After 18 years, Sony's Blu-ray media production draws to a close | Hacker News Reader

After 18 years, Sony's Blu-ray media production draws to a close

tomshardware.com

65 pointsrbanffy27 comments

Biggest losers are libraries and millions of citizens relying on them for content. Many are adding online streaming services, but licensing is significantly more than physical media.

I use the library often and a majority of their content is DVD. In fact, one of my neighbors was in the library and I overheard them telling the librarian they don't even own a bluray.

Recordable Blu-ray media. Not the kind that you buy with a movie on it.

This is so sad. We will inevitably 'own nothing and be happy' when it comes to media. At least I can still buy physical games for now.

I grew up during the golden age of digital piracy. But people under the age of 25 have no idea how any of that stuff works.

My huband is pretty tech illiterate. I set up a serv.arr ecosystem routed through a VPN and showed him how to add a search for a movie he wants.

Man, he has been sailing harder than I ever did in my youth. The majority of our torrent traffic is now his requests and not mine.

Sure he doesn't grok how it works other than some allusions to limewire, but that doesn't really matter.

If you have an experienced sailor behind you, piracy is now orders of magnitude easier than paying for seventeen streaming services. You don't have to know or care which service has your show this week, you punch in the name and some time later a file appears in jellyfin. He's even started loading up searches before the media is released. Servarr will catch it when it's uploaded and we'll get a pleasant surprise one day when it appears in jellyfin.

Servarr is a total game changer.

It is a pretty magical experience when you have your torrents automated.

I used an RSS feed based setup for years, and my first awareness that four episodes of game of thrones and one uncensored episode of south park leaked was the notification popping up on my PC telling me that a download completed.

I've recently been using soulseek (with nicotine+) more, since a lot of unseeded or obscure things appear on there.

This made my sad day even sadder. Much, much so.

During past year I was preparing to fully embrace Blu-ray for cold storage. Even bought a USB3.0 controller to shove into my NAS (that silently failed to recognize it) to use with external BD writer.

Only few of discs I bought are made by Sony, but I was planning to expand that collection.

The barrier of entry into BD enthusiast territory is already quite high: you have to read dozens of forum posts worth hundreds of pages to gain somewhat reliable knowledge befor buying something reliable - drives, discs, controllers, software. But now it's one less source for blanks of acceptable quality. No doubt it will lead to rise of already high prices of BD media.

I sincerely think BDs could be way more popular if people were more educated in data storage. Most individuals and businesses have data that they would want to store and protect long-term. But, for example, I knew someone who bought regular cheap USB flash pen-drives for backup of valuable photos and stored them in a drawer. Others, more advanced failures include cheap CD-Rs, old HDDs (literally: some guys are like "my laptop HDD is too old, slow and small, I think I'll copy my most valuable information there and throw it on a shelf") and cursed cloud services. If only more people realized how fragile most data storage solutions are!

You should be glad you didn't. As someone nearing the end of a 2-month journey ripping thousands of blurays, it's sad to see how many simply no longer work. The material degrades and they become unrippable (or DRM prevents it? Or the reader doesn't work?). As you found, it's user-hostile territory and I suggest you avoid it. In my case, these were all legally collected so each one that doesn't work stings because that's about $40 that's gone forever.

I'd say maybe 10% haven't worked. Some have visibly blackened which I didn't realize was possible. Plus if you have 1tb of data to back up, you need 26 disks at the minimum!

Wow! What a titanic task you've managed there! It's a pity that not even factory-stamped discs are safe from corrosion. I hope you share your stuff via torrents too.

Heh, while I wasn't a movie BD enthusiast, I'm well into data backup solutions for home. Even considered buying an LTO drive once. But backing up to 100GB discs is pretty much doable, valid solution. Except for clustering (dividing files/dirs between discs) and updates (which are only possible on BD-REs, but very time-consuming).

I also discovered DVD-RAMs recently, and not only are they darn beautiful, but very versatile and claimed to be more reliable than usual DVDs (nothing beats M-DVDs though). Good for storing project sources.

Kind of sad.. not unexpected considering their previous announcement. Ritek and CMC still make BD-R and there are others making pressed BD’s. This is definitely the end for MiniDisc production though!

Writable Blueray discs secretly belong in the highest tier of important consumer technologies.

No other widely available technology is really suitable for archival digital storage.

Most data today will be lost by the end of the century. Most data stored on the kind of archival Bluray discs found at your local office supply store (eg: M-disc) will be intact.

Not only that, but Bluray was widespread enough that, in the year 2100, it will be possible - though perhaps take moderate effort - to track down a device or business that can read it.

For additional context, I found a list of Blu-ray Disc manufacturers here: https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli...

Wow I was about to lament that minidisc with blu ray never happened but just discovered mini BD-R discs were a thing, and that there were camcorders that recorded directly to blu ray, who knew? I'm also kinda shocked miniDV was still being manufactured, is there some niche industry that consumed them?

In any case I'm looking forward to the minidisc exhibit at the upcoming vintage computing fest socal !

https://www.mdcon.live/MDLife

https://www.vcfsocal.com/exhibitors

This may sound controversial but I’m of the opinion that BD technology was dead on arrival. Yes, i know there were plenty of mass market applications. My point is that the mass wasn’t quite enough. Take CD for example - everyone has had a player at least at some point in their life (assuming they are old enough). DVD was almost as widespread thanks to the movie rental industry. BRD is different. Plenty of people have never seen one in real life. Plenty of people have never owned a BD player. Why? Because there have been better storage media options and more convenient information transfer methods.

DVDs were not that far from VHS, everyone could plug DVD player into any TV and enjoy it. But BD came with HD - new resolution and even aspect ratio required ridiculous amount of investments into new hardware. You'd have to buy:

- new TV

- new BD player

- new discs with probably mostly the same movies at the beginning

Plus:

- HD had lots of weird and obscure formats and ridiculous confusing naming like HD/Full HD/Progressive HD/your mom's HD

- no affordable computer drives at first

- new DRM protection

- and many PC owners didn't even have HD-compatible (e.g. 1280x) displays! Let alone 1920x+.

- by the time BD-RW.. I mean BD-RE drives became afordable, flash drives overwhelmed the market.

So, adopting BDs was generally more challenging than it was CDs or DVDs. Next, they were a bit too late for "just storage media" use case. And finally, by the time people started caring about their personal cold data storage, BD production started shrinking.

...wait, so then who is producing the discs for PS5 games? Someone other than Sony?

I understand there is version of the ps5 without a disc drive.

Perhaps they have enough stock to last to a fully disc-less ps6.

But there are still new games coming out! How do they press those? You can't do that ahead of time, you need the gold master build.

All versions of the PS5 support digital download. They’ll just release them digitally. Discs now are mostly collectors items anyway, day 1 patches (in the 10s of GB) have made them mostly useless.

...but is that official? No new physical PS5 games? I'm certainly not arguing they can't do it, but it would be a big change.

They just built another factory in Brazil for pressing discs.[1]

[1] https://www.techradar.com/gaming/consoles-pc/sonys-new-brazi...

...so then Sony is still making BluRays? I'm so confused!

I think the announcement is just for blank (recordable) media.

This announcement applies to recordable discs[0] (BD-R, BD-RE, etc), not stamped ROM discs

[0] The section of the website is "記録メディア"

Thank you!

BluRay Dual layer support links, anyone?

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