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I have a 56" screen haning at the end of my bed. So the distancance between my eyes and the screen is the length of my bed. Say 2m or 6.5ft.

I have looked at Elephants dream and Big Buck Bunny in different formats. When I played them next to each other, I could notice a differnce between 1080 and the rest. However when running in random mode fullscreen, it was extremely hard to know if I was running 480, 720 or 1080. 480 was noticable when I realy payed attention. 720 and 1080 was more guessing then reality.

Below 480 it was still acceptable for e.g. tv shows.

And yes, I actually made a scrit that ran 30 seconds from random files for 30 seconds from random starting points in the movie. I also did it with blueray movies I had, although less intensive and I saw no major increase in quality.

So that is one thing about the quality and can be very personal. Now about the disc format. I would rather have my data on a NAS. Even if it would be an ISO with all the menu's, a NAS is much more convinient. I have access to other data (e.g. IMdB or Rottentomatoes with something like XBMC), I do not have to look for the disc, put it in the machine and get it out again.

So I would not compare between streaming and disc, but between downloading and disc.

While the TFA's GTA movie is no doubt impressive, the Blender Foundation produced Big Buck Bunny, a (in my opinion) beautifully rendered ~10 minute short. You can download the rendered version here, and can even download the production data here -- it's released under Creative Commons I think.

It may not be quite up to Pixar's standards, but I think it's pretty slick (and no, I'm not affiliated with either company =) )

Sure, here is the download link for their previous movie, Big Buck Bunny where you can download the movie in multiple formats and video sizes, and at the bottom is the entire studio back up (over 200 gig) where you can download every part of the movie made and used.

blender? http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/ Tho yes, skill may be a issue. But the net is vast, and data files can be exchanged rapidly these days.

VLC, Mplayer, Perrian, etc on OSX can play better than Flash, that is not the same thing as "perfectly fine". VLC and Mplayer a quite optimized so with a fast enough CPU they can grunt through playback without help. That doesn't mean it's working fine. Use VLC or Mplayer on Windows or Linux on the same hardware and the CPU use is drastically reduced because hardware acceleration works.

Playing 1080 video in Windows XP, my Phenom II X4 faces a staggering 6% CPU usage.

You are correct.

(We discussed the beginnings of this project in 2007.)

Well, that is incorrect. You've linked to an article about Peach and Apricot projects, both of which were completed.

This is a seperate, 4th project, Durian (Orange being the first)

I take it you aren't used to using Poser or Blender, or any other related 3-d software and thus don't know the joy of: "You STUPID PROGRAM! I just want her to walk down the stairs! Why are her arms doing that! NO! NO! NOO!!!! Stop floating down the stairs and walk! Why is your hair clipping through the wall, why is your hair even moving that way! STOP IT!"

Hollywood's death knell might be sounding. But it's got a few more good decades in it left before we need to morn for it.

Hilarious you bring that up. Did you ever look at the model of Big Buck Bunny? It's like his face is sucked in down his throat, just so that when it renders, it looks like they way they want it to. It's horribly fucked up for anything more complex than snowmen or giant walking stick men.

Big Buck Bunny looks pretty good too.

Not to mention, movies can be made at any resolution almost, esp. cgi movies. Even using povray I can generate 6400x4800 res movies, and you know what? I don't need a dvd to same them. There is this universal storage device called a "hard drive".

According to this, Big Buck Bunny had an optimistic 1-2 CPU hours per frame. Let me know when serious home rendering of a CGI film can happen in a useful time span, because I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.

As long as we're mentioning garage bands and low-budget movies as acceptable stand-ins for, say, the Flaming Lips and the Dark Knight, I thought I may as well mention Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream.

Sure, Elephants Dream was a bit odd on the story and acting side, but it was visually impressive. BBB was a standard cartoony short. These were not at Pixar's level, but they were released under a Creative Commons license with all of their sources.

I've been hearing good things about Durian, too.

I don't think it's a case of Linux being unable to win the desktop. I think it's just that, while we may have superiority on the desktop and under the hood, we still need to gain ground in the area of software. This does not necessarily mean that we have to get Photoshop ported, IMHO building a following behind The Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, KinoDV and other open source apps on both Windows and Linux will help the war effort generally.

While these applications are (to be honest) still far behind their commercial counterparts, a greater user base and higher profile will attract developers and help them catch up, just as higher profile has helped garner support for the Linux kernel itself from developers and companies.

Projects like Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream have proven that high quality, professional results can be achieved using open source tools, a proposition that more and more companies will find attractive as new talent enters industries that use these tools.

Give it time. The Linux ecosystem is growing. Growing far faster than the commercial fields. We're already competing toe to toe in areas like web servers (Apache and LigHTTPD) blow away IIS and other web servers, PostgreSQL easily competes on a level field with Oracle and DB2 and Inkscape isn't as far beind Illustrator as Gimp is behind Photoshop. Blender was proved to be a highly capable 3D modeler and animation tool in the BBB and ED projects mentioned above.

It's only a matter of time.

Trent Reznor's HD footage: 400 gigs http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?52,378166 http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/ And, yes, the newest Ubuntu upon release.

But PONIEZ are not free.
BUNNIEZ, on the other hand... http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

Even something as interesting as the GPL would not exist without it. You might say that the GPL would be unnecessary, but if you think about it, that isn't quite true...

I disagree: copyleft licenses, of which the GPL is one, fundamentally serve to give back the freedoms that copyright takes away. With no copyright, there'd be no need for copyleft, so the GPL would indeed be unnecessary.

It might be less convenient to develop open source software without the GPL, since others would be able to modify your software and distribute the modified binaries, without releasing their source changes (which they can already do if you use the BSD license). But then you'd be free to reverse-engineer their code and port the changes back into your open source version - or you could just freely use and share their binary version.

I look at the content we agree we would lose, and I don't want it to go away. Of the content we would gain... I'm not really seeing the added value.

Well, first, I don't necessarily agree that we would lose that content; that was a hypothetical. As long as there's demand for movies like Toy Story to be produced, I have a hard time seeing how they could just "go away": if the market has taught us anything, it's that money will eventually find its way from the people who want something to the people who can provide it.

Second, even if you can't see the added value yourself, surely you agree that's a matter of personal taste. Pixar movies aren't "better" in any objective sense than, say, the music of Girl Talk or Negativland.

Perhaps you could have people building up movies organically like open source software. But I can't really picture that working out.

It's already happening, slowly but surely. See Big Buck Bunny, for example.

Off the top of my head, things like older versions of the Real codecs, MS MPEG4 (there are several versions and some streams need specific versions for correct decoding), old material in Cinepak, high-end QuickTime plug-ins that require registration, proprietary DV codecs for footage from certain HD cameras, and so on and so forth. Blender's Peach project just last month released an AVI version of Big Buck Bunny in 1080 using MS MPEG 4 video (has been deprecated for years). The decoder wasn't even present on my XP SP2 machine. DivX 3 content commonly uses old Windows Media Audio v2 codecs that don't ship with Windows Media Player these days and are only available through codec packs.

The submitter did not say all of the 100GB of content they have acquired is in MPEG-2. There are dozens of codecs that over periods of time have been popular but will be obscure in 20 years time, if they aren't already. I download files all the time that use strange combinations of codecs.