Basically just the title. With DVDs getting tossed to the wind it made me wonder when will blu-rays go? I’m gonna miss bloopers and extra scenes
Edit: A bit confused but the general consensus is that in some areas BRs have already began to be phased out while in others they’re just trucking along perfectly fine. It’ll be that way until they stop being profitable to the studios who make them. Is that correct? I don’t think the 8k argument is valid imo since that’s really niche currently.
Yesterday I was happy to own lots of Blurays because my internet was down.
I hate the DRM, and I haven’t bought a single one… But, the bitrate on BD’s is higher than streaming services, so its actually better for fast action scenes (where streaming services are more likely to appear blocky)
You can stream REMUX rips if you have the bandwidth and are willing to pay for a Debrid service, and those are BluRay quality. It’s possible to stream BluRay quality, it’s just that the main players aren’t willing to offer the service since it costs them more bandwidth and most users won’t care about the difference and will complain that their shitty internet/devices can’t handle it.
It’s why god invented external drives. :)
They are coming back like vinyl. Zoomers are realizing streaming plarforms can pull the plug
It occurs to me that I could totally put a short movie on a vinyl record. It would display “buffering” for quite a while though.
There was the Japanese VHD (Video High Density) that was kind of that. https://youtu.be/fCWLaAwr3sM
deleted by creator
The concept of vinyl still blows my mind… The fact that you can recreate every possible combination of sounds and etch it in grooves on a thin piece of plastic, then you can drag a needle across those grooves to hear the sound combinations again…
How does a person even create something like that? It’s mind blowing.
I think it was done with wax cylinders first, somewhat earlier! So at least for vinyl, there was strong technological precedent.
In the early days, it was quite a simple device! Sort of a cone to focus sound waves, with a membrane at the end attached to an engraver that carves wax. I bet it was quite hard to make those mechanical systems reliable, but I can sort of see how someone goes from “sound is a pressure wave in air” to that device!
Vinyl does have significant limitations in what sound it can produce, especially in terms of dynamic range. Wikipedia has a good breakdown of analog vs digital recording.
While digital is not perfect, it’s generally better in every regard that humans can physically perceive. That said, people will always romanticize physical things of the past, be it confirmation bias, survivorship bias of good examples, or just enjoying the ritual of physical interacting with a thing.
Well sure… But I can still speak a sentence nobody has ever uttered into a recording device, press that into tiny grooves on a plastic disc, and then play back a pretty damn faithful reproduction of the thing I said.
You seem to think that I was supporting a return to vinyl or something, but I did no such thing. I’m well aware that the technology has gotten better by orders of magnitude.
I understand there’s obviously limitations, but just the basic concept is mind blowing to me.
Theoretically you could get it with little to no buffering by writing an analog TV signal to the disk, no?
Sure – but at what resolution (analog signals have resolution too)? At what framerate? A vinyl should hold about 440MB of data (both sides, normal vinyl), with a read speed of 167 kilobytes per second.
So actually… that’s less bad than I thought! You could probably get 240p video or better!
And just like that, you’ve invented laserdisc.
Reinvent the wheel? No, it’s time to reinvent outdated media formats!
Hey, the tape drive never even went out of style!
I’ve only seen 4K REMUX streaming as the top quality option, but there’s no reason why 8K streaming would be impossible. You could even set it up privately with Jellyfin.
BluRay has evolved a few times since being released. The storage capacity keeps going up, which allows for 4K & 3D discs to be made.
DVD got replaced because it couldn’t hit the 1K mark. There was SuperBit DVDs, but they didn’t catch on. The picture size was still limited to 720p.
BluRay still has a lot of life left in it. It will be a long time before the market demands 8K recordings. And will there even be physical media for movies and TV by then?
On the other hand BluRay really came too late to become popular as a data storage medium. Outside movie enthusiasts there aren’t really a lot of users of the format so player hardware will likely not benefit from corporate customers as much to extend its lifetime.
Why not just put the movies on a SD card? The price is similar and the card is smaller. That’s what games do now, right?
Retention, or the lack thereof, when cold-stored.
In term of SD or standard NAND, not even Nintendo does that. Nintendo builds Macronix XtraROM in their Game Card, which is some proprietary Flash memory with claimed 20 year cold storage retention. And they introduced the 64 GB version only after a lengthy delay, in 2020. So it seems that the (lack of) cold storage performance of standard NAND Flash is viewed by some in the industry as not ready for prime time. Macronix discussed it many years back in a DigiTimes article: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120713PR201.html.
And Sony and Microsoft are both still building Blu-ray-based consoles.
DVDs were also commonly used as external data storage prior to flash storage becoming the predominant method. Anyone still have their spindle of dvds with a Win XP backup lying around?
