Sony ends production of Blu-ray Disc, recordable MiniDisc, and MiniDV media
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Ownership issues of streaming or DRM-encumbered digital releases aside, it’s a shame because Blu-rays are typically so much better quality, and as a movie buff there’s no substitute. Triple the bitrate of streaming versions is not uncommon.
Anecdotally, on streaming services I find that original content (e.g. Netflix originals) are good, but licensed content is often complete crap—low bitrate, SDR, often limited to 1080p, horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes. Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.
I don't know if Netflix just hates me, but I get that on all their stuff. It's to the point I pirated Midnight Club to watch it instead of just using my Netflix account because the show was unwatchable using their service.
("Film"? Yes. If anyone objects, I will "dial" my phone so we can discuss.)
I have a new annoyance though: many new movies are offered in Dolby Vision on streaming services, but the UHD BD release is only HDR10. I saw a comment on Reddit from someone involved in the industry who said that the additional work in getting the different metadata in line on discs is often just skipped. On streaming they can just serve different files for all combinations of resolution and HDR offered.
It’s annoying because if I’m paying a premium to get the best-of-the-best option, I want it to actually be the best.
OK, you sometimes get some trailers, promotional featurettes, etc. But nothing like the cool stuff I remember from the best DVD and Blu-ray discs. Interactive elements, themed menus, director & cast commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc... I miss that stuff!
Coco does have some great extra features about its Mexican heritage.
Is it really? My experience has been that 4K downscaled seems to make for a very solid resulting 1080p image. I've been kind of thankful for 4K streams in that way.
I generally do freeze-frame comparisons of stills in landscape/conversational scenes, however. It might be different for jittery action sequences?
On the one hand, even finding a DVD player that still works can be an uphill battle, and 480p looks like shit when it gets upscaled by a modern TV.
On the other hand, there are 100 titles that I already own outright. I don't have to chase down which service they're on or sit through all the ads it injects. I know that they'll always be there, even if a reality TV exec buys a prestige studio and starts deleting their backlog over in pursuit of some handwavey Hollywood accounting.
I should probably donate them and save my space for things I actually use, but I have a hard time committing to this world where we're perpetually renting access to our cultural heritage.
2 options:
- Rip them all and serve yourself using Jellyfin or Plex.
- If you don't want to go to the effort of ripping a hundred DVDs, you can, ah, take a trip to the high seas. Your legally-purchased DVDs serve as a license, for which the digital versions count as allowed "backups".
This is a pattern of thinking with no legal basis.
Over the years I've come around to "just pirate whatever you want". Not for music, where you can actually buy a digital copy and get a real file that you can download and play. But for non-indie video, may as well. The media/legal complex won't give you any credit for trying to be moral about it, and even accessing the DVDs you bought is usually a DMCA violation, so fuck them.
Doesn't every blu-ray player, Xbox Series X, and some of the PS5s play DVDs?
I believe both my parents' DVD and Blu Ray players have crapped out over the years. I still had a 24" iMac that would be a great DVD player for its size, but it didn't make the move. It's in my parents' garage now.
I think you can use a Wii as a DVD player if you find the right homebrew for it, but I haven't dug deeply.
I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.
And for whatever reason, DVD is still king for compatibility and still costs less than Blu-Ray.
I wonder what a similar endeavor would look like for video. I've been messing with my old Wii this weekend and am kinda shocked at how bad it looks - just stretched to fit with an awful anti-aliasing filter over the top. It's probably not worth the effort at any scale, but there's gotta be a better way to upscale old content than to just blur it. It didn't look blurry in its day.
I suspect it would look pretty cool, and probably better in some way than a plain upscale that a TV might do.
The big difference is that old games were often designed around the characteristics of a CRT, whereas films were (obviously) targeting film and cinema first and foremost. CRTs were the best those games ever looked, whereas at the time a tube TV was the worst way to watch a movie—albeit it the only one accessible at home.
I think the effect would be quite impressive for old TV shows shot on tape though!
That is copyright infringement.
If you subscribe to Paramount+ in the TV app, you get the entire library in a higher bitrate compared to actually using Paramount+, it’s incredible how unwatchable some shows were bc P+ basically just thought 1080p 8mbps H264 was good enough for everyone.
