Physical & Digital EST: The Future of Home Video Discussion Thread

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A friend bought the digital deluxe edition (PC) for me and I have immensely enjoyed it so far. It is damn addictive and intricately detailed. I wish I could play more often than I do, but my sorcerer is coming along at level 44.

I’m playing a delightful PS4 game (on my ps5) by the name of ‘inside’. A puzzler with beautiful, stark visuals and a tense, mesmerising atmosphere.

Absolutely gripped.

[JohnAV]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A friend bought the digital deluxe edition (PC) for me and I have immensely enjoyed it so far. It is damn addictive and intricately detailed. I wish I could play more often than I do, but my sorcerer is coming along at level 44.

D4 is an open world vs the usual linear game. Most play it in campaign mode because of the many hundreds of stories it uses. It has over a 100 larger dungeons to beat for new abilities located all around this gaming world, not counting any of the smaller types for loot. Once you get through the games main campaign you find you can play hundreds of hours exploring everything. The game will evolve as they do plan on seasonal updates to add to it. BTW you can always reset you skills if you see a better way to be a sorcerer. You are not locked in with your skill tree points at all. Play any style you want. Each of the five character roles can be vastly different. Hope it all entertains you not to the point you watch less content.

Worth looking at this story of their video rendering.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diab...s-of-diablo-iv

[Steedeel]

Vilya, which of the two films I have repeatedly ranted about to you did you enjoy best? Duel or The Wicker Man?

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by Steedeel

Vilya, which of the two films I have repeatedly ranted about to you did you enjoy best? Duel or The Wicker Man?

and don't exactly make for an apples to apples comparison. These are two entirely different types of movies and both are excellent.

Even so, I will choose Christopher Lee ruling over an island full of hedonistic pagans over Dennis Weaver running from a psychotic truck driver every time.

There's no one like Britt Ekland in Duel, either.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Vilya

and don't exactly make for an apples to apples comparison. These are two entirely different types of movies and both are excellent.

Even so, I will choose Christopher Lee ruling over an island full of hedonistic pagans over Dennis Weaver running from a psychotic truck driver every time.

There's no one like Britt Ekland in Duel, either.

Very true!

[cheez avenger]

Just watched an awesome documentary about John Milius called "Milius." It's free on Tubi and Vudu in HD.

[Vilya]

Here is another long-winded word salad tossed behind spoilers complete with a few $64 Scrabble words regarding my situation, but in order to stay sorta on topic let me first say that I have added this to my collection:



I have never seen the show, but what a handsome steelbook!

Warning: even the illustrious Dynamo of Eternity may find the following wall of text to be daunting; I have outdone myself here.

[Show spoiler]I will discuss all of the bad stuff first and save the best parts for last.

The day after my mesmerizing visit to gotmule's otherworldly home theater and the wonderful hospitality of he and his wife I went to the hospital for three tests. Two of these tests were simply slow torture.

I had to have two tubes, one after the other, shoved down my nose into my throat and stomach. I had to endure the first test for 40 minutes while a nurse kept squirting water into my throat from a syringe and ordering me to swallow only on her command. Repressing one's gag reflex is not an easy thing to control. This test checked to see if my esophagus was working normally or not.

The second test required I have a tube down my snout into my stomach for 22.5 hours while wearing a small computer device to record acid reflux movements.

The third test was a simple hydrogen breath test where I drank glass of lactose and then blew into a bag right afterwards and then again every twenty minutes over a 90 minute period. This was the only test of the three that went well.

The 22.5 hour long Impedance Manometry test showed that my acid reflux had worsened. I was prescribed pantoprazole over the short term and told to make some simple lifestyle changes.

The other invasive test, which lasted 40 minutes, was the Esophageal Manometry test. The results showed that I have near absent peristalsis (the wave like motion of the esophagus while swallowing) and weak muscles in my throat including the muscles that control entry to the stomach known as LES for short. All of this means that I have a lot of trouble swallowing anything and that exacerbates the acid reflux problem. This condition is incurable and untreatable.

This is another consequence of my having hATTR-CM (hereditary amyloidosis transthyretin cardiomyopathy), which is again a multi-systemic, degenerative, progressive, and fatal disease.

I have learned that the gene responsible for my disease (THR80ALA) is more lethal than most of the other genes that can cause hATTR-CM. I have also learned that when you have this disease with reduced ejection fraction, as I do, that the disease is late stage; my ejection fraction (EF) is 40% while a normal EF is between 55-70% according to the American Heart Association. If my EF falls below 40% then things could get very bad very fast.

It has been a hard week. My blood pressure hit a new low Monday morning with a reading of 77/38. It has been unstable all week.

Three nights this week I have had substantial chest pain that came and went over a period of 3-4 hours. I never know when to go the ER because if I went every time that I have chest pain I would have to forward my mail there.

