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Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by kens on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:28PM (#22883855)
As a historical note, the bouncing logo wasn't just for fun, but was important to prevent screen burn-in on CRTs. If you had a static image on a CRT for a long time, it could damage the phosphor. Sometimes you could even see the image when the screen was off!

This was the original purpose of screensavers, which saved your screen from damage. Displaying a dynamic image prevented one part of the screen from being overused.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hadlock on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:39PM (#22883968)
That you feel the need to inform us of this "historical fact" makes me feel especially old... having lived through the CRT -> LCD transition period when buying an LCD made going to LAN parties a lot easier
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by zorpner on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:01PM (#22884635)
I think my favorite contextual example of this is the opening line from Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Means something very different now.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by toomanybeersies on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:42PM (#22884900)
I wonder if 2000n years from now, scholars will be wondering over the meaning of that sentence, the same way that they currently discuss the meaning of "wine-dark sea" in the Iliad and the Odyssey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer))
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Talanes on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:15PM (#22885405)
That section on ancient languages tending to lack blue is very interesting. I wonder if there was just a lack of blue in their environment. If the local birds and flowers don't contain any blue, then you just have the sky and the sea(or whatever large body of water.)

If the majority of the blue you see in the world is the sky and the sea, would you just start to think of blue as a blank? If you just consider blue as something more like we consider white, then any competing hues dominate what you describe. So just like white with the tiniest bit of red becomes pink, a purplish sea becomes red?

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by goblin89 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:56AM (#22887450)
Homer’s wine-dark sea leads down an interesting rabbit-hole of thinking about perception, other minds, shared labels for sensations, how one individual consciousness is shaped by (exists only in context of?) others, and the implications of the information age with more extensive inter-mind connections and increasingly numerous and specific shared labels.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by airstrike on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:15PM (#22885682)
I guess that means perfect blue skies these days haha
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by smelendez on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:33AM (#22886075)
Neil Gaiman made a joke about this in 1996 in the novel Neverwhere. Search for "dead channel at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top...
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by m4rtink on Thursday April 16, 2020 @07:43AM (#22888401)
Or black sky with a moving "NO SIGNAL" notification box. That would actually fit to a cyberpunk novel I guess. ;-)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aogl on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:33PM (#22884844)
I still remember dragging my CRT around to LAN parties... oh the good old days... was such a pain in the ass though in reality...
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by mgiampapa on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:01PM (#22885042)
Those Sony Trinitron's were literally were made of lead. My back still hurts, but the 20" was worth it!
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by A_No_Name_Mouse on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:32AM (#22886422)
Was that the one with the demagnitize button? I used to slap the monitor while pushing the button so my coworkers would think I hit it so hard the image bounced around
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Slartie on Thursday April 16, 2020 @02:57AM (#22886864)
All the better ones had that button, usually named "degauss". My 22" flat CRT (it was flat on the front, like LCDs today, which was a great feature at the time, but made the thing extremely expensive and extremely heavy) had a degauss function that was apparently so powerful it visibly distorted the image on other monitors right next to it when I degaussed mine. I made a joke of doing that in the middle of games on LAN parties ;-) didn't work repeatedly though, after degaussing once I had to wait for some time until degaussing again would actually do something.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by PunksATawnyFill on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:10AM (#22887520)
I made the mistake of pressing Degauss on a monitor while holding a magnet next to it.

This basically calibrated the thing to look normal... with the magnet there. It took quite a while to restore to normal.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by glenneroo on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:27AM (#22889696)
I finally replaced my aging CRT at work (3rd screen for unimportant stuff) after it finally died after 20 years of service. I still miss pressing the degauss button, which (perhaps relatedly) needed to be pressed after powering on and sometimes multiple times during the day.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by dredmorbius on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:26AM (#22887002)
Numerous monitors had degaussing features, Sony's among them.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by gattilorenz on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:34AM (#22887638)
And if they didn't, and somehow you managed to magnetize it, you needed to use a degaussing coil, moving it away from the screen in a spiralling motion... ah, the memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pVLizAHby4

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by soylentcola on Thursday April 16, 2020 @09:49AM (#22889315)
I assume that by "somehow managed to magnetize it" you mean "had crappy detachable boom box speakers sitting on top of it in college, causing the TV to eventually display distorted blobs at the top edge of the image".

