cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4517587
Christopher Nolan took a playful swipe at streaming while introducing a Los Angeles screening of “Oppenheimer” that was devoted to spotlighting the film’s craft. Crew members reunited for the event Monday evening, billed as “The Story of Our Time: The Making of ‘Oppenheimer.'” The director said a lot of time and energy has gone into assembling the “Oppenheimer” Blu-ray so that it preserves the film’s soundscape, which is one reason moviegoers should buy a physical copy as opposed to waiting for the movie to stream.
“Obviously ‘Oppenheimer’ has been quite a ride for us and now it is time for me to release a home version of the film. I’ve been working very hard on it for months,” Nolan said. “I’m known for my love of theatrical and put my whole life into that, but, the truth is, the way the film goes out at home is equally important.”
“‘The Dark Knight’ was one of the first films where we formatted it specially for Blu-ray release because it was a new form at the time,” he continued. “And in the case of ‘Oppenheimer,’ we put a lot of care and attention into the Blu-ray version… and trying to translate the photography and the sound, putting that into the digital realm with a version you can buy and own at home and put on a shelf so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
Release date: 22nd November 2023
Tech specs: Blu-ray.com
He made sure to turn the voices down really low with no bass, and all the explosions max volume and will blow your subs.
Christopher Nolan has some of the worst sound mixing in movies, I couldn’t hear SHIT in Interstellar
USE YOUR MIDS
I can only watch interstellar on my bedroom TV because I’ve maxed out the audio compression to watch things at low volume, I can actually understand what anyone in that movie is saying.
ooh do you have any tips or guides for doing this?
i have tried doing this with audio effects (pulseeffects, easyeffects) things in linux but i never seem to get a good result
The term to search is “volume equalization”, windows has this option built in, not sure about Linux sorry.
many thanks!
I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and felt like an old man:
Me: IS IT ME, OR IS THIS MOVIE TOO LOUD?
My wife: WHAT DID YOU SAY??
My shitty TV makes a god awful buzzing noise when watching it at home.
I didn’t have an issue when watching it in the movies. Talking was understandable and I expected the explosions to be megahugeloud, would’ve been disappointed if they weren’t.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with Nolan trying to make more money. Nothing at all.
Nor does it have anything to do with Nolan overseeing a project that had dodgy royalties contracts that have since been banned by the unions.
I’m going to take his advice and pirate this straight to my hardrive where no one can take it away.
Just the way God intended.
Rofl yeah. How many other mainstream movies are on Blu ray? Every single one maybe? This movie will surely end up on a streaming platform too, having Blu ray release does not change that.
Will do! I’m so happy he’s coming out and saying this, because it’s become ridiculous that you never know where the movie you want to watch is. There’s zero guarantee anymore that the thing you love will still be there.
I buy them myself now, and will own them forever. (Plus the quality of a 4k disc is just so much better)
I had forgotten how much worse streaming quality was after being stuck on it for a while.
Popped in an old DVD and was surprised how much better stuff looked. Not to mention BR…
I always knew it, but actually seeing it in front of me made me sad for how much I’ve missed, and now I can’t go back.
audio especially is just so heavily compressed. Once you notice the video compression in the skies and in dark scenes and audio compression missing the “full body”-ness you just can’t go back. You can tell where compression clips out the bits it can.
plus it just feels so much better knowing you have the whole movie right there, playing off of something sitting in your den and not some shitty malignant corporation’s servers
It’s amusing since that audio compression is the reason why my pirated copy of interstellar is actually watchable as opposed to the streaming version which leaves your eardrums bleeding.
Not sure what you are streaming that a DVD looks better. Any 720p stream is better, let alone higher resolution ones.
No. It’s not. The bit rates tend to be lower. And compression obliterates tons of parts of images.
I would bet that a 720-upscaled dvd will look better than a low bitrate 720 stream. Hell, a 720-upscaled dvd probably looks better than a low bitrate 1080 or 4k stream. In many aspects a lower resolution video with a high bitrate will always look better than a video at higher resolution with a bitrate that’s too low. Excess compression makes visual quality turn to ugly garbage. Even just a little bit of additional compression quickly starts to cause color banding, blocky artifacts, and visual noise in motion sequences.
