Two Japanese suppliers commit to keeping Blu-ray discs and drives in supply as major manufacturers exist domestic market
Posted by bizude@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 111 comments
DateMasamusubi@reddit
A pity. Bluray offers superior visual quality vs streaming. I get really irritated seeing banding.
KaineNierWeissEmil@reddit
I would rather studios offer 100gb direct downloads so we can finally end this physical media vs streaming war and just have the best of both worlds
GHz-Man@reddit
It exists, Sony has a streaming service equal to 4K Blu-Ray (80Mbps or so)
But not enough people can see a difference for it to matter.
Apple streams at up to 40Mbps, and that looks great to me. I don't notice any compression issues.
Most people don't sit 2 feet away from their TV inspecting the picture for compression artifacts.
deep_chungus@reddit
the issue is that there's more than 2 services
i've never had apple tv and there's no way i'd pay for a sony streaming service. every streaming service i've ever encountered looks like shit compared to bluray or just pirating bluray rips
GHz-Man@reddit
It's not a service. You rent or buy the movies. There's no monthly subscription.
deep_chungus@reddit
A poorly encoded 4k video will look way worse than 1080p
YellowThirteen_@reddit
You don’t need to inspect your tv closely to notice the difference. It’s especially noticeable in a heavily shadowed or black scene, most streams get as blocky looking as mine-craft because the compression is so heavy. Netflix is the biggest offender but all streaming services do it
philthewiz@reddit
For that you need a codec like h.265 with 10bit with a proper bitrate. 80mbps is plenty if it's an efficient codec.
reallynotnick@reddit
And hell if it wasn’t such a patent nightmare H.266 should have been gaining adoption by now.
pdp10@reddit
AV1. Decode and encode IP cores are being baked into hardware these days, which means that fleet penetration takes longer. But we're looking at a 20-year standard, much like H.264.
reallynotnick@reddit
It’s a great move for patent issues, but the efficiency uplift is very incremental over H.265. It’ll be interesting to see how AV2 develops because if H.266 falls on its face I could see that being more quickly adopted as it’ll bring a giant leap in efficiency over H.265.
pdp10@reddit
AV1 is basically a contemporary of H.265. AV1 also came out as a considerably more conservative design than Xiph.org originally planned. The more radical leaps were moved to AV2, which is the H.266 competitor.
But H.266 probably won't see adoption anywhere. H.265 adoption is already highly imblanced; it's the basic codec of UHD/4K Blu-ray, and you find H.265 in cheap surveillance cam chipsets, but those are the only two that come to mind.
reallynotnick@reddit
Also H.265 is used in basically all 4K streaming, ATSC 3.0 (which yes is a dumpster fire of its own) and iPhones record in it (not sure on Android).
I know H.266 got selected for Brazil’s ASTC 3.0 but that’s the only use I have heard of. So yeah hopefully AV2 comes out swinging.
philthewiz@reddit
I think the hardware implementation is the hardest part. I haven't payed much attention on what supports it much. My clients still mainly ask h.264 out of habit anyways...
Sopel97@reddit
sounds like you're watching shitty h264 encodes instead of modern 10-bit h265/av1
GHz-Man@reddit
I haven't noticed it with Apple, they apparently have the highest bitrate, but yeah Netflix is the worst.
With most people having at least 100Mb speeds at home now, I'm surprised they haven't increased the quality a bit.
YellowThirteen_@reddit
Apple is a lit better than the rest but it’ll always but it’s not perfect either. Streamers won’t increase the bitrate because it also increases their overhead. Cloud services charge based on both data usage and bandwidth provided, higher bit rates means a much higher bandwidth and increased hosting costs. I can’t see it being profitable to do so, especially when most users don’t complain about the quality as is.
GHz-Man@reddit
But again, higher quality options do exist, like Sony Pictures Core, or at the very high end Kaleidescape.
Sony is a much smaller company than Apple, so I imagine Apple could afford to increase their bitrate if they wanted to.
There's also newer codecs coming like AV2 which provide higher quality at the same bitrate.
JJ3qnkpK@reddit
Get a large enough OLED and compression issues appear everywhere. Watch around people's hair as it blows in the wind, or watch for banding in dark scenes.
Shoot, I've been watching Survivor lately, and Paramount+ is riddled with horrific compression compared to YoutubeTV, and most of those are very bright scenes with janky filming.
GHz-Man@reddit
The bitrates seem to vary a ton by streaming service.
Some are as low as 15Mbps, some are 40Mbps or even more.
With most people having at least 100Mb speeds at home now, I'm surprised they haven't increased the quality a bit.
pdp10@reddit
Streaming services spent years building market share and market power, but making no money. Remember when Netflix streaming was $7 a month? But the times have changed and now it's the season to make those cable TV profits. Prices up, quality down.