No? Huh, guess it was just me ;)

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by gattilorenz on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:04AM (#22889468)
I honestly don't know. I picked up a Compaq monitor with a magnetized grille from the trash in 2002 or so, and used for my secondary pc (a venerable P200 MMX that took a LONG time to recompile the 2.4 kernel on a then-unstable Debian Sarge).

No idea how the previous owner managed to magnetize it, it never happened to me.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by digitalsushi on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:15AM (#22889564)
I did that, and figured out if you flipped the speaker around, you could "paint" the distortion away.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:35PM (#22885208)
And 120hz refresh rates... almost 20 years ago!
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by foobarbecue on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:29AM (#22887018)
Yeah, and I had 3d shutter glasses that worked great with the trinitron... In 2000 or so. Nvidia 3d Vision came along later but now sadly those product lines are abandoned, I guess due to VR which is just not what I want at all
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by ccozan on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:47AM (#22887100)
Wow, such memories with the 3D Vision. Was quite visionary. And indeed I had to buy a Sony Trinitron with 120Hz refresh otherwise it wouldn't work.

I remember playing MoH:AA, the play experience was quite out of this world.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by foobarbecue on Thursday April 16, 2020 @09:42AM (#22889239)
Coincidentally, my whole team still uses Nvidia 3d Vision 2 at work, despite lack of support from Nvidia. One of the reasons I took the job is because I saw they were using it. Not having access to those systems is one of the hardships of working at home. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7638&fbclid=I...
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:26AM (#22886033)
I never noticed a benefit over 70 or so. The flicker of 60 made my eyes bleed though. Then with LCDs 60 was fine.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:10AM (#22886282)
I still don't know what it is about 60 Hz that made me see the flicker plainly as a strobing light. TVs at 50 Hz—nothing (other than being generally bleh back then). Had to use 800x600 instead of 1024x768 just to have 85 Hz instead.

On LCDs, I still can see faint flicker on some static backgrounds, and I think 60 Hz might play a role here too—though it seems to also depend on the brightness and Flux being on or off. E.g. on https://marctenbosch.com/news/

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by blattimwind on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:07AM (#22887212)
Three reasons: You sit much closer to a computer screen compared to a TV, so your peripheral vision has a better chance with the computer screen to see flicker. Computer CRTs supported higher refresh rates, so they used phosphors with shorter afterglow (otherwise you'd get ghosting/S&H-like artifacts like TFTs produce). You can notice this one when you photograph a computer CRT vs. photographing a TV with the same shutter speed. And at the end of CRT TVs a lot of them were 100 Hz.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:57AM (#22888870)
Interesting hypotheses, though I still can't quite accept them as final. I seem to recall that the effect was much more noticeable, not only when sitting in front of the screen—basically enter the room and there it is. And I think that I've experimented with lower refresh rates too, at least I definitely had the time and inclination—but can't remember if the monitor allowed them with the available resolutions. It's stuck in my memory that only 60 Hz does this.

