Digital streaming is displacing the last remnants of physical media.
In a disappointing turn of events, FlatpanelsHD reports that LG has ended production of its Blu-ray player series, which includes the UBK80 and UBK90 models. With limited stock available, prospective buyers should act quickly to secure the last remaining units before they are sold out.
After Samsung and Sony’s departure from physical media, LG was one of the last major manufacturers of Blu-ray players
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.
Will, this sucks.
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.
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.
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.
What brand would you recommend for a blu-ray burner?
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.
When CDs were introduced they were touted as essentially eternal and damage proof. Id take M discs xlaim with a pinch of salt
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.
Sony and Panasonic still make Blu-ray players… Sony just stopped making the blank media IIRC
Welp, we’re one step closer to the “you will own nothing and be happy” future tech companies want for us.
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.
🏴☠️
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.
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.
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.
Or they might just make all disc drives extra attachments you have to get separately in the future.
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.
Bring back the MiniDisk!
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.
I find buying DVDs just to rip the contents impractical anyway. If I were concerned with ethics - I’d likely do like I do with Steam games and buy a DRMed version corresponding to my DRMless download. Because I’d rather not deal with a disk taking up space or needing to be disposed of, not to mention potential scarcity if it is no longer in print.
Agree on Blu-Ray. Also, weren’t there region restrictions?
Ripping them is actually really easy if you have a compatible drive.
Yeah, it is frustrating that the license is tied to the physical disc. Especially when they won’t send you a replacement for a damaged disc.
I personally buy, rip, and keep the physical discs of my collection which is now well over 1,000 titles. It’s a lot of work, and takes up a lot of space, but it’s also a hobby I enjoy. I’d much prefer if I could just buy a license for the film and watch it or store it however I want.
You know, this might actually be a decent application for NFTs.
I wouldn’t want that, NFTs are wasteful and also very much public.
I see the value in disks if you’re into collecting the physical pieces, but if you’re not into that, I don’t find it a good way to own - for me that would be useless pieces of plastic occupying space. Very much not for everyone.
This is all preventable with basic digital ownership laws, but governments are instead bending the knee.
A nas is your friend.
And there is plenty is space in the Caribbean Sea
Better buy Blu-ray PC drive
True, but I would expect a soon end of life for those too
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
Both the drives and disks are new old stock.
Amazon sells new new stock of these, though I can’t speak to the quality…
They’re still being made new because there are still companies around the world still using them to this day.
I’m surprised they lasted this long honestly
I assume there will still be less prominent brands making them, just as there are still DVD players being made.
And MORE prominent brands, as Sony still makes them and Panasonic still makes the best ones.
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.
There are still movies that get a VHS release, so I don’t see them completely abandoning disc media any time soon. Tons of people still use it to watch movies
Oh, nice. I knew Alien: Romulus was getting one, but it seemed like an outlier/gimmick than anything else.
It’s definitely a gimmick these days. I think it’ll be a bit before dvd/Blu-ray sales drop significantly enough to warrant discontinuing.
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.
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 ;)
Been waiting for over ten years now for hdd prices to go down significantly to replace my broken 4 TB drive. Now I don’t have any money or energy to rip the rest of my DVD collection.
There’s still no streaming for 3D movies yet tho :,( i still need to rip the 3D blue rays to my PC if i want to watch them in VR… fandangonow had a quest app to stream 3D movies but it doesn’t work anymore and it was a US only option. Hopefully the apple vision pro stuff makes it happen faster globally!
Have you tried Kodi? Maybe their Android app works.
I’ll look into it. Not sure what kodi does exactly based on their website.
It’s a media center app. To organize and play videos, TV, music and photos. With a nice interface for TVs.
It has settings for 3D content. I have no idea if works in VR but maybe you’re lucky.
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.
If you’re looking for something to write once read nearly never, just get 3 USB drives with the same thing written on all three of them
My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn’t regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they’re all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.
It degrades from writes.
I thought it degraded from lack of power flowing through it.
Blurays are too small for backups anymore. It would take hundreds of them to backup all of my stuff. If you want long term backups, you have to spend a couple grand on a tape drive.
I disagree. You’re the exception, not the rule.
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/
That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.
but those only last a few years.
Where do people get this information? Hard drives are very stable now (as are SSDs). All of mine are still going strong after 6+ years.
That was true a while back, but yes drives have gotten way better.
That’s just failure rate though, not data loss. You need your drives using a sane file system like zfs or using raid 1/10/6 where discs can do error checking as well to prevent silent data loss.
They also need to be powered on. Offline drives will lose data to bit rot over time.
What about btrfs?
ZFS is better.
What about it is better?
ZFS is unfortunately not in the upstream Linux Kernel :/
Btrfs is worse in many aspects but I like its flexibility of adding drives with different capacities over time.
How did we get becachefs upstreamed but not ZFS?
Edit: Nevermind, it’s licensing related
OpenZFS works just fine.
The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.
Tape drives.
They’re pretty expensive.
