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Comment by phire | Hacker News Reader

With this news, I have to wonder how much longer bluray will live.

Will we continue seeing new bluray releases of movies and TV shows for decades, or are their days numbered?

The loss of console gaming presumably removes a guaranteed revenue source that was keeping Bluray pressing plants alive.

Sales of DVDs and Bluray have been declining for years [1] [3]. Some people have been excited pushing the news that UHD bluray sales increased in 2025, [2] but that ignores the fact that the total optical sales still dropped.

[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

[3] This article has a more complete graph: https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-slight-r...

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The PC burners/readers are disappearing. We had like ASUS, LG and Pioneer manufacturing. Pioneer had thrown in the towel last year (they were heads above the best in quality). I think ASUS might be gone as well. LG's drives are super hit or miss and I wouldn't be surprised if they give it up eventually.

This is probably due to the fact that they relied on Intel SGX security which has been busted wide open and itself been discontinued by Intel so instead of redesigning the security model, just depreciate the entire format on PC.

I don't think there is that much of a market left for set top players either.

Of all the companies you'd think are committed to the format, it would be Sony right?

Well they currently list one model of set top player on their website and it is the same design since at least the pandemic(when I bought my player). The SKu has changed since then but after looking at the differences, the only design update they have done in those ~6 years is upgraded menu software and removing built-in smart or networking features.

8K hasn't taken off as far as I know but eventually it might and right now there is no transition path to that for physical media.

IMO they should just release BDXL drives with open firmware. Then "security" is not their problem.

And I don't think 8K will ever take off. 4K is already at the point where much (but not all) of the additional resolution is just noise. Meanwhile 4K pixels are already small enough even for 70"+ TVs at fairly close movie viewing distances so where 8K will provide any advantage at all is exceedingly limited.

I can't imagine content owners wanting the physical media to continue any longer than they can get away with. The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful. At least as long as everyone continues to buy into their DRM systems.

I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort

I do this. I'll buy used disks and rip them to a personal media server. It works great. A friend actually created an eBay bot which monitors listings of disks he wants and will automatically buys them.

The ripping part is a bit annoying and time-consuming though. Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

> Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

This is basically what mp3.com tried to do: treat the physical (music) disc as a license key that gives you access to a digital copy online. Sadly, the courts did not agree with their interpretation of copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....

I've been doing this as well. Occasionally I'll have a disc that fails to rip for some reason (maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme), and then I'll torrent it. Torrenting is always easier and faster, though it's hard to find special features this way.

> maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme

FYI for UHD disks in particular common ripping software does not include "player" keys (because they are hard to come by and would be blocked by future releases) but only the disc-specific decryption keys. This means that new releases can't be ripped until someone submits a dump of the copy protection data, which can sometimes take a while if you don't do it yourself.

> The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful.

I hope they continue to feel this way. WEBDL can come faster.

I'd much rather get releases that are NOT bit-starved crap optimized for streaming company profits.

That's part of what I was thinking. The idea of digital-only must be very attractive for content owners, so I don't think they will put much effort into preventing that outcome.

Why not just get everything on the high seas for free, instead of paying for used-bin stuff which is cheap but still costs something? I’m a huge cinephile with a collection on my hard drives of ripped Blu-ray and DVD images, a number running now into the four figures, and I have almost never paid for a physical disc; I own something like 6 that are in a box somewhere.

Because within my job/industry, getting caught pirating would end my career.

It's interesting how attitudes towards this are so different across industries. Jeff Gerstmann is a fairly well known and well connected video game journalist and he straight up does streams where he plays emulators using romsets clearly downloaded from the internet.

When an industry works directly for those rights holders, it's not that interesting of a difference compared to those to do not.

For fair amount of time Giant Bomb was owned by CBS and during that time I saw plenty of emulators getting used.

In NZ 4K Blu-rays are too expensive, at least by my standard (there's about one store chain, JB Hi-Fi). Never seen a single one at a second hand shop. (Though I guess a used bin is a place for 2nd hand goods at an otherwise first-hand shop? Which we don't really have.)

> With this news, I have to wonder how much longer bluray will live.

I hope that physical media sticks around. DVDs and Blu-rays often include something that digital releases don't: director's commentaries, "making of" featurettes, and other extras.

For me, it adds a whole new layer of fun to movies I already like.

The heyday of commentary tracks and extras was long ago, over a decade ago. Except for a few boutique labels like Criterion, distributors found that adding such extra features often wasn’t worth their while in the face of declining physical media sales. So, increasingly one just got the film and little else.

