This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Welp, we're one step closer to the "you will own nothing and be happy" future tech companies want for us.
Not owning just means you don't have to pay anything. Have at it. World's free now
You wouldn't download a car? Well maybe yes.
Hell yeah!
Yeah, I would download a car.
You'd have to be a special kind of stupid not to download a car and instead pay the thousands of dollars + dealing with scumbag dealerships.
Or just your average American.
Maybe when 3D printers become much more capable.
I've been actively avoiding it forever, but my peers are all-to-eager to give up any control or ownership of anything.
It's really a cultural problem, and most of the people receiving the short end of the stick aren't realizing it.
On one hand I'm happy less plastic shit will be produced and consumed. On the other hand, this is leading more towards dystopian timelines where we can never own anything anymore.
You can own DRMless media instead. BluRay was already more restrictive than DVD, from what I understand.
Eh. A few more steps to rip the content, but not bad really.
Now UHD Blu-ray is a different story. There are a limited number of drives that could do it before their firmware was patched.
This is all preventable with basic digital ownership laws, but governments are instead bending the knee.
Bring back the MiniDisk!
I had a Minidisc recorder I would use for field audio recordings back in the 90s and I really loved the format. Small, portable, didn't fuck up like a DAT but was close enough in quality to work in most instances, and basically indestructible.
You could probably drop a Minidisc from the top of a skyscraper and put it back in the player after dusting it off and there wouldn't be an issue.
A nas is your friend.
And there is plenty is space in the Caribbean Sea
Sony and Panasonic still make Blu-ray players... Sony just stopped making the blank media IIRC
And in all that time I never once owned a Blu-ray device.
At the beginning I was pissed at the DRM. And by the time that was solved streaming was good enough.
Streaming will never be a satisfying model for me - I need ownership and lack of DRM.
That said, I don't see much of a point in DVD or Blu-Ray either, hard drives are smaller than one DVD's case while fitting orders of magnitude more.
One of the points of DVD and Blu-ray is the additional material. I don't see a lot of streaming movies with commentary tracks and the like and sometimes commentary tracks are as good as the movies themselves.
The DVD commentary track for Spinal Tap is done by Spinal Tap as if they were re-watching the documentary about their lives, complaining about how everything was distorted by Marty DiBergi, and spending a lot of time debating whether or not virtually everyone you see in the movie is dead now.
The DVD commentary track for Cannibal: The Musical was recorded while they were getting drunk. Matt Stone accidentally turns off the recorder at one point and they don't realize it for a while.
The DVD commentary track for UHF is virtually indescribable, but involves Weird Al knowing the exact address of every location where they filmed (in Tulsa) and cold-calling a very confused Victoria Jackson to interview her about the movie.
Additionally, the DVD for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension treats the movie like it was a docudrama and talks about the "facts" behind the film in all different sorts of ways.
There are lots of others that are just interesting, but those four alone make the extra things on DVDs worth it.
Problem with streaming is you're effectively renting.
If the source of the stream wants to change their terms, there's nothing you can do aside from jump ship to the next business maximizing profit.
Unless you're smart enough to use free streaming services, that is ;)
I assume there will still be less prominent brands making them, just as there are still DVD players being made.
Possibly, haven't considered that. My main concern is that media releases will no longer target physical media, leaving streaming / perpetual renting as the only option. VCRs were still manufactured after the major brands stopped production, but VHS releases largely went away.
The Alien: Romulus VHS Release notwithstanding lol.
Hopefully they'll still be made for people without access to high speed internet.
It makes sense that VHS production ceased, since DVD's are better in every metric, cheaper to produce, and eventually became the bigger market after players got so cheap. I would've thought blurays would continue that trend, but if these sales statistics are anything to go by, it's possible DVD could outlive Bluray as a viable market. I assume DVD's occupy a sweet spot between good enough quality and affordability.
Wonder if the PS5 will be the last mass-produced Blu-ray player?
Xbox can play Blu-ray as well, iirc. Still though, your point does stand. Let's just hope that All-Digital consoles don't supercede physical media consoles.