DVDs have a maximum Bitrate of 10 Mb/s. This is like 5 Mb/s with H264 or 2.5 Mb/s with H265, since the compression back then was MPEG2. Feel free to look up Bitrates of streaming services. YouTube is at roughly 15x that with 4K videos. 720p uses about the same.
Bitrate per pixel is what we’re talking about. Bitrate alone tells you nothing. If you’re actually receiving a full as-advertised bitrate stream with a well-implemented compression algorithm then obviously if all else is held equal then higher resolution = higher quality. But in reality many streams are overly compressed to save on their bandwidth and server costs, and often due to tech inefficiencies you won’t actually receive the full bit rate, resulting in even more additional compression losses.
Again, a perfectly-implemented, perfectly-transported stream in 720p will always look better than a 480p dvd file. But in reality there are many situations where a stream is imperfectly-implemented and imperfectly-transported, sometimes to the point where visual quality worsens to below what you would get from an upscaled 480p dvd.
But anyway, neither of us are true experts on this topic. If you’re always 100% happy with the quality of the streams you see, then that’s great! But many of us sometimes encounter streams where the compression causes obvious visual degradations to the point of being distracting. Personally i prefer lower resolution with no obvious compression artifacts, rather than higher resolution with obvious color banding and visual noise in motion sequences.
I am not always happy. But I can also see that a DVD has lower quilted than essentially any YouTube video. Of course unless it was uploaded in lower quality to begin with. The source material has to be good enough. There are more than enough 1080p videos that are only 360p. Or 4K that is only 720p. Not due to compression, just from the source material.
I regularly see this response whenever someone mentions that home media (DVD, BlueRay) looks better.
I personally don’t know the answer, though I suspect as the other replies do also that it’s about compression and bit-depth … but I think someone really needs to do a breakdown on the technicalities here.
Either streaming has tricked everyone into thinking they haven’t lost anything, and that’s tragic, or we’re tricking ourselves into thinking our cherished home media looks better, which is somewhat sad but also interesting.
It’s not that complicated. Video compression methods are well understood. If you don’t understand them, there’s plenty of material available. But if you don’t know how video quality is measured, it’s hard to talk about video quality. The notes are already up above.
For more explicit detail, DVD is extremely straight forward:
DVD-Video discs have a raw bitrate of 11.08 Mbit/s, with a 1.0 Mbit/s overhead, leaving a payload bitrate of 10.08 Mbit/s. Of this, up to 3.36 Mbit/s can be used for subtitles, a maximum of 10.08 Mbit/s can be split amongst audio and video, and a maximum of 9.80 Mbit/s can be used for video alone.
Netflix is complicated. But tends to be one of the better options. But Netflix has no standard bitrate for their raw content, and they serve lower bit rates depending on their network traffic.
4k HDR content goes as high as 18 Mbps, but they will cram it down at least as far as 4Mbps. So while at times it can be better than a DVD, it’s often, in practice, lower. And that’s not even a really fair comparison, as most of their SDR 4K seems to cap at 12 and DVDs are ancient. UHD BluRays cap at 128mbps. Netflix isn’t going anywhere near that.
In my experience, watching content at reasonable hours plummet to 4-6mbps. It’s not even close.
And all that being said, this doesn’t touch compression artifacts, audio quality, etc. At the end of the day, Netflix wants to save money and doesn’t want to serve you any more data than it has to. Even if you notice, they’re selling you convenience, not quality. As long as they are up to par with other streaming services, it doesn’t matter. So they serve you the worst they can. And you bet your ass they don’t want to be serving large portions of the world individual 10mbps+ streams. It’s just not worth it to them.
But yeah, if you really want an answer to your question, there’s tons of coverage on this. A quick Google: https://www.howtogeek.com/872777/why-even-1080p-blu-rays-are-better-than-4k-streaming-video/
It’s undeniable streaming is just worse. It’s much cheaper to ship someone a physical disk of ALL the data than it is to blast it across the internet on demand. Physical media will always win that fight.
I feel like there’s something unfortunate going on here.
Part of the premise of my comment was that focusing on a simple numerical metric like pixel resolution is a misrepresentation of the actual quality.
Here, in your response and others, there seems to me to be a continued emphasis on numerical metrics. What’s missing is a treatment of the actual visual presentation on the screen and what differences a human is perceiving. No one “sees” a bit rate, they see the video.
