The Future of Home Video

[FrauBlucher]

In light of the FilmStruck news, physical media will continue to serve a purpose...

I know streaming has its advantages and conveniences, and no one knows how hard it is to store all those DVD and Blu-rays better than a film nerd who lives in a cramped New York City home like myself. The disadvantages of streaming, though, are too often overlooked. Instant access is fantastic, and a wide and varied selection of titles is wonderful. But if all that access and selection exists at the mercy of corporate managers who only care about their bottom line (and not even just profit, but massive profits the likes of which a niche concept like FilmStruck will never achieve) they are worth less in the long run than a pile of Betamax tapes. At least with the Betamax tapes, if you can find a player, you could watch them.

This from Matt Singer's article in Screen Crush... Here

[unclehulot]

I certainly buy my share of BluRay discs, but since subscribing to FilmStruck I’ve watched about 125 films. Even at BN sale prices that’s at least $2500. Some of those are titles unavailable on disc releases, and I may have bought some of them, but FilmStruck has been an invaluable supplement to the richness of my viewing menu. For the truly obsessed, this was a golden age of flexibility and choice.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Jonathan S]

Discs. Unlike FilmStruck, Warner Bros. can’t come to your home and rip them out of your collection anytime they feel like it.

The many collectors, including myself, who've lost multiple factory-pressed Warner DVDs to disc rot won't find any comfort in that assertion. Warner may not have intended or even expected it to happen, but I've yet to hear of anyone receiving a helpful response from them about this issue.

[movielocke]

Discs. Unlike FilmStruck, Warner Bros. can’t come to your home and rip them out of your collection anytime they feel like it.

The many collectors, including myself, who've lost multiple factory-pressed Warner DVDs to disc rot won't find any comfort in that assertion. Warner may not have intended or even expected it to happen, but I've yet to hear of anyone receiving a helpful response from them about this issue.

Is this a thing? I just discovered that my WB disc of for Apache won’t play, played once fine fivish years ago but in spite of a pristine look to the disc, it won’t play.

[domino harvey]

It is a thing, we've been talking about it for years, though we don't have a centralized thread for it. Any Warner title could be effected, because the volume of WB DVDs means different titles had different plants pressing simultaneously, so there's no sense in making a list

[Jonathan S]

Has anyone ever established a common pressing plant code or other identification on the affected discs? That would make it much easier to predict, monitor and back up any DVDs likely to fail (as in the case of slowly "bronzing" CDs from the UK PDO plant in the early 1990s).

[tenia]

Nothing last forever.
With streaming, the library can lose some titles, or the platform close altogether.
With physical medias, discs can rot, players can break down at a time when you can't find a replacement easily anymore.

In France, a pressing plant have produced somewhere around 250 Blu-rays releases that rot overtime, some in a matter of a couple of years. Since some releases date back from 2008, it can be hard to hunt down the label in 2018 and ask a replacement disc (the label sometimes has lost the video rights for the movie inbetween). The manufacturer went bankrupt since, and has been bought (twice), so good luck hunting them down for a replacement, when the label and the manufacturer don't just trow the ball back at each other. The manufacturer only officially recognized 24 titles to be concerned. That's a far stretch from the totality of the titles now found to be concerned.
I found a few of mine to have rotten, but managed to have them replaced. That was a few years ago. However, I found just a few days my Akira BD copy to have rotten and being unreadable. I've emailed twice the label, and they just don't answer. No surprise : the disc was pressed at this manufacturer.

There just isn't any eternal solution, but at least, with discs, they can't contractually remove the title away and just say "Hey, that's just business". It's actually the other way around : they probably have to replace it if it becomes unreadable in a matter of 3 years.

[domino harvey]

Has anyone ever established a common pressing plant code or other identification on the affected discs? That would make it much easier to predict, monitor and back up any DVDs likely to fail (as in the case of slowly "bronzing" CDs from the UK PDO plant in the early 1990s).

I don't believe so, but I'll post the one from whichever round of Russian Roulette I lose next. The worst is when it's a dual layer dvd and only the second layer fails, so you get halfway thru the movie and it freezes!

[movielocke]

Ahh I upgraded a huge number of my WB stand alones when they had the dvd to blu program, probably explains why I hadn’t run into it until I went digging through rarely accessed boxsets

[colinr0380]

Hey, it could be worse. Many years ago I opened a factory sealed DVD copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring only to find no discs inside! The paper inserts were though!

[Aunt Peg]

Has anyone ever established a common pressing plant code or other identification on the affected discs? That would make it much easier to predict, monitor and back up any DVDs likely to fail (as in the case of slowly "bronzing" CDs from the UK PDO plant in the early 1990s).