I assume they only did it to explain why the DVD cost more than the VHS you might already have. Even with Redbox you probably didn't have the DVD long enough to get a chance to watch the extra content.

I am very annoyed by this with the recent surprise smash hit of the movie 'Obsession'. This is a new director made popular by his devoted fan base and they just announced the blueray. One director commentary, a tiny 'featurette' and then just the film.

I remember back in the heyday of physical media(2010s) directors like Edgar Wright took curation of physical media extremely seriously: Multiple commentaries by not only the director but with the cast, production crew, sound designers etc. Deleted scenes, multiple featurettes and even picture slideshows.

I wonder how much the design of Blueray menus is hampered by the tech choices used in the format. DVDs were video files that repeated with tiny overlays that the player would just draw. Bluray seem to be entire Java applications of which most studios develop one generic version and reuse for every release.

I wish companies would release these for promotional purposes on e.g. youtube or equivalent.

Apple includes these in digital purchases from the iTunes Store. It’s part of “iTunes Extra”.

But I never see them anywhere else. Especially streaming. A real loss.

Even then they don't include everything on the disc. If you buy anime on Blu-ray or DVD it's really common to get both the original Japanese audio and the English dub. Even on iTunes they are often separate releases (although it looks like that's finally changing.

Personally I'd rather see those bits spent on a better encode of the main feature.

Collecting is going strong, though. My husband collects physical media, and media books, including a booklet and a nice cover, sell very well. As are special editions of more mainstream movies. Give people something extra and they will gladly buy it. I'd have expected them to go down that path, sell nice steelbooks, media books with an included art book and so on. Add a blu ray with interviews about the development process and so on. I'd pay good money for that and others would as well. Even if they sell the console only with an external disk drive.

I saw my first Dolby Vision Blu-ray and immediately started a Blu-Ray collection. The Blu-ray player on the PS5 is fine, but a nice dedicated player from Sony blows it away.

I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Purest Feeling?

>dedicated player from Sony blows it away

If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar.

My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...

> Leica Cine 1

Didn't even know there was such a thing... Knowing Leica cameras, I'm afraid to ask about the price. Well, like they say: if you have to ask... :)

I think it was around 8500 euro for the 100''. They also have a smaller one for 3500!

Hey thanks. Not that I could afford even the "cheap" one, but that's less than I expected. I'm watching some videos of it and, at the very least, it's a beautiful machine.

I know. The Sony UBP-X700U is $330 and the Magnetar UDP 900 MK II is $3,300. So I got the Sony.

You can still buy CDs. They don't come with music videos usually but they sound greatr

Still have my 2014 Corolla which was the last year they included a CD player. My son is begging me to have it instead of trading it in when we get a new car this Fall. He's super into physical media which is crazy to see since he's a zoomer. I'm seeing a lot of kids in the zoomer generation coming back to physical media which is really cool. I play with two guys who are millennials and they're completely hooked on their Sony Minidisc players.

It gives me hope the future is not completely lost.

I'm a zoomer. I use a flip phone and collect physical media. I play ripped CDs on my PS Vita while I'm on the go, though I would love minidisc if it was less expensive

What's better about the dedicated player out of curiosity?

(Not op)

it typically offers better video processing and upscaling, more accurate color reproduction, cleaner gradients, and superior HDR handling (including dynamic tone mapping on some models). Many also support Dolby Vision from UHD Blu rays, which the PS5 does not.

It won't show on a bad screen that much, but a dedicated player will squeeze out more of the disc.

Knowing nothing about the topic: what kind of processing and upscaling happens when I play a 4k movie on a 4k TV?

No upscaling as it's not necessary. (But better players have better 1080p to 4k upscaling too, as the algorithms are more sophisticated, e.g. edge-adaptive scaling, temporal filtering, etc.)

First, the player performs MPEG-4 HEVC decoding, reconstructing full video frames from heavily compressed data.

Once decoded, the signal is still not in a display-ready format.

UHD Blu-rays are almost always encoded in 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, meaning luma (brightness) has full resolution, but chroma (color) is spatially reduced. so one of the first steps in the pipeline is chroma upsampling (chroma reconstruction). After that, the player applies color space conversion and output formatting, usually converting to a HDMI-friendly format like YCbCr 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.

HDR handling is sometimes done on the player. The tv is doing a last stage processing that is fine tuned for it's display like contrast enhancement.

I hope that helps

Most blu-rays are 1080p, not 4K. The latter gets marketed as "UHD" and sold in a black case, to contrast the blue case of traditional FHD blu-rays.

