BlueRay, RIP?

[Rick Law]

With streaming seemingly taking over, and with Sony apparently not planning on doing a new 4K format for BlueRay...

Do you think BlueRay is dying?  Would you miss it?

I personally found DVD rather adequate for movies.  When DVD was new, I upgraded many of my VHS tapes to DVD version.  Seeing some of those movies on BlueRay disc in store-displays, I have not found the small incremental gain BlueRay has over DVD worth the extra $.  Personally, I would miss DVD when it dies.  I would not miss BlueRay as long as DVD can still be purchased.

[Mr. Scram]

With streaming seemingly taking over, and with Sony apparently not planning on doing a new 4K format for BlueRay...

Do you think BlueRay is dying?  Would you miss it?

I personally found DVD rather adequate for movies.  When DVD was new, I upgraded many of my VHS tapes to DVD version.  Seeing some of those movies on BlueRay disc in store-displays, I have not found the small incremental gain BlueRay has over DVD worth the extra $.  Personally, I would miss DVD when it dies.  I would not miss BlueRay as long as DVD can still be purchased.

I think the disappearing of physical media will mean another chapter in DRM and how the consumer suffers thanks to it.

[Barryg41]

I can't remember the last time I bought, rent or even played a DVD of any type. We stream 100%! Everything is at our finger tips.

[BrianHG]

Blueray and the 4K blueray is only there for those who want the picture and sound quality of the high bitrate.  If you didn't put the money into the super expensive large screen and sound system, or you are happy with youtube quality, blueray is a waste of money.

[ElektroQuark]

Blueray shines in projection.
A HD projector is not that expensive, and a 100" image size at home is really an immersive experience.
I love it.

[metrologist]

With streaming seemingly taking over, and with Sony apparently not planning on doing a new 4K format for BlueRay...

Do you think BlueRay is dying?  Would you miss it?

I personally found DVD rather adequate for movies.  When DVD was new, I upgraded many of my VHS tapes to DVD version.  Seeing some of those movies on BlueRay disc in store-displays, I have not found the small incremental gain BlueRay has over DVD worth the extra $.  Personally, I would miss DVD when it dies.  I would not miss BlueRay as long as DVD can still be purchased.

What display device are you using? I can plainly see the increased resolution and apparent increase in color depth with blueray.

[Jeroen3]

Blu-Ray never took off imho. I asked around at work recently, nobody had Blu-Rays or a player. Some did have a console but didn't know I could play Blu-Ray movies.

With the ever increasing average bandwidth of consumer internet, I imaging physical media being gone soon. Unless failed net neutrality starts the dark ages of the internet.

[AndyC_772]

When I buy a movie, I want it on a real, physical object that can't be taken away from me because I stop subscribing to a service, or the internet connection goes down somewhere between me and the server where the content is stored, or it otherwise becomes unavailable for some reason outside of my control.

I also want to be sure that it'll play continuously from start to finish, only stopping when I want to pause the action to get more popcorn or go for a p*ss. When I'm settled on the sofa with my wife, beer and cat, the last thing I want to do is get up to reboot some piece of network equipment.

Blu-ray has its faults, but picture and sound quality are first rate and I don't think I've ever had one skip or stutter. My experience of on-demand TV is quite the opposite; reduced bit rate and "this show is temporarily unavailable" are all too common.

(yes, I know I could probably enter into a long and fruitless debate with my ISP's call centre, and/or punch holes in my walls to run ethernet cables instead of using powerline or wi-fi, but... NO. Not when I can just buy content on disc).

[Ampera]

Regardless of how good a blu-ray is, you will NEVER be able to beat the quality of a high bitrate digital file on a hard drive. It's what I use, it's what a lot of people use, and it is the world's best. Even streaming starts on a hard drive.

I don't stream movies. When I buy a movie it's first destination is on some sort of contraption to be ripped directly to drive in whatever way is possible. It goes on a drive, and I watch it there or anywhere I want.

[Zbig]

Funnily enough, I had a lunch break conversation with a colleague on this very subject today. And contrary to you, I'd like to see DVD format go ahead and die already as it has ovestayed its welcome by some 10 years, in my opinion I find the quality difference between the two immediately obvious, there is no contest for me, really. And I watch on my average, lowish-end, 48" Sony Bravia, using my crappy eyesight. My personal pet peeve is still referring to 1080 material as "HD" over ten years down the line. I refuse to call it that - it's SD or TOAD (The Only Acceptable Definition) as far as I'm concerned It's high time we move on and stop treating ancient PAL/NTSC resolution as some kind of reference. To the defense of BD (by the way, it's "BluRay" - not "BlueRay"; yeah, kina stupid) versus streaming: although it's hard to beat streaming services' accessibility and convenience, BD stream is almost always of higher bitrate, tuned to higher quality while it's the lower bandwidth that's the priority when movie is (re)encoded for streaming.

