The Ultimate Home Theater Experience
#1
Posted 11 November 2008 - 08:04 PM
However.
When I watch a movie, all I need is the movie (preferably DVD, but I'll still do VHS if I'm desperate), something to play the movie, a TV with speakers, and, begrudgingly, a remote control.
Blu-ray discs. Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Flat-panel Hi-Definiton TVs with 1080p. This all seems a little...decadent to me.
Am I alone?
-John Carpenter's They Live
"God help us...in the future."
-Plan 9 from Outer Space
nooooo
#2
Posted 11 November 2008 - 08:27 PM
Anyway, while it can be fun to have big booming sound and a giant screen to watch, I certainly am not going to pay for all of that. I am just fine with a regular ol' tv and what-not.
I think there is a lot more than just movie-watching that is overly decadent these days, personally.
#3
Posted 11 November 2008 - 09:11 PM
This is important information.
#4
Posted 11 November 2008 - 09:34 PM
At my mom's house, I have a smaller, round-screen TV with a built-in DVD player and VCR on a stand next to my computer desk. I usually put in a disc, plug in some headphones and turn off the lights and I'm set.
And make some popcorn.
In hindsight, I should have given the back story.
Thanks, Civ.
-John Carpenter's They Live
"God help us...in the future."
-Plan 9 from Outer Space
nooooo
#5
Posted 12 November 2008 - 03:16 AM
We're seeing less than favourable adoption rates for new standards like Blu-Ray, IPTV and HD euqipment at the moment, since they lack the concrete unique-selling-propositions for an immediate switch. At the same time, customers who already switched are generally very pleased with the improvements in quality (except for IPTV, which is somewhat behind since it heavily relies on broadband connections and quality of service routines that aren't thoroughly implemented yet).
Personally, I have to say that 1080p televisions combined with a nice surround-sound system really improve the experience, but obviously only for movies which support them.
From what I've seen in practice so far, setting up the surround-sound really is the most difficult task there right now. Make some ill-adjustments and you're completely ruining it all.
There's also the thing that you don't really get to appreciate the possibilites until the movie producers decide to really go nuts on the effects. Most movies make very subtle use of the multi-channel capabilities, so most of the time you won't really notice a difference to stereo. It's only when they extract some specific sounds, like... uhh... I think in one of the early scenes of Gladiator, someone threw an axe and they really pushed that little bit, making it seem as if something really was coming at you from behind.
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#6
Posted 12 November 2008 - 04:31 PM
While romantically I like the idea that the film is the thing, transport to a world of imagination and all that crap, a giant screen with great sound is the reason I will be seeing the new Bond film in the theatre rather than waiting for the DVD.
I am not a huge fan of Blu Ray yet because I think they tinker too much with the colour and the contrast. So in effect everything looks too sharp, which isn't natural, and there are no degrees of black, which is impossible. Ultimately when they get their shit together and start making discs that look like the actual movies, its larger file size will allow for broadcasrting movies on bigger screens without artifacting. Then I may give it another look.
For now I would only bother with High Def DVDs or at least an upconverting player and tv. And yeah, flat screen is preferable because what you see is what you get. The rounded screen is just a lens to magnify a smaller image. So naturally the resolution won't be as good.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 13 November 2008 - 10:36 PM
#7
Posted 12 November 2008 - 04:40 PM
EDIT: That's exactly my argument. Certainly seeing a movie in a theater is a different can of beans than watching one at home, and I too will be seeing Bond in a theater, but it is most definitely the filmmaker's job to make the movie worth watching in any situation.
I suppose if someone could convince me that such stuff is needed to provide the full experience and not just a better experience I could rethink it.
This post has been edited by TheOrator: 12 November 2008 - 04:53 PM
-John Carpenter's They Live
"God help us...in the future."
-Plan 9 from Outer Space
nooooo
#8
Posted 12 November 2008 - 07:46 PM
Personally, those are not things I am interested in seeing. And beyond those little minute details that I don't care to see, HD doesn't really offer anything to justify the money for it.
I do have an HD television because I got it for Christmas, but if I were the one spending the money, and I I needed a tv, and I could get a non-HD tv for cheaper, that's the way I'd go.
And Blu-Ray sucks for all the reasons Civ mentioned. The colours are just plain awful. But there is potential there, I will give it that.
Surround sound can be fun for certain movies, but again, not something I think is worth spending a lot of money on.
No movie should be dependent on these effects - surround sound, high def, etc - to be worth watching.
#9
Posted 13 November 2008 - 03:30 AM
And what's that about the colours? Blu-ray is just the storage medium, the thing that would affect the colours should be the used video codec which is h.264 for most movies... or the displaying screen... or are movie producers using a special film format for Blu-ray releases today?
This post has been edited by Gobbler: 13 November 2008 - 03:30 AM
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#10
Posted 13 November 2008 - 11:51 AM
And I like seeing special effects, but I don't believe any movie should depend on them. The Star Wars prequels, for instance...
