Are you buying movies online yet?

[Sonnie]

Instead of buying physical media, are you now buying movies online?

They appear to be less money... and I suppose you can buy and watch as often as you so desire, basically using whatever service to store your library of movies purchased.

I looked at Amazon Prime Video and see several new releases at $14.99 in HD, but not sure if that is 4K with Atmos, which is what I would want of course.

Pros and cons?

 

[phillihp23]

If they aren’t marked 4k or UHD then they are 1080 or lower. It’s a crap shoot if the service provides it with atmos or equivalent audio format.
I still prefer Disc, if it comes with digital also I add it to my catalog.
Recently was probably the first time I actually wanted a digital version of a film rather than a disc. In this case oddly they do not have a 4k disc release but a streaming service (vudu) offered it in 4k. Who would have thunk...
As for price you can pretty readily pick up 4k movies and case ( no Blu-ray or digital included) for around $10-$12 from second hand sellers.

 

[Sonnie]

Yep... I continued browsing a bit later last night and actually found one marked "UHD" instead of "HD", so I assume it would be 4K. It also cost less at only $12.99. I can't even remember what it was, but IMDB only had it ranked at about 4 or 5 out of 10... didn't look like anything I'd wanna pay to see.

 

[mechman]

I’ve bought a few online - Outpost, Mary Poppins Returns, Frozen 2 and there may be a couple others. I’ve never noticed any issues with them. All of them are UHD. Never checked if they were ATMOS.

 

[Sonnie]

Yep... I'd take you for a Mary Poppins guy.

 

[mechman]

Outside of the Outpost, they are all movies the ladies wanted to watch around here. Just didn’t care to have a hard copy of them. And I don’t think there are hard copies of the Oupost.

 

[phillihp23]

Yep... I'd take you for a Mary Poppins guy.

Is that an umbrella he’s holding above his head in the profile pick?

 

[Sonnie]

Is that an umbrella he’s holding above his head in the profile pick?

Oh he'll probably say it belongs to his wife.

 

[Todd Anderson]

Even if they are Atmos, unless they’re from a service like Kaleidescape, you’re not getting lossless audio. That’s a non-starter for me.

 

[Sonnie]

I don't think it would matter to me either way on movies, but on music... it's lossless or bust.

 

[JBrax]

Even if they are Atmos, unless they’re from a service like Kaleidescape, you’re not getting lossless audio. That’s a non-starter for me.

So you’re saying if I rent/buy a movie from iTunes via my AppleTV 4K it’s not truly Atmos? My Marantz shows Atmos during playback. Movies encoded as Atmos on Netflix also show Atmos on my Marantz.

 

[Coy Ramsey]

So you’re saying if I rent/buy a movie from iTunes via my AppleTV 4K it’s not truly Atmos? My Marantz shows Atmos during playback. Movies encoded as Atmos on Netflix also show Atmos on my Marantz.

Not fully competent on this but I believe that most streaming is Dolby Digital Atmos which is lossy. Need to be Dolby TrueHD Atmos to be lossless.

 

[Sonnie]

I am curious now... although I am not sure it will matter to me, as I can't complain about anything Atmos I've heard thus far, it all sounds pretty good to me. I'd still like to know.

 

[mechman]

If there's something fishy going on with the video I'd notice. But I don't notice these things on the audio side of things I guess.

 

[Sonnie]

Todd must know something we don't and just ain't telling... it's a secret.