PC Optical Drives: Gone With The Wind

[Judge]

I intend to to use DVD's for decades to come, although I use a traditional DVD player rather than a PC DVD player for my movies or television series disc sets.

I think like someone mentioned here in this thread, working DVD players will be possible to purchase, even long into the future, even if they might demand more of a price tag, when working devices become less commonplace.

As Judge points out though, 1080p seems to be the limit for having DVD's play at an acceptable quality.

I still haven't moved past 1080p and don't intend to for a while, so this isn't a problem for me at the moment.

The real irony here is that I'm fine with FHD 1080p. But the market took away those larger than 43" televisions to force consumers into 4K technology.

I'd be "happy as a clam" if I could find a brand new 55" or 60" FHD tv. One with all the bells and whistles I miss from my last widescreen tv. Seems now while there are a handful of manufacturers out there who make 40" to 43" FHD screens, they are also somewhat lacking in features that I enjoyed with my last widescreen tv.

So to get that larger set that would be much easier to read so much fine text with streaming media, I would have to give up DVDs other than to play them on the set I have. And yes, I have thought of possibly relocating that tv not necessarily in another room, but to literally have two tv sets in my living room. (Not sure if my OCD can stand that.)

 

[NB79]

I think there are lots of people who are tired of hollywood and the gaming industry,
and they just have a huge backlog of old stuff, to play watch, and that is enough for them.
I wanted to upgrade my pc some time ago, but later i'm like meh, i'm ok for now with old stuff i don't need everything new.

 

[Judge]

As Judge points out though, 1080p seems to be the limit for having DVD's play at an acceptable quality.

That's another issue that really spooks me. I've heard this in print many times, yet such observations tend to be ambiguous given we don't all see the same things when it comes to extreme attention to detail. While I can notice higher resolutions than 1080p, I am still satisfied with this resolution in general. But to render it poorly beyond that resolution has always seemed objectionable to me.

To put it another way, the advent of quality with DVD from the VHS video tape format spoiled me beyond all recognition. To accept anything less than optimal DVD displays is unacceptable.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is quite simple. I've never seen any practical demonstration either publicly or privately of someone displaying a conventional DVD subject to being upconverted on a 4K television.

I can only cite how in looking at screens that I tend to notice details others don't necessarily pay attention to, or even notice. But it's all still just a guess to me. Though I'm not willing to gamble over such a thing either. That if I do purchase a 4K television, I won't even bother to use my DVD player to watch videos on it.

Pity as well to determine the so-called "mCable" technology to apparently be little more than a scam. An HDMI cable with hardware attached claiming to recapture lost resolution with 4k displays.

 

[Judge]

I think there are lots of people who are tired of hollywood and the gaming industry,
and they just have a huge backlog of old stuff, to play watch, and that is enough for them.
I wanted to upgrade my pc some time ago, but later i'm like meh, i'm ok for now with old stuff i don't need everything new.

The same dynamic I have observed with DVDs is similar to music CDs as well.

That with each new technology, the variety of media offered becomes less and less. Just as while there were so many vinyl records once available, that with cassette tapes that variety was considerably less. With even more such disparity when CDs came along. Though it finally appears that when it comes to digital audio, the pattern has finally been broken. Where I have been able to recapture 100% of my original music collection and even go well beyond it through the availability of the MP3 format.

However with the pattern still repeating itself when it comes to video blu-ray disks and 4k disks. Higher prices, fewer choices. "Homey don't play that game!"

 

[MildredHubble]

Perhaps it's due to me deteriorating eyesight, but I'm personally not fussed about super high resolution video. I tend to stop noticing it after 10 minutes and you could switch the video out for something lower quality and I'd be unlikely to notice. I don't seem to be as pedantic about video as I am about audio. Low bit rates make me unhappy in the audio domain as does distortion, but a few ethereal clicks or static on a record is fine and I actually like it as long as it doesn't go beyond a certain threshold.

