At: ashok.org.uk/2009/two-kinds-of-quality
I've been shopping for a new DVD player recently, and have been quite surprised by the attitude of so many shops when I ask which of their players are multi-region.
I'd really like a multi-region DVD & Blu-ray player, but that hardly seems like an option. I expect I'll get an encumbered PS3 later on, and a multi-region DVD player now.
A typical response from shops that sold decent electronics was 'We don't sell that sort of thing' and to suggest I try a cheaper, dodgier part of town.
This is tricky for me as I'm looking for two distinct kinds of quality. I want both:
They are both about a smooth and pleasant user experience, but one is the side of that the industry pushes, the other is about how the industry tries to segment markets in both time and space.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have brought a bundle of European (and a few Aussie) DVDs to North America. People move, and by-and-large they take their stuff with them. I don't know what the movie industry's official line is. Should I have sold them all second hand and re-bought them over here? I guess they would prefer if I had binned them, and bought them again, but that's hardly likely.
Some of the shops were more reasonable. In rough order of snootiness, I tried:
None of the indies I tried were especially snooty, but they weren't going to let me play with the machines to figure it out, or make it terribly easy to return a box if it wasn't up to scratch.
Best Buy and Futureshop tried to be helpful, but Futureshop were smarter, and at least knew of a line they used to stock that worked well. The problem with both was that didn't know very much about their current products. I was just comparing model numbers to online lists of hackable players.
Currently, I'm trying a Toshiba SD7200, which has an easy handset-hack. Both Best Buy and Futureshop have decent returns policies, so I have a few weeks to figure out if this will do. I'm happy that it plays any disc I have thrown at it. I'm not so happy with the quality of the upscaling – not a patch on our old PS3. Any suggestions of good quality (in both senses) players available in Canada would be very welcome.
Tagged: Distribution, Media, Social, Technology
Posted at 16:37 GMT, 13th December 2009.
3 Comments
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One of the items on my todo-list is to feed all of my DVDs, one by one, into one of my computers, and have it convert them all into a set of efficiently-transcoded files with nice metadata.
This will have the beneficial side-effect that I'll then have the files stored in clear, and thereafter able to play them on whichever computer I want.
The primary limiting factor is that I don't currently have a nice automated process that will do everything just so – storing subtitles and multiple audio streams as separate tracks, generating separate files for extra features, etc.
That's something I'm planning to do too, just as many of us have for CDs. The shiny discs become the backups, and you can stash them somewhere that's fairly hard to reach.
There are some proper legal questions as to whether you would be breaking the law, but then in the UK they still haven't fixed that for CDs, either. The difference is that there's been pretty broad agreement about fixing the copyright side of it for CDs, but little noise on fixing the anti-circumvention junk that you'd need for DVDs.
I'll wait for storage costs to drop a bit further first but it should become reasonable when it drops by a factor of ten or so. For me, it's still cheaper to buy a DVD player and keep using them straight off the shelf. Also, the main reason to get a player now is to use Zip.ca, which is a service similar to Netflix or LoveFilm over here. With my old LoveFilm account I very nearly started ripping throw-away copies of the discs just to check that they would play through smoothly. It's very frustrating to plan an evening in with a particular film and have it bomb out halfway through. We had a short run of duff discs.
I'm also not sure of whether to transcode at all. I think it might be more useful, for the medium term, to keep the whole DVD structure, and cope with them being a few times larger on disk. I'm still thinking of re-ripping all the CDs as lossless, once I figure out how to do that neatly for future re-use.
As for a streamlined process, although I now rip my CDs using iTunes, I used to find Scot Hacker's RipEnc bash script a real doddle to use, back when I used BeOS. I'd be tempted to build something that way for DVDs…
Regarding UK copyright restrictions, it's my understanding that the European Union Copyright Directive – which protects anti-circumvention measures – has yet to be ratified into UK law. So in theory I think I can use still use wicked DVD players that disregard region codes.
Regarding lossless ripping of music CDs, I've long since adopted the practice of importing everything as FLAC, which is an open, lossless format. File sizes are roughly half the raw .wav, verses the ~10:1 you could obtain with .mp3.
Virtually all open-source GNU tooling supports the format, so I'm all sorted on my shells of choice. Tools like Rhythmbox (*nix iTunes-alike) will live-convert tracks to something suitable (like .mp3) when exporting to a portable device – so my phone also has a full copy of my music spool in a format it can use.
My home fileserver runs an instance of mt-daapd / Firefly, which will live-transcode local tracks to .wav prior to streaming to DAAP clients (Rhythmbox, iTunes, etc.) if they don't support FLAC themselves.
MusicBrainz.org has proven to be effective as a data store of tagging information, too. (If you haven't seen their Picard tool, I'd recommend having a brief look at it for sheer interest's sake.) They've clearly spent quite a lot of time on their data model – though their web interface could use a bit more polish.
Regarding video playback, our household's primary TV is a Windows box with a couple of TV tuners plugged in, some nice speakers and a large flat-panel – which is far more flexible than a dedicated appliance could be.
(When you're using VLC or similar to do decoding / upscaling / playback, your choice of storage format matters a lot less – and it'll auto-skip the non-skippable parts of DVDs, too.)
Sadly, I don't think open-source support for Blu-ray playback has yet reached maturity. But with drives (and disks) still apparently costing an arm and a leg, I'm personally less fussed about that right now.
Regarding DVD transcoding, it's fairly clear that you'll want a two-stage process – taking a dump of the disk contents, and post-processing the result. Unlike audio re-coding, we're not going to get high-quality compression running at multies of real-time without dedicated hardware (GPU? FPGA?) so buffering is going to be necessary anyway.
Keeping the original disk images around is tempting, but I've got several TV box sets that will take up a heck of a lot of space…
But you're perhaps wise to wait for disk prices to drop; looking at Dabs.com just now, I see that 2TB disks can now be obtained for a little under 125UKP, and 1TB disks going for less than 70. Which is frankly ridiculous!