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DVD Players - Buy Now or Wait for the Violet Laser Models?
PateraSilk asks: "I've been resisting the DVD pull for a while but VHS is becoming more and more obselete. So, I'm thinking about joining the hordes, but I have two problems with the DVD format: compression artifacts and low-level pixel dithering, which annoy me no end. Maybe I've just seen crappy DVDs, but this leads me to my question: should I go ahead and purchase a DVD player regardless of my qualms or wait for a violet/blue laser standard to emerge? My hope is that a larger storage capacity would lead to a less lossy compression format, but, then again, I could be waiting in vain. Plus, I don't want to embrace a technology only to have it be replaced within a couple of years." Remember, Sony's violet-laser player has already hit the market, so hopefully it won't be long before other manufacturers follow suit. How long will it be before competition in this market drives down prices to reasonable levels?
its the compression that sucks. Most movies look pretty damn good on a 700MB Divx.
WTF? You're worried about poor quality video so your sticking with VHS?
Is it just me or are you insane?
Ok, let me make sure I'm reading this correctly... You are currently using VHS, and the picture quality bothers you, but DVD artifacts bother you MORE? Did I read that right? DVD artifacts and pixelation bother you so much you won't leave VHS?
I'm not going to type anymore about this, that is just sbsurd.
There are many decent DVD players avaliable for $100. Why not just get a cheap one for the time being then decide on buying a more expensive one when the new standards come out.
Sweetness!
This is the worst Ask Slashdot ever.
They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.
For $50 for a pretty good low-end model, you really can't go wrong. I bought one last year, and I'm happy with it for now, until I can get a recorder. (I'm going to build a Linux-based TiVo box with DVD recorder.) When I get something better, I'll give it to my parents -- $50 is a good deal for a couple years worth of usage.
Also, if the Next Big Format uses 12 cm discs, it'll almost definitely play current DVDs. Just like today's DVD players can play CDs and VCDs.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I don't know anything about this, but violet lasers sound awesome!!
(Yes, DVDs don't look even close to film quality, but they're a lot better than VHS, and players cost like $50 now. I say it's a no brainer unless you don't want to be supporting the DVD CCA and a closed "standard"!)
My advice, Don't wait. The current DVD standard is widespread at this point. The industry is not going to drop DVD any time soon and you will probably find few movies done specifically done for higher capacity drives. Any transition will be very slow, especially since most people will be perfectly happy with a standard DVD.
First, I have about 300 or more DVDs. Only seen artifacts on a handful. And only on a crappy, Apex DVD player. And even then, only in lack of handling dark scenes well.
Second, you can get the aforementioned, crappy Apex for $40, a reasonable name brand model for $110 and really nice stuff for a bit more. Expect the higher end jobs to be just about as relevant as SVHS players/recorders.
If you are really seeing artifacts on DVDs frequently, then how can you stand tapes? If you buy them, they are much more bulky, no random access, etc. If you rent them... Lord help you. When I was still renting tapes, if I couldn't get it within a week of release, I passed. It was generally just barely viewable to me. It was unwatchable to my wife, as the captioning information degrades VERY quickly on VHS. This is just one very obvious sign of the lack of durability of VHS tapes.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
When DVD players were first coming out, I won one on the radio that retailed for $800. Almost 5 years later, that model is still selling used for almost $200. The picture quality on it is awesome, and it still works perfect.
Now, compare that one to some of the cheap new ones that some of my friends bought at Wal mart for around $100, and there is a very definite quality difference in the picture and sound. On my player, there is only pixelation if the disc is very dirty. The cheap new ones pixelate if you so much as look at them wrong.
The bottom line is, if you are really that bothered by pixelation, fork up some cash and buy a nice one, not an Apex or one like it.
its the compression that sucks. Most movies look pretty damn good on a 700MB Divx.
What the fuck?? I have never seen a Divx movie that wasn't either (a) encoded from a camcorder (which looks like shit anyway) or (b) re-encoded from a DVD. If it's reencoded from a DVD, it can't look better than the DVD, because you've already suffered the compression and decompression.
