8 ms·

Sony Is Killing the Blu-ray, but Physical Media Isn't Dead Yet

53 points by austinallegro 2y ago

rnd0 2y ago
I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.
- zx8080 2y ago
  How long before it's considered a piracy?
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Depends on the local laws. Over here ripping for your own use is legal, sharing isn't. Actually downloading is legal too, you just can't upload (making Bittorrent effectively illegal)
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Ripping is a tort in the UK.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      It's explicitly legal in the UK: "In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
      - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
        The right was rescinded the following year after lobbying by media representative organisations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 (I've not looked at this link, I just know it to be the case and prima facie this looked right)
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    If the option is not watching at all vs DVD, you still kinda need to pick the DVD. There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
    - mikae1 2y ago
      > you still kinda need to pick the DVD. Or the high seas...
      - theshrike79 2y ago
        On some cases it may or may not be easier and faster to hit the high seas instead of bothering with ripping :)
  - upon_drumhead 2y ago
    Not every HD redo is better. https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      It's not just the interlacing, the main problem is the terrible resolution. Upscaling can only do so much; it's not going to make 480p video look decent on a 75" 4k screen. As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years. Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine. Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration. I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.
- Yodel0914 2y ago
  I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions. DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them. Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify. I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.
  - PlaneSploit 2y ago
    24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
    - DragonStrength 2y ago
      Do you mean lossless over lossy? Few people if any will be able to tell the difference between 16/44.1 lossless and 24/44.1 or 24/48 lossless.
      - snvzz 2y ago
        24bit is definitely noticeable. The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
        Yodel0914 2y ago
        > The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering. I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
- shinycode 2y ago
  I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches. The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key
  - cubesnooper 2y ago
    For games, the equivalent level of ownership comes from DRM‐free digital purchases. That means buying games from platforms like GOG, Itch, and Zoom Platform, and then backing them up. Steam is distantly behind in terms of user ownership—their installers are always DRM‐locked, but some games can be run DRM‐free after that—and Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even on the same planet due to their hideous DRM and online service tie‐ins.
shiroiushi 2y ago
It's really too bad there isn't something like M-Disc with a 1TB capacity and the price of current BD-R discs. We're missing a good data archival solution these days.
- cm2187 2y ago
  Agree. LTO devices are crazy expensive. I hope HAMR will boost HDD capacities such that you will be able to use a HDD as cheap archival storage. I would expect you can get a good 10y from a HDD you keep off but scrub once a year. Long enough for storage capacity to have increased another order of magnitude.
irrational 2y ago
I don’t own a 4k TV, yet, but someday I would like to watch the Lord of the Ring movies in 4K. It seems silly to buy the discs and a 4k player when I don’t anticipate buying a 4k TV anytime soon, but… I keep wondering if the physical disks or the player will go away before that day comes. Is this FOMO or a realistic concern?
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  It feels like FOMO but I don't work under the same rules you do. The disks would be hard to find, but the high resolution content wouldn't; piracy. The disks would probably last for as long as you'd remember them, same for the player. The player could almost surely be adapted to whatever display when the time comes. Will it? Dunno. Finding a player wouldn't be too hard. We're not in niche format eras any more. There are standalone devices and consoles that can both make due
fifteen1506 2y ago
Is tape reasonable for aficionado home users?
- gambiting 2y ago
  If you can stomach the very high cost of modern tape drives, then.....yes? For long term archival I'm not sure the value is there though.
Aardwolf 2y ago
I have a blu-ray writer, and blu-ray disks, from Verbatim. The article implies Sony is ending humanity's ability to do archiving on blu-ray Is Sony affecting Verbatim's ability to produce these?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Animats 2y ago
This is bad. With no immutable media, society is very vulnerable. We will regret this.
- gambiting 2y ago
  Sony is just one of manufacturers of Blu Ray media and as far as I know the others will continue manufacturing them. Also, not sure what you mean - as a regular consumer you still have access to immutable media to distribute whatever you want - is there some specific example that you have in mind that you're worried about now?
  - izacus 2y ago
    This isn't about manufacturing, this is about publishing content on them And Sony is one of the worst offenders of just deleting things you bought from your owned hardware: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstation-discovery-shows-removal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstati...
    - gambiting 2y ago
      Well no, OP said specifically "without immutable media society is vulnerable", nothing about publishing. If you want to shift the discussion that way that's fine, but don't say it's not about manufacturing when it clearly is.
      - izacus 2y ago
        If anything, you "shifted the discussion", who gives a crap if you can buy plastic disks when DRM and content delivery doesn't allow you to use them at high quality.
