Quake3World

Just wondered what people are thinking when it comes to media in this day and age. I was talking to a mate in the pub the other day and he literally laughed at me telling me that physical media is dead and I am wasting my time with 4k discs. We went for after pub drinks at his and he boots up Netflix and chucks on The Crown which is fantastic and looks beautiful in 4k on his 150mbit connection. I currently don't have a good internet connection where I live, but it will be sorted in the next 4 weeks, but even then I am only going to be on 70mbit at best, though far better than the 12mbit I am on now.

Since I bought a good TV, a good set of speakers and an amp worth powering them, I have invested some of my hard earned money in several "Ultra hi-def" mediums; be it 4k blu-ray discs or SACD/Blu-ray audio, and I swear that these are head and shoulders above any online streaming I have encountered. Netflix have some stuff like Luke Cage which uses Dolby Vision (which is better than HDR in my opinion) but it still doesn't compare from what I can see to physical disc. Does anyone else own anything like this and do you have any experiences with physical 4k media? It wold be good to know if its just me and my mindset trying to justify my purchases to myself or if I am correct (which I think I am ) and that you can't substitute streaming from the interweb with what you can get on a disc if you have high quality audio/visual components.

I still buy DVDs & Blu-rays. If I had a 4K device I guess I'd be buying the 4K discs. Mind you, the movie has to be up there for me to get the hard copy.

My internet connection at best is 10Mb/s and I don't have cable TV (Netflix) by the way.

So in answer to the question, "Is anyone else buying 4k discs?", I would be

You will never achieve the bitrate and quality of a physical disc from streaming. I always buy a disc for my favorites.

Even if you had the connection to stream 100GB of data (size of 4k blu-ray) in 2hrs I don’t think streaming services with their compression algorithms will do it.

shaft wrote:You will never achieve the bitrate and quality of a physical disc from streaming. I always buy a disc for my favorites.

Even if you had the connection to stream 100GB of data (size of 4k blu-ray) in 2hrs I don’t think streaming services with their compression algorithms will do it.

I think I disagree with that (kinda). Netflix streams "at 4K". Now. Ridiculous 6 or whatever was one of the first ones. And having internet to do it isnt crazy anymore. We have 400 megs here with gig coming soon. And its not like I live in some high tech place.

Now I cannot prove this, But they do claim its 4k and they do have other content.



Buuuuuuuut I do kinda agree though with the you cant really REALLY ever be 100% on par with physical media, only if because it takes a single frame to go pixel and lose that quality. I mean, I guess you could download it, then you could technically get that quality "digitally" but then you're kinda cheating with a sorta physical copy.

Netflix is good but doesnt compare, bitrates and compression means theres at least some loss in pic quality and when you consider sound it doesnt come close. With your home cinema set up youre gonna wanna stick to discs if only for the uncompressed audio with truehd n stuff.

Soapboy you’re confusing resolution vs quality.
Streaming is subject to lower bitrate and higher compression regardless of resolution.

It’s all subjective to the person though. If you don’t have the equipment or the eyesight to notice the difference it definitely doesn’t matter.

Streaming clips white and black ends of the pixel range, you might see it in dark films where it can sometimes look blocky. Disk is still the best way, but it's got to be said NF is very good.

4K Blu-ray is definitely worth it, especially for HDR

shaft wrote:Soapboy you’re confusing resolution vs quality.
Streaming is subject to lower bitrate and higher compression regardless of resolution.

It’s all subjective to the person though. If you don’t have the equipment or the eyesight to notice the difference it definitely doesn’t matter.

Right, The whole exp with audio and everthing. Fair enough. Hell Days of Thunder in 1080 with uncompressed audio is 33 gigs. So you're right there.


Guess thats me being a consumer these days and not caring about the audio side so long as it looks good

SOAPboy wrote:

shaft wrote:Soapboy you’re confusing resolution vs quality.
Streaming is subject to lower bitrate and higher compression regardless of resolution.

It’s all subjective to the person though. If you don’t have the equipment or the eyesight to notice the difference it definitely doesn’t matter.

Guess thats me being a consumer these days and not caring about the audio side so long as it looks good

Thing is good speakers in your home theater will make it a lot more impressive than the screen. It gets expensive though.

SOAPboy wrote:..........Days of Thunder in 1080 with uncompressed audio is 33 gigs............

Where did you get that number? Wait, a simple google result here, so the question should be why did you pick Days of Thunder?

Whiskey 7 wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:..........Days of Thunder in 1080 with uncompressed audio is 33 gigs............

Where did you get that number? Wait, a simple google result here, so the question should be why did you pick Days of Thunder?

I happened to have a copy of it. haha

Yeah I guess there's probably a difference but I switched to 4K recently and there's definitely a noticeable difference. I also switched my netflix subscription to include 4k streaming, cause you know... it doesn't if you don't pay for it. I watched a series called Moving Art and I gotta say the quality was pretty nice but video games is where 4k really shines imho.

Only physical media I get is nature documentaries, even though our projector's only 1080p I still get 4k when available for forward compatibility. For all other content streaming is fine imo.

Total homo thread... Grow up weirdos...

So I have a good test; I have The Martian on my Sky Q box in UHD. It is on Netflix in UHD and I have the UHD disc. Should be interesting to see the difference between all 3 mediums with the same material.

I will let you know my thoughts

just skip to the action shots, you'll see the compression then.

Make sure you got TrueHD or DTS MA enabled when you stream :P

also Netflix is wholly dependent on the platform running it. for instance the webplayer doesn't even run in 1080p unless you're on Edge or Safari.

I'll be using the app on my TV, so it should be fine