orangerunner

It was the unrated version to boot! I'm sure someone at Toshiba was reprimanded for that decision!

Travis McClain

...And someone at Warner was congratulated for that deal!

Alan Smithee

That's what's missing today. There's just no real excitement anymore. I'm sure a lot of people have gotten fatigue by now, but the industry could at least be trying a bit more to push 4K discs and stuff like that. Instead they're trying to cripple discs by releasing new movies on digital early, and they seem to know there's no excitement in that. I click "Buy" and now I have access to this movie- yay.

What really sucks is Best Buy put many real media retailers out of business by undercutting them on pricing. It was only after most of them were gone when they decided "You know, we really don't want to sell this stuff anyways."

Travis McClain

For me, it goes back to the days of VHS rental. Because of the nature of that business model, you only rented something if you were committed to watching it that night, or at least within however many days your rental period spanned. The viewing experience was private, in your own home with your own family and/or friends, but the rental store was a public, communal environment. You'd browse the shelves next to strangers, maybe make small talk. "Have you seen that? Is it any good?" Even if you didn't interact with anyone but the clerk, that itself was some kind of engagement. If you went in wanting to rent something specific, there was the chance you'd be disappointed because there wouldn't be any copies available. When you found there was one, though, it was a bit of a thrill. Movies should be thrilling. There was no "put it on for background noise" attitude about rented movies.

As the home video market shifted from rental to retail, and from VHS to DVD, that kinda died off but it lived on in a way on New Release Tuesday. Even if it was only a virtual shared experience of chatting on here about the scavenger hunts for retailer exclusive variants, that was something. The best, though, were the Star Wars DVD releases. Those got midnight release events. Here in my small town, that consisted of the Walmart electronics department worker bringing out the box to stock the shelves while a handful of us nerds stood around waiting to get our grubby little paws on them. It was paltry, but it called to mind those VHS rental store experiences.

Alan Smithee

Right when the format debuted there was nonstop asking "When is Star Wars coming out?" And that was before Fox had even started releasing anything on the format, they were the last major studio to join. That release was a non-event to me though since they weren't the original versions, and had even been tweaked further than the 1997 special editions which were at least shown in theaters.

I'd stopped renting movies by the time DVD came out, I switched to laserdisc in 1993 and there were only a handful of places that rented those, and by 1997 there was only one place left. I worked at a theater so I already saw most of the current movies. I remember in the VHS days though when you were lucky enough to be in the store when a new release would get returned and put back on the shelf, you almost felt obligated to rent it then. I don't know how that was by the time DVD came around, I'd vowed never to rent them because the studios were threatening to start pricing those the same as VHS which thankfully never happened.

morriscroy

This particular mindset remained with me, long after my first dvd purchase of a defective Terminator2 dvd which froze 20 minutes into the movie. The time period limit for me, was the number of weeks where a dvd could still be returned/exchanged at the retailer. I would not buy any dvds which I was not willing to watch immediately from start to finish, and all the special features.

In those days, there was no easy way to check for unreadable bad sectors on dvd discs due to manufacturing defects, other than watching through the entire movie from start to finish.

Once I figured out that it only takes around 11 minutes for a computer to check through an entire dvd disc for bad sectors (due to manufacturing defects), this completely changed how I thought of dvd discs.

One of the big reasons why I never got into 4Kbluray, was that it takes over an hour to check a fully packed 4Kbluray for bad sectors on the computer. If it is taking a computer over an hour to check for manufacturing defects on a particular 4Kbluray discs, then I mind as well just watch the entire movie by just playing the actual disc.

Travis McClain

Remember how people reacted in 2000 when Episode I was released only on VHS and George Lucas said he DVD wasn't a priority? That was a moment for me. As for the OT DVD release in '04, I had mixed feelings. Replacing Marjorie Eaton and Clive Revill with Ian McDiarmid in Empire worked for me (though I prefer the original dialogue). Replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christiansen in Jedi did not. I'm sure I've watched the DVD's far fewer times than I ever watched my 1992 box set. Hell, I probably watched the original making-of VHS, From "Star Wars" to "Jedi": The Making of a Saga more. In fairness, though, by time the DVD box set came out, my interest had largely shifted from revisiting favorites frequently to chancing new things with my viewing time.

milo bloom

I held off a bit, saying I would wait for either Star Trek or Star Wars to be released because I figured that once one did, the other would follow. So when Paramount finally started releasing TOS on two episodes per disc DVDs I got serious about joining the format.