Maybe you're just saying that if we used MPEG-4 to compress DVDs in the first place, we'd be able to use a much higher bitrate and lose the kind of MPEG-2 artifacts that the poster complains about. I'm not sure that's true, since MPEG-4 is strong mainly at lower bitrates and has many of the same image quality problems that MPEG-2 has. But we can't base our opinion on Divx DVD rips!!
Seriously ... you're talking about pre-recorded DVDs, right? Even if all the companies offered violet lasers today, it wouldn't change how many of the original DVD players are out there.
It will be YEARS before you see DVD movies move off of the current standard. There is no reason for the movie industry to alienate the current adopters. They will not be releasing movies (much less re-releasing existing DVDs) until the proportion of violet laser players in use is larger than the install base of older players.
The only way around this is to make violet laser DVDs backwards compatible and that doesn't seem feasible to me.
I'm not against the technology, I would love to see HD DVDs become standard, but it isn't realistic to base your adoption on the new technology. The only place violet lasers are going to make a difference in the near future is for data storage.
BTW, I would guess you were watching on a fairly cheap DVD player. There is some low level color distortion (not nearly as much as on DirecTV streams though) in the MPEG encoding, but better DVD players can prevent most artifacts. I waited to buy my player until the new Faroudja chipset was available about 18 months ago and I couldn't be happier with the picture quality. You can get better than that, but the Faroudja based players are reasonably priced with great quality.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Actually, you have three problems. If you're new to DVD, you may not know about the 'region' nonsense. Simply put: if you buy a disc in Europe, forget about playing it in the US, and vice-versa.
There is no technical reason for this. It's pure marketing BS. However, there are DVD players on the market which make it possible to circumvent the region encoding. You may want to consider one of these...
Next-gen DVDs aren't expected to really get off the ground until 2008-2010, so unless you really don't plan on watching any movies in the next five years, you'd better get a DVD player.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Everyone seems to use jpg now and gif looks like dead, should i get a jpg viewer or wait for png to break through fully? I'm in a limbo here and fear the 0.000c investment for jpg viewer could be in vain if everyone use png soon :(
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The captioning data fails because of tape streach. It does not take much. The dubbing process also does a job on it. The only good way to dub a captioned tape is to TBS the source and encode the captions as you are dubing. Almost no one does that I am afraid.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...backward compatible is to make players that have both a violet and red laser in them and have them sense which laser to use using the same method that current dvd players sense what laser to use for a cd or dvd.
Being an early adopter of DVDs, I always have to act a bit shocked when I hear people don't have one when I'm on my 3rd player. So I fully suggest you go out and get one seeing as VHS is all but dead (hizzah!).
As per your comment on poor video compression, more often than not, poor video compression is the fault of the studios. I've seem a lot of crappy transfers (Highlander, Evil Dead, etc) and a lot of beautiful transfers (Anything Pixar has done, LOTR, Panic Room, etc). The fact is a lot of studios are willing to cram a crappy video transfer on a disc, edge "enhance" the hell out of it, and cram in some extras with th space they've saved. But the good studios (Dreamworks, Universal sometimes) have learned that it's better to put good video and audio on one disc and put the exras on a second, resulting in much improved video transfers.
So don't let a few bad transfers spoil the DVD experience, the bad transfers are usually equally as bad on VHS, so it's not like you're losing much. I'd say invest in a good solid medium range DVD player now (you can get solid progressive scan units for about $150), and then when the new laser models come out, wait through the price wars and tech sniggles and get one of them when the technology has been tightened up and the prices have gone down.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
You can buy a very cheap player for about $50. But why not spend a little more. For just a little more you can buy a decent progressive output DVD player. Check out this DVD Benchmark test which seems to be more thorough than most DVD tests. They recommend several players that retail for only $230 (street price is a lot less).
Other things to look for:
There's always something better coming, and you wouldn't want to miss out!