There is a whole thread on Home Theatre Form. Some pressing plant in Canada screwed up a stack of Warners disc from about 2005/06 to 2009. Read it and weep:

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... ay.351260/

I am in the process of watching all my Warner DVDs before they start to fail. I have over a dozen that have so far. As I'm only watching one a week its going to take me up to another 6 months to get through the lot.

[Vachel in Valdosta]

Thanks for that link, Aunt Peg. A page 1 poster mentioned my most recent WB disc failure, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, which plays fine until about the halfway mark. It then pixilates across half the horizontal frame and freezes. Tried skipping frames and chapters, "backing in" via reverse skipframe, rebooting etc all to no avail. And this was a boxset "exclusive"!

This makes around a dozen WB discs I've had problems with. Can't recall all my affected titles but ANCHORS AWEIGH is the by far the worst. It started out with random intermittent freezing that seemed easy enough to work around and now won't play at all. None of the affected discs were visibly abnormal. No "bronzing" or other discoloration, warping, label "bleeding" or imprint damage. They just stop doing what they're supposed to do.

[Boosmahn]

A slightly paranoid post from a /r/boutiquebluray user

One interesting bit of information is Shout! Factory stating that the recent delays are "due to the consolidation of almost all major Blu-ray and DVD manufacturing at a single facility." Am I reading this incorrectly or do most Blu-rays get manufactured at the same plant?

[Big Ben]

A slightly paranoid post from a /r/boutiquebluray user

One interesting bit of information is Shout! Factory stating that the recent delays are "due to the consolidation of almost all major Blu-ray and DVD manufacturing at a single facility." Am I reading this incorrectly or do most Blu-rays get manufactured at the same plant?

I would assume so. It would be an enormous cost saving measure.

Good time to remind folks that the brain evolved to process patterns and not probability. That Reddit post is a DOOZY.

[Drucker]

I think that post is dead on.

[Gregory]

This eight-minute video about the last Blockbuster store standing is worth watching. They were a local (Bend, OR) video store before being swallowed up by the Blockbuster chain as a franchise, and now they're the last one in business, servicing their customers' needs and buying their rental discs at a local big-box store.

[David M.]

A slightly paranoid post from a /r/boutiquebluray user

One interesting bit of information is Shout! Factory stating that the recent delays are "due to the consolidation of almost all major Blu-ray and DVD manufacturing at a single facility." Am I reading this incorrectly or do most Blu-rays get manufactured at the same plant?

Haven’t read the post, but for the Americas, I understand that to be correct. Everything tends to get manufactured at Technicolor in Mexico.

Sony DADC in Terre Haute, IN is manufacturing the UHD100 triple layer discs and PlayStation games.

[knives]

This eight-minute video about the last Blockbuster store standing is worth watching. They were a local (Bend, OR) video store before being swallowed up by the Blockbuster chain as a franchise, and now they're the last one in business, servicing their customers' needs and buying their rental discs at a local big-box store.

I thought there was one in Alaska as well?

[cdnchris]

It closed.

[Vachel in Valdosta]

Getting back to the WHV defects issue from up-page: folks this is becoming a catastrophic epidemic! Seriously, this is no longer an issue of an isolated title or a short run but possibly every WHV disc from their two primary pressing plants used at the height of their deep supplements/mega boxset era circa 2006-2008. I urge all of you to use the link provided by Aunt Peg to see for yourself just how many titles are involved. There is a WHV contact person to email but they are requesting that customers make every effort to confirm purchase with physical receipts and/or electronic invoice (after 10-12 years!) to facilitate replacement. If the pressed discs are OOP then MODs are the default.

I just this weekend found the time to do a systematic check on some of my boxsets and so far I'm running about 50%! I generally sold off or gave away unwanted titles from my sets so the roster is a little skewed but after checking my Brando, Newman & Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory Vol. 2 I've found 7 defective discs out of 14 extant. Most of the defects are attributable to layer change freezeups around mid-feature as per Domino above but at least one was failure to load (MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY disc 1) and another (BELLE OF NEW YORK) started intermittent skipping and freezing within the first half dozen chapter stops. I've only tested on my Oppo by scanning chapter stops with occasional real time viewing but HTF members have been trying discs on every available piece of hardware they own and meticulously watching complete features. Several are considering a second or third batch of replacements and are wondering if they'll be "cut off" at some point despite continuing to find defective product.

Again, I urge everyone (or at least those of us with substantial WHV titles from 2006 - 2008) to take the time to scan the linked thread and then spot check their inventory asap.

[FrauBlucher]

Wired.... Streaming Isn't Everything, and Blu-rays are back to Prove It

[domino harvey]

The guy who runs an entire subreddit devoted to Blu-rays only owns 300 movies?

[tenia]

That's what I thought too. The amount of Arrow releases I own is already just a bit more than 300 titles (306) and it's even more for the Criterion (360).

[Drucker]

The article also exclusively talks about US labels.

Folks really need to "get on our level"

[domino harvey]

We are the real BDE of home media