        gambiting 2y ago
        ....what does that have to do with BD-Rs?
thomassmith65 2y ago
In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era. The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do. All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age. All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too. If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them. The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray. So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.
- YokoZar 2y ago
  From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
    - tmountain 2y ago
      Curious why the media is more durable than CD-Rs which are known to degrade after 5-10 years (give or take).
      - nutrie 2y ago
        I have CD-Rs more than twice as old that work just fine. Would I place my bet on it? No. But it's not set in stone.
      - 2y ago
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
So the article that wants me to feel good about physical media being replaced with (DRM-encumbered) streaming contains embedded media which proudly proclaims: This video is restricted from playing in your current geographic region In the words of Dr. Evil: "Riiight."
crimsonnoodle58 2y ago
I just told my young boys about this sad news. They've recently gotten very into visiting retro gaming stores and buying DS, Wii and other console games. The death of physical media means the death of video game stores (eg. EB games), and the death of the second hand market, the very market which allows retro gaming stores of this generation to thrive. The kids of my boys won't be able to experience the games of the next generation of consoles because their game stores will have been shut and entire generations of games no longer available unless said company decides to re-release them again. That's just games. Movies have a similar problem. I can see Archive.org becoming very popular for accessing what publishers have decided they no longer want, or care for, being available.
dawnerd 2y ago
Title is clickbait trash. They’re only ceasing production of recordable media, they’re still producing commercial disks.
chrismorgan 2y ago
> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years. Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently. Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either). By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago. All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all. —⁂— ¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure. ² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors. These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings. Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.
js8 2y ago
I just buy internal high-capacity (at least 10 TB) HDDs and use an USB SATA controller. I use Borg backup for archival, at least 2 copies on 2 HDDs. It seems more reliable than DVDs.
- thomassmith65 2y ago
  As long as one never misses a back up, HDDs are fine. They're more laborious though. With the right optical disc, you can get away with just storing your discs in light-proof boxes and forgetting about them - with an HDD it's wise to copy the data over to a fresh drive at least every few years. Capacity, price and speed is the issue with optical media. With one M-disc, you get only 100GB, and the cost of the discs adds up.
  - js8 2y ago
    But backups are easier to manage with HDDs because you have less media to shuffle around. So for M-disc to be competitive, it would have to be several times cheaper per TB than HDDs, but in reality the M-discs are almost 10x more expensive.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Depends on how much data you care to store. I'm just trying to store family photos and what not, I'm not generating TB's a year. 100GB is more than enough for a whole year of important data for my family. A 25GB M-DISC BD-R, two to mail one off-site to another family member, and we've got an offline backup of our most important files with geo-redundancy. On top of the local copy and cloud storage whatever as well.
deaverpamela 2y ago
[dead]
prmoustache 2y ago
I can't see the next generation of the Sony Playstation console be as successful as the PS5 in my area if they abandon physical media altogether. A lot of people still use console games because they can sell and buy games second hand. The price would need to go down to a spotify/netflix monthly subscription for people to use a console without physical medias in my area.
kalleboo 2y ago
Sony is not the sole producer of recordable Blu-ray media though, right? This concerns a Japanese factory and the BD-R I have in front of me says Made in Vietnam.
- wmf 2y ago
  I read that the only factory making BDXL-R is closing. Regular BD-R may still be made but its capacity is so low.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Interesting! That would be concerning. If I look up BDXL-R media available on Amazon Japan, the Verbatim disks say they're made by Mitsubishi Chemical. It could be that components come from Sony though.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Maybe Sony's 128GB BDXL, but Verbatim makes 100GB BDXL-R discs as well.
xtiansimon 2y ago
Drive compatibility with blu-ray is horrible. Unlike DVD, which seems to work with any major OS—Windows, Linux, OS X
- FMecha 2y ago
  Because PC Blu-ray drives didn't really take off?
- vel0city 2y ago
  In terms of just data, I haven't had issues with compatibility with Blu-Ray drives. Every drive has been pretty much plug and play in at least Windows and Linux. Discs have been immediately readable in both OS, and every drive has worked just plugging in USB or SATA. Now, playback of DRM content? That's been a mess on Linux, pretty straightforward on Windows.
drbig 2y ago
For those thinking about long-term data storage: first and foremost it's a process, not "a thing to get done". Think about both a) migrating and b) growing capacity needs at the same time vs your usage pattern. It may happen that for your case any write-once media is simply never the best choice. (it will always take a lot longer to migrate a stack of CDs/DVDs/BluRays than to plug a new bigger drive alongside the end-of-live'ing old drive) (and please appreciate the Venn diagram of `backup` and `long-term storage`; it's not 100% overlap)