When I get rich and have lots of free time, I'll probably buy a bunch of old CRTs just to dig to the roots of this.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:57PM (#22891313)
Btw, I count only two reasons there.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by blattimwind on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:38PM (#22893838)
(1) You sit much closer ... (2) Computer CRTs supported ... (3) And at the end ...
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by extrapickles on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:34AM (#22886435)
The LCDs you see this on are 6-bit color displays using temporal dithering to pretend to be 8-bit color.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by garaetjjte on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:55AM (#22888852)
The reason for flickering on specific patterns is independent of temporal dithering. This is caused by cyclic polarity inversion: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php

(temporal dithering usually is visible as slight noise on darker shades)

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by exikyut on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:48AM (#22887717)
That's why drop shadows look horrible when I'm looking at my screen at the wrong angle... I knew it was a dithering thing, forgot LCDs were 6-bit.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by blattimwind on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:50AM (#22888088)
Only cheap/low-end LCDs are 6 bit. Most are 8 bit with no dithering.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:39AM (#22888739)
Should this be the case with a Macbook, even if a sorta old one? Because that's the machine I've seen the flicker on, for the past bunch of years.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by TylerE on Thursday April 16, 2020 @02:06AM (#22886600)
AC power is 60hz so room lighting (especially florescent) also flickers at 60hz. It’s a sort of wagon wheel effect.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @02:19AM (#22886666)
I dropped a hint right there that the AC frequency is definitely not 60 Hz where I am.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by TylerE on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:22AM (#22889644)
Actually you didn't. There were many countries that used PAL for TV broadcasts but have 60hz AC.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:50PM (#22895168)
They didn't say PAL, they said "50 Hz TV."

PAL and 50 Hz TV are not synonymous. Brazil has 60 Hz AC and uses PAL-M which is 60 Hz TV. AC=TV even in these odd cases.

Old CRTs couldn't possibly clock their flyback to anything but mains.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by aasasd on Thursday April 16, 2020 @11:09AM (#22890157)
Hmm, afaik the framerates were chosen to be equal to the AC freq so that there are no glitches in the image. Do those countries have converters or something in the TVs, or did they watch jumpy image?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:37PM (#22895095)
Fluorescent lighting, assuming it's not starting to fail, flickers at 120 Hz because each half cycle lights it up equally (+ or - doesn't matter). Incandescent also has 120 Hz flicker but the valleys are almost as bright as the peaks (slow response) so it's essentially imperceptible.

Cheap LEDs like some holiday minilights are rectified so they'll flicker at 60 Hz and I can't stand them.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by enneff on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:05PM (#22885061)
Still the nicest displays I've ever used.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by tomc1985 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:18PM (#22885128)
I am amazed that I never gave myself a hernia trying to lug a 21" monstrosity of a CRT to LAN parties
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by saberdancer on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:18AM (#22887557)
I bought an aluminum PC case and was quite happy with myself because it was much lighter. It weighed about 5kg instead of 15kg of normal metal ones.

15 years later it is still the case I use today, even though I am thinking about replacing it. Doesn't get much carrying today though.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by fred_is_fred on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:57PM (#22884139)
It didn't even occur to me that this would need to be explained. Up next we should talk about why it was bad to leave VCRs paused for long periods of time.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by tomc1985 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:19PM (#22885132)
Some kids call 3.5" floppies "save icons" because they've never seen them in any other context
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by vonseel on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:43PM (#22885830)
That’s what I call them and I was born in 89...
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by cgriswald on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:50AM (#22886173)
The icons or the physical item?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by cpach on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:07PM (#22884208)
Why was that bad?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by brirec on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:21PM (#22884318)
It isn’t about tension. In order to display a paused image, the head must continuously rotate and scan that section of the tape. You can literally overheat and wear the tape out in that spot because there is a spinning piece of metal against it. Only specialized VCRs such as high end professional/broadcast or security recorders have something like a framebuffer.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by mortenjorck on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:15PM (#22884273)
I remember being told as a child that it "wears out the tape," but I'm going to guess it's specifically because the same section of tape stays wrapped around the capstan (the metal cylinder it loops around to be read) when it would normally be passing through. Keeping the same section of tape under tension for a prolonged period presumably weakens or risks distorting it.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by kozak on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:24PM (#22884347)
It was worse than that. The head drum continued to spin throughout the entire duration of the pause, rubbing against the film at high speed. That's because the VCR didn't have any "memory" to hold the entire frame¹, so the lines of the frame had to be read from the tape over and over again.

