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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain.

Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops.

It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case, or a full-on library in something similar to an early 2000s portable CD flip case.

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Sadly, I still need to buy occasional physical media.

For some reason, none of the streaming services has recent seasons of Doctor Who in my European country. I have to buy Blu-rays from Amazon long after the shows were streamed in the UK.

I just don't understand how the system can be so shitty for consumers. The cost of streaming an additional show is minimal, so there must be some business decisions to not buy/sell the show to all markets. Instead I see lots of "filler" shows that I'm sure will not get the same audience

Is BBC too greedy, or is the purchase process broken?

Distribution rights for content can get pretty complicated. Unnecessarily complicated.

There are so many examples of this, like how impossible it is to watch some UK football (soccer) matches online if you live within the UK. If you live outside the UK, then it’s very easy.

In the case of those sports matches, it’s because clubs don’t want to risk seeing a drop in ticket sales at the stadium.

What might happen with Doctor Who in your country is that someone ones the rights to the original series but someone else owns the rights to the new modern era.

>It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on.

What's wrong with SD cards?

Agreed! For anyone else who, like me, didnt really pay attention to SD cards for a few years, it’s quite amazing how cheap they are for their capacity now. 256GB from reputable people like sandisk for low tens of dollars. Used one as a good travel backup drive on a recent work trip.

They have a limited lifetime. It's a fairly long limited lifetime, sure, but unless you're reading and rewriting the data on the cards regularly, you can't rely on them to all still be intact a decade down the line.

Which is a shame, because I kinda love the idea of my music collection being stored in a little cube that unfolds to reveal a hundred or so micro SD cards.

Maybe not SD cards but something similar - Nintendo Switch cartridges are a few GB and seem quite durable.

Huh, those are neat! The largest ones seem to use Macronix HybridFlash technology, and:

"HybridFlash provides a very stable medium to contents and OS, enabling storage as long as 20 years at 85 degrees centigrade and it also works normally from 40 degrees below zero to 85 degrees centigrade."

So, not forever, but definitely longer than regular flash memory. Cool.

I'm surprised nobody has made SD cards with mask-programmed ROM or even traditional write-once PROM.

It's called a Nintendo DS game card. I don't know if the Switch game cards are flash or mask-ROM.

Mask ROM.

I don't have a source, but I think I remember reading somewhere that Switch games are some kind of archival flash, designed for 50+ year retention.

SD cards would be nice. Opus at 128 kbps is perfectly listenable (transparent for me) and 9 times smaller than PCM audio, so if you only need PC compatibility, you can burn data disks full of Opus.

there was also writable media. so...

how about one blu-ray of MP3s?

Would technically work, but if I’m keeping physical media around I’d want archival quality (original CD audio or at least FLAC). A Blu-ray would fit a lot of FLACs too though, if not nearly as many as it could MP3s.

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