I continue to be nauseous the first 8 hours of every day. I feel full whether I have eaten anything or not. There are other more unpleasant symptoms, too. It's all a little hard to endure.

The more promising part is that I get my second IV infusion treatment of the experimental drug Patisiran this Friday. It's a four hour long ordeal involving four preparatory drugs followed by the headliner Patisiran. I do this every three weeks.

Patisiran has shown in many patients, but not all, to have some very positive results. After just one dose it has been shown to reduce production of transthyretin by 80%. Transthyretin is a naturally occurring protein, but in my case my bad gene causes it to become unstable and it misfolds into amyloid fibers instead. It is these amyloid fibers that cause the life threatening damage to the heart. After 18 months of treatment that reduction increases to 88%.

The pill that I take, Vyndamax, the only FDA approved treatment for hATTR-CM, attempts to stabilize the transthyretin that remains.

Patisiran has been found to improve, in many patients, four key aspects of heart function. It reduces the thickening, the enlargement, and the stiffness of the left ventricle.

It improves the left ventricle end diastolic volume (LVEDV) which is the amount of blood in the heart’s left ventricle just before the heart contracts.

It improves left ventricle global longitudinal strain (GLS). GLS is a measure of left ventricle systolic (pumping) function. This measurement, when abnormal, is a strong predictor of mortality. My GLS is severely compromised.

Patisiran has been shown to reduce N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) by as much as 55%. NT-proBNP is a hormone released by the heart in increasing amounts as heart failure worsens. It is another indicator of mortality. A normal reading is under 300 pg/mL. My last reading was 3,084 pg/mL.

The problems with Patisiran are that 97% of patients experience adverse side effects, 36% are serious, and 28% are severe. After one treatment so far, I am only having minor side effects.

The other problem is that while Patisiran shows some very promising results those four areas of dramatic cardiac improvement that I just listed take 9-18 months of treatment to realize. My prognosis as of March was 1-2 years.

It took me 5 months of trying to get into this drug trial. The manufacturer is covering the insane cost. Each treatment costs over $39,000 and there is a treatment every three weeks!

Patisiran, despite all of the risks, offers my best chance. Not everyone benefits from this treatment, but I hope that I will be among those who saw their prognosis extended. That and I like proving my doctors wrong.

If anyone was willing to read all of this then you rival Job for his patience. In some strange way chronicling all of this is helpful for me, so thank you all for allowing me to do so.

[bhampton]

Originally Posted by Vilya

A big thanks to Wendell for the gift copy of

I suspect that I have my work cut out for me in order to optimize my settings, but I am so grateful that I now have the tools to do so.

I definitely recommend the beginners guide on the Hand Forged Video website. There's a lot of great documentation on the site.

https://spearsandmunsil.com/3rd-edition-articles/

I feel like I know things but then there's always more to learn I will use the test disc to setup the player and the projector in my case. I really like the color space forms in the downloads section that can be printed and used to organize settings information.

It would be great if default settings were the best every time. The OOB (out of box) experience of newer things tends to be good. However, some defaults of a player and display may actually clash with one another. I have seen some banding from SDR on my projector (most recently watching Fall on Blu Ray) and I think I will be able to find and correct that using the test patterns.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Vilya

Here is another long-winded word salad tossed behind spoilers complete with a few $64 Scrabble words regarding my situation, but in order to stay sorta on topic let me first say that I have added this to my collection:



I have never seen the show, but what a handsome steelbook!

Warning: even the illustrious Dynamo of Eternity may find the following wall of text to be daunting; I have outdone myself here.

[Show spoiler]I will discuss all of the bad stuff first and save the best parts for last.

The day after my mesmerizing visit to gotmule's otherworldly home theater and the wonderful hospitality of he and his wife I went to the hospital for three tests. Two of these tests were simply slow torture.

I had to have two tubes, one after the other, shoved down my nose into my throat and stomach. I had to endure the first test for 40 minutes while a nurse kept squirting water into my throat from a syringe and ordering me to swallow only on her command. Repressing one's gag reflex is not an easy thing to control. This test checked to see if my esophagus was working normally or not.

The second test required I have a tube down my snout into my stomach for 22.5 hours while wearing a small computer device to record acid reflux movements.

The third test was a simple hydrogen breath test where I drank glass of lactose and then blew into a bag right afterwards and then again every twenty minutes over a 90 minute period. This was the only test of the three that went well.

The 22.5 hour long Impedance Manometry test showed that my acid reflux had worsened. I was prescribed pantoprazole over the short term and told to make some simple lifestyle changes.

The other invasive test, which lasted 40 minutes, was the Esophageal Manometry test. The results showed that I have near absent peristalsis (the wave like motion of the esophagus while swallowing) and weak muscles in my throat including the muscles that control entry to the stomach known as LES for short. All of this means that I have a lot of trouble swallowing anything and that exacerbates the acid reflux problem. This condition is incurable and untreatable.