53 points by austinallegro 2y ago

rnd0 2y ago

I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.

zx8080 2y ago
How long before it's considered a piracy?
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Depends on the local laws. Over here ripping for your own use is legal, sharing isn't. Actually downloading is legal too, you just can't upload (making Bittorrent effectively illegal)
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Ripping is a tort in the UK.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    It's explicitly legal in the UK: "In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      The right was rescinded the following year after lobbying by media representative organisations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 (I've not looked at this link, I just know it to be the case and prima facie this looked right)
shiroiushi 2y ago
I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  If the option is not watching at all vs DVD, you still kinda need to pick the DVD. There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    > you still kinda need to pick the DVD. Or the high seas...
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      On some cases it may or may not be easier and faster to hit the high seas instead of bothering with ripping :)
- upon_drumhead 2y ago
  Not every HD redo is better. https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    It's not just the interlacing, the main problem is the terrible resolution. Upscaling can only do so much; it's not going to make 480p video look decent on a 75" 4k screen. As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
theshrike79 2y ago
I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years. Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine. Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration. I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.
Yodel0914 2y ago
I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions. DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them. Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify. I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.
- PlaneSploit 2y ago
  24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
  - DragonStrength 2y ago
    Do you mean lossless over lossy? Few people if any will be able to tell the difference between 16/44.1 lossless and 24/44.1 or 24/48 lossless.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      24bit is definitely noticeable. The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
      - Yodel0914 2y ago
        > The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering. I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
shinycode 2y ago
I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches. The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key
- cubesnooper 2y ago
  For games, the equivalent level of ownership comes from DRM‐free digital purchases. That means buying games from platforms like GOG, Itch, and Zoom Platform, and then backing them up. Steam is distantly behind in terms of user ownership—their installers are always DRM‐locked, but some games can be run DRM‐free after that—and Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even on the same planet due to their hideous DRM and online service tie‐ins.

shiroiushi 2y ago

It's really too bad there isn't something like M-Disc with a 1TB capacity and the price of current BD-R discs. We're missing a good data archival solution these days.

cm2187 2y ago
Agree. LTO devices are crazy expensive. I hope HAMR will boost HDD capacities such that you will be able to use a HDD as cheap archival storage. I would expect you can get a good 10y from a HDD you keep off but scrub once a year. Long enough for storage capacity to have increased another order of magnitude.

irrational 2y ago

I don’t own a 4k TV, yet, but someday I would like to watch the Lord of the Ring movies in 4K. It seems silly to buy the discs and a 4k player when I don’t anticipate buying a 4k TV anytime soon, but… I keep wondering if the physical disks or the player will go away before that day comes. Is this FOMO or a realistic concern?

bravetraveler 2y ago
It feels like FOMO but I don't work under the same rules you do. The disks would be hard to find, but the high resolution content wouldn't; piracy. The disks would probably last for as long as you'd remember them, same for the player. The player could almost surely be adapted to whatever display when the time comes. Will it? Dunno. Finding a player wouldn't be too hard. We're not in niche format eras any more. There are standalone devices and consoles that can both make due

fifteen1506 2y ago

Is tape reasonable for aficionado home users?

gambiting 2y ago
If you can stomach the very high cost of modern tape drives, then.....yes? For long term archival I'm not sure the value is there though.

Aardwolf 2y ago

I have a blu-ray writer, and blu-ray disks, from Verbatim. The article implies Sony is ending humanity's ability to do archiving on blu-ray Is Sony affecting Verbatim's ability to produce these?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Animats 2y ago

This is bad. With no immutable media, society is very vulnerable. We will regret this.

gambiting 2y ago
Sony is just one of manufacturers of Blu Ray media and as far as I know the others will continue manufacturing them. Also, not sure what you mean - as a regular consumer you still have access to immutable media to distribute whatever you want - is there some specific example that you have in mind that you're worried about now?
- izacus 2y ago
  This isn't about manufacturing, this is about publishing content on them And Sony is one of the worst offenders of just deleting things you bought from your owned hardware: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstation-discovery-shows-removal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstati...
  - gambiting 2y ago
    Well no, OP said specifically "without immutable media society is vulnerable", nothing about publishing. If you want to shift the discussion that way that's fine, but don't say it's not about manufacturing when it clearly is.
    - izacus 2y ago
      If anything, you "shifted the discussion", who gives a crap if you can buy plastic disks when DRM and content delivery doesn't allow you to use them at high quality.
      - gambiting 2y ago
        ....what does that have to do with BD-Rs?

thomassmith65 2y ago

In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era. The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do. All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age. All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too. If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them. The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray. So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.