#11
Posted 13 November 2008 - 03:07 PM
Blu Ray took this idea and went to hell with it. So far in every blu ray disc I have seen, if something is black then it is in complete absence of colour. I am curious what they would do with THE GODFATHER or better yet, CITIZEN KANE, famous for their use of contrast. The Blu Ray displays in stores always show animation, because with their high-contrast worlds, cartoons look great when they are really really sharp. But the real world, and hence films of it, son't look that good when the contrast is too high. Everything is perfectly separated from everything else, and this is not how the real world looks. And everything black simply has no colour at all. There are no degrees of shadow, which again is great for a cartoon but not for BLADERUNNER.
I haven't looked at Blu Ray in quite some time though, so maybe that was a problem in its infancy? I'd like to see the Blu Ray of the special edition of ALIENS.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 13 November 2008 - 10:35 PM
#12
Posted 13 November 2008 - 04:03 PM
I've tried to do some research but it's all pretty vague... maybe I'll ask some of our gadget-freaks here if they heard of those problems before.
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#13
Posted 17 November 2008 - 11:49 AM
#14
Posted 28 November 2008 - 04:50 PM
Thanks Lecter. This shit always annoys me whenever people ask why Blu Ray is so much better.
Well of course it's better because blu ray discs are priced so much higher.
The logical answer is that it's not. Most people still have an infantile concept of blu ray thinking it has some sort of magic in it that makes it better, however you'd be hard pressed to find someone who could readily tell the difference between "DVD quality" and "Blu Ray quality". I've answered this enough for a number of friends and they almost don't believe me for some reason when I tell them that blu ray is essentially the same tech as dvd, which is the same tech as cd. It's just storage capacity. The easiest thing I can explain is that the 1s and 0s on a Blu Ray are the same 1s and 0s on anything else.
It's definitely not affordable yet (for media, PS3 price range is about right now).
As far as sound goes, 5.1 is a little much. I think a nice 2.1 tower setup is better in a home theater environment and more affordable.
For 1080p resolution though, this is awesome. The only caveat is finding things that support this high of a resolution. Most HD television signals broadcast 720i/720p/1080i. A lot of programming is still being upscaled (meaning it's the same resolution but it doesn't look shrunk, aka "bigger pixels") and DVDs are still using old resolutions due to their initial recording. You can't make a film look any better than what it was originally recorded in (Sorry! Blazing Saddles will never be a true 1080p movie). However, newer formats (like Blu Ray) have the capacity to store feature length movies with high resolution and are now beginning to do so. I think the real winner for HD are games. Playing MGS4 on my 1080p television was an eye opener. It looked incredibly cleaner than on my 720p television.
Either way, for your money, a nice sized, flat screen, high res television (with a high tolerance for ambient light) is a good investment. The biggest part of a movie experience is the visual aspect and it's better when you and all of your friends can watch and enjoy it together.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
And to what Civ said in his post about Blu Ray imaging. This is more on a playback difference because of the amount of data they can store and what they want to tweak. Think of how many "remastered" movies of old came back on DVD with different colorations and whatnot. This even occured on VHS.
It's even more silly because of stuff kind of like this: http://www.tomshardw...abyte,3924.html
I remember hearing a couple years back about some guys out of Berkeley I believe (I need to find the source again) that simply reduced the space between valleys on a normal dvd, modified a normal dvd-rom and stored 3TB of data on it. We learn to compress and be more precise, but the technology leaps are always years between.
This post has been edited by reiner: 28 November 2008 - 04:57 PM
#15
Posted 28 November 2008 - 05:17 PM
Yes...
No. The other thing about Blu-Ray is the codec used for encoding, which is h.264, also known as MPEG-4 AVC. Now while you're right about it essentially being the same as the good ol' MPEG-2, the enthusiasts will tell you that MPEG-4 is capable of registering higher color depth and precision information, along some other small (also hardly perceivable) improvements.
Ahh, that really depends. You see, most movies aren't recorded digitally yet. From what I've read and heard so far it's only slowly becoming the fashion since the technology is either too costly, or unable to process the required data in the given time, or consumes too much space, or consumes too much virtual storage space - or all of the above. But I'm trailing off.
The nice thing about old movies is that they've been recorded with analogue technology. Ever been to your local photo-shop with some of your old small photographs and had them digitized? You might be surprised about the outcome's resolution and precision.
It's not always possible, but for a lot of movies it can actually turn out pretty well - I've seen it work out brilliantly with Lawrence of Arabia, though I don't know about Blazing Saddles. IMDB tells me that the former was recorder in 65mm while the latter's only 35mm. (Then again, even Iron Man was still filmed in 35mm.)
This post has been edited by Gobbler: 28 November 2008 - 05:23 PM
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