the whole point is to stop you from owning physical media so they can arbitrarily raise prices by creating artificial cause and demand through artificial scarcity.
anyone remember when the argument for digital goods was " We wont have to waste money on boxes, printing, media, storage, or shipping! So your goods will be cheaper than ever, and everyone will still get a more profitable cut!"
Pepperidge farm Remembers, because Pepperidge farm called bullshit on the argument back at the very start, and said they would get rid of physical media, not lower prices, and that we would lose ownership of our purchases… and the internet poopoo’d me to hell in back calling me paranoid and stupid for it.
and look where we are.
and its so goddamn fucked up I don’t even get a single molecule of serotonin from being right about it.
The internet is chock full of idiots who piss all over Cassandra
who?
Not sure if joking, but just in case:
That makes this even more depressing. Sailing the high seas is the life for me.
But where to store it all now?
More hard drives. RAID, rotate them out when they fail, more backups too. lol
Sounds pricey. Discs are cheap.
I’ve never had a CD/DVD R last more than a year anyway, even when using expensive media and slow burn speeds. So its not exactly archival.
Which brand do you use? Not a single Verbatim has ever failed me, neither DVD nor Blu-ray. I also use a full-size burner with 12V SATA-USB adapter, not those stupid “slim” ones.
Damn, that’s some Qanon-level shit.
I mean, except it’s not a conspiracy. The death of physical media is an actual tragedy because digital media is nowhere near as free.
It’s to the point where much of the media I love is actually not available legally and officially for physical ownership, in some cases becoming actual lost media physically, and not available for purchase or even download anymore.
Companies absolutely want to control the consumption of media in more restrictive ways that they can control, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the actual truth.
DRM, always online, digital only, subscription services - they are all designed to remove you further and further from being an owner.
Everything from video games, music, movies…all entertainment media is moving in this direction and it’s an actual tragedy.
Welp… There goes physical media…
Yep, I’m sure it’ll be gone Verbatim.
Take your upvote
Its an old code but it checks out 😅
It’s just one company, it’s not all the Blu-ray production stopping. I think the last time I bought any Sony recordable media was CD-Rs for my MP3 CD player in the mid 00s.
Sony owns the blu-ray format. I’m worried.
They do not own it, they did co-develop it. They’ve never owned it outright.
🏴☠️
I always preferred the rips fork Blu rays though. They had the highest quality video and audio and stuff. This sucks so much =(
EDIT: I just read someone else’s comment that although they developed it they don’t own it outright so that makes me feel a little better that hopefully other people can still make them.
How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
I guess hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical somehow?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
All media is still, technically, physical media.
Even when you stream it locally and don’t have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
All media is still, technically, physical media
No one is arguing this. You’re making the strawman arguement. The not-so-subtle undertone of the article is clear.
Quoting the article:
The planned job cuts come amid a decline in demand for traditional storage formats such as Blu-ray discs, with streaming services now the norm.
…
The electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also gradually cease production of optical disc storage media products, including Blu-ray discs, according to the sources.
You will not be allowed to legally own tv shows or films and you should learn to like it. As I can tell from many of the other comments here, not many of us are fans of that idea.
Keep in mind that though this is a blow to the industry, it’s not like optical media is just yet dead. Hell, there are still new releases to DVDs coming out today.
Downgrading from blu-ray to dvd is extremely grim.
I guess current codecs can make miracles with 4GB of disk space
If I wanted to watch movies destroyed by compression, I’d go streaming. Blu-ray allows for way less compression. There’s a reason Blu-ray remuxes aren’t DVD-sized. Heck, some movies don’t even fit on a single layer Blu-ray! Do you want to compress that to 4.7 GB? And that’s only main title, without extras!
So that they can fully control the fate of digital media for “normal” people. Better not lapse on that subscription or fail to upgrade to the latest Sony TV… “Your” media library might not like that, be a shame if you lost access to those pretty titles you love…
i can’t even remember the last time i saw an optical disc. it must be several years.
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as “used”. It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
I don’t want physical media because it’s a liability. It can get lost or destroyed very very easily, especially optical media.
Digital copies are portable, I can data hoard them, and, worst case, I can just re-download it.
Most people don’t know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They’re using the built in streaming apps or they’ve plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.
Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.
The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.
