The primary value of Blu-ray to me is on a good home theater system the audio is going to be so much better than a stream.
The visual fidelity on a good 4k streamer is hard to tell the difference between Blu-ray (you can, it’s just not glaring), but even the sound on a DVD beats any streamer.
I never understood why they encode stuff that way. Most streams that I've looked at devote literally 98-99% of the bits to the video, and the audio stream is just scraps.
The film's sound department worked really hard on that stuff! It doesn't take much -- 500 kbit/sec can sound amazing if they encode it well.
I would guess that the number of people listening to this media on anything higher quality than the built-in speakers on a 65-inch TV is minuscule. They’re optimizing for sound on an iPad, not a full surround sound setup.
The thing is, if you watch using AirPods on your iPad with spatial audio, it's actually far better than the vast majority of people's actual surround sound setups.
I never cared much about surround sound until the AirPods got spatial audio. Now it's like I can't live without it.
Yup. That’s my guess as well, but on the other hand there is a pretty large industry serving the many people who do have a decent home theater system (and even some where it’s more “theater” than “home”).
As somebody who has a very nice (and expensive) 5.1 set up, I’m legitimately a bit worried about this trend.
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
Not quite sure what you're referring to here - Silicon Valley voted heavily against the current president. 68% margin the other way in Santa Clara county and 73% in San Mateo.
Some did, others didn't. That's how it normally goes; there were plenty of Romney, McCain, and Bush voters in tech. The only reason it went differently during the last Trump presidency is that he went out of his way to antagonize tech leaders while promising to end the H1B program their businesses heavily rely on.
More the SV tech-bro cabal. As I predicted this submission (1 hour old and ~70 upvotes, reached #1 10 minutes ago) has been removed from the front page. In fact I can't find how far it's been throttled. Even if it used to be, Silicon Valley is no longer the friend of anyone who holds a conscience.
You're right... I can't find it by scrolling. I thought this site was all algorithmically ranked? Are there people throttling material critical of SV and/or other topics?
By the by, is it possible to see where a post is (or isn't) in the numbered list from within the post?
Nope. It's not the first time I've seen this happen. And I think it might even be against the guidelines to imply it ever does. If it was flagged the normal way, there would at least have been a 'flagged' designation on the post, whereas this one was done silently, but by who?
Edit: Oh wait. It has since been flagged. Must have been too political or something, because we all know the tech scene is especially apolitical right now.
You have been using HN for over 10 years but don't know about the flamewar filter? There is some magic comment to upvote ratio that bumps posts down once reached.
The post hadn't been ratioed by the time the throttle happened, so it wasn't that mate. It's since been ratioed by people coming back to reply to comments.
Let me guess, you’re a man who worked hard but never quite made it to the top of the class.
And those damn women and minorities (not East Asians of course, just the bad ones) who got higher grades than you, rejected you for dates, gave you weird looks and laughed at your macho arrogance - there’s no way they are as smart as you, right? Must be something else going on…
…it must have been DEI that got them the grades you wanted, the spot at the university that rejected you, the job where you didn’t make the cut…
…or maybe you’re a born loser, and you’re going to live life as a loser, and when you’re old and frail you’ll look back on a pointless life of bitterness, dying a loser.
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Also, you crossed badly into personal attack here. Please don't do that on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You may not owe people who you feel are losers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
In my defense, I’ve been advocating for accessibility in computing for over 20 years, and reading the original post really enraged me as it goes against all I stand for, hence reacting too strongly here.
HN audience is essentially pro-Trump as well. 1/3rd of Santa Clara county (heart of Silicon Valley) voted for him, and a lot of tech employees come from authoritarian countries (China) and really see nothing wrong with authoritarian rule.
Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
Give me a break, that’s fine for rounding and a huge gap between SCC and San Francisco and Santa Cruz. SCC is the outlier in the region, and a good percentage of HN is very pro-Trump because a good percentage of HN is pro-greed.
And the point about Chinese being among the most pro-Trump is South Bay stands - I have had several conversations and most people from mainland (RIP HK) see zero problem with authoritarian rule.
Lots of voters see many things wrong with authoritarian rule but on the freedom versus authoritarianism spectrum it's not at all clear that Democrats are any better. With the recent national shift towards populism, both major political parties seem roughly equally authoritarian in different policy areas. Besides AI policy there are other major authoritarianism issues around online censorship, public health, gun control, recreational drugs, reproductive healthcare, etc. I'm not trying to start yet another fight over which side is right or wrong on those particular issues but rather using them as examples to show how both parties are authoritarian when it fits the ideology of their core voters and campaign contributors.
Overall voters who identify as Asian mainly voted for Harris. So I am skeptical of your claim that Trump got a lot of votes from first-generation immigrants from China.
This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
You don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.
I think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power.
When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
The visual fidelity on a good 4k streamer is hard to tell the difference between Blu-ray (you can, it’s just not glaring), but even the sound on a DVD beats any streamer.