Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs | Hacker News Reader

Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs

bbc.com

25 pointscoloneltcb17 comments

And Best Buy is officially pulling such media from its stores. Bad timing?

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222813514/best-buy-says-it-w...

It's possible that reports about the resurgence of physical media (based on numbers provided by the historically, very shady publishers) doesn't reflect the reality faced by people who sell physical media.

It's doubly weird, because "cinephiles collecting 4KUHD discs" would seem like a thing Best Buy wants to capitalize on, it's a high margin hobbiest niche much like custom car audio, and it's slowly growing as conventional streaming services are starting to fall apart (HBO Max and Paramount+ especially)

And every Best Buy I've been in, is practically empty anyway. They aren't hurting for floor space, they clearly don't have any higher-margin / higher-value / higher-selling thing they can fill that space with instead.

We need something that is more resilient than BluRay in long term but cheaper, much larger capacity and smaller.

I think our best bet would be tape.

Currently tape is amazing technology for archiving data and long term storage. The pysical media costs very little...the big cost is in the hardware for reading and writing.

I really wish we had an alternative open hardware competitor to the current tape market. I could justify the cost of tape but even used a lto7 library or a single reader for a desktop can run from a few grand for parts all the way up to 8 grand from what iv seen.

YMMV

Is there something about tape HW itself that’s inherently complex and expensive? Or is it just that the target market is enterprise and so the manufacturers are able to price discriminate more effectively?

Regardless, I doubt tape is a good consumer solution because it’s primarily for archival. That means that retrieving data is super slow (average seek time is ~1 minute). On the other hand, given that’s for an 18TiB cartridge, you might be able to cut that drastically by using less capacity. So it would be interesting if someone attempted a consumer play with tape, I just don’t know what the business model would look like since most customers rely on the cloud for archival to offload the technical and physical maintenance parts of the problem.

It's probably a mix. Consumer tape drives used to exist, but uptake was low. And really, most consumers want to ignore backups and hope nothing bad happens (which usually works out ok).

Something like a cost reduced two generations old LTO tape drive might work, but of course it has to compete with surplus two generations old LTO tape drives and be careful not to attract the business of enterprise which should be buying the current drives. Anyway, I'm not sure how much cost reduction is possible --- there's a lot of precision movement required.

Edit: also, at least in the current market, I doubt many consumers have enough data to make tape economical. An online array of rotational drives, plus backup to and rotation of external drives is probably a better fit for consumers, and a lot of enterprises.

Tape would be perfect because people don't tend to skip through movies to random points. At least I don't.

You might not, but some people do. And disc based formats assume reasonable seek times for menus. Plus if you're storing multiple movies on a tape, you still need to seek to the beginning of the one you want. A 100-disc changer or an archive of discs onto rotational hard drives would be a better experience.

Seek time wouldn't necessarily be a deal killer, as you could store chunks of movies as files in a structure similar (or identical) to LTFS[1] and have average seek times from tape load less than a minute and local seeks (forward/back chapter/minute/etc.) somewhere between a few seconds and instantaneous, depending on chapter length and how much cache RAM you're willing to throw at the problem.

Bear in mind that tape movement in an LTO drive is many times faster than a naïve tape capacity / transfer rate calculation might suggest, as LTO drives require anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred head passes to read/write a full tape, and seek to a given logical block number considerably faster than they can read or write.

The bigger problem I see with tape library vs. RAID for consumer movie storage is cost.

Even if we assume economies of scale would drive the cost of LTO-9 drives down to, say, $1,000, you'd still need to store a lot of movies for the cost of LTO-9 drive + library robotics + tapes to approach the cost of large capacity hard drives + additional cabling and interface electronics, given that $1,000 will buy enough hard drive capacity to (non-redundantly) store over 1,000 50 GB UHD Blu-ray movies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System

Is the cost of LTO due to the technology or the small market and a few large players taking advantage of that?

That's the primary issue. It's not the medium it's that you don't own it and it can be taken away.

If you could download a movie and store it without someone taking away some decryption key or deleting it I would probably prefer that over a DVD.

have I got an option for you, yo ho ho ...

Those tend to be DVD or BlueRay rips. It doesn’t help at all for what the thread is discussing and, frankly, isn’t funny or cool to recommend something everyone is aware of.

It's already the case with several movies and shows. The French Connection for example has an entire scene removed on streaming services because a racial slur was uttered in 1971. Multiple Always Sunny episodes are not even available except on physical media, i.e. censored because it might offend someone.

Somehow we can handle films and TV shows full of murderers, rapists, and all forms of violence but naughty words or the wrong color face paint on the wrong colored person simply cannot be tolerated.

censored ? In a democracy ? You must be joking. /s

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