¹ It was actually an interlaced field, not a frame, but that too much nitpicking.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by mc32 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:32PM (#22885194)
So kinda like riding a clutch... ok maybe not that bad.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:29AM (#22886060)
More like a burnout vs launch control, with infinite tread and it's the road you really care about.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jannes on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:09PM (#22884229)
I believe because the tape will stay under tension
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by z3t4 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @02:51AM (#22886841)
I visited a TV shop about 5 years ago and some of the TV's up on display had the demo image burned in. So it's probably still a problem.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by fidelramos on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:40AM (#22887060)
From what I have heard this is a problem with OLED panels.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by leshenka on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:09AM (#22887517)
I frequently use apps with "night" theme (black background, white UI controls). You know how Android apps have "back" button on the top-left corner, right?

There is also a navbar (back/home/recent buttons). In my case it's a white-ish rectangle that's almost always present on screen. By the time Samsung added an option to hide it, the damage was already done.

I have them both burnt in on my screen. I first noticed them after merely 1.5 years of using the phone.

OLED burn in is a 100% real thing.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Kuinox on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:29AM (#22887615)
Make an image of the back button, revert the color, and make your phone display it when you sleep. You will burn the other pixels and won't see the pattern anymore !
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by sitkack on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:53AM (#22889948)
Doesn't this level of "burn in" mean that these oled screens will simply burn-out with use rather quickly?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by chronogram on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:13AM (#22887862)
I've been using OLED for a long time now, and never had this OLED burn in - including one particular phone (Ativ S, so Samsung S3 screen) that was in use by me for years and then used as a navigation system by my mother until the battery perished. However, someone I know had a phone (I believe the Samsung S8) nearly constantly playing videos with full brightness, and there it did show red streaks over the screen. I wonder what kind of usage triggers it.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by billfruit on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:42AM (#22887680)
It does not seem to be a permanent thing though in OLEDs, after some normal usage it recovers perhaps.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jrockway on Thursday April 16, 2020 @07:23AM (#22888301)
I have an early OLED TV that I burned in (left it on for some reason while I was asleep, displaying YouTube). A few years later there is no longer any evidence of the burn-in; it was very apparent at first, but went away quickly with normal use.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by wdobbels on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:07AM (#22887812)
The people I know who use waze a lot (30+ min drive to work every day) have the notify icon (bottom right) clearly burned into their OLED phone screens.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by interestica on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:50AM (#22888822)
As unread this comment on a white background on my phone (Note 8) I can see the burned-in remnants of the keyboard.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by epse on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:08AM (#22886908)
LCD can definitely have burn in
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by 72deluxe on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:05AM (#22887490)
My Honor Play phone has this problem if the screen is higher than 50% brightness. It's very bad.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by globular-toast on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:03AM (#22886885)
I'm not usually an early adopter but I was the first guy at my LAN party to bring an LCD monitor. It was smaller and looked worse than everyone's CRTs and had terrible ghosting, but everyone was fascinated by it and could tell it was the future.

I've still yet to see an LCD that performs as well as those CRTs, though.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by ck2 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:21PM (#22884769)
I finally threw out my $1500 Sony Trinitron 27" high resolution CRT this year.

It worked fine, felt like a huge waste of money. But it weighed over 100 pounds!

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by BallyBrain on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:46PM (#22884931)
Too bad that you threw out. Those Trinitrons are still sort after for retro gaming. You could of sold it or given it away.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by soylentcola on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:01AM (#22889442)
I had one (it was either cheap or free from someone who wanted to get rid of it years ago) and I loved that it was my first TV with HDMI input at a time when HDTVs were out of my price range.

I had a small apartment so my desk/office area was a corner of the living room and I could run an HDMI cable over to use it as a secondary monitor for watching stuff on the computer. Even the fact that it would display 1080i was a huge jump from my previous bargain bin TV.