Their original content on TV+ looks and sounds incredible, and while you do sometimes come across licensed stuff on iTunes that is only 1080p SDR, I don't recall any time I've bought or rented a movie from there and been reminded of the 700MB DVD rips I used to download as a teenager. I'm sure there are some stinkers, but it seems far less prevalent.
Even when studios stop publishing Blu-Rays, I'm pretty sure you're still gonna be able to buy used (and dirt-cheap) Blu-Ray players for a long, long time.
I don't think this is part of any larger plan at all, except to discontinue products that consumers have basically stopped buying, which is what any business does.
Considering the fact that many pieces of media in streaming services disappear all the time, I think we're fucked from a preservation point of view.
Preservation is a totally different subject. It's an ongoing challenge that is nothing new, and something librarians and archivists have made an entire profession out of.
Although these days, preservation is actually astonishingly easy for end users who store media in major clouds like AWS, since the cloud providers take care of eternally ensuring redundancy and re-copying data to new hard drives as soon as old ones fail.
> All part of the plan for everyone to have to repurchase all the content they already own. Again.
If you're arguing that you want to repurchase, then I don't know what we're talking about anymore.
I was in film school in the 00s. At the same time that kids were getting sued into oblivion over piracy, media executives would come be guest speakers at our class and would be gushing about how cool it was to watch a movie on their iPod on the way there. They were participating in the same piracy they were trying to ruin other people's lives over, and they were completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
The 25GB discs are cheap, and have enough space for a considerable backup (depending on your needs). It's also possible to put 4K h264/h265 videos on one and play them on some players, but this isn't very convenient compared to other options.
The 50/100/128GB discs are far more expensive per GB, and have an awful failure rate for writing.
Write and read speeds leave a lot to be desired. Fast enough to stream video, but that's about it.
And consumer writable optical media has a poor lifespan, and will probably become corrupted within a decade.
I have moved on to LTO tapes. A single LTO-6 tape is about $10, and holds 100x more than a basic single-layer BD-R. Read and write speeds over 1gbps. Not appropriate for everyday access, but perfect for large long-term backups.
If I want to move files from device to device, especially multimedia, I just use a flash drive.
>The rate of decline in US physical video game software spending accelerated in 2024.
>Spending on physical video game software in the US has been cut in more than half since 2021 and is now more than 85% below its 2008 peak.
https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3lgj...
The visual fidelity on a good 4k streamer is hard to tell the difference between Blu-ray (you can, it’s just not glaring), but even the sound on a DVD beats any streamer.
The film's sound department worked really hard on that stuff! It doesn't take much -- 500 kbit/sec can sound amazing if they encode it well.
I never cared much about surround sound until the AirPods got spatial audio. Now it's like I can't live without it.
As somebody who has a very nice (and expensive) 5.1 set up, I’m legitimately a bit worried about this trend.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
Why spend hours sorting through Netflix' low quality catalog when you can watch a movie you love whenever you want?
Because I would rather watch something I've never seen before?
I've heard a story on Reddit of a guy watching Big Trouble in Little China everyday for years, but usually people wanna watch new stuff. I guess people also rewatch shows like Friends and The Office, but do they really "watch" it or do they just play it as background noise?
Consider that new doesn’t mean good .
Even if you just like old movies, there are tonnes of great old movies. Don't you want to watch more than one?
Experiencing something for the first time just isn't the same.
Learning how to continue appreciate things that you've already experienced gives you the power over the experience. You don't have to depend on an a constant influx of "new" content.
I've seen Interstellar, Matrix, Gladiator, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings 20+ times. They are even more moving now when I watch them because I can see how I've changed and related to the movies in a new way.
I really don't care for it though. I have 0 interest in watching Harry Potter 20 times. And considering new content comes out over 10x faster than I can consume it, I don't see "depending on new content" as being a problem.
It's impossible to catch everything in a well made film on first viewing. Not everything is worth watching more than once but for me the first rewatch of a good movie or show is actually much better than the first viewing.
I like knowing what is going to happen, and having the freedom to let my attention wander to aspects of the media besides the primary plot and dialog, and keeping up with what is happening.
