Upgrade your DVD's to Blu-Ray inexpensively!

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#330870 17-May-2010 12:33

I have managed to completely sidestep the whole "buying the disc" thing.
I have hundreds of DVDs, and just a couple of Blu-rays.

But my recent secret to success in this regard has been twofold: - 1 - I joined Fatso; and 2. - I learned to accept waiting for several months before I got/saw new release films. This combination is saving me heaps of money.
I used to purchase a DVD of all the new films that came out, pretty much as soon as they came out.

Whilst I amassed a fairly large collection of films, I found I seldom watched a movie twice. So really, there wasn't a lot of point in buying a copy. Much better to rent the movie. (Mind you, when my daughter was younger and I bought lots of kid's films - they did get watched repeatedly.)

I now pay $27.95 a month to Fatso for their "2 films at a time, unlimited films per month" plan. I watch on average 10 - 12 films a month. So they cost me < $3 per film- and that's for the Blu-ray version!

The new release films do take a lot longer to be available, but patience is a virtue, and once you make the shift to being a few months behind, you do have a steady stream of "new" films to watch, just like everyone else.

Definitely move to a blu-ray player & HD TV though. The improved quality is worth it.
One of the other benefits of Fatso is that they charge no more for the Blu-ray version of a film than the DVD version.

Whilst this post may sound like a blatant plug for Fasto, and in effect it is, rest assured that I have nothing to gain by recommending Fatso to you. :)

kind regards Andrew TD

dklong

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#330887 17-May-2010 13:27

A word of caution before jumping on the BluRay wagon. Recent issues with many players not playing Avatar on BluRay suggest that the DRM-brigade are still pi$$ing around with BluRay and the format is not settled yet.

You'd be fairly annoyed if you went out and bought a new bluray player and then a few months later it wouldn't play the latest movie without waiting for weeks for a firmware update or, if you had a PC with a bluray player, and the software company expecting you to pay them more money to upgrade to their recently released version ... just to play one movie!

Don't get me wrong, the result looks great and I hardly ever rent movies on DVD anymore... but the Copy Protection/DRM stuff has been a pain since I first got it.

By comparison, the DVD player you bought 10 years ago would happily have played the Avatar DVD.

lchiu7

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#330893 17-May-2010 13:41

Handsomedan: Just out of interest - I often format shift my DVD's to watch them on my iPhone while I am out of town etc.

Is it as easy to do this with BD's?

Not so easy. There's only one that I am aware of, tool that is free and can rip Bluray discs and that's in beta still. .There is commercial software around. But if you're going to rip for the iPhone might as well use the DVD as the source since you won't see the PQ difference.

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#330895 17-May-2010 13:45

dklong: A word of caution before jumping on the BluRay wagon. Recent issues with many players not playing Avatar on BluRay suggest that the DRM-brigade are still pi$$ing around with BluRay and the format is not settled yet.

You'd be fairly annoyed if you went out and bought a new bluray player and then a few months later it wouldn't play the latest movie without waiting for weeks for a firmware update or, if you had a PC with a bluray player, and the software company expecting you to pay them more money to upgrade to their recently released version ... just to play one movie!

Don't get me wrong, the result looks great and I hardly ever rent movies on DVD anymore... but the Copy Protection/DRM stuff has been a pain since I first got it.

By comparison, the DVD player you bought 10 years ago would happily have played the Avatar DVD.

There is a thread on this over at AudioEnz - miniscule number of people have had problems, easily fixed with a simple firmware upgrade.
I've played hundreds of Blu-ray discs on a PS3 and a Panasonic BD60 ( not running the latest firmware either ) and never had one not play.

Jaxson

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#330925 17-May-2010 15:28

It's all personal taste really, more than people maybe want to admit.

Most people knocking bluray don't have it, or don't have a setup to maximise it's impact. Once you do have it, you wont want to go back in my opinion. I use a PS3 for my bluray duties and I've never had a single problem playing any disc on it. Doesn't mean others don't but for me it's been flawless.

Re the DVD/Bluray/CD collections.... Each to their own on this once again. (I'm big on that whole zen thing, each to their own man, do what you want with your money). For me it's often a case of compensation, look how big mine is etc. I like many found that whilst i had a DVD in my collection, I didn't reach for it every night and I ended up with a big collection with a lot of money tied up in it. I'm not doing that again for Bluray.

Especially when the movie is not necessarily great, it's just new, and being new they charge top dollar for it. A bit like ZM knocking old songs like Achy Breaky Heart when they themselves played it non stop when it was new. Transformers 2 for example was huge on bluray, everyone wanted it, but really the movie was a huge heap of crap and will only be pulled out for short bursts now to demo your system. Real keeping up with the Jones fodder.

Each to their own man. Bluray is a huge step up on DVD but it's also brought in a new era where DVD is good enough for most who have realised that maybe they don't have to replace every single title this time around.

eracode

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#330942 17-May-2010 16:03

Don't forget that a decent BD player (or perhaps the AV receiver you use it with) will often do a pretty good job of upscaling the picture from a DVD towards HD standard - not the same as full-monty BluRay but not a bad compromise if the option is buying BD versions of discs of movies etc you already own as a DVD.

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andrew027

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#331411 18-May-2010 15:10

Well I'm a Blu-Ray noob, but I have to say it's worth the upgrade.

I had a DVD player and 5.1 AV receiver and upgraded to blu-ray and 7.1 receiver (although still only running a 5.1 setup) less than a month ago. The improvement in both video and audio quality is so noticable. I would recommend it to anyone.