You can kinda upscale using handbrake for movies but it doesn't really improve the image. What it will do is make a 480p DVD look more like its playing on a smaller screen, or in other words it won't look like a MPEG mess to the same extent it will playing an SD MPEG encoded DVD direct to a huge TV without any attempt at upscaling. A lot of modern TVs, particularly high end ones can actually look rather good with their built in upscalers. You could always use something like Kodi to playback ripped movies and try out different upscaling options. I've read that the resolution of a 4K display is actually an integer multiple of 720p so it tends to upscale better to 4K than 1080p does. You could maybe save on file space by trying encoding videos at 720p instead of 1080p if you are always going to be upscaling them anyway.

Handbrake is very good and has lots of presets. Once you are happy with a resolution its the bit rate that is most important. Higher bit rates will give you much higher fidelity, particularly on video with complicated fast moving images, eg. scenes with fast moving forest scenes so they don't break up into something that looks like a rain covered windshield with no windscreen wipers

Generally, the longer an video encode takes, the better the result with a reasonable file size. If you have a powerful state of the art PC you could probably chew through encoding in very little time. One of my iMacs has a 4th Gen i7 and using handbrake on the 720p Fast preset usually will get a movie done in 20-30 minutes. You can create custom presets too. So once you have results that you are happy with you can save and also backup your presets. So it can be less of a chore than you think to get through your DVD collection. Then you can store them somewhere safe with some Silica gel packs like I do to prevent bit rot!

 

[Outdated]

One of my iMacs has a 4th Gen i7 and using handbrake on the 720p Fast preset usually will get a movie done in 20-30 minutes.

Last time I played with it was with a 9th generation i5 and 16 gig of ram, ripping movies at a reasonably good quality averaging 1 to 1.5 gig in file size was taking around 20 minutes per disk.

I really liked Handbrake, so well worked out.

 

[MildredHubble]

I really liked Handbrake, so well worked out.

I found it maybe 17-18 years ago as scary as that seems! I needed something to transcode some video I had captured on my G4 Mac mini using my Sony mini DV camcorder which had a secret menu on it to enable video pass through via its composite/RF socket. It was my cheap student money saving hack to record video from TV via an app called Vidi. My camcorder was really weird, I still have it.

I had a Sony VCR I would attach the camera to via composite video and it had some clever way of communicating with the VCR somehow when connected and you could receive analogue TV on the actual camcorder. You could skip through channels. I don't know if it was a documented feature, I just discovered it by accident one day.

I recall that at the time, handbrake could transcode video pretty quickly on my lowly G4 Mac. It was much quicker than the apps I had used on my PC. I discovered some settings that could really drive down the file size of Simpsons episodes for example to 147MB and appear essentially identical to a DVD even on a 32" TV. You can get away with some more aggressive settings with animations. Live action could also look acceptable with the same settings if you could cope with some pretty obvious artifacts in dark scenes or fast moving stuff.

Handbrake is very customizable, and with a bit of trial and error you can get some very efficient, high quality results from it!

 

[Outdated]

It lets you transcode to mkv as well, that seems to have better compression and less image degredation for larger files.

 

[Judge]

Another "blow" to my DVD collection, but a welcome one. My cable provider keeps making these glorious contractual agreements with major streaming services to carry them on a much broader basis in term of content provided. The only caveat being that they come with commercial advertisements.

It used to be discouraging having to search for small wording or little lock icons to discern programming I could watch versus programming I'd have to pay additional fees for. (The kind I avoid like the plague.)

It's getting so I don't even turn on my cable box anymore, unless my Internet goes down temporarily.

Now if I could just have Peacock bring back the second incarnation of "Battlestar Gallactica". All four seasons. The one thing I methodically watch every year on DVD.

 

[Outdated]

I have never in my life owned a TV. I most certainly would never pay for watching one.

 

[Judge]

I have never in my life owned a TV. I most certainly would never pay for watching one.

You would if you lived in my complex. Whether you wanted to or not.

I don't deal directly with my cable provider. The bill is included in my rental statement. Something I previously never had to deal with.

 

[NB79]

we have tv since always, but until now from some years ago we didn't use it, we had cable years ago, but since we didn't watch it much, we cut it, but i was given a gift of a android tv box thingy, and we can watch youtube or something else with it. I need to try more applications to see if there is interesting stuff.