I won't be concerned until the only manufacturers left are Chinese brands no one in the West has ever heard of. We're not even nearly there yet.
Floppy drives died decades ago, yet you can still buy the drives and disks, brand new. This end of production will create a void, and it will be filled by someone else. No innovation will occur, but that's not necessarily a bad thing here.
Sometimes the innovation continues, just not in a way beneficial to the masses generally, like tape drives
What are we supposed to use now? DVDs?
For physical media, yes actually. Plenty of DVDs still getting made and sold today, throught the world. Nollywood and Bollywood Films, latin american dvd collections, Japanese Anime collections, etc. Several different DVD player companies too.
Honestly, i wish some of those companies sold pen-drives or mini-ssds with the media, but that was never tried. Imagine a theme-shaped ssd stick with pixar movies for instance, too cool to exist. But a 4Tb HD with files will do for me.
Fuck LG, not like they made good BR players. I've sworn to avoid buying their shit since they discontinued support for a BR player within a year of release, which back then meant you wouldn't be able to watch any BR movie released after a certain date due to new DRM or whatever. They just up and decided to not release new firmware for units still under warranty.
You can sound the real warnings when Panasonic and Sony stop making them.
But the writing is already on the wall. You used to be able to go into any supermarket and have a whole aisle for DVDs and Blu-rays, and now it's like a single rack of things that came out recently. People have spoken with their wallets, and these things will go the same way as CDs before them.
Now we just need to get back to a streaming service that doesn't suck.
NOT a streaming service. Rather - DRMless purchases. GOG did it, Bandcamp did it, now we need it for films. If not available, I would rather buy a DRMed version to correspond to the one I downloaded.
But yeah, sad for those who are into collecting, the physical experience and extras.
DRMless. Purchases.
Seems to be an either/or situation right now. I'll happily take the first one though.
Yeah, exactly - I specified that. Back when I had some money for media, I bought games on Steam (because they weren't on GOG, sadly) and had pirated copies correspond to this. That seems about as fair as a rip corresponding to a DVD but without clutter and inconvenience.
I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we'll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.
Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI.
That's what "they" want. lol. Everything seems to be pushing that way for sure.
Though I am a little less pessimistic about spinners fully going away until all-flash datacenters are the norm. I've also had some running for close to 10 years, and they're going strong (I've also got much newer ones as well)
I forget the article I posted here months ago, but there's a new optical format which is in the multi-TB range. Not sure if/when it'll be commercially available, but maybe that will come about?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/optical_disc_breakthrough/
Never had a BR disk of mine
Never really bought into bluray. DVD was still good enough on early HD TVs, and at the time where the really good ones became affordable, you could buy decently sized HDDs and later SSDs for little money. Ever since my video library has been entirely digital.
Right, but if you want a digital video library that hasn't been compressed to hell by some streaming company then your only option is using Blu-ray as a source.
I think the appeal of blu-ray today is for large amounts of long-term storage.
For you or I who just save the files we're interested in, it's not that big of a deal. For the archivists who provide those files, it could be significant.
It's really about quality imo. Not all 4k video is equal, and streamed video tends to be especially bad. It's possible to download decent quality video files, but they are all from blue ray rips. If blue ray goes away, streaming sites might be the only remaining source for digital video files, and high quality digital video will essentially die.
What brand would you recommend for a blu-ray burner?
For long term storage of my several TB of "family photos and videos" of course.
Or any other way to do "cheap" long term storage without maintenance (burn and forget). I heard that hdd are not reliable for long term unmaintained storage like that so I thought some form of optical storage.
One that is capable of burning M-disks. They are available in sizes up to 100gb and are supposed to last a few hundred years. They can be read by most Blu-ray players made after 2011.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Of course, this is more suitable for genuine family photos and videos. For "family photos and videos" you could use any Blu-ray disk, but I doubt it's the cheapest way to store them.
I'm surprised they lasted this long honestly
Will, this sucks.