Blu-ray doesn’t have that advantage. The only major commercial applications it has been used for is movies and games, and games are already breeching the size that even a 4k blu-ray can hold, and have long since required faster data transfer speeds than blu-ray is capable of(this is why even with physical games, the game has to be installed to the console)
I’m still wondering why PC videogames weren’t ever released on Blu Ray, installing 120GB off a Blu Ray is much less annoying than having to download the same amount.
The norm is to download several 30, 60 or even 120GB updates afterwards. You then end up with an inconvenient DRM disc that has to be inserted for your game to run. When instead you could buy it online, download it just like you would’ve ended up doing and then never have to worry about damaging a Blu-ray disc.
Don’t get me wrong, I love physical copies of games… But in the era of never ending updates, live service games, indie games, and games broken at launch, I definitely understand why most of us don’t prefer them anymore.
How would the game companies profit from releasing fully complete and mostly bug free games on BluRay? Without a profit motivation it will never happen.
That would require computers to still have Blu-ray drives as default
I’m guessing the eventual outcome for the niche market of people who want to own physical copies of media will be some form of flash storage—which seems a better option all around versus a fragile optical disk.
Optical disks might be fragile but cheap flash storage (like USB sticks) is much more fragile than that.
DVDs had a maximum resolution of 576p. The Superbit DVDs by Sony were DVDs that had no extras so that they could use the entire space on the disc to maximise the bitrate. I think this was only beneficial to those with very large TVs.
Till the next upkeep phase
I don’t want blu-rays, I want DVD. Less anti-consumer stuff going on there (although not for lack of trying, just a bit less technical know-how at the time it was made).
I don’t want blu-rays, I want DVD
HD-DVDs were neat. More reliable, too.
I’m eagerly awaiting the demise of Blu-Ray so I can finally get use of my HD-DVD player.
Nah, HD-VMD is gonna make a big comeback I tell ya
How about those Universal Media Discs (UMDs) used on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the PlayStation Portable
Nah, you haven’t experienced shrek until you’ve seen it the way it was intended: on the GBA.
They were a very portable way to play PlayStation
Keep your physical media. Don’t be Charlie Brown assuming the football will be there every time.
There are problems with physical medium as well. My father and I enjoy physical CDs, in my opinion they are the best. Yet my father’s collection is over 20 years old so disks are degrading. My collection was destroyed during a house break in, they threw them on the floor and stomped on them, fucking hooligans. So I stopped with physical media such as CDs due to this
Long term storage hasn’t improved since tape drives
I heard tape drives might be making a comeback, due to increased storage capacity, like insane capacity if we use today’s technology. And a lot of data we have only needs to be stored and not readily available
They already have. Huge SANs like AWS Glacial Storage use them. It lets you store comical amounts of data for like 0.0001€ per gb or something crazy, but access times can take up to 24 hours. This is because there are massive archival databanks, think a robotic vending machine full of tapes. It’s actually incredibly cool technology.
I did know they are already using the technology, so it is so cool for letting me know. Yes some data you do not need to have constant access, like security footage. Maybe 20 years from now a detective asks if you still have footage from that night where the serial nipple pincher first attacked, and boom they solved the mystery and Gotham will be safe again.
Better yet, digitally back up your physical media in multiple locations because no media lasts forever, especially optical Media.
Disney has already killed theirs off in Australia. But at the same time most of their stuff is rubbish so I guess I’m not missing out on anything
i haven’t seen a blu-ray in at least a decade, what are you on about?
There are these things called “stores”, you may have heard of them.
Target and Best Buy are just NOW talking about phasing Blu Ray out in 2024.
In 2014? Frozen sold over 7 million copies. Guardians of the Galaxy? Over 3 million.
Everyone with an Xbox Series X (2020), Xbox One X (2017) and Xbox One S (2016) has a 4K Blu Ray player. Same for the disc based PS5 (2020).
In 2014? Frozen sold over 7 million copies. Guardians of the Galaxy? Over 3 million.
Ahh, so just 2 or 3 years ago.
There are these things called “stores”, you may have heard of them.
How long til stores get phased out?
Never. Even Amazon is making stores now.
While a decade is a stretch, there are some barren areas for Blu-ray Discs.
A few months ago I wanted to build a collection of Blu-rays as a conversation starter in my living room. I checked out well over two dozen Best Buy, Target, and Walmarts in a ~50mi radius (DC area) to find any that had a reasonable selection for sale. I was incredibly disappointed with how much effort I had to put in for this.
It seemed that DVDs were still a higher priority in my hunt.
i don’t have a single device with a disc drive in it like what you’re referring to
Oh, you’re the one.
They are hardly anywhere now… Best Buy is phasing out their remaining physical movie sections this year.
That makes sense, to be fair. Movie catalogs are more of a “long tail” product. It’s not economical to stock 1000s of titles in 100s of locations, but it’s a crappy shopping experience if they only have a few titles. So, even those who do still buy physical media won’t frequent Best Buy for them.
Not until there’s an 8K standard and 8K players.