It was the days of Windows Media Center and it was before cable companies got rid of Clear QAM channels so I found that I could just take the shared cable in my 3-apartment house and hook up to a cheap Hauppauge card for tuner, guide, and DVR. Add a cheap USB IR receiver/remote and it was like having the "good" cable with the bells and whistles (but with a better interface and for free).

Eventually got an HDTV when prices came down and income went up, but a few years ago when a girl I knew was looking for a CRT to set up a retro gaming station for her young daughter, I donated all 111 lbs. of it gladly. That thing is probably still going.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by PunksATawnyFill on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:12AM (#22887532)
"Could of?"
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by exikyut on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:51AM (#22887727)
You missed "sort after".

We're both just as bad as each other, the meaning is discernible.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by prawn on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:22PM (#22885435)
I once spent over $2k on a second-hand 21" CRT at an IT auction. Took two of us carrying it up/down stairs because I was worried about one of us slipping if solo. Needed a corner desk to fit the thing. I remember having 2-3 CRT screens pre-2000 and the desk required filled the room.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Hydraulix989 on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:43PM (#22884914)
I would have bought it.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by MayeulC on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:38PM (#22883958)
As to why they are not necessary anymore: we just turn the screen off (some displays, especially OLED, are still prone to burn-in).

This was not necessarily wanted in OLD CRTs, where the startup sequence could take a while (and possibly other factors, such as reducing the lifespan, but I'm not sure about this).

Funnily, we are starting to see a bit of a comeback of these in OLED smartphone that have an always-on display to show time and a few things: the illuminated portion generally moves over time.

You can see some burn-in on old phones, in the notification areas, the taskbar for computers, or sometimes the always-on TV panels at airports or train stations.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by tialaramex on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:22PM (#22884331)
Waterloo Station (in London, named after the bridge, which is in turn named after the battle, which was in Belgium) for a while had these full colour panels which I guess may have been plasma? These were used to display train information.

They suffered terrible burn-in, and I was never sure why they were used. Eventually they ripped them out and replaced them with panels using the same technology (monochrome panels made of amber LEDs) that is used in the rest of the network for displaying information.

The thing about information is that you don't want it to spin or hop about, it needs to remain perfectly still while a potentially large number (tens of thousands of people use the station in an hour, if anything goes wrong all those people want information) stare at the information and so it can't avoid burn in. I can see that for the advertising screens, the opportunity for huge full colour screens is worth the risk of burning in an image, and worst case you could in theory even charge an advertiser who insists on holding a single image for the cost of repairing/ replacing your screens. But the information screens don't much benefit from colour, the pixel-addressable LED screen is only a small improvement over prior electro-mechanical devices which of course couldn't burn in, why allow burn-in just to get a colour screen? Maybe they were cheap?

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by devenson on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:14PM (#22885400)
Just move it imperceptibly slowly.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by exikyut on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:53AM (#22887744)
That only works for screen-width-length runs of text.

Also, cue trainspotters and such putting 10-hour+ 1x-speed captures of the screens running through the entire cycle up on YouTube...

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Arbalest on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:45PM (#22884038)
DVD was also popular around the time that Plasmas were being introduced, which also had burn in issues.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by projektfu on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:29PM (#22884379)
Yeah, those were mad expensive. I remember complaints about the logo "bugs" on TV stations that were fixed parts of the display.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by M2Ys4U on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:51AM (#22888825)
Yeah the BBC News DOG was got burned in to our plasma TV pretty bad when I was a kid
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by tunnuz on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:15PM (#22884269)
Aren’t DVDs popular anymore?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by chrisseaton on Thursday April 16, 2020 @03:43AM (#22887085)
No, they’re low resolution and bulky. Do many people even own an old DVD player anymore?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by nelblu on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:00AM (#22887466)
I still buy DVDs because I like classic movies and for those movies it doesn't matter whether you watch in dvd quality or Blu-ray. Plus DVD rips are significantly smaller in size and even though I have Blu-rays for some movies I don't have a Blu-ray player on my computer to rip them. So effectively my preference is to buy DVD, unless it's a relatively modern movie (post 90s)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by PunksATawnyFill on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:16AM (#22887544)
Not true. Movies were of course shot on film, which has way higher resolution than DVD.