And if we are to keep our focus on actual visual quality and not got distracted by marketing, at some point, you’ve got to bring it down to what the human in front of the screen is actually perceiving.
In this case, I think a simple first step is to emphasise the essential effect of compression, which is that the number of pixels effectively goes down by grouping them together for certain frames in order to save on data rates. Whereas a DVD is “lossless” and lets each pixel display its part of the image freely no matter how subtle its difference from its neighbours is. The result of this is all of the increases color depth and bitrate stuff, which in a nutshell means that DVDs etc are using each of their pixels as well as possible while streaming, even if it puts more pixels on the screen, is getting them to cut corners. The additional information provided by pixels being more independent in the values they display leads to greater amounts of colors and more detail (per pixel at least) and consistently so across the whole image and video such that weird artefacts and glitches from compression won’t pollute the video.
Whether that’s what you intended or not, that’s not the premise of the comment you had written:
I think someone really needs to do a breakdown on the technicalities here.
My comment answered saying that if you don’t understand the basics of compression and bit depth, then there’s no way to talk to you about video and you need to go learn the basics. Those are not technicalities or a deep analysis. You just need to learn the basic vocabulary of these things and that is very readily available online.
Either streaming has tricked everyone into thinking they haven’t lost anything, and that’s tragic, or we’re tricking ourselves into thinking our cherished home media looks better, which is somewhat sad but also interesting.
My comment then laid out how it’s very clearly something lost - the video color, audio, and compression are all measurably worse. We know it has been lost. That’s quantifiable. And my post quantified it.
If you don’t understand the jargon, you’re not looking for “someone to breakdown the technicalities”, you’re looking for someone to explain the basics of how digital video works and what the terms mean.
It sounds like you are actually looking for something like side by sides of uncompressed and compressed video. And high vs low color depth. But that’s not what you originally asked for.
First, my comment, though directly in response to yours, was addressed to what seemed to be the general nature of these sorts of discussions. FWIW I upvoted your comment and replied to it specifically because it was the most substantial. There’s nothing personal, directed or venomous from me here. I liked your response and should have opened with “thank you!”
Second, “technicalities” are not limited to the data transfer details, or generally, IT. Visual perception is incredibly technical (more so than than the IT details involved I’d wager, FWIW). In calling for a breakdown of the technicalities, that can and should encompass all that is relevant to the issue. And that’s the point of my critique.
Data transfer rates on their own mean fairly little, and yet they seem to be the go-to description of what’s going on here with matters like color depth and spatial detail handled with a hand wavy mention. I suspect it’s because a bitrate is a single easy number to communicate, and that’s fine. But it’s not a breakdown or explanation.
We don’t need side by side comparisons for this, though that could be nice. And I think this is at a point above defining jargon terms. I think what would be helpful for many here is an explanation of what they see and why. In my particular case, and I suspect many others, you’d be surprised at how much of the components of the issue are already understood, at least to some extent. It’s the complete picture of the process that leads to the differences that is incomplete.
For example, I’d bet many find it plainly unintuitive how a higher resolution could possibly look worse and would somewhat dismiss claims of lower bitrates being important on the basis higher resolutions should just trump that. Why are they wrong, and by how much? Many probably know something of compression and bit/color depth, but don’t grasp how impactful they can be to an image compared to resolution which they’ve clearly seen demonstrated to them repeatedly over time.
Genuinely, the bitrate for streaming is much, much lower than physical media. DVDs average about 6 Mbps, HD Blu-rays average roughly 30 Mbps, and 4K Blu-rays average around 100 Mbps. From everything I’ve seen Netflix doesn’t really go higher than 20 Mbps even at 4K. Color banding and blocking is going to generally be the most visible issue with Netflix and other streaming services
I think someone really needs to do a breakdown on the technicalities here.
I second this sentiment. I would love learning more.
Only speaking for myself (decidedly not a videophile) I’ve been ripping all my DVDs that had been sitting in a box doing nothing and I’m completely happy with the quality even at 4K (the pixels really pop! 🤣 )–knowing that I own the material makes me that much happier. I even bought some more used DVDs to rip. They’re practically giving them away at second-hand stores.
