Shopping experience: The end of the DVD era?

Being the owner of a 37" HD-ready TV set at the foot of my bed I was watching my anime on this device by playing it on a stand-alone DVD player connected to this TV set (as my PC is in a different room of the house). This required me to

• convert the anime to
• an AVI container
• with XVID video stream
• in SD resolution (max. 720px width),
• hard-coded subtitles and
• MP3 audio stream
  (as this is what my stand-alone DVD player was capable of playing; for a complete description of the conversion procedure see here),
• burn it on a (rewritable) DVD,
• carry this disk to the other room and
• insert it into my DVD player.

• Rewritable DVDs tend to produce errors at certain disk positions after a few times of burning, and
• the player tends to dislike DVDs until it had a significant "warm-up time" of at least a couple of minutes.

• a new ↗Universal LNB for the satellite dish and
• a new ↗Set-Top Box capable of decoding digital video material.

• .dat / .vob (with MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video), 720x576px - this is standard DVD format
• .ts (with MPEG-2 or H.264) - these are the transport streams of HDTV
• .mp4 (with MPEG-4 ASP, i. e. DivX/XviD, or H.264) - these are Apple Quicktime videos
• .mkv (with MPEG-4 ASP, i. e. DivX/XviD, or H.264) - these are Matroska containers, widely used for fansubs these days in the net
• avi / divx (with MPEG-4 ASP, i. e. DivX/XviD, or H.264) - these are the older fansub formats but capable of HDTV resolutions, and as such an improvement over my DVD player
• but note that H.264 is supported only up to Level 4.1 whereas some of the latest fansubs are already using H.264 Level 5.0.

• AC3, AAC and MP3 in MPEG-4 files
• MP-2 and AC3 in MPEG-2 files

• SRT, SUB, SMI
• no SSA subtitles (which unfortunately happens to be the format of choice for most fansubs)
• no subtitle stream within the video container, the subtitles must be a separate file in the same directory instead.

• MKV/MP4 containers with
• AC3 audio and
• hard-subbed video in
• H.264 Level 4.1 encoding in
• 1920x1080px resolution with
• 4 GB max. file size

Edited on 09/24/2011 07:20 PM.

What even makes it worse for DVD's is the new TV's can play MKV direct. No more conversions!

DVD's are going away as Netflix expects Qwikster to go bankrupt in a couple of years.

Well, that depends. As explained above, "playing MKV" for the XORO device means "playing MKV without subtitles and the video stream using H.264 Level <= 4.1". So for the latest anime fansubs, this isn't sufficient yet.

Then again it allows me to upgrade the quality level of my re-encoding format to the same level as the fansub files, instead of throwing away 70+% of the quality by shrinking down to 704x396px which I had to do until now.

And the limitations I reported here might give the reader an idea what to test for their next "TV purchase candidate" claiming to "support MKV": Take a USB stick, copy a few recent fansubs to it, and try to play these on the TV set in question.

Technology is leapfrogging forward, and I can't help worrying that a person like me, with little technical savvy and not much money to spare, is falling farther and farther behind.

Stretch, you're the main target group of this thread. My goal here is to show how close technology has come to making the complex conversion procedure that we have been discussing in epic length obsolete.
We're not yet there but it might now be a question of months rather than years. Technology is getting cheaper every day while at the same time offering additional features, one of these being the media player that I got as a surprising add-on for a different device. I don't know the satellite TV situation in the U.S., thus I don't know whether you're in the same situation as I am; I just wanted to mention that devices like the one I linked above (a satellite receiver with on-board media player and USB slot) is available now for a price that's a lot cheaper than a BluRay player (which would have been my alternative for entering the era of playing videos in HD resolution on my TV set, and thus my topic in this thread eight months ago).

The main issue that I see is the inflation of formats and parameters, the lack of widely supported standards. Then again, if we were to wait until H.264 became "stable" and won't produce any more new versions and "levels", and only then begin to expect the box makers to support H.264, MKV, SSA subtitles etc., then we would have to wait another ten years or so until the perfect media box will become available in the two-digit US dollar range. So if the price for finding a "bridge technology" beyond these ten years is meant to be reading current standards, adapting my conversion procedure accordingly and reporting the current situation in threads like this one then I'm more than willing to do this.

Edited on 09/24/2011 12:16 PM.