YokoZar 2y ago
From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
- gambiting 2y ago
  There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
  - tmountain 2y ago
    Curious why the media is more durable than CD-Rs which are known to degrade after 5-10 years (give or take).
    - nutrie 2y ago
      I have CD-Rs more than twice as old that work just fine. Would I place my bet on it? No. But it's not set in stone.
    - 2y ago

wannacboatmovie 2y ago

So the article that wants me to feel good about physical media being replaced with (DRM-encumbered) streaming contains embedded media which proudly proclaims: This video is restricted from playing in your current geographic region In the words of Dr. Evil: "Riiight."

crimsonnoodle58 2y ago

I just told my young boys about this sad news. They've recently gotten very into visiting retro gaming stores and buying DS, Wii and other console games. The death of physical media means the death of video game stores (eg. EB games), and the death of the second hand market, the very market which allows retro gaming stores of this generation to thrive. The kids of my boys won't be able to experience the games of the next generation of consoles because their game stores will have been shut and entire generations of games no longer available unless said company decides to re-release them again. That's just games. Movies have a similar problem. I can see Archive.org becoming very popular for accessing what publishers have decided they no longer want, or care for, being available.

dawnerd 2y ago

Title is clickbait trash. They’re only ceasing production of recordable media, they’re still producing commercial disks.

chrismorgan 2y ago

> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years. Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently. Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either). By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago. All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all. —⁂— ¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure. ² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.

adrian_b 2y ago
You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors. These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings. Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.

js8 2y ago

I just buy internal high-capacity (at least 10 TB) HDDs and use an USB SATA controller. I use Borg backup for archival, at least 2 copies on 2 HDDs. It seems more reliable than DVDs.

thomassmith65 2y ago
As long as one never misses a back up, HDDs are fine. They're more laborious though. With the right optical disc, you can get away with just storing your discs in light-proof boxes and forgetting about them - with an HDD it's wise to copy the data over to a fresh drive at least every few years. Capacity, price and speed is the issue with optical media. With one M-disc, you get only 100GB, and the cost of the discs adds up.
- js8 2y ago
  But backups are easier to manage with HDDs because you have less media to shuffle around. So for M-disc to be competitive, it would have to be several times cheaper per TB than HDDs, but in reality the M-discs are almost 10x more expensive.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Depends on how much data you care to store. I'm just trying to store family photos and what not, I'm not generating TB's a year. 100GB is more than enough for a whole year of important data for my family. A 25GB M-DISC BD-R, two to mail one off-site to another family member, and we've got an offline backup of our most important files with geo-redundancy. On top of the local copy and cloud storage whatever as well.

deaverpamela 2y ago

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prmoustache 2y ago

I can't see the next generation of the Sony Playstation console be as successful as the PS5 in my area if they abandon physical media altogether. A lot of people still use console games because they can sell and buy games second hand. The price would need to go down to a spotify/netflix monthly subscription for people to use a console without physical medias in my area.

kalleboo 2y ago

Sony is not the sole producer of recordable Blu-ray media though, right? This concerns a Japanese factory and the BD-R I have in front of me says Made in Vietnam.

wmf 2y ago
I read that the only factory making BDXL-R is closing. Regular BD-R may still be made but its capacity is so low.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  Interesting! That would be concerning. If I look up BDXL-R media available on Amazon Japan, the Verbatim disks say they're made by Mitsubishi Chemical. It could be that components come from Sony though.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Maybe Sony's 128GB BDXL, but Verbatim makes 100GB BDXL-R discs as well.

xtiansimon 2y ago

Drive compatibility with blu-ray is horrible. Unlike DVD, which seems to work with any major OS—Windows, Linux, OS X

FMecha 2y ago
Because PC Blu-ray drives didn't really take off?
vel0city 2y ago
In terms of just data, I haven't had issues with compatibility with Blu-Ray drives. Every drive has been pretty much plug and play in at least Windows and Linux. Discs have been immediately readable in both OS, and every drive has worked just plugging in USB or SATA. Now, playback of DRM content? That's been a mess on Linux, pretty straightforward on Windows.

drbig 2y ago

For those thinking about long-term data storage: first and foremost it's a process, not "a thing to get done". Think about both a) migrating and b) growing capacity needs at the same time vs your usage pattern. It may happen that for your case any write-once media is simply never the best choice. (it will always take a lot longer to migrate a stack of CDs/DVDs/BluRays than to plug a new bigger drive alongside the end-of-live'ing old drive) (and please appreciate the Venn diagram of `backup` and `long-term storage`; it's not 100% overlap)