But we all know how that went and eventually I began exploring other sci fi and even horror titles that I never would have seen if I hadn’t been on forums like this.

orangerunner

This sums-up how I feel about the all-you-can-consume model of today. It's great that everything is dirt-cheap and accessible but the trade-off is nothing has any resonance or long-term worthiness.

Think about how we used to watch TV before the VCR? TV shows were important. I kept an old TV Guide magazine from 1981 (Vancouver, BC, Canada, medium-sized city at the time) and it was shocking how little choice there was in any given time-slot. PrimeTime on Tuesday night there were maybe 3 or 4 shows to choose from. No wonder 30 million people tuned into M*A*S*H*, "Dallas" or "ABC Sunday Night Movie" every week!

PrimeTime TV shows never just played in the background, you had to adjust your schedule around these shows or otherwise you'd have to wait for a re-run in the summer months if you missed an episode. Everything is available where-ever and whenever you want and while the convenience is appreciated, the down-side is there's no sense of importance or significance revolving around TV shows or movies anymore.

B5Erik

I got my first DVD Player in 1999. I had to get an adaptor to make it work with my older TV at the time, but I loved it! The picture was cleaner and crisper than VHS or even LaserDisc. And they were small and didn't take up as much storage space as those other formats.

I miss the days when I could walk in to WalMart and see a huge DVD section. I always found at least a handful of stuff that I wanted, and bought at least one of them.

Travis McClain

There's another byproduct of this: People my age and older aren't nearly as spoilerphobic as younger people. We treated shows more like gossip than anything else. The next day's conversation went like this:

Person A: Did you see [show] last night?
Person B: No, what happened?

As for movies, they had up to five waves of buzz. There was the initial theatrical release wave, which had a smaller second wave when the movie hit second run theaters. Then came the third wave: home video release, by which time we'd kinda forgotten that initial buzz from the first wave. For quite some time, this only included rental. Everyone rented it at the same time (or, rather, as soon as someone else returned it!) and because of the aforementioned business model, most everyone who rented it watched it promptly. Having to check periodically to find out if a movie had been returned and was available prolonged that buzz. A fourth wave was the home video retail release. That could be the same date as the rental release, or it could be more than a year later. A fifth wave was the first network TV broadcast. Today, though, the window between theatrical release and streaming is so brief there's really only one wave of buzz, book-ended by those two releases. And, of course, no one relies on TV broadcasts anymore and certainly not the edited versions a network would have to air. I'm not talking about the instances where movies have streamed date and day with their theatrical releases; those have been under extenuating circumstances. Here are three examples (spoiler'd for length):



Toddarino

I bought my first DVD player in 1999. I still have it actually in a closet. It’s a Samsung 511 and still works I think. My first movies were Ghostbusters 1&2. Those however are long gone. I believe I’ve bought those five times since then.
I’m trying to remember the last dvd I bought. I think it was fairly recently. It might have been 8mm since I couldn’t find it on streaming anywhere and I stumbled upon it at a used store.
Cost and rewatchablity are what drive my purchases. Most of them these days are blu followed by UHD. I’ve only made two digital purchases. I’m not ready to go all in on that yet. I don’t see it ever happening.

milo bloom

I still buy DVDs, mainly used but I bought the last Daniel Craig 007 movie on DVD because I started collecting his movies on DVD with the special edition of Casino Royale and I wanted to finish the set on DVD.

-----------------------------------------------

I was thinking about this thread and I wondered if we could discuss some "what could have been" things, like if you could send a message back in time to the groups that standardized the DVD format, what would you tell them to add or take away from the format?

For me, an easy one: any film 1.66 or wider would be required to have a 16x9 transfer.
Also, English subtitles or closed captioning would be required. My hearing is going with age and I've got DVDs that are getting hard to watch because I can't always make out the dialog and there's no subs, like most of my MST3K collection.

morriscroy

(On a tangent).

Was this version of the Casino Royale dvd disc which was notorious for being "unplayable" on many standalone dvd players back in 2007 ?