A neighbor of mine was streaming the new Dune on TNT in the background while we were doing something else. The colors were terribly washed out, and it might have been 720p. No digital artifacting, but it looked horrendous.
GHz-Man@reddit
It really depends on the source you stream the movie from.
deep_chungus@reddit
cause people put up with it and it's cheaper not to
when they were trying to sell bluray players they actually had to offer advantages over dvd, once it's a service they're better off making the service worse and trying to push people up to a higher tier
JJ3qnkpK@reddit
It's surprising to me, too, especially since HDR gives so much room for definition in dark scenes. You'd expect them to use a bitrate that let one take advantage of such technology and screens.
It's just sort of wild - with a 77" OLED, I can easily pinpoint which streaming services have higher bitrates than others, and I can also tell that none of them are offering a "full quality" image so to speak.
I've honestly never been a pixel peeper, but sometimes I feel driven to piracy just to get a decent quality image, which feels insane for services that are ~20/month. Even a modest increase in bitrates would be a vast improvement.
EmekaEgbukaPukaNacua@reddit
The problem is piracy doesn’t even solve it any more as blueray releases become less and less common.
GHz-Man@reddit
I don't subscribe to any services unless there's an exclusive show I want to watch. Like if you want to see Stranger Things, you need to have a Netflix subscription, or buy the physical discs.
Most movies you can just buy or rent directly from Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. usually in better quality than the streaming services.
Apple's 4K bitrate is pretty decent (up to 40Mbps) and has Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
I haven't noticed any quality issues with them.
But Netflix's 4K bitrate is something crazy low like 15Mbps and looks terrible.
PXLShoot3r@reddit
The compression quality varies a lot too. Netflix 15Mbs looks like shit compared to 15Mbs stuff I can download from people who actually know how to compress.
arahman81@reddit
It's not individual dl, it's the total bw demand on the server.
Sopel97@reddit
not even bitrate can fix incompetent encodes
JJ3qnkpK@reddit
Probably. It varies from platform to platform, some are worse than others. I definitely see compression artifacts everywhere, but also catch things like banding and of course terrible definition when things are moving.
dparks1234@reddit
The last Game of Thrones season had that big battle that took place entirely at night and GOOD GOD did it show the limitations of low bitrate streaming
Gippy_@reddit
This is the fault of the OLED TV itself. This is a known problem on WOLEDs called near-black chrominance overshoot. QD-OLEDs don't have this issue.
BrafMeToo@reddit
the banding is luminance, not chrominance - this is a separate issue
kuddlesworth9419@reddit
They say that but I don't get that on my LG B4.
JJ3qnkpK@reddit
Interesting. I'll keep an eye out - looking at examples, I think I'm often seeing a mixture of both (blocky dark areas being exposed, well, blocky rather than decently-defined). It seems more stable in lower movement scenes, but is still present, so it makes sense that it's overshoot.
Helps me feel not as shortchanged by the streaming services if it's just TV tech being TV tech lol
ThisIsPaulDaily@reddit
I tried to play 4K from a crummy laptop over a cheap HDMI cable to a new 4K TV and my in laws got upset thinking it was broken and I had to explain that HDR wasn't enabled and that I needed to adjust picture settings and that artifacts happen with slow laptops and stuff.
"That didn't happen on our old TV".
The old TV doesn't have HDMI. The old TV is ~19" and has rabbit ears.
The old TV you couldn't read the subtitles without blocking a third of the picture.
Now you want to complain that the black is kind of not the same black when we pause it?
GHz-Man@reddit
DVDs are still outselling Blu-Ray and 4K discs lol
And now Gen Z is collecting VHS tapes.
I'm convinced most people need an eye exam.
smile_e_face@reddit
As someone who can't see worth a damn but has really sensitive hearing, it amazes me how people can't tell the different between shitbox streaming audio and real DTS-HD MA / TrueHD / whatever. But then it amazes other people that 1440p and 4K monitors look the same to me after adjusting the scaling.
GHz-Man@reddit
Most people just use their TV's built-in speakers haha
But Apple uses Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos for audio. It's not lossless but it sounds great to me.
I think they use a bitrate of 768kbps.
pdp10@reddit
But only ironically. VHS decks and tapes have been globally out of production for a while now, with no possibility of a resurgence for prerecorded media.
Now that they're long since junk and nobody can buy new ones even if they want, then there can be a small collectible market. It's like how flared trousers can't come back again until all of the old ones are long gone from everyone's closets.
(Three VHS decks, one Beta deck, but only for recorded media digitising.)
As of 2025, DVD disc shipments still did exceed Blu-ray, but Blu-ray revenue is notably higher. The stereotype is that DVD is the choice of the lending library, the senile, and the legally-blind, but there's a lot more to it, from picture quality to DRM to playback hardware.
Sopel97@reddit
no, if you're getting decoding errors it's because your laptop can't keep up or otherwise a hardware failure
pdp10@reddit
I imagine that product awareness and total costs are major barriers to market penetration.