There's a bit of misinformation here. At the end of the day, a blu-ray player is reading information from the disc and passing it onto the TV digitally - one player or another are going to do that identically. One can't have 'better color' or anything like that.

HOWEVER, there is an exception: Feature support. For example, not all blu-ray players support 4K blu rays. Not all players support Dolby Vision.

If you try to play a 4K blu ray disc in a non-4K blu ray player, it won't function at all (won't read). If you try to play a disc using Dolby Vision in a player that doesn't support it, it will fall back to HDR10.

But assuming 2 players both support the features a disc uses, the end output will be identical.

There's also upscaling, which some players can do differently.

The other commenter is spot-on. A blu-ray player is a computer decoding a compressed file on the fly as it sends the image to the TV, rather than just a passive pipe for digital bits.

Accordingly, different brands use different video processing hardware and software to rebuild that compressed data. This absolutely results in color accuracy variation, shadow detail, and overall picture differences.

Hu?

the final output is not guaranteed to be visually identical because parts of the processing pipeline (chroma reconstruction, tone mapping, scaling, and output formatting) are implementation-dependent. There is a spec, but multiple processing stages are not strictly defined to be identical. Higher end players also use a HDR Optimizer and the ps5 does not, which is visually noticeable.

I just pre-ordered the 4K UHD remaster of The Sopranos, and while on the Gruv site I saw another UHD remaster of a movie I enjoy and ordered it. I am excited to experience this (haven't watched physical media in forever), but I was planning on using my PS5. My research also confirms that standalone players are legit, but they are more expnsive than I figured! I guess I'll give one a try and hope this isn't another addiction...

Huh, I bought a ps5 specifically so i could have a up to date playstation console with a 4k blu ray player. Planet earth / blue planet are achingly beautiful on a 4k oled. Sadly the market for 4k blu ray seems to be pretty thin, but I do hunt for good docs in the format.

I think blu-ray will live for quite a while, but will be a bit like vinyl; there will be a consistent, niche market.

Hilariously, DVD production could potentially outlive Blu-Ray discs, since DVDs are still popular enough 30 years later, and surpass the sales of Blu-Ray movies.

unfortunately mpeg2 is still standard for them so i guess people have to stick to 480i on double layer i guess, unless stars align and someone decide to make av1/opus standard for them lol

A surprising amount of newer-ish DVD players will play H.264 off a DVD just fine and AVCHD is essentially Bluray formats and file structs on a DVD.

That will last only as long as boomers are still around watching movies.

I'm Gen Z and I buy DVDs (though mostly second hand). You're probably right on the whole, though I've only observed the opposite.

Why DVD and not Blu-ray? The reason I said boomers buy DVD is because there are still a lot of senior citizens that are not internet savvy that like to rent out movies from their libraries, the dvds are simpler to operate, are more reliable from deep scratches, and a lot of boomers have simple equipment. Most of them don't care about perceived quality. This market is big enough that ironically DVDs may actually outlive Blu-Ray. Its the format that wont die. In fact I bet part of the reason Blu-Ray is being kept alive is due to studios already putting in the work to produce DVDs.

I spoke to my local librarian who cited this as the reason they haven't bothered with 4K blueray despite it being 10+ year old technology at this point.

They're often cheaper and not everything is on Blu-ray. If Blu-ray was going really strong and overtook DVDs, I'd be happy about it. I don't really think DVDs are "simpler to operate" except for the fact that you only need cheaper equipment (though one can imagine someone with ingrained habits believing them to be "complicated").

>I don't really think DVDs are "simpler to operate" except for the fact that you only need cheaper equipment

Think of it from the point of view from senior citizens. They likely already have the equipment for DVD and are used to it. That alone is "simpler to operate". Yes Bluray could often have simpler menus but that existing inertia is something that is important as well because I dont think most senior citizens are actively seeking out newer tech if they dont need to.

Also, I’m impressed at some of the up scaling techniques that some players use to help improve the quality of DVD movies. Sure, it’s not native, but it’s certainly not bad looking either.

Why is that? Vinyl has some unique characteristics. But as far as I’m aware, blu-ray is just a storage format for bits, so other than the box art, what is compelling about a blu-ray pressing?

The movie itself is generally encoded at a higher bitrate than what you can find in streaming or torrents.

The media includes bonus features that generally aren't available in streaming or torrents.

The media will not suddenly stop existing if some server breaks down, some company goes under or some contract expires.