IIRC, Sony actually did a recall / replacement of this botched dvd version at the time.

milo bloom

Wow, I hope not, I haven't tried to play in years. I'll have to pull it out tonight and try it.

morriscroy

I took a look at the *.ifo files on a known botched dvd version of Casino Royale, in order to figure out what might be causing them to be "unplayable".

As far as I could figure out, it was some heavy "extra basketcase drm" (in addition to the generic dvd-video css drm) which attempted to cause then-current ripping programs to fall into an infinite loop and/or outright crash.

The subsequent dvd copies of Casino Royale released by Fox, did not have this "extra basketcase drm". For example, such as the various bluray/dvd/digitalcode combo set versions release by Fox.

Sony was releasing MGM titles during the mid-2000s, until the MGM board of directors change to Fox after 2006.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...m31-story.html

cultshock

Man, 25 years, I can't believe it. First time I saw DVDs for sale was during a trip to Japan in April 1997 (can't believe that trip was 25 years ago this month!). I was in a Tower Records and they had a stack for sale, mostly Warner titles as I recall, and a Japanese edition of the Hong Kong film Chungking Express, which was playing on various little monitors in the store. I didn't pick up my first player until 2000, and I think the first DVD I bought was the special edition of Boogie Nights.

morriscroy

I never had my own standalone dvd player until sometime in the late 2000s.

Back in the day, my then-wife was the one who was buying the laserdisc and dvd players for stuff like karaoke. After the divorce, she got all the laserdisc/dvd stuff. Though she left behind several of my dvds which she really hated, such as Cheech and Chong, etc ....

So for several years, the only way I could watch my dvds was on the computer. (I rarely ever watch them anyways).

Eventually sometime in the late 2000s I got an old standalone dvd player from a then-nearby friend, who was clearing out old junk they didn't want anymore.

BobO'Link

This is something I just don't get... *why* are they not required? The FCC 100% requires SDH/CC on *all* broadcasts. Having that on a physical media release seems, to me, to be a given/necessity.

I almost always watch with subs on - for new movies it's because the sound mixes are often horribly done with dialog buried in sfx/music queues, for older ones it's "just because" and I sometimes "get" things I'd never truly heard properly before, and sometimes it's because it's late at night and I can use those while keeping the volume down enough that my wife doesn't complain.

It really hit home a few weeks back when my 18yo grandson came over for a first time viewing of Game of Thrones (yes - and he's managed to remain mostly spoiler free to boot) and *asked* for them to be turned on because "Lots of times you just can't hear or understand what's being said and those fill in the gaps." This from a "kid" with good hearing. That made me feel better and pretty much said my hearing likely isn't as "bad" as I thought it was (and I *do* have issues - some from constant ear infections as a kid, others because I generally listen to music at very loud levels, and some just from age).

milo bloom

Yeah, between my hearing going and the terrible sound mixing out there, we have them on for almost everything we watch now. Most streaming services have them nowadays, but stuff we find from alternate sources is hit or miss.

orangerunner

Here's a good article about the current state of sound and dialogue in the movies. You aren't the only one having trouble hearing dialogue.

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/her...ays-to-fix-it/

milo bloom

I tried it in my PS5 this morning and it worked fine. I just realized I haven't owned a dedicated DVD/Blu-ray player in several years. For so long now we've had either a PlayStation or Xbox of some kind in both our living room and bedroom so we've been using those for a while now.

morriscroy

At the time circa 2008, Netflix even had an official list of standalone dvd players which would choke and not play these partcular botched Sony dvd discs.

https://static.flickr.com/3035/27416...175f3bc303.jpg

https://zatznotfunny.com/2008-08/net...py-protection/

morriscroy

The botched dvd copy of Casino Royale I came across, was one which came in a larger longbox with a deck of cards included. It was a $2 dump bin find at a dollar/discount store back in 2011 or 2012.

At the time, I also picked up "The Holiday" and "Stranger Than Fiction" found in a local $3 dvd dump bin. From reading the *.ifo files, I saw that they both also had the same extra basketcase drm as the botched Casino Royale dvd version.

milo bloom

Wow, I guess I had missed that issue back in 2008. I do recall the issue with some CDs having that DRM problem.