Depending on how you watch audio is way better on bluray vs streaming, as well. 5.1 or any good aftermarket receiver + speaker combo will sound much better.
We’ve gotten to a place where people are paying for the chance that the thing they want is still on the service when they want it. Literally paying to throw the dice.
Let’s just apply fucking loot box mechanics to everything in our lives.
The quality of a regular bluray is much better than streaming for the most part! Bitstarved content sucks and I really hope discs don’t die out.
That’s why I download all my movies and tv shows. My personal server never removes movies and always streams to my devices without restriction.
It’s all just bits. It doesn’t matter if they’re stored on a BluRay or on a hard drive. There’s nothing stopping you from ripping your BluRays and dumping the bookshelf of media onto one disk.
didn’t say I don’t do that
The only moral screaming service is tubi because they don’t charge
I’m glad that we are all saying fuck you to the streaming services. As soon as people started leaving Netflix to form their own streaming services, I knew shit like this was going to happen. There is going to be a fucking market crash I guarantee it.
I was under the impression that every blu ray inserted needs to show a certain encryption key in order to work. At some point if you dont get a firmware update on your player, it will stop playing newer blu rays. (In theory, its entirely within a blu ray player creators power to simply create a new player with certain keys revoked, meaning some or all of your blu rays wont play on new machines, leaving you dependant on old stock. But its highly doubtful this will EVER happen.)
I don’t believe DVDs have to worry about any of this. Im probably wrong however. It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this.
DVDs suffered from similar issues, but thankfully people figured out how to crack them reliably, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss
Rip it as soon as you get it.
Yup. The only bluray player you can trust to keep working is a Playstation, hah
Did he hire someone to fix his terrible audio engineering for home media as well?
Did people have a problem with Oppenheimer’s audio in the theater or do you mean specifically home releases from Nolan?
I thought the audio was fine on Oppenheimer.
Silly Chris Nolan, only I get to astroturf Lemmy to sell Blu-rays of my movie, Barbie, the better half of Barbenheimer and the better movie to own.
Lemmy is my territory.
Yarr. Can’t steal from me, if I do it first.
By “soundscape” does he mean the explosions and random atomic/quantum noises that shattered my eardrums throughout the film? Nah, I’m good on that
I liked that aspect and tbh expected it. I just wish the explosion visuals were up to the audio. It was the thing that should’ve been fuckhuge big spectacle in a movie like this. Quite the letdown.
Fair play on the explosions, I expected those too. I just really wasn’t prepared for the microscopic cutaway stuff or how loud those parts would be in the theater
This is a well marketed movie. 😔
Care to elaborate? The emoji threw me off and I’m genuinely interested.
My guess is they’re referring to the fact that Nolan’s statement here is ultimately nothing more than marketing meant to increase sales. I’m sure Nolan will still get paid for it being on streaming services, regardless of how often it’s watched, even if all the actors he employed will only get paid per watch on said services.
Cool, cool… I think I have an old DVD player in a box in the attic somewhere, I guess I’ll go look for it specifically for watching Oppenheimer
Hopefully it still works
Blu ray? Is it available on DVD?
Maybe I’ll wait for the laserdisc version
I have a laserdisc player a friend gave me. I compared one of the films on disc to a Criterion version that I um…found.
The Criterion version blew it away. It was like the difference between watching a glitchy VHS tape versus a DVD.
Honestly that was about my opinion of laserdisc when I first saw one in the 90s lol I didn’t get what the big deal was
You look like a film projector kinda guy.
Puppets maybe…
I holding out for it to be released on wax cylinder
7 disc all CAV special edition or bust
Do they not have DVD/Blu-ray packaged deals these days?
They might.
Cool, so we can pay royalties to other crappy companies who benefit from their Blu-Ray Patents.
I agree many streaming services suck, but, the Blu-Ray standard is a much bigger suckfest (especially considering all the people they screwed with newer copy protections and such)
Copy protection is what these people want
I’m ok with this. I prefer 4k physical media I can rip into it’s raw state and stream via Plex. Looks dope, yo. Best part? I own it. There’s no marketing douchebag that flips a killswitch to remove it from the streaming service.
Something something the seven seas
Oh shit, they still print discs?!?
Can I get it on gramophone instead?
(e: I’m kidding. Streaming is horrible for artists, I agree.)
