Topic: How do you watch films?

[touchingcloth]

use my fuckin eyes mate

I also use Replies From View’s eyes.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I have a friend in her 20s who watches VHS tapes on a big screen TV. She likes the nostalgia factor of it. Was round there one time (to watch Babe) and found it unbearable at first but your mind adjusts to it pretty quickly. I don't recall ever being bothered by "inferior" past formats at the time, it's only when you compare to what we have now that they look bad.

I do draw the line at watching heavily edited films that are interrupted every 10 minutes by ads like some people I know (generally older) do in the US. I was at my friend's parents house and they were watching Goodfellas. It was about 4 hours with all the ads, a ropey transfer and of course half the dialogue was replaced with "freakin" this and "forget you" that. Although amusingly, most of the violence was intact.

I sometimes watch films via VR headset theses days just to get a nice virtual environment. I have a lot of downloaded stuff and find that 4 to 5GB is the sweet spot for quality without taking up too much space.

[Magnum Valentino]

I watched The Matrix on video a few years back but didn't struggle with the image or sound so much as it being in 4:3. Remember films being released on separate wide-screen and full screen tapes? It just looked incorrect. I couldn't finish it and switched to Blu-ray by the end.

[Josef K]

Mostly streaming with the odd blu ray these days. Can't remember the last time I pirated a film. It's either on one of the streaming services within a year or I'll just use to Google Play Store credits from those surveys they send you and rent it.

Never used to be too fussed about sound/speakers, but I did recently splash out on some 5.1 atmos speakers and now I'm converted. If it's mixed well it really adds to the experience.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I have access to Netflix, Prime, Apple+, Disney+ and The anime streams...

But generally I find the quality of films on Netflix and Prime to be atrocious. I am not that far away from my OLED tv, and whenever I watch streams I can see huge blocks of pixilation in dark areas and just generally poor picture quality. I even connected the Ethernet cable directly into my TV to rule out WIFI as an issue. In the end only Apple TV seems to hold a nice image. The rest are an atrocious mess. Just typing this out makes me realise I should cancel Netflix at least.. How many Adam Sandler films can they make for FFS (Uncut Gems was a rare treat)..

I would suggest if you do like films just buy a region free blu-ray player and get going. We are even handing out Blu's for free on another thread ;)

I just like that I have a film forever on Blu-Ray. I hate that you can never be certain if anything stays on streaming services as they come and go so often. I see streaming as a means of finding odd bits of entertainment here and there. Blu-ray for durability, quality and overall joy.

Then again I do like physical media and own a collection of CDs and Vinyl..

At one point there was going to be a thing with video like you get where you buy an LP and can download it and use it in different digital formats. Ultraviolet or something it was called. I guess it never took off.

Actually reading quickly it seems it worked a bit like Adobe Digital Editions with ebooks does. Which is a shite bit of software, so most of the time I tend to buy the book then download it from libgen with all the drm bollocks already stripped off.