What type of medium do you prefer for HD movies?

The HD copy off of iTunes is going to be more compressed than the blu-ray, especially when it comes to audio. A 50GB Blu-Ray disc can hold a lot of uncompressed sound, a 5GB MP4 cannot. The same will happen with the video, but it's not as dramatic.

Full stop if you're not bothered by collecting discs and swapping them out to play a movie then yes the quality is objectively better with the physical media. If it's cheaper than the iTunes copy, that's even better. Hell half the blu-rays out there come with a digital copy anyway.

Also with the iTunes copy they generally don't have the special features that a blu-ray will have. That only really matters if you like commentary or making-of featurettes anyway.

Blu-ray, no question about it.

You'd be insane to prefer the other one.

*queue people commenting they actually do prefer the other one for some reason, making me look like an asshole*

If you wait blu rays can be so cheap to buy. And they offer so much more than digital copies do (especially of you're interested in the filmmaking process). And blu ray is close to perfect when it comes to faithfully replicating a movie in its best quality, so even if there's a new format down the road blu rays as they are now do a pretty amazing job of showcasing movies

Blu Ray.

I make my own digital copies.

I prefer digital. I usually prefer to buy the Ultra Violet codes for movies to redeem on VUDU. As that is cheaper than buying the movie directly from VUDU.

Unless it's like a special edition bluray or something, I'll take the digital copy any day of the week.

Blu-Ray here. REAL HD won't be stream-able for some time yet, and none of us got HDTVs because we wanted to see compression effects in higher resolution.

I don't think those digital copies are HD quality though. At least the ones that came with the Dark Knight trilogy were SD/DVD quality.

I guess one reason I like digital iTunes copy is that I have retina iDevices and an Apple TV so I can watch it anywhere, but thanks for clearing up for which medium actually is better (visually and audio wise)

Dabbled in grabbing "HD" movies off the Play store, geeez it's bad. Probably passable for using a tablet or a small (sub 50") screen with inbuilt speakers, but just not good enough for a proper home theatre. Living in Australia, streaming at the sort of quality i want isn't really going to be an option for a long time. I would be happy to purchase and download a proper digital copy and throw it on the NAS instead of having to buy discs and rip them. Shame that will never happen.

Man it would be cool having access to the DCP format the cinema's get. Storage is cheap, let me grab those 300gb+ files. In a sane world, you're paying for the rights to view the art. If the file you're playing is 700mb or 300gb it shouldn't matter.

As someone who is very adamant in my support for digital in all forms of media, the current quality difference between a Blu-Ray and a digital copy is too significant to suggest buying digitally instead of a disc.

Blu-ray. Uncompressed 30mbit plus encodes will always be better then whatever digital copies offer.

You've made me realize that this is probably the one medium where I prefer physical to digital. The digital quality is just nowhere near that of a Blu-ray right now.

I watch movies I don't really care about on Netflix or torrents.

Movies that hold a place in my heart I buy for posterity.

Blu-ray. Every once and a while, I'll buy a digital HD movie if it's on the cheap, but more often than not, I choose Blu.

Blu Ray should in theory be completely lossless, but its not feasible to offer lossless video for digital download. But either way you should be talking about 1920x1080 video, plenty of people may not even be able to tell the difference.

Digital, just because I don't like having discs around if I can help it. Also if a Rifftrax ever comes out for that movie it's much easier to sync a digital copy than a physical one (especially since I don't have a Bluray drive on my computer).

I do own Blu Rays of movies I find visually stunning though because of the difference in quality.

I care too much about video and sound quality not to buy Blu Ray versions of films. I'm also fascinated by the film making process, so I value extras highly.

Thats right "we" bought the HDTVs to play games ;P Also can you even find a TV thats not HD ready nowdays?

Blu Ray

HD DVD for sure

but really I watch movies on my monitor, I don't have a TV, and the blu-ray watching experience is a lot worse than just the digital one.

For quality, physical media hasn't been beaten yet, so Blu-Ray.

However for convenience, digital copy.

