# BluRay vs. downloads



## Wayne A. Pflughaupt (Apr 13, 2006)

A good buddy of mine likes to utilize Direct TV’s PPV, and wants to “gear up” his system to utilize “On Demand” downloads from BlockBuster, Netflix, etc. He also has a Sony Blu Ray player and (quite naturally) loves HD discs.

I have always had concerns that you might not get the same sound and picture quality with PPV or downloads as you get with Blu Ray, even if the former and median are supposedly 1080p.

Do any of you have any experience comparing a downloaded movie with its Blu Ray counterpart? If so, how do the two compare?

Regards,
Wayne


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## Dave Upton (Aug 4, 2009)

Unfortunately they rarely compare favorably - purely a function of compression being higher and bitrates conversely being lower. You'll see that most download/on demand content has a bitrate roughly half (at most) of a good Blu-Ray.

There is a new service coming out called XStreamHD that will let you PPV full 10080p Blu-Ray quality video with lossless audio. It's due to launch soon so that may be his best bet if fidelity is a concern.


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Ive used PPV HD once and did not like it as much as the real deal, The audio was only DD5.1 and I found the picture quality to be somewhat compressed looking and broke up on two different ocations during playback.


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## Dale Rasco (Apr 11, 2009)

I heard a couple of mentions of XStreamHD that Dave mentioned but don't know many details. I can say that compared to bluray, all HD download service are lacking in the audio department.


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## bambino (Feb 21, 2010)

dsr7997 said:


> I heard a couple of mentions of XStreamHD that Dave mentioned but don't know many details. I can say that compared to bluray, all HD download service are lacking in the audio department.


On occasion my wife and i will rent a movie from the playstaion store usually they come in SD & HD as options for the rental, being that the video quality is not the best (but not bad either) we always rent the SD versions plus they are 2 dollers cheaper but they come as 2 channel audio, the HD versions come as 5.1 audio. being that we don't rent the HD ones i can't judge the audio or the video for them. I just don't want to spend the extra money for them to be disapointed.:spend::spend::dontknow:


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## Dale Rasco (Apr 11, 2009)

bambino said:


> On occasion my wife and i will rent a movie from the playstaion store usually they come in SD & HD as options for the rental, being that the video quality is not the best (but not bad either) we always rent the SD versions plus they are 2 dollers cheaper but they come as 2 channel audio, the HD versions come as 5.1 audio. being that we don't rent the HD ones i can't judge the audio or the video for them. I just don't want to spend the extra money for them to be disapointed.:spend::spend::dontknow:


The only one I haven't heard is the Blockbuster. I have seen/heard Xbox, playstation, Vudu, Apple TV, Netflix, Cable, Satellite and Amazon and I would actually give the nudge to VuDu for the 1080P but still, Dolby Digital is the best sound option and it is such a far cry from Dolby TruHD or DTS HD MA and Vudu's 1080P is not comparable to Bluray. IMHO


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## ironglen (Mar 4, 2009)

Hey Guys, any update to give on the performance between these forms of media since this time last year? (I've left Netflix due to faulty, unplayable discs)


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## fitzwaddle (Aug 25, 2010)

My only significant experience with streaming is with Netflix, where the quality varies a ton, depending on how much bandwidth they've allocated to the content in question. I find its generally acceptable for watching older stuff that isn't that high video quality to begin with, but it still isn't that great for movies, where I want the best video and audio quality, and no interruptions due to connection issues, which really kill the whole willful suspension of disbelief / immersion thing.


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## ironglen (Mar 4, 2009)

I'm interested in high quality viewing on a 92" screen, so probably not streaming but possibly download material. Any recommended companies if such material is available?


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