In general terms, the reduction of stuff is an important goal and one far to broad for me to go in to now and likewise the increase in experience is an admiral pursuit else we would happily live in a cave. The do-it-right and do-it-once mindset manifests itself in many forms but in this instance boils down to doing what an expert says weather that be seeking and following advice or by becoming an expert through education. These are also ideas that I suspect will become more relevant at a later date so I will start by reasoning on the problem domain.
"I've pretty much given up on TV."
By this I mean I'm largely dismissing broadcast television on the grounds that if it is to be cast broadly then it cannot be to everyone's taste. Through empirical means I deduce that the majority of broadcast television is not going to suit me because either the scheduling or the content is not going to match up. Everybody is entitled to set their own standards on what media content must match up to and I'm not going to go to the trouble of defining mine now, needless to say it must present some entertainment, education, or otherwise trivial distrationary value.
From a requirements gathering perspectinve, experience of watching TV and being at the mercy of a TV-Guide gives me the requirement that I must be able to schedule my own viewing. To be concise, if I am building a media centre it must be an "On Demand" service.
Film resolves this, and by setting up a projector and silver screen you can watch content on Demand. Film however is far from convinient, so from film we earn the requirement of convenience. Its an abstract qualitative measurement, and falls outside the basic Getting Things Done principle of first deciding what Done looks like but I think I can safely remain consistent on if a thing or activity if convenient or not so will stay with the term convenient until another presents itself.
VHS is a MUCH MORE convenient medium than film due to its light weight form factor and small player hardware. VHS achieves this through a reduction in quality compared to film, so now we have a quality datum and can construct a scale. I want quality to be better than VHS and accept that since the original recording is probably on film, My quality scale is measured as a continuum with VHS at one and and Film at the other.
Digital SD content was "sold as" higher quality than analogue VHS, but a simple examination of the artifacts on DVD media shows colourspace and quantisation effects that are enough to all but discount SD, placing it very close to the VHS end of our continuum of quality. While it may be erronous to associate all SD digital media with DVD, its widespread consumer acceptance stands for itself and provides a range of bitrates at which typically Full SD Frame 50/60Hz Interlaced 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 format streams are displayed.
Current On-Demand TV services fall into this category. Due to limitations of bandwidth, assuming storage is so vast as to be considered free-and-infinite, such services offer SD video content on a sub 2mbps MPEG-2 equivalent level where scene changes and fast moving objects such as fire or water break into objectionable digital compression artefacts.
A pioneer in its own right, DVD has accustomed the viewer such that digital compression artefacts are now considered both normal and accepted. It has also provided a new standard of packaging, in its robust disc form factor, that far outlives the slow degradation and stretching of VHS tapes. All of these factors have earmarked DVD as a trailblazer, and following that trail are a number of new technologies characterised as HD content.
While an observer might have an arguement against usage of the acronym "SD" to mean Standard Definition, Its incorporation into a number of standards at least make the claim credible. The Perpetual Modern Perspective throws an even greater objection at the acronym "HD" to mean High Definition, as its a much more relative term and one screen or media file is only High in Definition when compared to the previous generations Standard of Definition. Nonetheless, I will refer to 1080p content as HD for the purpose of this article.
HD, in its contemprary BluRay packaging provides the same convenience of scheduling and form factor as DVD but at a more respectable resolution and bitrate such that HD content does look better than DVD. Fine details such as facial features that were approximate blurs on DVD are now visible in HD. In general terms, HD content on BluRay still displays digital compression artifacts that are more noticable and more objectionable than the analogue artifacts present on film so from this we conclude that HD/BluRay lies somewhere between DVD and Film rather then surpassing Film on the Continuum of Quality.
And I think that is enough of a conclusion for me, I've drawn a continuum of quality with Analogue TV and VHS at the bottom end of the scale, followed by SD(DVD) and HD(BluRay) before Film at the top. I also know that if I witness a digital medium where visible analogue film artifacts are more objectionable than digital ones, I can place it above film on that scale.
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