Not everything is worth watching twenty times but anything good is at least worth two viewings. The very best media has layers that unfold each time you experience it.
And tbh, I feel like movies are very meta and you also get more from each movie if you watch more movies/read more books. Like Doctor Sleep for example, is an adaptation of a Doctor Sleep novel, but also a sequel to both the Shining novels and movies. You would get more of it if you read the two novels and watched the shining movie than if you just watched the movie or read one of the novel twice. I also enjoy watching different adaptations of something and pit them against each other, like Let the Right In (both the novel and the movie) and the American adaptation. I guess that's my version of what you get when you watch a movie twice.
That being said, there are other Blu-ray Disc manufacturers, and I don’t see the production of Blu-ray discs ending anytime soon. There are new titles being released all the time: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/releasedates.php
Happy to discuss MD more if people have questions!
Mass-produced MDs were stamped (or molded) just like CDs were. There was nothing new here but stuff like the codec and the packaging -- the media itself had more in common with a CD than it had differences. They were strictly read-only.
Meanwhile, recordable MDs were a whole different magneto-optical thing, full of neat tricks.
AFAIK, there haven't been any mass-produced MD albums for a rather long time.
But there have been some recent albums made on recordable MDs -- slowly, one at a time -- whether new, NOS or recycled or whatever.
A DVD might have been peak consumer, but it didn't have nearly the versatility of VCR. Hell, I could record 6 hours of content on 1 tape!
Vantiva (formerly Technicolor) are the biggest players but have just announced they’re unloading their Supply Chain Services division, which includes their disc-pressing plants, to private equity.
Blu-Ray (both HD and 4K) is obviously a niche product now but there are numerous boutique labels doing great licensing work. It feels in a healthier place than it did a couple of years ago when the streaming wars were at their height.
It’s a bit like a return to the Laserdisc days of the 80s/90s. Most people were happy to rent VHS tapes (read: streaming today) but there were enough connoisseurs, techies and collectors around to keep the premium physical media format of its day alive and kicking.
Obviously you're right and and literally every commercial* videogame ever released is digital in the sense that it's binary information, and the movies that person was talking about were already digital on Blu Ray.
You can kind of justify it as literally correct if you infer the context of "digital" referring to the method of transferral, rather than the method of information storage - I.e when I bought a game disk from a shop, the game was transferred to me physically on a disk, but when I bought one from Steam it was transferred digitally. Doesn't really apply as much for this situation tho.
(*I almost said every videogame ever made, but I suppose Tennis For Two and some other experimental games ran on analogue computers)
Yes minidv/dv are digital, but they look like tapes and require something that can read them to get them on to a computer.
Also, that setup is a pretty good way to digitize Hi8 analog tapes. And I think you can use some of the camcorders as analog to digital converters of an analog video stream (eg, an attached vcr).
Friend brings over MiniDV camera and a tape, and asks if I can transfer it to a PC.
"I don't know, but we can try!"
It took longer to rummage through the cabling collection for the right FireWire cable than to get it working, plugged straight into the front of a Q6600 box running Windows Vista or 7, with whatever software Microsoft included by default.
Even the tape transport controls worked perfectly from the GUI on the PC.
Old macbook is just a cheap all in one solution with FireWire inputs and software processing g.
And maybe I'm old-fashioned, but the last thing I think when I need to connect up some old gear is "I have just the answer! I'll buy a whole 'nother laptop!"
I mean: They still make PCIe Firewire cards in factories every day -- or at least, they once made enough of them that plenty are still kicking around for not very much money.
And it may be 2025, but they definitely do still make desktop computers (with industry-standard expansion slots, even!) in factories every day.
All 3 are digital.
If you want to copy: MakeMKV for BluRays are perfect.
For MiniDV you can use any MiniDV camcorder, they have a digital video out (probably FireWire) then import with a video editor on PC. An old Macbook/Pro is the best with the built-in port and iMove.
dd if=/dev/cd0 of=moviename.iso bs=4M conv=excl,noerror,fsync status=progress
I bought a drive a number of years ago with intentions on backing up my NAS. Never did because the media was still prohibitively expensive for the amount of data I was looking to back up.
I've been waiting for the price to go down.