Like the original poster, I have a lot of problems with the DVD format.
DVD sucks because:
1) It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
2) Discs usually have mandatory, can't-fast-forward-through-them FBI warnings at the beginning of disks. By jove, when I buy a movie, I want to see a MOVIE, not some goddammed threatening legalese from the MPAA!
3) artifacts. DVD players (or at least the Sony my sister lent me) can't seem to keep the most basic artifacts suppressed. I remember seeing a white-painted wall, and noticing that the paint "crawled" like white noise as action elsewhere in the frame caused a wacky encoding of a simple signal. Call me back when you can film white walls.
4) compatibility issues. One in twelve DVDs I rent doen't work on my player, in which case I have to watch it on a laptop. (Unless THAT also doesn't work.) Yes VHS tapes get eaten, but not at that high a rate. VHS is more reliable.
5) Skipping. Usually have to endure this once or twice per film on rentals. Lame.
6) Frilly menus. Please less ghay animation, more do-what-I-want.
For these reasons I continue to prefer VHS to DVD. Yes, I use trolly language here, and for that I apologise, but I'm bitter everyone else has been so suckered by this crap technology. (And yes I had a Betamax way back when, and Yes, I'm bitter about that losing too).
1st of all:
"wait for a violet/blue laser standard to emerge?"
Standard? To emerge? See DVD+/-RW/RAM/ROM/R for standardization example. In other words you will wait till the end of the world...
2nd of all:
Go get yourself a $50 DVD player. And that is before rebate, or without any deal. You can afford this, go ahead. You can invest another dinner when the violet/blue lasers get market share.
3rd of all:
I agree with you about the poor quality, but realistically it will be 10-15 years before another format will come out. CDs stayed around (and are staying) for a while, even if they have their own problems. Have you been buying DVD-Audios lately? Not me either.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
If you rip a 4 gig DVD, and it looks as good at 700 megs, then its better.
Photos.
First, DVD looks much better than VHS. Most/all cable providers now have 'digital cable'. This provides cable in Mpeg2 that is much more compressed than your average DVD. Digital cable looks like crap.
I've been resisting the indoor-plumbing pull for a while but out-houses are becoming more and more obselete. So, I'm thinking about joining the hordes, but I have two problems with indoor plumbing: paying the water bill and the periodic cleaning, which annoy me to no end. Maybe I've just seen crappy looking toilet bowls, but this leads me to my question: should I go ahead and purchase a toilet and indoor plumbing regardless of my qualms or wait for a machine which sucks the shit straight out of my ass? My hope is that such a machine would lead to a more convenient defecating experience, but, then again, I could be waiting in vain. Plus, I don't want to embrace modern technology only to have it be replaced within a couple of years.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I bet they'll keep the compression the same but just add a few more hours of "the making of" and unseen footage crap with the extra space.
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
You may as well buy now. I too am often bugged by the dark scences looking a little bad. But by the time the blue standard is widely adopted you will be wondering if you should wait for ultraviolte or other new technology that will be coming down the pike to store more.
.. the movie industry is going to suddenly decide on a new standard simply because the quality will be better. Pfft.
DVD players work just fine now. People are happy. Everybody has one. I wouldn't worry about new discs coming out until HDTV is in use like DVD players are today. Until then, things will stay exactly like they are.
So, are you saying that either:
A) your expensive one manages to encounter fewer errors in the read servo because it is higher quality
or
B) your expensive one decodes the stream fully, whereas others somehow decode the stream mostly
There are only few servo makers out there, and I assure you, there is very little difference in the data reading abilities between them (mechanical lifespan is another matter).
Even the cheap players decode the entire stream. I predict the high resale value of your player has nothing to do with quality, but rather perceived quality. Just like in every other consumer A/V application. It's the same reason people pay extra for oxygen-free speaker cable. If it is expensive, it must be good.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes chips for DVD players and A/V equipment. The same chips go in the $50 as the $500 one.