I've had to switch my Netflix plan to streaming-only recently due to needing to tighten up on money thanks to the economy. The Qwikster division that Netflix announced seems to be the provider's way of distancing themselves from video rental so they can focus on being a streaming-only provider. It also looks like some parts of the anime industry are slowly transitioning over to the Blu-Ray format as Funimation has started having some of their titles being Blu-Ray/ DVD dual-release and some titles from Aniplex of America being only in Blu-Ray format. I've yet to hop into Blu-Ray considering the lack of interest I have in the format (only difference being boost in resolution and picture quality compared to the jump between VHS and DVD) and how it is still rather pricey to get a player, especially with the economy as bad as it is right now. Very likely, I won't be hopping onto the Blu-Ray bandwagon until retailers seemingly rid themselves completely of the DVD format.

We're merging two discussions here:

• SD vs. HD as formats, and
• DVD vs. BluRay as storage media.

• replace the DVD player by a media player box (instead of a BluRay player) and
• replace the DVD by a USB stick (instead of a BluRay disk).

Edited on 09/24/2011 07:39 PM.

Two weeks after this purchase I can report some big success that I wasn't expecting in my wildest dreams: Today I'm watching a MKV container with H.264 Level 4.1 video stream in 1280x720px resolution, AC3 audio with 5.1 channels and SSA subtitles on this XORO media player - without any conversion! (The anime being Evangelion Shin Gekijouban: Ha, and I could hardly have selected anything better than this.)

Unlike most technical devices, the logic of this digital receiver & media player is not hard-coded into the device; instead its producer continues to improve the software and offer a free download of the latest version on their website. (One may say this means that early customers are guinea pigs but given the price for this device I'm more than fine with this.) The procedure is as follows:

• download the archive file from their website
• extract the software patch file
• copy it onto the USB stick
• connect the USB stick to the XORO box
• select "install new software" from the box's configuration menu
• switch the XORO box off (by disconnecting the power cable), and then switch it on again
• reset all configuration settings (by selecting the corresponding XORO menu entry; this is required for the patch to work according to the producer, thus eliminating old configuration data that might not work any more with the new software)

• It now enables the XORO box to understand USB devices formatted with a ↗NTFS file system (getting rid of the previous file size limitation to 4 GB, something that would not have been sufficient for HDTV versions of long movies), and
• they improved the handling of subtitles. Even the previous version was already able to read SSA/ASS subtitles (which are the norm for today's fansubs in MKV containers), extract the mere text and display it in the operating mode for SRT subtitles (which can't contain any formatting information); the new patch fixed a layout issue of the largest (and best readable) predefined font size for subtitles and slightly improved the readability of subtitles by putting a small black border around the (preferably) white subtitles.

• The display of longer subtitle lines is often delayed by a few seconds. You are able to follow the dialog but the timing feels odd compared to hard-subbed releases. This can also lead to the subsequent subtitle being displayed only for a very short time (sometimes even shorter than one second; rewinding and rewatching the scene will often fix the issue).
• When watching a longer movie in stop & go mode and even rewinding a few times (due to the first issue), subtitles and other streams get a bit out of sync after half an hour. I bypassed this by aborting the movie, restarting it and selecting "continue at the previous position" (which the XORO box still remembered) which re-synched the streams and merely took a few seconds for pressing four buttons ("abort", "start", "cursor up" in a menu that was displayed automatically after the re-start, and "okay").
• The line wrapping of text is primitive, often inserting a line break in the middle of a word instead of searching for the most appropriate position. In this case the very first letter of the first text line (which then has maximum width on the screen) may be only partially visible, or even be cut off completely in the case of an "I" (which is not an unlikely first word of a sentence in the English language...).
• The readability of white subtitles on bright background still leaves room for improvement; a thicker border (2-3px instead of 1px?) around the text font would be very helpful. There are other colors selectable from the configuration menu (black, blue, green, red) but white is the best readable one by far on a background of mixed and varying colors.
• SSA/ASS subtitles may contain formatting information within the dialog text, such as {\i1}italics{\i0} for individual words, varying character width, fading effects etc. The XORO box does not remove these cryptic commands from the text and simply displays them as part of the dialog. This will appear awkward to those who don't know the SSA/ASS command language; me who has written such scripts myself can understand these commands and imagine the intended visual effect so I don't care.

Edited on 10/06/2011 10:31 PM.