Even old TV shows look better than ever, as long as they were scanned from film. Look at the original Star Trek or Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by blattimwind on Thursday April 16, 2020 @07:03AM (#22888181)
As far as I know lots of TV shows were not shot on film but rather on tape, which naturally limits quality to PAL/NTSC, since that's what gets recorded on tape. Similarly the archives of broadcasters are/used to be tape.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by dmos62 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:21AM (#22887905)
You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't. Plus, we lost immense amounts (most) of cinema that was produced before ~1950s when better film started being used.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by chrisseaton on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:43AM (#22888036)
> You're talking about the most popular movies that were transfered to digital or even restored. Most films weren't.

How are you watching a film on DVD if it hasn't been transferred to digital?

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Lammy on Thursday April 16, 2020 @07:16PM (#22894565)
DVDs have been around for over twenty years. There are plenty of things that were released on DVD but now hang in license limbo due to a publisher going out of business or whatever. There may have been a transfer done for a DVD release that would need to be re-done for HD, and that all takes time, money, usually personal interest of some sort, and of course the physical items still have to exist (2008 Universal Studios vault fire, anyone?)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by exikyut on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:58AM (#22887767)
Why classical films look great at 2K/4K (21:39): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpABCxiDaU
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by chungy on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:23PM (#22884333)
Blu-ray has been around for a good while now.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by mattnewton on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:34PM (#22884424)
And broadband adoption. I think streaming actually killed it, not a higher resolution format.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by frosted-flakes on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:16PM (#22885686)
Doesn't Blu-ray still have better quality than most streaming services?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by function_seven on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:25PM (#22885730)
It does. I’m sure most people don’t think the quality difference is worth the hassle of storing physical discs and paying for them. Compressed 1080 is good enough.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:37AM (#22886109)
A decent number of streaming services have very good 4K and all you need is a Chromecast Ultra with a $200 TV to make it all work.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Fnoord on Friday April 17, 2020 @06:38AM (#22897818)
True, except now in EU, the bitrate of 4k streaming is low because the EC asked companies to reduce it. This because of the COVID-19 pandemic leading to everyone [who can] being required to work from home.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by mattnewton on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:56PM (#22891302)
Yeah, if you buy a new TV and sit close to it you can tell the difference. But I think for most people 1080p at a distance was acceptable where a fullscreen VHS picture would have been illegible, and the convenience became the next biggest factor. The leap from VHS to DVD was a lot larger than the leap from DVD to Blu-ray, in terms of the perceived quality IMO.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by matheusmoreira on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:05PM (#22908617)
Yes. Streaming services provide 1080p or 4k resolution images but it doesn't matter because they apply heavy compression in order to save bandwidth. In my experience, even 100% black frames have artifacts. No wonder people turn to copyright infringement.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by qlm on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:44AM (#22887392)
My local supermarket has 2-3 times more DVDs than Blu-Rays.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by sitkack on Thursday April 16, 2020 @11:04AM (#22890102)
The population of devices in the field is heavily dominated by DVD. Old people and immigrants use a whole lot more DVDs because the video they watch is not available online. Fidelity matters way less than the message.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Fnoord on Friday April 17, 2020 @06:39AM (#22897825)
DVD might also be "good enough".
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by segfaultbuserr on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:12AM (#22887237)
Ironically, the increased popularity of OLED displays in television, computer and smartphone screens has brought this problem back. If this trend continues, perhaps those 3D maze, tubes, fish, will come back to everyone's computers soon.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Tepix on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:18AM (#22887265)
Let's hope we just stick to black screens to save some power and prevent burn-in at the same time.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by segfaultbuserr on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:33AM (#22887347)
Why didn't we do this back in the CRT era, and invented screensaver instead, then? TV is understandable, you don't want a DVD player to show a black screen, otherwise it appears dead. But what about screensavers on computers, why did it come into being? (I know turning a CRT on takes time, but we don't have to turn it off completely to blank the screen either?)