I find visible quantization and blockiness to be more irritating than moderately poor high frequency reponse and random noise. Thus I find that I like poor analog quality better than I like poor digital quality. On the other hand, I like good digital quality better than good analog.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
ok... i am a video compression expert so it's my JOB to find artifacts and deal with them. in the lab, we have some seriously high end equipment, if the input signal sucks, the equipment shows it. if it's good, it shows it.
until recently, we have been feeding our alternate encoder with DVD source as a test for reliability. we had some PS2s sitting around and used that. on the set, you can see DVDs that were sourced from DV camera and it looked like shit with all the interlacing and the block noise in the shadows, etc.
THEN, we got a VERY nice Sony DVP-NS915 progressive output DVD player... the output with the SAME DVDs...
UNBELIEVEABLE.
there was such a world of difference! we even turned off the progressive mode and it was STILL beautiful! this thing kicked the crap out of the PS2 in output quality. no block noise, interlace noise gone, and a LOT cleaner image.
now i know, all DVD players are not equal. you definitely get what you pay for!
for a question like this, get a NICE DVD player and you'll be very happy. get a crappy one, well... you'll be asking this again and again.
also, blue-ray rocks! but you MUST have high end stuff end to end or you're just wasting money.
Oh god. Now someone's going to point out I said "just stick it in". Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, people!
What we need is a disc that stores a really fricking huge amount of data. 23GB is nothing. How about 100TB? That'd be good. All they have to do is replace the red/blue/violet laser with some kind of evil death ray.
I'm still using Eyeballs v1.0, analogue encoding devices acquired in the early 1970's. While they're not quite as good as new, they do tell me that images from DVD are considerably better than images from VHS. Maybe there's out-of-band data that Eyeballs v1.0 are filtering out, or frequencies that are being processed incorrectly?
Is there a newer version available? Is there a upgrade discount for established Eyeballs v1.0 users?
A decent DVD player today plays DVD's, CD's, VCD's, SVCD's, MP3's, JPEG picture CD's and probably more. I got a Phillips for $139 and I've been very pleased with it (except for the lack of real buttons on the front). Compare that with a JVC I bought in '97 for $499 that sucked ass to the point where it wouldn't play some DVD's (and that's all it was supposed to do) and it seems like a great deal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Old DVDs had a lot of artifacts. The publishers were still figuring out how the compression worked. New DVDs rarely have artifacts. One thing you have to remember is that, like most things, you get what you pay for.
If you spend $69 on a DVD player don't expect perfect video. I had a cheap player before and it was the weak link in my home theater chain. I upgraded to a nice, but expensive, Pioneer Elite 47Ai and it looks FANTASTIC. The bigger the TV the more difference you'll notice, of course. A good $200 player will satisfy almost everyone.
There are British slashdotters who found that one quite useful, I'm sure.
He said he won it from a radio station. That means he got it for free.
While a violet-laser DVD might be available, it will probably be some time before any media is availble for it. If you are looking for high-definition, uncompressed video, DVHS is currently the only way to go. As an added bonus, you can even record on them, as well as play back regular and super VHS.
JVC makes a few nice models.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
Is expensive for a DVD player these days.
You can get a decent one for $60ish nowadays. $100 is where you start finding progressive-scan DVD players.
If the poster thinks DVD is worse PQ than VHS, he either:
a) Is using a REALLY shitty DVD player, even shitter than my $60 Rowa, which makes even VCDs look better than your average VHS. (Oddly, while I get horrendous artifacts when playing VCDs on any PC player, I get NO visible artifacts when displaying to an NTSC TV via a composite cable.)
b) Is comparing based on a VERY badly encoded DVD. CSI: The Complete First Season disc set by any chance? (Worst DVD PQ I've ever seen, but still better than VHS. I could simply be spoiled after watching CSI in full HDTV widescreen glory - the Complete First Season is 4:3!)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Admittedly some of their models are crap.