I used to go strictly for blu-rays but I haven't actually felt the need to buy a movie in a year or two. I rent anything I want to see off Netflix.

You lose a lot of image quality with a digital copy.

I'm surprised how many people watch blu rays. I've never watched one myself, but then I don't buy movies, and don't care too much as long as the picture is decent enough.

^This

All of my movies are backed up on my NAS, and simply hitting play on XBMC/Plex is way easier than looking through a bunch of identical blue cases and then inserting into a machine, then waiting for preview garbage to be skippable, then navigating more menus.

But at the same time, I periodically go through all of this (usually with From Paris With Love or Inglorious Basterds) to revel in the glorious uncompressed HD with fully supported surround sound.

laserdisc all the way

I only watch Torque and I only watch that on HD DVD.

Unless the streamed/downloaded version can push out around 40 Mbit/s like a Blu-ray can...

Blu-ray.

Oh, and extras.

• Remember, a video on a Blu-ray is still a "digital copy" of a video. And "HD" simply means High Definition (which, in turn, just means a resolution of 1280x720 or 1920x1080).
• A 1080p iTunes downloaded video pushes less than 10 Mbit/s right now.
• A 1080p Netflix streamed video pushes around 5 Mbit/s right now.

Depends on the situation, of course. If you wanna take 100 HD films with you on a trip, for example, you probably don't want to be carrying around all those Blu-ray discs.

uncompressed blu ray all day

Blu ray for the best video and audio quality as well as being able to watch on multiple Blu ray players around the house. I wanted to go digital a few months ago but trying to get 5.1 from iTunes was unsuccessful and Apple TV proved unreliable for streaming the iTunes movies from my PC.

Man running into consensus on the internet startles me sometimes.

Definitely Blu, no question. The advent of 4k and 8k are only going to push physical superiority for movies even further, unless, I dunno, Google Fiber becomes dirt cheap, spreads worldwide and internet data caps go away? Who knows I guess.

I'm wondering how 4k/8k are even going to work with Blu-Ray. I imagine the file sizes are going to be even more ridiculously huge. I imagine at that point there seriously has to start being a public push for formats like HVD, or some sort of crazy ass cartridge media.

Now that would be funny, after all the talk from the digital-only cultists about physical going away completely, we're back to using bulky ass tapes. Though I'm still hoping HVD or similar is the route 4k/8k take...

Yeah I often rent movies from iTunes for the Apple TV and whatnot, and if I really like the film and want to watch it over and over again, then I tend to buy the blu-ray.

Most of the set top boxes that I've used (Roku, PS4, XONE, PS3) don't let you download the files, they want to stream them. And honestly, my internet doesn't give me reliable HD quality, and I have 12mbps.

Also, I like to feel like I have ownership. What if Google tanked tomorrow and closed down or got bought? I'd have no guarantee the movies I bought would still be accessible.

There is nothing like owning a tangible copy of something!

Yeah that's a great question. And never mind movies. Can you even imagine the file size of a PC/PS5/XB2 Skyrim-style game that is 8k? O.o

I think definitely we see the "archival media formats" make their way to consumers, maybe rebranded as Blu-Ray or New-Ray or whatever, but clearly the current physical format isn't going to cut it or someone creates a bad ass new compression method that squeezes 4k flicks onto Blu Rays without negating the entire reason you bought a 4k tv.

Digital streaming solutions and super fast download speeds just seem so far away. I can't even get more than 15 mb/s in my area so the 100 GB/s connection seems like a pipedream.

I'm reminded of something - didn't Sony say the PS4 could play 4k movies in the future? You would assume they mean from a Blu Ray.

More than the better video quality, I like actually having a copy and not just a license to view a film.

By the time 4k becomes common huge SSDs will also be common.

We already have games that take up the whole 50GB of a Blu-Ray, so yeah... We're looking at games in the hundreds of gigs, especially when we get to 8K. With cable companies in the US refusing to get out of the way, to say nothing of the rest of the world, I can't imagine downloads of these sizes being mainstream any time soon.