this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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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

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[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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

[–] UnspecificGravity@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] neocamel@lemmy.studio 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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??

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm going to take his advice and pirate this straight to my hardrive where no one can take it away.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Just the way God intended.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 39 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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)

[–] Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] _number8_@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

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.

[–] Eheran@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not sure what you are streaming that a DVD looks better. Any 720p stream is better, let alone higher resolution ones.

[–] Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No. It's not. The bit rates tend to be lower. And compression obliterates tons of parts of images.

[–] Glowstick@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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

[–] Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Overzeetop@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Zellith@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

Yup. The only bluray player you can trust to keep working is a Playstation, hah

[–] Zorque@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did he hire someone to fix his terrible audio engineering for home media as well?

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[–] MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] oshsul@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Yarr. Can't steal from me, if I do it first.

[–] thebuoyancyofcitrus@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a well marketed movie. 😔

[–] lolrightythen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Care to elaborate? The emoji threw me off and I'm genuinely interested.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

Copy protection is what these people want

[–] thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] MrJameGumb@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Blu ray? Is it available on DVD?

[–] MrJameGumb@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Maybe I'll wait for the laserdisc version

[–] KnightontheSun@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] eoddc5@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

That’s why I pirate it and own the mkv

[–] realcaseyrollins@narwhal.city 4 points 1 year ago

I'm surprised he didn't mention the 4K UHD disc instead.

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh shit, they still print discs?!?

Can I get it on gramophone instead?

(e: I’m kidding. Streaming is horrible for artists, I agree.)

[–] ulkesh@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Or…I’ll just get it by my usual means since I’m a grown-ass adult.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

Buy overpriced physical media? lol no thanks.

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