This is another consequence of my having hATTR-CM (hereditary amyloidosis transthyretin cardiomyopathy), which is again a multi-systemic, degenerative, progressive, and fatal disease.

I have learned that the gene responsible for my disease (THR80ALA) is more lethal than most of the other genes that can cause hATTR-CM. I have also learned that when you have this disease with reduced ejection fraction, as I do, that the disease is late stage; my ejection fraction (EF) is 40% while a normal EF is between 55-70% according to the American Heart Association. If my EF falls below 40% then things could get very bad very fast.

It has been a hard week. My blood pressure hit a new low Monday morning with a reading of 77/38. It has been unstable all week.

Three nights this week I have had substantial chest pain that came and went over a period of 3-4 hours. I never know when to go the ER because if I went every time that I have chest pain I would have to forward my mail there.

I continue to be nauseous the first 8 hours of every day. I feel full whether I have eaten anything or not. There are other more unpleasant symptoms, too. It's all a little hard to endure.

The more promising part is that I get my second IV infusion treatment of the experimental drug Patisiran this Friday. It's a four hour long ordeal involving four preparatory drugs followed by the headliner Patisiran. I do this every three weeks.

Patisiran has shown in many patients, but not all, to have some very positive results. After just one dose it has been shown to reduce production of transthyretin by 80%. Transthyretin is a naturally occurring protein, but in my case my bad gene causes it to become unstable and it misfolds into amyloid fibers instead. It is these amyloid fibers that cause the life threatening damage to the heart. After 18 months of treatment that reduction increases to 88%.

The pill that I take, Vyndamax, the only FDA approved treatment for hATTR-CM, attempts to stabilize the transthyretin that remains.

Patisiran has been found to improve, in many patients, four key aspects of heart function. It reduces the thickening, the enlargement, and the stiffness of the left ventricle.

It improves the left ventricle end diastolic volume (LVEDV) which is the amount of blood in the heart’s left ventricle just before the heart contracts.

It improves left ventricle global longitudinal strain (GLS). GLS is a measure of left ventricle systolic (pumping) function. This measurement, when abnormal, is a strong predictor of mortality. My GLS is severely compromised.

Patisiran has been shown to reduce N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) by as much as 55%. NT-proBNP is a hormone released by the heart in increasing amounts as heart failure worsens. It is another indicator of mortality. A normal reading is under 300 pg/mL. My last reading was 3,084 pg/mL.

The problems with Patisiran are that 97% of patients experience adverse side effects, 36% are serious, and 28% are severe. After one treatment so far, I am only having minor side effects.

The other problem is that while Patisiran shows some very promising results those four areas of dramatic cardiac improvement that I just listed take 9-18 months of treatment to realize. My prognosis as of March was 1-2 years.

It took me 5 months of trying to get into this drug trial. The manufacturer is covering the insane cost. Each treatment costs over $39,000 and there is a treatment every three weeks!

Patisiran, despite all of the risks, offers my best chance. Not everyone benefits from this treatment, but I hope that I will be among those who saw their prognosis extended. That and I like proving my doctors wrong.

If anyone was willing to read all of this then you rival Job for his patience. In some strange way chronicling all of this is helpful for me, so thank you all for allowing me to do so.

Thanks, that’s a lot to deal with but I’m liking your stubborn attitude. ��

I have an update of my own as you (and many others) were very supportive a while back when I revealed my sister’s troubles.

Her kidney function is down to 8% now so she has had a procedure to prepare for dialysis. She can’t have a transplant as of yet because her bladder is constantly inflamed. She will need to have her bladder removed before the surgeon’s can perform a transplant as she would probably bleed out otherwise. So we are talking the operation, a few months to recover, then the transplant.

We don’t know what caused what, her kidney stones, COVID and/or sepsis could be to blame.
Furthermore, because she is so poorly we are keeping other news away from her, (not related to her) but that’s a one for PM as I have already hijacked the page.

So, every night I pray for my family, and I pray for you. As I say to my sister, only that person knows how they feel, as they are the one going through it.
I think you are a very strong person, I’m rooting for you.

Oh, and Strange New Worlds is fab!

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by Vilya

In some strange way chronicling all of this is helpful for me, so thank you all for allowing me to do so.

As always hoping the best for you. You must have a great memory to remember all of those medical terms and the sequences.

Steedeel: May your sister have success with her health issues.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by bhampton

I have seen some banding from SDR on my projector (most recently watching Fall on Blu Ray) and I think I will be able to find and correct that using the test patterns.

Some BD titles do have banding in them. John Wick 4 had at least one brief instance of banding. In the past Kris Deering has noted Lionsgate as the biggest offender in terms of BD titles with banding.