The movie will not suddenly get "patched" with an AI-upscale or censored scene one day while watching it.

You can lend the media to someone else to watch without having to ask for permission to anyone else.

Technically blueray has a 'update mechanism' that newer films will require players to update to.

AVGN complained about it here: https://youtu.be/tetXKdi9U3c?t=400

"To play this Blueray, you must renew your encryption key"

Is that really a thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

Also, you can import blu-rays from other countries when streaming releases have geo restrictions.

Like DVD before it, Blu-ray includes region locking as a feature (but apparently ~70% of disks don't bother with it, notably Paramount and Universal don't). Non-locked disks are marked as ABC (A is the Americas and Asia, B is Europe/Africa/Aus/NZ, C is Russia/India/China).

Libredrive says: "that's cute"

Ever compare a Blu-ray to the same content over streaming? It's not even close. Unlike vinyl records, Blu-ray is vastly superior in quality to alternatives.

In case you're asking "why", it's because your "4K" stream is compressed to hell and back. Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.

A UHD Bluray tops out at about 150Mbps, most home internet is capable of that. It would just cost too much for the streaming services to support it.

But also the reality is that most people have their devices connected through a shitty wi-fi connection and may be effectively limited to 50 or even less mbps, specially if you consider the unpredictability that comes with it.

True. Plus the big streaming services' business model now is low quality content produced in house or with cheap royalties, that people put on in the background. They might have a prestige show or two, but that's just a hook to get you to subscribe, they'd much prefer you watch the cheap stuff.

> Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.

This has not been true for most people for a while now. Even the high end of 4K blue rays tops out around 100 Mbps, which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection.

> which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection

It's only achievable in a real sense if there are video providers out there offering the content at that bitrate. The absolute best you can hope for in optimal conditions is from Apple TV+ at between 30-40 Mbps which is equivalent to what you get with a non-4k blu-ray.

For sure, my only contention is that the bandwidth is there, which makes the paltry bitrates Netflix et al will provide you even more frustrating...

Yeah, you’re right. Despite Grandpa over here having a 1Gb fiber connection, my head was apparently stuck in 2005 thinking 50 Mbps downstream internet is some kind of high-faluten’ wizardry.

Netflix isn't serving 100Mbps though.

Are any streaming services actually serving that bitrate?

Sony's is.

Many of vinyl's unique characteristics are severe drawbacks compared to digital disks. I see a lot of kids collecting CDs instead—cheaper, lighter, easier to maintain, you can find cars that play them pretty easily, you can rip them losslessly, more hardware to play them, etc. Plus you can a lot of the same benefits of album art, lyrics, etc.

Blu-Rays also have special features, which most streaming platforms don't offer (I think largely except for iTunes).

Having it, physically. It’s harder for companies to play silly games like put the media into a vault, take it off their streaming platforms for tax reasons, etc… I started collected physical blu rays when HBO randomly took a million things off its platform so that it could do accounting tricks.

I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.

Even if Sony keeps a token factory or two open to produce blu-rays, I'd imagine we'll see fewer and fewer new releases. Maybe we'll only see them as part of collector's sets that have enough margin to afford a cut of the more limited supply.

This feels like the beginning of the death spiral for blu-ray. Sales aren't going to go up enough for it to be worth it keep factories going, much less spin up new ones.

Years ago I did a podcast[0] on physical media and hypothesized UHD would be the last physical movie format (and was shocked that it was even a thing).

The next two years are probably going to be a mess as collectors snatch everything up annd inventory gets cleared out.

0 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cherry-bombs-the-under...

UHD bluray isn't really a new physical format. It's the exact same physical format as regular bluray. They didn't change a thing except move some previously optional parts of the bluray spec (like three layer discs, and 33GB per layer) to being compulsory.

I don't think we have ever seen something like it before. A new media format that breaks backwards compatibility, yet uses the exact same physical medium as the previous version. Some people did attempt it with HD movies on DVD, but the attempt failed so badly I don't think it even counts.

Its very existence was a very strong signal Bluray would be the last optical disc format. And the launch of the PS5 without a new optical confirmed it.

It has Dolby height sound encoded for x.x.4 systems

Yeah I wouldn't give it more than 20 years. Obviously they won't suddenly stop; it will just be rarer and rarer for things to be released on bluray until it's only super popular stuff and collectors editions and things like that.

They won't be releasing new Blu Rays for decades. Outside of collectors, why would they? Unless there is a hidden market for the discs elsewhere it's not worth it

Libraries :(

My local library never made the jump to Blu-Ray and still only has DVDs. They have physical copies of video games too though.

