Full Screen DVDs
 

Why are these still being released? I don't notice them most of the time, but Wal-mart is littered with them, right next to their rows of HDTVs.

Because people still ASK for them.

"Why don't you have this movie in fullscreen?"

"...have you LOOKED at the TVs anybody sells anymore?"

Didn't even make sense to me on the old TVs. The obsession with cutting off part of the image just so you can fill every corner of your TV was always a mystery.

Simple.

If your TV isn't fully filled, you're getting "cheated."

That's how these people think. "You're charging the same for a widescreen DVD as fullscreen, but it isn't filling my tee-vee!"

Never mind the fact that, y'know, you're getting more of the shot.

YOU'RE NOT FILLING MY TEE-VEE!

Fool screen dvds.

I hate explaining aspect ratio to people. Even on a tube TV the dreaded "black bars" never bothered me.

Freaking people are so obsessed with not getting "ripped off".

When I had a regular TV, I preferred fullscreen, because the vertical resolution you lose makes the picture look really bad.

Now with an HDTV, I don't mind letterboxing (to get the 2.35:1 ratio in) at all.

some people just don't like those black bars

that's racist

I blame MBBF. 2 years on from the end of the next-gen war, and Blu-Ray is still only 15% of disc sales.

That's because you still have to dig to find them under $20, except for older titles and/or right at release. Some decent ones do have reasonable pricing, but it's a mixed bag on the newer ones that look best on Blu-Ray.

Some of us are doing just fine with our tube tvs and dvd players.


i am old

all i have is a tube tv and vhs!

I actually own a non-widescreen hdtv. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Um, yes? I don't think most people have a blue-ray player.

And many can't spell it correctly. ;)

Front Office Football Central - View Single Post - Full Screen DVDs

And many can and just naturally add an "e" to the letters "blu" without thinking about it.

i might buy a blu-ray player when they come down in price to a decent level, but only if they're backwards-compatible with regular dvd's...no way i'm rebuilding my collection. fuck that.

I don't know of any blu-ray players that don't play dvds as well, so that is not a huge deal. I bought a dvd player mostly to also be able to stream netflix through it as well (something I actually do far more than watch blu-rays), so it was a multi-purpose purchase for me.

That said, I only own 10 blu-rays while I own over 600 Dvds plus full series of various tv shows on dvd (the wire, lost, dexter, the tudors, etc). Occasionally I'll rent a blu-ray, but since dvds are $1 to rent and usually about 20-30% less to purchase, most of my watching is still dvd. Only the absolute favorite movies with outstanding visuals are ones that I get on blu-ray.

They just cost 2-3x.

any blu ray players that play xvid? I still use xbmc to play my shows.

I know my PS3 does. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but it works great for xvids and streaming video over your home network.

I know I wouldn't have purchased a BR player on my own for a bit, but I came across one on Amazon that was about $140 or so from Sony. My wife had wanted one, mainly for the ability to stream Netflix and this player could do that, so I put it up on my wishlist for Christmas and was somewhat surprised to get it. It's a been a good thing to have. I'm not converting my small DVD collection over any time soon (as noted, BR discs are still pricey), but the Netflix connection has paid off in spades and then some (two kids six and under, so getting a fair selection of movies on-demand that I'd never pay to own is a huge bonus). Another nice feature is that it's been able to "convert" some of our other 4:3 movies into a "widescreen" format on our flatscreen (presumably by cropping the 4:3 into a 16:9 ratio, though not much is lost in the process) and also eliminates the letterboxing on most of our widescreen discs (I have seen it show up on only a couple of discs and then only a little bit at top and bottom, presumably because these are even wider than 16:9).

We still only have one BR disc, "Up", and that's only because it came in a multi-format pack with a regular DVD and a computer version. Since we still have two traditional DVD players, a multi-format pack is likely to be the only way we'll get BR discs for a while so that we can play movies anywhere in the house and not only on the BR player in the den.