 

[Outdated]

I don't deal directly with my cable provider. The bill is included in my rental statement. Something I previously never had to deal with.

Pay TV was never as popular here as it was in the US. In fact by the time we started to see those sorts of services on offer in Australia they were no longer "cable" but encrypted broadcasts over the air.

I've known plenty of people over the years that have had a subscription but they didn't keep it for very long because it was such a rip off. They'd play the same half a dozen movies over and over for a 3 month period and when they started throwing in adverts as well people lost interest or couldn't see the point of paying.

The only people that are subscribers in Australia are the die hard sports fans and most of them complain long and hard about the cost and the quality of the service.

 

[Judge]

Pay TV was never as popular here as it was in the US. In fact by the time we started to see those sorts of services on offer in Australia they were no longer "cable" but encrypted broadcasts over the air.

I've known plenty of people over the years that have had a subscription but they didn't keep it for very long because it was such a rip off. They'd play the same half a dozen movies over and over for a 3 month period and when they started throwing in adverts as well people lost interest or couldn't see the point of paying.

The only people that are subscribers in Australia are the die hard sports fans and most of them complain long and hard about the cost and the quality of the service.

Yep. Different countries, cultures and economy.

You'd probably have heart failure if you saw my monthly lease statement, to see how many itemized "ancillary costs" have been tacked onto what used to simply be my "rent". I'm even charged a separate $10 a month just for having assigned parking and a carport. And charges for two different third-party entities that monitor the billing process and to account for tenants keeping up with mandatory liability insurance on an annual basis. And that's just the tip of this iceberg.

It was never like that some thirty to forty years ago. Yet cable tv was around even before that.

And then I think of commercials advertising apps that can locate and purge all the things people are paying for who have literally lost track of them. OMG- the society we live in.

Where basic living expenses themselves amount to one big "ripoff". Living in America...

 

[Outdated]

And then I think of commercials advertising apps that can locate and purge all the things people are paying for who have literally lost track of them. OMG- the society we live in.

When you consider all the ancillary costs people have to pay and what money they're left with after all these payments are made I think the US is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet.

Just looking at people's "after tax" pay tells a very misleading story. As an average worker all my life I earned what I considered to be good money, yet there was only one year in my life where I actually achieved the national mean average wage - considerably higher than what the average person in the street really earns.

On average I paid around 23% of my total income in tax but in return for that I also get free health cover, cheap medicines, and a heavily regulated insurance and banking industry that isn't allowed to run rough shod over our society. This year my car registration cost me Au$660 for 12 months, but that includes the compulsory insurance component.

According to this video the average US worker loses 43% of their income before they even think of paying rent and buying groceries.

 

[Judge]

"Good capitalists exploit demand. Great capitalists invent it where it never existed before."

An economic phenomenon at its best at the present moment.

 

[Crossbreed]

The end of PC optical drives?
That stinks. All of my favorite apps are in that format!

 

[Outdated]

The end of PC optical drives?

Not entirely ending, just going the same way as the record player and VHS tapes.

 

[Judge]

The end of PC optical drives?
That stinks. All of my favorite apps are in that format!

Might be a good idea to hedge your bets and transfer them to a USB flash drive with astronomically higher rates of holding data. A transition I made long ago. I just like the DVD player in occasionally having the capability of playing my some 400 DVDs. Not much else these days.

I still keep some of the data I have archived on disc, but I don't depend on it either. Most of it that is data that precedes using Windows 7.

Though while their manufacturing will likely end now, it doesn't preclude how many existing units are for sale, and even more so how long some of the better known brands will last. I have them in all three of the PCs I built, and two more just sitting in my closet that are more than 20 years old. For an electro-mechanical device, they seem pretty hardy to me.

 

[Crossbreed]

Might be a good idea to hedge your bets and transfer them to a USB flash drive with astronomically higher rates of holding data.

Will they still load the same?
Must they each need to be in the root directory of their respective drives, or can I load multiple installation discs on one flash drive?