We have about 100 titles on DVD, and perhaps six BD titles so far. I wont upgrade every DVD title I have to BD (but will with some of the titles we watch more often (LotR, Matrix and Bourne trilogies, Saving Private Ryan, a few others) but where there's a choice between the two formats I'll only buy on BD from now on.

And, yeah, if you're paying anywhere near $50 for a single-disc BD title that's way too much. I've seen one online site selling Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for $70.99 - what idiot is going to pay that!? Shop around, both online and in retail stores - I've seen some good titles for under $15.

ilovemusic

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#334137 24-May-2010 17:03

bazzer: Did you get cheap copies of all your LPs/tapes when CD came out?

No cheap LPs until the late 80s/early 90s when CD was firmly established and collectors were foolishly dumping collections.

cgrew

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#334507 25-May-2010 14:11

ascroft:

- A DVD version on the back of the disk

Double sided disks suck.. They scratch to easy.

As for Blu-Ray though - have you seen a decent 1080P BD movie on a Full HD 1080P LCD or Plasma?

Gorgeous.

Also I bought spider-man 1, 2 & 3 on Blu-Ray for $99.95 from Real Groovey - all of them of which are the special editions with hours of bonus content etc. Very good price I think.

minimoke

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#335062 26-May-2010 14:23

eracode: We had the DVD version of Roy Orbison's "Black and White Night" (one of my favourite music DVDs) then the BD came out. Last week I bought the BD version for $19.99 from JB HiFi in Queen St, Auckland, and at the same time Marbecks in Queen Arcade had it for $39.99! Gave the DVD version to a friend.

Now heres something I don't understand and someone could enlighten me.

I've got this DVD as well and use my Oppo to upscale it to 720p for my plasma - and it looks and sounds pretty good.

But going back a step it was a concert filmed in black and white on 35mm and 8 mm film in an essentially 4:3 aspect ratio.

So given this raw material how do they turn somthing into 16:9 ratio in blue ray? I would have thought there would need to be some special magic to turn film into HD digital without distorting the original image. So how can this be?

Most of my DVD's are concerts and I can't see something like Eva Cassidy Sings translating well into BD. Then again I have PSB's Cubism and Steve Vai Where the Wild things Are that were both filmed with HD camera's and they are just great on the telly. Will I really see an improvement if I went BD?

Jaxson

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#335091 26-May-2010 15:33

You can make a 4:3 image 16:9 by lopping off the bottom and top parts, leaving a 16:9 ratio in the middle. This can be done with no image stretching, but obviously you're losing some of the original recorded image.

If it's a proper transfer from film to bluray then yes, it should look better by reason of being a higher definition representation of the film source. Bluray should sound better too, assuming you have a setup to utilise the HD audio track, and that this track was sourced from a high res original sample, not simply sourced from the compressed dvd soundtrack.

I guess to be fair you have to look a bit closely at where the source material comes from when you think about it. Most blurays I've seen though haven't tried to scam the user, although I have seen a few like Oceans 11 that only have the compressed dvd soundtrack on them.

Do you have a full HD plasma?
To answer your question, there is a heck of a lot more pixels in a 1080p image than a 720p one.

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minimoke

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#335143 26-May-2010 17:06

Jaxson:

Do you have a full HD plasma?
To answer your question, there is a heck of a lot more pixels in a 1080p image than a 720p one.

Its a 720p 42 inch and I sit 4 metres away.

But how many lines of resolution are there in a 1080p HDTV compared with a 35mm film. Somewhere I recall 35mm has around 750 lines that viewers can see. Its the lines that are important not the pixels.
I understand the 1080P has more pixels but I cant see the advantage if the movie is getting bits (lines) lopped off it to fit a HD format and I'm sitting way out of the recommended "Screen x 1.5 = HD sitting distance" formula and out of the 720p range of 2.5 times.

MarkX

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#335155 26-May-2010 17:34

cgrew:
ascroft:

- A DVD version on the back of the disk

Double sided disks suck.. They scratch to easy.

As for Blu-Ray though - have you seen a decent 1080P BD movie on a Full HD 1080P LCD or Plasma?

Gorgeous.

Also I bought spider-man 1, 2 & 3 on Blu-Ray for $99.95 from Real Groovey - all of them of which are the special editions with hours of bonus content etc. Very good price I think.

I don't want to rain on your parade but I recently bought the Spiderman 1, 2 & 3 Boxset on Bluray from JB Hi Fi for $39.99. Great price

cgrew

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#335376 27-May-2010 08:51

MarkX:
cgrew:
ascroft:

- A DVD version on the back of the disk

Double sided disks suck.. They scratch to easy.

As for Blu-Ray though - have you seen a decent 1080P BD movie on a Full HD 1080P LCD or Plasma?

Gorgeous.

Also I bought spider-man 1, 2 & 3 on Blu-Ray for $99.95 from Real Groovey - all of them of which are the special editions with hours of bonus content etc. Very good price I think.

I don't want to rain on your parade but I recently bought the Spiderman 1, 2 & 3 Boxset on Bluray from JB Hi Fi for $39.99. Great price

Wow that is good - I got my box set in 2008 when Blu-Ray was just starting to kick-start so $99 was a pretty decent deal at the time.

Jaxson

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#335422 27-May-2010 11:06

minimoke: how many lines of resolution are there in a 1080p HDTV compared with a 35mm film.

Film is analogue as such, so there's no direct conversion to say a film source has this many pixels in it.

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