Update: It appears that the original motivation was public terminals/machines.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by amelius on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:24AM (#22887920)
There is something to say for knowing that the device is on. Saves you from accidentally turning the device off when you wanted to turn it on.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by dmos62 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:13AM (#22887856)
Spinning up and down a CRT reduced its life-span, I wager.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by segfaultbuserr on Thursday April 16, 2020 @11:19AM (#22890273)
I don't think it was a major concern. First, you can always display a dummy black image without turning off the CRT. Also, VESA defines two "off" modes in DPMS (1993): blank and fully off. "Blank" allows the monitor to partially suspend without shutting down the CRT completely, which allows an instant recovery.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by dmos62 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:44PM (#22891184)
Might as well have an animation, as opposed to "black light"?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by segfaultbuserr on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:38PM (#22891703)
> as opposed to "black light"

BTW, the "black" on a CRT is almost a true black. The electron beam is off when the signal voltage is less/equal to the black level, there's no "black light" if the black level is perfectly calibrated. Displaying a black image fullscreen is indistinguishable from an endless vertical/horizontal blanking interval from a practical standpoint. There's a measurable decrease in power consumption, although it's not much (it can be great enough on a large TV, though).

On the other hand, VESA blanking mode turns off additional circuitry, and it can save a lot of power while still keeping the CRT heater on, suspending the screen without the disadvantages of a long wakeup time or stressing the tube.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Dahoon on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:25AM (#22887306)
Actually it was Plasma that did that a long time before OLED.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by navaati on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:25AM (#22887307)
But hey, raytraced !
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by katzgrau on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:41PM (#22883984)
Just following this thread to see if anyone here thought screensavers were just for fun :)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by cardiffspaceman on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:51PM (#22884572)
After Dark's "flying toasters" weren't just to prevent burn-in on your Trinitron.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by edoceo on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:25AM (#22886383)
Xscreensaver has BSOD mode, with all these different error screens. And a toasters clone :)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by ChrisMarshallNY on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:20AM (#22887282)
Anybody remember Todd Rundgren’s Utopia Softworks?

They were going to redesign the Apple operating system, and started with the screensaver.

It was a very cool screensaver, but I’m not sure how much progress they made beyond that.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by nikkwong on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:00PM (#22885334)
I had heard of this before, but didn't know that screensavers were designed to prevent that damage from happening. In this case, the bouncing DVD logo seems like an odd choice, as the way it's designed, there are certain pixels on the screen that it will never cross (corners, for example), which would fail to serve the desired purpose. Can someone explain?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by edoceo on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:27AM (#22886396)
There was a video going around of the logo hitting the corner perfect and a room full of people got real excited
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by speakeron on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:17AM (#22887891)
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by exikyut on Thursday April 16, 2020 @06:04AM (#22887793)
If you look really really carefully at that video, when the camera shakes around you can see where the motion tracking for the logo overlay loses it a bit.

Sorry.

(Someone should do a better version.)

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22882947

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by Polylactic_acid on Thursday April 16, 2020 @01:51AM (#22886526)
It doesn't have to cross them. Showing a black screen won't burn it in. The problem is illuminated areas that stay that way for too long. The dvd logo itself just can't be in the same spot. They probably could have just had the tv turn off/show nothing. Maybe it would have confused users not knowing that the tv was still on.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by anyfoo on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:59PM (#22885601)
Those pixels are off.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hunter2_ on Thursday April 16, 2020 @12:43AM (#22886145)
To expand on this: off is perfect, off most of the time is wonderful, on and changing is great, on and unchanging is bad. So yes, you ideally want equal usage all around but you're splitting hairs between perfect and wonderful with the bouncing DVD logo's coverage.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by dspillett on Thursday April 16, 2020 @05:52AM (#22887740)
> Can someone explain?

