Blu-ray conundrum

It would make more sense to stop being so cheap and just buy a decent 1080p TV.

It would make more sense to abandon physical media altogether. The future is downloadable, and there's no reason to hoard physical discs, especially if all you're interested in is high picture and audio quality.

No, because your standard def TV can't display HD quality.


This.

Also of note, computer screens have contained more pixel density than televisions for quite some time. So if you have a good monitor, you can watch HD video on it (assuming the video itself is HD). itunes gives you both SD and HD videos of a show that you purchase, you should be able to see the difference.

Popcorn hour and learn to use torrents. Will broadcast to anything from 1080p on down. When your ready to upgrade to a better TV you already have all your content ready to go and a device you understand how to use.

Drop in a 2 terrabyte drive and your set.


Plenty of other devices but I setup my house with popcorn hours 2 years ago and it doesn't rely on a server/computer to run the whole thing.

I agree.
I use the Popcornhour's gritty cheapskate of a cousin, the Patriot Box Office. I am slowly dumping all my DVDs on it as ISOs and will retain my stand-alone Blu-Ray player for the time being for those few (so far) BD I have...

Yes. You can get decent players for $100 bucks or less. So, why not?

For older movies, the cost of a DVD and a Blu-Ray is often the same.

It will be a long time before you can practically (or will want to) download and store movies that equal BR for picture and audio quality.

Being a huge Sony fan, and refraining from being a total douche', it's actually a "Vega" series. I had an old roommate who called it a Wega all the time, wanted to smack him in the face, probably because he had red hair...

I say get a PS3, it works as a BluRay players and if you want to just do the downloading movies thing, you can just connect an external HD to the PS3 and play movies through it. I am not sure if other BlueRay players will play movies through an external HD though.

As for downloading movies, at this point, I find it useless since the files are too big and download time is usually too long. If you have a regular DSL connection, it could take some time to download a single movie. I haven't really looked at torrents but I would imagine it would still take a pretty long time to download an HD movie.

Unless you're buying a new TV soon, stick with what you have and upgrade when ready for the TV. Prices fall, new tech emerges and the BR player will be a waste of money at this point.

You must not be familiar with the devices and the sources available. Popcorn hour rips DVDs and bluerays and more importantly pulls torrents.

Long time before this is available? Been doing this for 5 years.

Just skip BR altogether. The picture quality improvement is nice, but not noticed by all, and the audio quality improvement is negligable.

You aren't the real Stig so I don't believe you!

If you don't notice the picture improvement you're either blind or watching on a screen that's too small and too far away. The difference is night and day on a large display. Audio improvements are also very real, though unless you have a good system, you probably won't notice.