Quote:
Originally Posted by hello_hello
Every device in our house capable of playing media will play MKVs. Two 8yo TVs with built in media players, two Bluray players of a similar age, and the cheapest LCD TV it's possible to buy. It has a small screen, terrible black levels, viewing angles don't apply.... but it's built-in media player supports all the common formats including MKV.
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I did not say doesn't support MKV at all, as you interpret it, but it does not support essential features for me. And probably to all people that will become one day old enough that either will drive their neighbours to hell raising the loudness or read subtitles.
There are other features not supported so far in standalones.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hello_hello
That's a scenario that'll probably only ever take place in your head
My 83yo mother can cope with switching on the USB hard drive connected to her TV, waiting for the TV to recognize it and using the remote to scroll through folders and select a video.
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Lucky you and Sid (from Ice Age) have both a mentally-agile granny and let's hope you'll exhibit the same ingenuity at her age. maybe it's the Oz effect, all nutritive blood descends gravitationally to the heads... who knows?
Is she able to rip and encode a BD to 4GB (because of FAT32 limitation, or the size of choice) by herself?
Quote:
Originally Posted by hello_hello
My Bluray player supports far more formats than my old DVD player, software devices can be updated or new players installed, and the next generation of players will no doubt continue to support the same formats as before. Well... aside from discs... as that requires a disc drive.
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I am absolutely sure a computer or computer-based mediaplayer would be able to support far more formats and files than any standalone. And I of course never contested this.
The real question is then: why? Why do I need this? Why should I pay more for licences for formats I would never use? In duplicate or triplicate (for the AVR and the TV and even the STB include now the ability to play AVIs of lots of kinds).
All other formats, like DivX, RM, AVI, etc., are almost exclusively the result of "human activity": people like our original poster that are convinced by others that is best to convert their existing library (in standard formats) to the "award-winning" AVI in 1998, to the "award-winning" MKV in 2008 and to the award-winning MP4 in 2018. That works with 5 DVDs, but how about 1000? I understand the reason of doing this is to save time in the future, by dropping flipping the labels in the cellar (plus go down, find the box, go up, open the tray etc.) to browse all titles on-screen and press Enter/Play/Ok. This gives the excuse for the manufacturers to implement those in basic mode, with lots of bugs, the developers to cash fees for their codecs and so on - everyone on that side of the food chain would get his money from the customer.
Thus, with the notable exception of some camcorders that recorded in DivX, few cameras that recorded in AVI (or MOV), and a few modern action cameras recording in MKV or MP4, all sources available to a regular user are one of the 3 mentioned in my post. The rest is obtained by endless conversions. It would be idiotic to encode a perfectly valid video into a format then complain the player X or the TV y cannot replay it or do it wrongly. For some people this appears to be the normality.
As for space... it is 109€ too expensive for 4TB of space? I would actually pay 218€ (maybe less for some quantity discount
) to have a "doublure" - this is far more usefull for a personal library than spending precious time on recoding to the "codec of the year" (to be repeated for each such codec of the year), unless I do not have a life. How much are 220€? Well, 22 VHS 3h cassettes, holding AT BEST two movies of 1:30 (but these are usually longer) - so let's say 40 movies. At 40GB (the size for a full quality BD) per movie, 220€ store me 100 movies in duplicate (maybe more, as there are 25GB movies), 5 times more, and at a spectacular quality vs VHS. 1000 in DVD-quality, still better than VHS.