Also consider the bandwidth. The world had converted a lot of terrestrial broadcast, cable, and satellite to IP traffic running over the Internet, and unicast bandwidth* has kept pace. But quintupling bandwidth, perhaps not.
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^* ^(Yes, I'm aware of edge caches and peered CDNs.)
GHz-Man@reddit
It may just be the streaming services being cheap and not wanting to pay for more bandwidth by increasing the bitrate, but I wish they would.
I don't notice any issues with Apple at 30-40Mbps, but Netflix is apparently like half that.
braveLittleFappster@reddit
Dark scenes regardless of distance look pretty bad to be honest. I think that's a bit of a worst case.
dingo_xd@reddit
They should allow encrypted downloads during off peak time (~3AM).
Area51_Spurs@reddit
The closest thing is Sony Pictures Core who has up to 80mbps bit rate with their PureStream.
Peppy_Tomato@reddit
Sony is intentionally trying to kill that service, because they made it exclusive to Sony TVs and the Playstation, which limits the audience. It also has a very small collection.
For these reasons, I don't buy movies from there, and usually end up buying Blu-rays instead.
steik@reddit
Kaleidescape offers better than bluray bitrate on some movies. You need to buy their super expensive equipment though.
arahman81@reddit
Because it's for the people with full theater rooms in their mansion.
ineedsomefuckingcoco@reddit
Isn't the cheapest thing you can get from them like 3k? I haven't looked much into them after I saw the eye watering prices.
Area51_Spurs@reddit
Yeah. I mean… lol
virtualmnemonic@reddit
Debrid services have bluray remux. 60-80gb a movie.
Though thats piracy
makimmma@reddit
even for 🏴☠️, most trackers also prefer bluray than webdl
Flamebomb790@reddit
Also wayyyy better audio
zdy132@reddit
I thought something was wrong when I first played Bluray, because the sound was so much different from streaming. Turns out it's just video streaming having bad audio.
dingo_xd@reddit
Moving from BR disks to streaming was one of the largest "voluntary" downgrades in technology.
Vitosi4ek@reddit
Far from the first time consumers sacrificed raw specs for convenience. VHS over Betamax was one example (Betamax technically had better picture quality at the start and the VCRs were technically superior, but VHS could record for longer), USB over FireWire arguably another (FireWire 400 came 5 years before USB 2.0 and could supply more power).
dingo_xd@reddit
But in that case Betamax was never dominant over VHS. And Firewire was also never dominant (in the PC sector) over USB. Blu-Rays were dominant for like a decade and then an inferior product replaced them pretty much totally.
Vitosi4ek@reddit
Were they? Where I live DVDs were pretty dominant (if we don't consider piracy) up until streaming proliferated. Blu-ray players and big HDTVs were too expensive for too long.
pdp10@reddit
Although there was very significant overlap in functionality, it's always been hard to see these as true direct competitors.
Besides the backward-incompatible change of connector with FW400/FW800, and beyond the proprietary licensing, the real tragedy of 1394 was the utter disrespect for end-users seen in the branding/labeling.
It only makes sense if the principals assumed Firewire was going to succeed no matter how unfriendly it was to both the end-users and the product manufacturers.
ggRavingGamer@reddit
256kbps aac is transparent. 225 opus, 320 mp3 and so on. You couldnt hear a difference.
Introvert52@reddit
Netflix looks way worse than YouTube and doesn't allow you to manually select quality
1080p Blu rays look way, way better than 4k Netflix
madmandendk@reddit
Netflix is 192kbps for 5.1 content by default. Premium gives you 640kbps, which is just on the edge of being acceptable. 7.1 isn't a thing when streaming, and Atmos is 768kbps max, no matter how many virtual channels there are.
Peppy_Tomato@reddit
Plenty of times I'm lazy and decide to stream an old movie that I also have on disc. After a while, I give up and fetch the disc.
I definitely enjoy the audio from my blu-rays more than the same movie streamed, and I trust my ears. It could be that the processing pipeline through the Blu-ray player is simply better than that through the streaming app... Who knows? I don't think it's placebo.
Gippy_@reddit
Well, purists hate it, but the strategy now is for the user to buy a high-end TV that processes the image. My Sony Bravia TV does a pretty good job of removing glaringly obvious banding. Ideally this shouldn't be necessary, but that's the reality now.
BrennusSokol@reddit
You mean fakes
milyuno2@reddit
If you tv cando that with streaming then just imagine what could do with superior quality, also go with the eye doctor just in case...
Gippy_@reddit
Well, you can toggle no processing (gaming mode) to see the before and after. I hate to admit it but the processing does look nice. For vintage video game consoles, a Retrotink would be even better.
CoUsT@reddit
Same. But I understand why "everyday people" can just ignore this entirely.
I know many that just google "