Hardly surprising given the rise in popularity of streaming services for movies. I haven’t touched a video silver disk of any form for over a year.
Shame. I’ll buy one when they’re worth a hundred quid.
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'tis true.
Oppo were always the flagship brand (IMO). I have one, and a spare room full of DVDs and blu rays, that I never touch.
I do still use DVDs and Blu-Rays. Is the technical performance of streaming now as good as Blu-Ray or are we looking at the triumph of convenience over quality once again (“MP3 is pretty much as good as any other source of music and it means you can listen while you’re operating a pneumatic drill”) ?
VB
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You can stream 4k now
A lot of the rise and rise of Netflix can be put down to their game-changing video compression codecs. They really are leaders in this area.
So good they nearly work ?
That said, given the faff needed to source a disc, at least the first time, I’d happily download a very high-res digital file overnight the night before I wanted to watch the movie.
VB
I don’t have any context for your cynicism, Graeme. 
Lol, I installed a 20GB game recently and the download took a minute. You really don’t need to wait to stream even very high res movies.
Unless you live in the sticks… Oh…
yes I watch Netflix stuff in 4k
Sorry, I should have added a jokey smiley. I don’t have any context at all except that the performance of the catch-up channels (iPlayer etc) on my cheap Virgin system is much poorer (glitches, dropouts etc) than the performance of the real-time telly down the same fibre/wire and through the same box. I strongly suspect that this is due to penny-pinching at the Virgin ‘storing and streaming’ end rather than to something fundamental though. If they wanted to then I’ll bet they could do at least as well as the real-time telly.
VB
I have Amazon Prime which streams at up to 1080p, which is in any case the most my TV can cope with. It looks good when it is working well, but frequently drops down to lower resolution if the network is busy.
Similarly iPlayer in HD is good, but can sometimes start buffering. I have BT infinity but only about 20 Mbps due to distance from the local green box.
Blu-Ray is still better-looking than both, and more reliable.
Streaming is a bit of a post-code lottery in the UK.
Same here, found the new Tivo box to be quite shite as well as their TV service in general. Last time I switched the tivo on it told be my account had been disabled, when I phoned up they said it was automatic as my tivo hadn’t been online for 6 months.
I just stream everything via amazon/netflix now.
VM have fantastic broadband but shit TV services.
OK, neither is Netflix. You’re lumping in other streaming service providers.
Netflix have a big lead in streaming technology services.
They’ll give you a free V6 box to replace the old box. It’s a ton better/faster.
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This. All the issues are sorted.
have you a Tivo or an even older V+ box? The new V6 Tivo, is significantly quicker, no dropouts as far as I can recall.
We have our first gen Tivo box upstairs and that is as glitchy as hell (ok at recording) but up until last weekend (when we got a new TV for the bedroom) we have been using an Amazon Firestick wirelessly for iPlayer and that is less glitchy than the old Tivo.
The new V6 box we have in the living room is significantly better. But anything running on a VM box will need to go through the VM servers. So we use the apps on the TV for iPlayer/Netflix/Amazon which are quicker to load than the V6 box. But the performance of the V6 and the smart TV apps appears to be similar once they are up and running. Apart from the fact the apps on the V6 through VM don’t support 4k.
The market for £1K+ blueray players is bloody tiny. Personally, I have a cheap Chinese DVD player for £40 and just play a few DVDs I own on it. It won’t be long before Blueray and DVD is as dead as a dodo.
Think that’s the one I’ve got. It was the new (smaller) Tivo box that came out last year.
that’ll be the V6