I prefer Blu-ray for quality reasons, and also I find some comfort in owning a physical disc
This has the benefit that they are now available without having to find the disc, and also this process gets rid of annoying menus and extras and just gets you to the movie. This will also prevent kids from using your BD discs as frisbees.. ;-)
Only downsides I can think of are that last time I checked, VLC/Kodi didn't support Dolby Atmos soundtracks on Xbox and some amount of time that goes into extracting them.
I haven't tried archiving any UHD titles yet, so don't know if this would work for them. I'll hazard it would. Only take more storage.
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Many years ago it was accepted wisdom that the very best blu-ray player you could buy was actually the PS3.
I am mildy interested in a blu-ray player and I wonder if, in 2018, the PS4 is the best option - in the same way that the PS3 was at that earlier time ?
OTOH, you can get a regular old dirt cheap blu-ray player for <$100 now.
However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60"+) then you are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.
Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may 'say' it's a 5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the same film on blu-ray ? All I can think is that the audio is compression is also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.
I.e. using that bandwidth, you can consume it in 2.22 hours. So you that's how long they expect you to use Internet in a month? Comcast are smoking something very unhealthy.
This is not news, sadly, and is pretty common for telcom oligopolies around the world. Consumer apathy is a real problem: people know Comcast and have 'no reason' to switch, so Comcast can do what they like and people perceive it as normal.
The only solution is for voters to get their act together and demand taxpayer funded network infrastructure and treat it like a utility. It makes no sense for 10 different companies to run fiber to every residence.
When I lived in Silicon Valley, it was barely better, I could chose from Comcast or Sonic Fusion DSL. I tried Sonic for a while, but my distance from the CO limited my speed (and maybe line quality) to around 8mbit/sec.
"Blu-ray is a bucket of hurt." - Steve Jobs, on why Apple never supported it.
I think that there should be a law against this.
One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you're out of luck: AACS is mandatory. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.
You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.
So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.