For me, physical media takes up more space. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it’s also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it’s physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don’t have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it’s unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
Blu-rays do not actually take up this much space: On a 1TB drive you can store about 10-12 4K movies. You need a backup and you need a second drive for your Raid setup. This takes up quiet a lot of space too.
Besides that: storing the movies on a Raid system is a lot more expensive. If I’d rip all of my blu-rays to a digital copy, I’d need like 12 TB of storage. In a raid setup with backup, that’s quiet expensive!
I meant physical size, not data size. With one computer with multiple 24TB drives, you can store hundreds or thousands of Blu-rays. To have that amount of physical Blu-rays, you would need a massive shelf - or more likely, multiple massive shelves.
True, RAID is more expensive, but it also ensures your data will keep working reliably - and it’s much harder to lose than a small disc. Doubly when you throw backups into the mix.
They’re a very common form of personal backup. A few discs and an USB writer and you get a very long lasting medium for passwords, personal files, family photos etc.
Can also archive multimedia of course, the smallest discs are 25 GB and can pack a few films, a season of a series, or a lot of music.
i guess, but they’re not great for backup. Eps. R/RW optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged. You’d be better off with tape for long-term storage. or an M-Disk or some similar magnetic backup solution.
M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.
Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.
They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.
In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.
Politely disagree. M-disc for BD-Rs are still absolutely worth the money if you want to properly archive something. NIST has agreed that the archival lifetime of a M-Disc BD-R is 100+ years.
You have to be careful with normal BD-Rs because there are two different types of recording material on the market: High to Low and Low to High (LTH). You want to stay away from BD-R LTH discs as their longevity isn’t as good as the High to Low discs.
Politely agree to disagree and I’ll elaborate. Thanks for your input.
LTH are all marked as such. MABL normal (non LTH) discs such as verbatim sells for less than half the cost of M-Discs have the same physical properties as M-Discs, the protective layers are the same, the recording methods are the same using the same materials. Therefore the longevity is the same or near the same without getting into M-Disc’s ridiculous marketing claims of 1000 years (when NIST and others agree the poly-acrylic protective layer would degrade and decompose after a century or two at most even in ideal circumstances).
/r/Datahoarder has had this argument several times and the consensus so far seems to comes out to the fact that M-Discs were a DVD-era innovation that in the BD era offer no meaningful advantages in technologies.
I’d rather have two BD’s from a reputable company like Verbatim (not fly by night plain white discount bulk BD’s from who knows where) from separate batches bought 6 months apart stored properly than rely on one overly expensive M-Disc that isn’t going to last any longer and probably isn’t made to meaningfully tighter tolerances.
NIST only estimates the lifetime of M-Discs, real world abuse tests on BD’s (non LTH, should have mentioned that to be honest) show good endurance that far exceeds DVDs. It comes down to however burning it right and storing it right. A pile of M-Disc left in a window in your uninsulated garage year after year and burned at 16x are not on the whole going to be in a better state in 20 years than a pile of BD-R’s burned at 4x, stored in protective sleeves in a case in a temperature controlled, insulated environment. Add in having a back-up copy and the chances of total data failure on both primary and backup disc and you’re looking at better survivability. NIST numbers generally assume things like storage in archival quality environments such as old salt mines which are a controlled environment, low humidity, neither excessively hot or cool and not subject to shifts in temperature. Most people can’t store things in an environment like that and those who can usually have the finances for a better solution like multiple tape copies and/or continually updating and refreshing hashed/checksumed files and moving on a schedule to new better storage mediums (e.g. keeping files in a raid array in a plugged in NAS, checking for failures regularly, replacing disks and upgrading disks every 5-10 years one at a time).
I wouldn’t trust any media not professionally stored in a purpose-built archival environment and with at least two copies to last more than 25 years without degradation or loss. Anyone trying to store stuff really long-term and cannot afford degradation or loss needs to have a plan to update their archival copies every 15 years or at least do an assessment that often and survey the options as well as the physical and ideally logical state of their chosen back-ups.
Uh oh.
I’m perfectly fine with storing media on flash drives. Optical disks just adds an unnecessary step between me and enjoying my movies.
Flash loses bits of data without power
Damn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
I’ve started building mine up again, too, because too often a movie I want to watch isn’t available to stream and purchasing a physical copy costs less than a digital copy.