A CRT screen basically works by firing electrons (or if you want that a bit more scaremongery: a beam of beta radiation) at the phosphor plate, the impact of which makes it emit light. Shades are achieved by varying the intensity of the electron beam and colour is formed by having three different colours of phosphor dot and three beams (and a grid to make sure the right dots were hit by the right electrons), but these details are irrelevant to the burn-in problem.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube for a longer and better explanation of how it works, and the history of the technology.

Under normal operation this is mostly all fine: the phosphor "recovers" once the beam stops hitting it for a while. The phosphor does degrade (essentially they burn) a little over time with use which is also fine if the wear is level, though it does mean the screen effectively fades a little with age. If you leave a particular image on screen for a long time then it becomes more of a problem because the lit areas degrade and the unlit ones don't. Essentially the phosphor plate develops permanent tan lines. It was not uncommon to see the shadow of login prompts or semi-permanent UI elements burned into screens this way.

It happens to other screen types too, though for slightly different reasons in each case. Plasma screens are particularly sensitive to the problem, but it can affect LCD displays too (some types worse than others). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in for examples and a bit more detail.

The earliest screen-savers were just turned the screen black. This could lead to machine being powered off accidentally (potentially losing work if a user had walked off without saving) when someone thinks they are off and tries to turn them on, so instead a simple moving message was added, the message to indicate the machine is intentionally on and the movement to stop the message burning in. Other animations were added, with After Dark's iconic flying toasters appearing in ~89, and around the Windows 3.x era it exploded and almost became an art form (anyone else fondly remember the three-and-two-tenths flying toaster brigade, or Johnny Cast-Away?), some people competed to have the best screen-saver, or just the most "them" screensaver along with wallpaper/colour-scheme/other-desktop-customisations, and of course every corporate desktop carried the (bouncing) company branding when idle. Things died down when we became more energy conscious: going back to black screens because turning the whole apparatus off when idle saves energy.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by WhyNotHugo on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:12AM (#22888570)
I really wish modern vendors would stop shipping screensavers -- or at least refuse to disable them on non-CRT monitors.

The energy waste, battery degradation, and keeping the CPU/GPU awake longer are all huge wastes. Sadly, screensavers are nothing but wasteful nowadays.

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by sitkack on Thursday April 16, 2020 @11:06AM (#22890133)
One could make an HDMI screensaver (blanker) out of an HDMI buffer chip!
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jordanbeiber on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:09AM (#22887222)
True for any flat screen panel as well. The plasmas are really prone to ”ghosting” - just a matter of minutes. And there are ”washing” programs to ”reset” the panel.

I guess plasma is the main reason why on-screen channel logos went from solid to translucent?

Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jaywalk on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:34AM (#22889758)
What channel logos have gone from solid to translucent?
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jordanbeiber on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:37AM (#22907003)
Not the actual logos but the ones you see on-screen when watching a channel/stream.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by sam0x17 on Thursday April 16, 2020 @04:17AM (#22887261)
And is now important again with the advent of OLED. Those things can burn in so bad.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by andrepd on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @07:39PM (#22884465)
After CRTs, Plasmas had issues with burn in at least.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by sjwright on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:19PM (#22884752)
Plasmas were worse than CRTs for burn in.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by bnegreve on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:56PM (#22885003)
It reminds me of this: https://imgur.com/gallery/eVubO
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by jksmith on Thursday April 16, 2020 @08:02AM (#22888518)
I always wanted to do a theme for AfterDark involving spinning mummies unwrapping as they floated across the screen.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by EamonnMR on Thursday April 16, 2020 @11:26AM (#22890365)
I remember the login screen burned into every Mac G3 at my school.
Re:Bouncing DVD Logo by hkiely on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:46PM (#22884043)
This is key.