But others are VERY nice players that rival the "name brands". In some cases they blow away the "name brand" players. Apex makes one of the most feature-packed portables out there. Apex is well on the way to joining the ranks of "Name Brand" manufacturers.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The only readily available DVHS recorder/player on the market is the JVC HM-DH30000U (Maybe there's a new one available now...), but probably over 25% of 30ks went back to the service center within months and in some cases JVC is taking many months to fix returned units.
I've heard that the Mitsubishi units are good, but they're impossible to find.
If you want to get DVHS, you also need to find:
An HDTV tuner with 1394 output
Invest in a good broadcast TV antenna (None of the cable HD boxes seem to have 1394 outputs)
Invest in an HDTV display.
Actually, one of the best options for many Slashdotters would be a Mitsu unit combined with a PCI HDTV tuner card. (If I'd been able to find a Mitsu unit I would've bought one for use with my MyHD MDP-100 tuner card.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's a string of buzzwords with no actual meaning.
I could see a lot of meaning to me. I translated it like this: Where sound is transmitted from one medium to another, or reflected off a medium, slight nonlinearities can come into play, and frequencies outside the range of human hearing can contribute to these nonlinearities. Air itself has a nonlinear response, which some tube amps mimic (explaining why some audiophiles prefer the tube sound).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not quite true. You only need an HDTV tuner if you wish to record HDTV. One of the benefits of the D-VHS system is the ability to buy pre-recorded HD content. As for the HDTV display, why the hell would you buy a HD player/recorder if you didn't already have, or plan to get in the near future, an HD display.
It goes out of its way to screw you over by refusing to route video signal through a VCR, thus rendering it inoperable with most legacy TVs.
A good VCR should only fall victim to Macrovision when the record button is pressed. Otherwise, consumers in the States can get a standalone RF modulator at Wal*Mart for $20 or a video clarifier (which happens to defeat Macrovision as well) at RadioShack for $30.
Discs usually have mandatory, can't-fast-forward-through-them FBI warnings at the beginning of disks.
Look for the searchlight. Fox tends to the FBI warning at the end of the main Title.
Skipping. Usually have to endure this once or twice per film on rentals. Lame.
Before you put a rented disc in your player, turn it over and wipe it from center to edge with a damp soft cloth. Go in-and-out rather than around because players are better at interpolating around in-and-out scratches than around scratches parallel to the groove. This will get rid of the smudges (and even crayon!) that you find, especially on family titles. If that doesn't fix it, the disc has scratches. A reputable rental shop will give you a discount off the price of your next rental if you rented a scratched disc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you see a lot of blockiness, chances are your TV is not adjusted correctly. Most sets come from the factory with brightness and contrast settings that are way out of line. Blacks are gray and everything in shadow is too bright. The encoding blocks up a lot in dark areas, but on a well-adjusted set those will typically be dark enough that you don't notice.
If you want to talk *artifacts*, try Tivo on Basic (or even Medium) quality. That's a great way to see the mpeg process live.
Anyway, get a copy of Video Essentials (or if you're old skool, a laserdisc copy of A Video Standard, which is an earlier version of the same thing). You can often rent it, though it will not come with the color calibration gel. You can still do a lot of useful adjustments with it.
If you are really that concerned with buying DVD hardware now, then do one of two things:
/rant
1) buy a decent video card for your computer (hardware decoder) and put it in a cheap p166 box with a dvd drive. my Hollywood Magic PCI card in an old dell p166/32mb ram works great. And I spent all of $100 for the whole thing. Then you can eventually put it in your bedroom, whereever, doesn't matter because its still cheap. also, put an ethernet card in it and vnc, boot on all errors, no login screen, windows 98, and auto start the player software, whamo, instant console dvd player.
2) buy a cheap dvd player from walmart. I got one the other day (samsung) for $70, could've spent less and got the akai? for $50, but even I have my standards.
