And people completely gloss over the "good enough" part, and head straight to arguing bitrates and resolutions.

Pop quiz hotshots, why did the CD become a big hit, but the DVD-A died a quiet death?

Answer, because there was no convenience to be had with upgrading!

The CD was a massive improvement of convenience over the cassette tape or LP record. Now you could instantly find the one song you wanted, and skip between them with the push of a button.

Similarly there is no convenience upgrade to go from MP3 to FLAC or some other audio format.

And the same pattern plays out with video.

DVD video was a smash hit because no more having to rewind that VHS, and they took up a whole lot less space on the shelf (buying a TV series season on VHS was downright crazy for the physical space it would require).

BR and similar is simply not enough of a convenience upgrade.

> Answer, because there was no convenience to be had with upgrading!

If anything, DVD-A was a convenience _downgrade_. People already had CD players (and upgrading to DVD-A would provide little-to-no audible upgrade anyway), plus you have copy-protection controlling acceptable output formats and preventing ripping.

A megabyte saved is still a megabyte saved. An mp3 sourced from a FLAC at 320kbps is ususally indistinguishable from 128kbps Opus to me, but I can often tell the difference between that and a 128kbps mp3. I encode all my music in 128kbps Opus on my storage constrained devices for that reason.

The value of that MP3 vs FLAC is like 90% less than it was 20 years ago.

MPEG2 good enough? It's horrible! Anything from before H.264 is potato quality.

Streaming 4K videos (or fitting them onto a 50GB physical disc) requires better video codecs. MPEG2 wouldn't be enough.

Personally, I see the benefit in 4K having a setup to take advantage of it.

Most of MPEG2 was focused on interlaced formats. MPEG1 can already handle 4k by 4k video. MPEG1 and 2 can already handle HD on bluray media. Even at the max bitrate (100Mbps), a bluray can store 1.4Hrs of video.

One could definitely take parts of MPEG1 and MPEG2 to create a new good enough codec for many use cases.

> One could definitely take parts of MPEG1 and MPEG2 to create a new good enough codec for many use cases.

Well people did exactly that - and they named it:

  - MPEG-4 Part 2 (also known under names like DivX, Xvid, ...)
  - MPEG-4 Part 11 (also known as AVC, H.264, ...)
  - VP8
  - VP9
  - AV1
  - MPEG-H Part 2 (also known as HEVC, H.265)

Those are all codecs that build on and extend what MPEG-2 is.

Bandwidth and storage have been slowing down and stagnating for some time now. My internet isn't much faster than 10 years ago. The difference between video codecs makes a huge difference in the quality of video I get to see.

My internet is way faster compared to 2008. Probably had something like 10Mbps back then, paying less for 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home now.

You're lucky. I have 100mbps Spectrum, but I've visited a number of slightly more rural areas and been shocked by how truly horrible the network was. 5-6 mbps.

Yeah, I get about 7Mb/s with a downhill moon, a following slope, and a full wind. About 100m away the street-side box is emblazoned with a declaration that "super-fast broadband is here", by which they mean ADSL2+, which is 24Mb/s (again, with a following moon, full slope, and downhill wind). But it somehow hasn't made it to this house.