Yeah, I'm waiting for a BR player with the built in Netflix capability to come down into my price range.

My problem with Blu-ray is that I really cannot justify the cost right now.

1. I rarely watch "disc" movies any more. Just about everything I watch is on the computer. A Roku box will probably be in my home before a Blu Ray player.

2. $20-$30 for a movie is silly. I would never pay that. I don't care if the movie jumps off the screen and blows me. Still not buying it.

3. To fully enjoy Blu-Ray, I would still have to go out and purchase a new $500+ TV. Considering how little I am watching TV these days. I just cannot imagine spending that much on a TV. I have 4 TVs in my house right now that work fine for what I use them for.

4. With On-demand streaming technology knocking on the door, I really have to wonder how long Blu-Ray will really last.

"Full screen" is a horrible choice of terms. Wife and I have had a widescreen HDTV since 2003. She still buys us full screen DVD's every time she buys a DVD, thinking thats what we need. Given how many people hook up their same composite and s-video cables from their cable box to their HDTV, I am sure she's not the only one.

Is it cheaper for a company to sell both full screen versions and wide screen versions of a movie then it is to sell a DVD with both on the one disk? DVDs with both on one disk have existed for a while now, so I don't see why they are not all that way.

My main reason for not buying into BR right now is, the cost vs quality issue. I'm sorry, but, the step up in quality from DVDs produced these days is not big enough to justify the cost of buying the BR discs and a new player. There is a difference in clarity for sure, but, it isn't THAT big in my opinion and I've watched plenty of BR movies on many different TVs and players.

Now, I could see if the step up in quality was as big of a difference as broadcast SD to broadcast HD, (especially sports broadcasts) even with how much compression is going on. Now that is a big jump that is worth the extra money in my opinion.

I have never seen a full screen DVD in the UK.

Until bandwidth goes high enough to get rid of pixellation during action scenes, I'll be buying / renting blu-rays. Sure, if I want to watch "Survivor", online streaming will work fine, but I'm not watching "Star Trek" online and expecting the same level of quality I get on Blu-Ray. Heck, TWC can't give me decent HD action scenes with a dedicated channel.

I feel ya. Comcast HD in my area sucks ass on action scenes too. Almost bad enough to make you want to watch the standard def signal. :(

I blame the ancient "HD cable boxes" they have in my area. Dating them on internet shows articles from 2005 writing about these same damn boxes. I'm going to guess that the technology just isn't where it should be in my area.

Onto the blu-ray debate. There is no way I would give up my blu-ray player for a dvd player. Absolutely no way at all.

Nah, its all about data rates. Couple huge numbers of pixels with the fact that MPEG compression basically sends information about the changes from frame to frame, and the data rates needed for high def action scenes get pretty high.

Yup. A good Blu-Ray is something like 25 Mbps and reach 20+GB for the whole movie. Over-the-Air ATSC can hit 19 Mbps, as long as they don't cram too much in the subchannels. By the time cable is done cramming multiple channels into one stream, they are often sending 8 Mbps or less (and this was a big issue for DirecTV before they went to MPEG-4 and all the new satellites, as even their SD channels were showing some issues). Too much changes in an action scene to be represented at 8 Mbps at HD resolutions. And most folks have 4-6 Mbps for internet download speeds, and the movies are 5-6 GB for a full download to keep times low, so that is often even worse.

So until I can stream a movie at 25 Mbps over a fiber connection, I'll be sticking with Blu-Ray for lots of the movies I like.

The biggest WTF device we sold all year was the Panasonic BD-70(I think that's the model number). An excellent full featured BD Player which featured a VHS player. It really made no sense whatsoever to me. If it recorded on Vhs or had a tuner/DVD recorder I might have seen it having appeal. At 400 dollars retail I'm really not sure who they were going after. It did sell ok at 249 sale price. But I doubt we moved any at 399

My sister-in-law only buys fullscreen movies. She'll return it if she gets a widescreen. No, I don't understand.