107
After 18 years, Blu-ray media production draws to a close — Sony shuts its last factory in Feb
(www.tomshardware.com)
welp 🏴☠️
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Technology
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Even regular Blu-Rays are better quality than streaming.
4K-blurays are the definitive way to see movies at home.
Are they that much better?
Netflix 4K has a bitrate topping out around 16 Mbps (and often lower), Blu-ray 4K is something like 140 Mbps. Streaming services compress the hell out of video to save bandwidth. It's like comparing MP3 and FLAC.
They compress the shit out of the audio too, don't forget!
Pops in another spinny boi
If you have a good enough tv then it’s an extremely noticeable difference. Especially in big budget movies like Dune.
I find the easiest way to spot the quality difference is a dark scene. On streaming look at the dark areas. You'll likely see bands and patches of different levels of black if you pay attention.
This is truly disappointing. The end of a physical media era and nothing on the horizon to replace it.
But this move to streaming libraries, where there is no ownership and the movies and shows you watch could simply disappear without warning, reminds us how fleeting life can be.
No, it reminds me our corporate overlords will continue to take away things that don’t make them a continuous stream of free money.
Jellyfin/Plex + Sonarr/Radarr + Usenet + HDDs/SSDs
HDDs/SSDs are a form of physical recordable media with FAR more capacity and speed than any optical medium
No, there was one next more "optical image" after Blue-rays. Archive Disc mainly used for backups in companies dealing with lots of images. Biggest one could take 2TB per disc, as much as tape drives. However, they didn't get adoption and it has been discontinued. Sadly
Biggest one could take 2TB per disc
I mean it's cool for a disc, but HDDs still beat that, Seagate just released a 36TB HDD to mass market, optical always lags behind on storage density and speed
From wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc
Sony used Archival Disc in their Optical Disc Archive professional archival product range, and aimed to create at least a 6-TB storage medium. As of 2020, they offered 5.5 TB Optical Disc Archive Cartridges.[14][15][16]
That limit I mentioned has nothing with the 'technological limit'. Simply enough they lost with the adoption - if the clients wanted, they would get bigger archival discs.
I'm aware, I've done heavy research for my own mass cold archival plans.
It's a physics problem is why it lags behind HDDs so much, and to reach that 6TB on optical it's a cartridge with literal multiple discs inside. Adoption or no, it was never going to reach storage density parity with HDDs. Hell, even SSDs are having a difficult time taking on HDDs storage density
Optical drives already are surpassing magnetic or even ssd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage it's more advanced version of optical drives, for obvious reasons it's just a prototype and most likely it will stay so for quite a long time but still, optical storage hasn't reached the limit.
Tape drives go currently to 18TB with LTO9
If there are no more discs to rip how will people get the movies and shows in the first place?
For all their efforts in DRM, Netflix et al have thus far failed to prevent people from ripping their highest quality streams and torrenting them
My setup has had 0 issues grabbing the latest "streaming only" content very quickly after release
I've learned one thing in my time on the internet.
If there is a will, there is a way and yo ho fiddle dee dee they sure will find it.
Having watched some of my favorites on Netflix, even with their 4K offering, the compression can kill a scene. Netflix has no incentive to provide the 0.1% of viewers who care about a better quality stream, so they don’t.
There's always an analog hole.
Webrips mate.
There is the Ultra HD Blu-ray. The problem is that not enough people are buying it.
I wish there was an easy answer. However, I can't think of one.
This is about recordable BD-R's, this doesn't affect Blu-ray movies.
At least, I hope not...
this doesn’t affect Blu-ray movies.
Yet.
Article says it started as removing BD-R and they'd keep operating for corporate customers (studios) but that appears to have collapsed quickly. I'm interpreting it as the end of Blu-ray production entirely.
Commercial sales have quickly become insufficient to sustain Sony’s optical media business.
Didn't Sony recently take over Blu-ray production for Disney? And don't they also have Blu-ray titles scheduled for release in the next few months? This doesn't make sense to me.
Yes and yes, but looking at BR releases, they seem to drop off hard around the month of May.
This lines up pretty close to 3 months after close, I think that could be a reasonable lead time if production ends next month. They are probably printing April releases right now.
But I'm speculating and toms hardware seems to be waiting for clarification from Sony themselves, perhaps there is still some hope.
You never know, maybe they just didn't announce new titles yet.
Or maybe I'm just coping.
I did a really quick search and a mechanical hard drive costs around 1$ for 50gb of storage while a blank Blu-ray was closer to 1$ for 25gb of storage. That would suggest a drive is more effective at storing data from a cost perspective, so there just needs to be a service that sells movies in a digital format.
"Sell" and "digital format" are not something that media companies like. More like long term rent on very specific locked down hardware and software.
"Best we can do is an overpackaged, encrypted, read-only microSD for $49.99. It requires a dedicated proprietary media player and if you're lucky, it won't fail in a year."
"Why won't anyone buy our movies :("
The thing is they want people to stream media for the most part. Buying movies is the niche that needs filled for the sake of it.
What I want is a healthier media economy. Right now I don't pirate anything and I would love to legally get content in a way that is sustainable.
However, at the rate we are going piracy is going to be the only way.
It’s what happened with music eventually, but so far I have not seen that with mainstream video releases, only some independent things
I survived the DVD-Blueray era, having successfully never bought a DVD or Blu-ray player, movie disc's, etc.. Long live piracy.
But many of the releases you've pirated were ripped from the Bluray.
And now they will be ripped off streaming services.
Fair enough, but I get what he is saying. I also never owned a DVD or BluRay player because of piracy. Yet, of course it sucks that physical media will disappear and with it all semblance of regulated quality.