The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using.

A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.

▲

mschild 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most movies and tv shows are available for similar prices on blue rays, often in 4k versions.

While the resolution may be higher on streaming, the bitrate is often significantly worse. Beyond that Netflix has done upscaling in the past with middling success.

Nevermind the horrendous AI upscaling they tried last year. https://futurism.com/netflix-ai-upscaling-old-shows-horrific

	▲	tombert 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve noticed that a lot of newer releases, particularly TV shows, are not getting Blu-ray releases.

▲

MrDOS 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Resolution isn't the only problem. SD resolution (particularly PAL) is quite tolerable, if it's well-encoded from a good source.

DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.

DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).

If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.

Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.

▲

simpaticoder 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I have both Blu-ray and DVDs and I've found its the content that determines which is good enough. Kids in care not one bit about image quality. Obviously: people still like retro games, too. But then other movies, like anything by Villenueve or Nolan, or Baraka, really want to be on 4K Blu-ray. But kids movies on DVD are perfectly fine, and sitcoms like Community. (Personally I'd pay extra to NOT see Pierce in 4k).

I recently purchased the Firefly Blu-ray and it was an interesting case because it's image quality isn't that much better than the DVD (but definitely better) however it's sound quality was astonishingly better than the DVD. I imagine this has a lot to do with the source material, how it was mastered, etc. I still stream, but I like that I have a core collection that will never disappear without warning, or be edited behind my back (which happens all the time, without notice, especially on YouTube and on Amazon Prime).

	▲	layer8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, for older TV titles, the main reason to opt for Blu-ray is the better sound quality. Although DVD supports uncompressed audio (LPCM), that was rarely used outside Japan, and regular stereo audio typically used pretty mediocre compression. When using subtitles, another reason is the higher-resolution fonts.

▲

prmoustache 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On paper yes it feels like a downside. Practically if the movie/show is good, you don't really mind.

I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).

I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).

▲

tehwebguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!

▲

to11mtm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think too many people remember DVDs but mostly remember them on Interlaced displays.

Or hooked their DVD player to the HDTV with an RCA cable and were disappointed.

On the flipside, if you had a DVD player capable of progressive scan and Component or HDMI-out, it's fine for couch viewing.

That said, there are plenty of DVDs out there (extreme case, single layer DVD with extras on same disc as movie) where the bitrate can show, but that's not a fault of the format.

▲

prmoustache 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I am watching DVDs on a 1080p projector to the large wall of my living room. It is a 10y old cheap aliexpress one so it is not the sharpest you can get and it actually makes the DVD enjoyable as it smoothen a bit the whole thing. I don't really know what is at play but I can only say it seems to blur the image in a pleasant "optical way", not like if I was applying a gaussian blur and was watching it on an high dpi screen.

	▲	mrec 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Makes perfect sense; old CRT TVs had the same kind of effect in making low resolutions bearable. (If you think DVD is bad, you'd have loved long-play VHS at around 230p...)

▲

b112 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It really depends on the size of the unit I think. When you get over 50", it seems to me you can really tell 480p vs 1080p, especially if you watch lots of 2160p content.

If your TV is under 50", I don't think you'd notice quite so much.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]