5.1GB it's been compressed 300% more (at least) than the disc Amazon are selling.

 

I'm using a bunch of examples. I used 300, because you referred to special offers for dvd's. If we work off RRP's, thats 3-5 quid for rental or 30 quid for hddvd, would you prefer that?

 

As for your capacity/file size arguement, you clearly don't understand how these things work. Sure, HDdvd/BD has the capacity, but the movies themselves aren't encoded at that quality. They're not mastered at that quality. You don't fill a whole HD DVD with the movie.

 

They "can" be, yes, but what's the betting they won't be? Even Sky is limited in what it can show and how many times it shows it based on all sorts of contractual nonsense and copyright issues, now just multiply that by every film in the world.....

 

Na, you're mixing up broadcast with download.

 

You'll probably be alright for your mainstream big studio blockbusters, but when you start going off the beaten track a bit, it's a fantasy to think any download service will ever match being able to get hold of a real physical disc.

 

Why? A download doesn't go out of print. Nobody has to stock it. It's just a file floating round in a list.

 

(Case in point is a band called "Trees" who did a couple of albums in the seventies, not one single download service in the world had their stuff available (including Napster and iTunes) - in the end I bought the CDs directly from an eBay seller, if I relied on downloads to get them, I'd have died of old age before I'd ever get to hear them again. Same goes for even slightly obscure movies.)

 

Well sure, some old obscure band from back before digital downloads kicked off, what a surprise!

 

I don't think VHS and DVD will be "obscure formats" for an awfully long time, moreover, if you own the original media, you'll ALWAYS be able to digitally preserve them using your own PC, and the file will be yours to do what you want with, you can then bin the original tape or disc if you want to. You concede yourself that the selection of films available from download/pay services is wank, I'm betting that it's a situation which won't improve a massive amount in the years to come, because the money isn't in making as big a library of films as possible available to as wide an audience as possible, it's in selling exactly what they want us to have, with the most mainstream appeal possible, for the highest price possible.

 

VHS is definately an obscure format. i'm sure there's many of us who no longer have vhs players, why would you? And how can you seriously advocating digitally preserving your own tapes? What's the point in going through all that hassle when you can just get them digitally in the first place? Legitimate download libraries are limited currently, but it's getting a lot better.

 

Not withstanding your continued insistence on using nonsensical price comparisons, yes I would rather pay £7 for a DVD I can keep forever and archive out in whichever form I see fit (including a simple file on a computer, same as your downloads are, except mine don't get deleted after seven days whether I like it or not), than pay £3 to watch a film once, with no guarantee I'll ever be able to watch it again in the future, whether I'm prepared to pay again or not.

 

Ripping dvd's and storing them is a good solution, one I've done myself. It's not legit though, don't kid yourself that it is, they don't put copy protection on those dvd's for fun.

 

It's a faff, most new dvd's are £15 not £7, and given the choice I'd rather download em for a few quid and not be arsed with the fucking around.

[ramsea]

Cant be arsed reading all the above, but I admit I'm very disappointed about the films currently available on XBL. (as with most of the media content on XBL, such as music videos etc who in their right mind pays for this shit??)

 

Anyway, the downloadable movies will only work, for me, is if you can either download a film (for the same price or less than it is already available to buy) to keep or;

you can download a film (for the same price or less than it is already available to rent) to watch as many times as you like say within 24 hrs of the first watch within a week.

[slinkydevil]

Where are you getting the price of £30 for hd dvd/blu rays from?

 

You can pick up most films for under £20

 

I referred to amazon prices in my examples, looking up the equiv items on xbox marketplace.

 

What? I'm finding it hard to even see a £30 BR film on Amazon. Anyway for me I like some of my media on Disc and some I like to download. And guess what? I quite like my Music collection on original CD. I like it's packaging and I like browsing through them. If i'm not 100% fussed then an album will get downloaded or maybe just the tracks I like off an album - so I still have hundreds of downloaded music tracks too.

 

 

"Media is dead"

 

Not for a while. There are plenty of people who don't live in their little computer world furiously downloading stuff and sitting through ripping old dvd's to their computer.