-or-
3) wait forever because you'll always be too concerned with the investment cost to purchase. something better is always going to come out. you just have to live with not being on the bleeding edge all the time. it costs too much money!
joey
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
if you are looking into finding out about the quality of ld, dvd and d-vhs releases you need to subscribe to this magazine: Widescreen Review. it has reviews of just about every release and is for video and audiophiles. subscribers also get access to their website (which isn't the prettiest thing, but it does have a ton of useful information). i can't recommend it enough.
we have a large a/v room in our home with a projection system and a very large projector screen on the wall. crap sources are very evident and the magazine is good for these types of situations where the picture might look fine on a 30" tv, but edge enhancement, jaggies, and poor color reproduction are very evident. they do detailed technical reviews on each movie and note problems with each release. saved us a pile of money on buying poor transfers...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
It's fucking DVD player. Commodity item. Even Walmart sells them these days, alongside the CD-players and televisions. There are no replacement standards on the horizon for consumers, certainly none that are going to be widespread before the decade is out.
Yes, there *can* be poor encodings. DVD encodings are variable bitrate - and as such the mastering process requires care. Higher rates are typically used during action sequences and when a lot of detail is required (closeups / etc). VHS doesn't hold a candle to it. And if a DVD player has progressive scan output - wow.
In short: the manufacturer of the movie decides how much effort to put into making the picture good. When I first started collecting DVDs I worried endlessly about what the transfer quality was going to be like. I've had my player 4 years and I no longer care - so long as the disk plays I can enjoy the movie. Quality is taken for granted.
If you're a videophile geek (perhaps not, if you're asking about DVD many years after most geeks got into it), may I recommend some starter disks:
* Alien Legacy (Alien & Aliens were, I believe, encoded from the laserdisc version)
* Gladiator (nice DTS soundtrack too)
* Blade (a superb transfer - one of the first "reference" quality movies [plot not withstanding])
* The Matrix (on come on - it's just about everybody's first DVD purchase)
I'm sure there are more I could recommend, but I'm getting tired of typing.
Oh, and The Digital Bits is a good DVD site. Check out the reviews of movies before you buy them if you're that picky about the transfer.
The older ( now almost gone ) video disk format was analog, and didnt have the same headroom issues that tape has, or the gradual degredation of signal after each play.
But i agree 100% analog IS better quality.. though rather impractical these days..
( why the hell was teh parent modded as funny? )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Vinyl IS better then cd on decent equipment, and if taken care of properly..
Digital cant beat analog. Peroid.
YOUR ears may not be able to tell the difference, but many people can.
VHS, yes i agree.. it sucked. The headroom and speed accuracy were both dismal, thus quality suffered.
But a *real* video disk is better then DVD ( remember DVD is both digital AND compressed )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With how common current red laser DVD systems have become, the technology has dropped in cost dramatically. Walmart even has an Emerson DVD Player for only 60 bucks.
Even Though violet laser DVD systems are on the market now, it will be some time before their cost comes down, and it will be almost as long before we start seeing DVDs out on the market that would take advantage of this feature. It seems to me that if you want to see DVDs that the $60 or so for a DVD player now could be worth it, depending on how much you have to spend. Then when violet laser system prices come down and DVDs for them are available, you can get one of those. THere will still be pleny of regular DVDs around, so the red laser unit won't go to waste for a long time.
~Mike
Mike Rizzo
Score: -1, Howling Moron
no text
I think no matter what you buy or when you buy it there is always going to be something in a few years that will be bigger and better. There just isn't any way to keep up with technology. However, I think that you would be wise to purchase a DVD player because VHS really is becoming ancient.
Don't sit so close to the TV. The Mpeg-2 compressed artifacts will give you brain cancer! If you can see the dvd artifacts, you're too damn close. If you want artifactless video go down to your local pawn shop and pick up an old laserdisc player. But remember it is only stored digitally. The video is analog. I don't know all the specifics but there are some tradeoffs vs dvd. Considering home dvd players can be had for much less than a C-note these days why not just get a cheapo "Panofujisonic" until you decide on your technology.
Thanks, I've been looking for a tv-tuner card for linux for a long time now.