The banding I have observed on BD titles is nothing compared to the banding I have saw via streaming. It is very possible the cause is the HDR → SDR for my 8 bit projector. Don't recall seeing banding while watching UHD HDR BD.

[bhampton]

I don't have banding with HDR either. I have only seen it recently in Fall and it could just be in the source. I didn't compare to the iTunes 4K copy it came with.

I was surprised to learn that I needed to adjust color and hue for SDR on my JVC. Sony always has these perfect at defaults. I'm learning a lot from the calibration disc. Even reading the documentation has lots of hard earned wisdom.

-Brian

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by bhampton

I don't have banding with HDR either. I have only seen it recently in Fall and it could just be in the source. I didn't compare to the iTunes 4K copy it came with.

I was surprised to learn that I needed to adjust color and hue for SDR on my JVC. Sony always has these perfect at defaults. I'm learning a lot from the calibration disc. Even reading the documentation has lots of hard earned wisdom.

-Brian

I saw the banding too. Good film though!

[Steedeel]

The older I get, the more I enjoy Apocalypse now. Already watched it twice since I bought the 4K and what an experience. The 4K and surround brings everything to life and makes that journey down the river even more foreboding. Always fascinated with this film, but I understand everything it is trying to say now, unlike 20-25 years ago.

Heck, I even love the plantation scene.

[crutzulee]

Originally Posted by Steedeel

The older I get, the more I enjoy Apocalypse now. Already watched it twice since I bought the 4K and what an experience. The 4K and surround brings everything to life and makes that journey down the river even more foreboding. Always fascinated with this film, but I understand everything it is trying to say now, unlike 20-25 years ago.

Heck, I even love the plantation scene.

APOCALYPSE NOW and the DEERHUNTER are two movies that resonate with me now in my 50's moreso than they did in my earlier years...

My father is(was?) a Vietnam vet. I unfortunately had to break off ties with him once I decided to have kids of my own... watching these movies now gives me some perspective on what he's been through.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by crutzulee

APOCALYPSE NOW and the DEERHUNTER are two movies that resonate with me now in my 50's moreso than they did in my earlier years...

My father is(was?) a Vietnam vet. I unfortunately had to break off ties with him once I decided to have kids of my own... watching these movies now gives me some perspective on what he's been through.

Thanks for sharing, thought provoking stuff.

[stonesfan129]

So one of the other things that annoys me with digital - some of the codes are VUDU-only or Apple-only. I first noticed this with my 4K Blu-ray of No Time To Die. It only redeems in Apple. I, again, noticed this last night with Guy Ritchie's The Covenant. The code is VUDU-only. What gives? I wanted to try to build a collection in Apple because some movies in VUDU use older prints/masters and do not have surround audio. The Host is one such example. In VUDU, DD+ stereo. In Apple, DD+ 5.1. And I'm noticing more and more things that are not MA-compatible, so it's one ecosystem or the other. Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, I thought, was distributed by WB who are MA. But the disc also says MGM, who are not in MA. Same thing with No Time To Die. The movie is distributed by Universal, but owned by MGM, so not MA.

[bhampton]

I definitely recommend trying to redeem directly in iTunes whenever possible.

I used the "lists" feature of Vudu for everything that is only available there. I have to keep Vudu as there is like 50 or so titles that are only in Vudu.

I wanted to let ATV4K be my everything but as usual it just wasn't good enough to do it all. They could make it almost good enough if it had the audio capabilities that older versions of the hardware had.

Online/ streaming .... it's just something to deal with... it won't ever be seem-less and trouble free.

When my kids go off to college, I'll be tempted to use online stuff with my TV and keep the theater for disc only. It's pretty radical considering just how easy to use the online stuff is. If someone else is using my HT I actually prefer them to use the ATV4K unless I can help with the setup. My kids watch the online version of things I have the disc of.

Things are so easy to use that no one knows much about how to use them.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount are VUDU or iTunes, no MA or any other digital locker. Been that way for several years now. MA is US only, maybe some of our non US members can refresh us how codes, if any, are handled in their area.

Now that Amazon owns MGM it will be interesting to see how they continue to deal with MGM codes. Although Prime is also a digital locker you can not redeem a code there unless it has changed in recent times.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount are VUDU or iTunes, no MA or any other digital locker. Been that way for several years now. MA is US only, maybe some of our non US members can refresh us how codes, if any, are handled in their area.

Now that Amazon owns MGM it will be interesting to see how they continue to deal with MGM codes. Although Prime is also a digital locker you can not redeem a code there unless it has changed in recent times.

Codes are not even a thing now in the U.K. people I know (who don’t collect discs) just use Apple to buy films. Amazon isn’t a great option imo. Their compression is poor, especially in dark scenes.

most people just subscribe to several subscription services. Netflix is the most popular last time I checked.