I don’t know the stats but I would guess more people have DVD players then Blu-Ray, so it makes sense for libraries to rather offer DVDs. DVDs is also one of these things that is good enough. The jump in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is very unnoticeable (when fully immersed) compared to e.g. between VHS and DVD (or even between vinyl and CD).

The jump in quality from DVD to Blu-ray is huge, as much as it was from VHS to DVD. Going to 4k from there isn't noticeable, but going to HD in the first place is massive.

VHS was bad quality, DVD had good enough. The jump from bad to good enough has a much better impact then from good enough to amazing. While most people will make the switch to go from bad to good enough, not many will make the effort to switch from good enough to amazing, unless they are pushed in that direction.

The jump between vinyl and CD was also massive, but vinyl was still good enough. what CDs had though over the massive sound quality improvements was the added convenience of playing specific songs, not needing to turn it over, or play on the move in your car/walkman/etc, and added features such as easy skipping, shuffle, ripping, etc.

I would wager that it were those extra features + added convenience (and the cheaper price) which got people to switch to CDs over the massive improvements of sound quality. Blu-Ray had exactly the same features as DVDs (until publishers artificially decided to skip adding extra content on their DVD releases), were exactly as convenient to playing DVDs, but were more expensive. So I think for most people it simply wasn’t worth their time to upgrade from if all they got was to bump their picture quality from good enough to amazing.

DVDs and VHS are more or less the same resolution. And depending on encode quality some DVDs can be even worse, although unlikely to be a problem for mainstream releases.

This is an overly reductive argument. Resolution is only a relatively small part of the quality. Generally people value sound quality much higher, which DVD brought to CD level, and Blu-Ray has exactly the same sound quality (nobody has speakers for the 7.1 surround sound). VHS also had interlacing, and older VHS also had plenty of the tape artifacts polluting the image, DVDs had none of those.

At the end of the VHS era (when DVDs had already been available for years) maybe you had a good enough (picture) quality on the first few plays of the tape (which you still had to rewind etc.), but at the same time you could go to your local video rental get a 5 year old DVD that had been played hundreds of times, had the same (or slightly better) picture quality, much better sound quality, no need to rewind, and tons of extra features.

Lol most people buy an expensive TV for the display features and then use the crappy TV speakers that come with it. They do NOT care about sound. AT ALL.

And DVDs have interlacing too. True, they add the ability to not store the repeated fields from a telecine but that's mostly because the lossy codec would otherwise fuck things up even more. And not all movies even make use of this and even more don't use it for 100% of the frames.

And while DVD's don't have analogue artifacts, they do have a VERY BAD lossy codec with noticeable blocking. Add to that that contemporary encoders didn't even use the limited encoding space of that codec very well.

DVDs winning has nothing to do with quality but was all about convenience. Smaller package size. Don't have to be rewinded. Can be pressed for duplication instead of having to run through a long tape.

DVDs have pretty good bitrate, just lower res and old codecs. HD would be nice, but as long as you aren't using an old DVD player with composite, they look ok.

Much better than 480p youtube these days.

DVD bitrates are good for the resolution but without a codec that doesn't just waste those bits it doesn't mean anything.

4K is still a noticeable increase but, yes, much less so than going from NTSC/PAL resolutions (sometimes even halved horizontally due to interlacing) to 1080p.

That is very much not true and even less true when the blu-ray release comes from a new master that isn't limited by older technology.

If you are right and I am wrong, then that very much goes against the public perception. The switch to DVD was pretty quick and universally pretty well received. So the public was very much willing to spend their money and time to make the switch for the extra quality (or maybe the convenience) of DVD. The switch to Blu-Ray is still ongoing now what 20 years later, and it looks like it will never be complete.

In the eye of the public the quality of DVDs are obviously good enough, and the jump to Blu-Ray is simply not worth the time and effort to make the switch.

DVDs winning has nothing to do with quality but was all about convenience. Smaller package size. Don't have to be rewinded. Can't be entangled like a tape. Can be pressed for duplication instead of having to run through a long tape.

Yeah bluray is really only necessary for 4k. And dvd probably beats streaming quality

Uhm, no. What are basing this on?

I honestly doubt they'll stop. Sony is a Japanese company, and they seem to still enjoy buying blurays

But is there enough of a market for blu-rays of newer western releases in Japan to keep the entire production and distribution chain alive around the rest of the world?

Yeah this is the thing. Everyone seems to be forgetting about economies of scale.

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