[helius]

Blu-Ray is not the name of a video format, just a type of digital disc storage. The highest capacity per disc is 128 GB for BDXL recordable discs.

H.264 and H.265 are the video formats that are most used for high-resolution video content. H.265 provides about twice as much compression as H.264 or SMPTE 421M, with a data rate of 25 to 100 Mbits/s at 4K, 30 Hz video.

128 GB divided by 100 Mbit/s gives you 2 hours, 50 minutes of 4K video per disc. In practice the bitrate will be less for less complex scenes, so you can store more than 3 hours on a disc. There is no need for Sony to do anything, this is already possible using existing Blu-Ray drives and existing software.

[PlainName]

As someone notes above, Blueray was still-born because Sony determined to a) win the optical disk wars this time around, and b) milk it for every penny they could. The result was the need for new players and artificially high media and hardware costs. Personally, I am glad it's bit them in the arse and maybe next time they'll have second thoughts about having to be top dog.

I used to dump backups to DVD periodically for long-term storage, but that became impractical. The successor to DVD looked like it would continue the job, but then Sony spent many, many millions^[1] on stiffing that. I've never owned or used Blueray and instead found alternative storage, so even if HD-DVD made a comeback it's too late now.

--
[1] Sony's method was similar to asset strippers taking over companies. Typically, they will borrow against the company assets to acquire the dosh to make a buy-out, then repay the loan from the company. It costs them nothing but completely fucks their target, and they walk away with mucho wonga in the end. Sony basically gave away free Blueray players to saturate the market and funded that largesse by raising prices once the competition was done for. Basically, they made us pay for them taking over.

[helius]

From the above discussion you might think Blu-Ray drives were expensive, or exclusive to Sony.
You can find drives at less than $100 from LG and Pioneer at any computer retailer.

[PlainName]

Prices of Blueray drives have been coming down - they were definitely not cheap to start with, and $100 is quite a bit more than the $10 a writable DVD drive costs!

How about media costs? This is typical:



https://camelcamelcamel.com/Verbatim-BD-R-25GB-Branded-Surface/product/B00471HK0Q?context=search

Note that only 2 years ago they were $60. Blueray has been out for quite a bit longer than that, and the prices have only trended down. Do the maths.

[abraxa]

I'd like to see DVD format go ahead and die already as it has ovestayed its welcome by some 10 years, in my opinion

While I see your point from a A/V quality point of view, I absolutely refuse to spend any money on pre-recorded blu-ray media. The reason is copy protection. If I am not allowed to do with this media whatever is convenient to me and the few rights I do have as a consumer can be taken away at any moment for any reason, I simply refuse to take part in this. DVD is "open" in the sense that if I buy a DVD, I can copy it to my NAS and "own" the movie. Streaming services are even worse but the fact that they produce exclusive shows that other people in my household want to watch makes them much, much harder to avoid. I still do try, though I do begin to wonder if it's futile. The general masses love convenience and choice more than they value their own rights and freedoms.

[helius]

Prices of Blueray drives have been coming down - they were definitely not cheap to start with, and $100 is quite a bit more than the $10 a writable DVD drive costs!

I think most people would expect that a product with greater capability costs more.

Note that only 2 years ago they were $60. Blueray has been out for quite a bit longer than that, and the prices have only trended down. Do the maths.

Is that supposed to be supported by the graph? It covers 6 years, not 2. Two years ago, the line was around $24.

[timb]

I'd like to see DVD format go ahead and die already as it has ovestayed its welcome by some 10 years, in my opinion

While I see your point from a A/V quality point of view, I absolutely refuse to spend any money on pre-recorded blu-ray media. The reason is copy protection. If I am not allowed to do with this media whatever is convenient to me and the few rights I do have as a consumer can be taken away at any moment for any reason, I simply refuse to take part in this. DVD is "open" in the sense that if I buy a DVD, I can copy it to my NAS and "own" the movie. Streaming services are even worse but the fact that they produce exclusive shows that other people in my household want to watch makes them much, much harder to avoid. I still do try, though I do begin to wonder if it's futile. The general masses love convenience and choice more than they value their own rights and freedoms.

FYI, BluRay discs can be ripped if you know what you’re doing.

There was once a time when DVDs could only be played with official, authorized hardware and software players and digital ripping was impossible. It took three years before the CSS was cracked, and that’s only because DVDs used a weak form of 40-bit encryption, which even in 1999 could be brute forced fairly quickly.

Despite that, it still took until 2007 or so before it became space efficient and fast to rip and store DVDs, due mainly to software like Handbrake making it easy to transcode several gigs of MPEG-2 data into less than 1GB of MPEG-4 or H.264 video. By 2010 you could buy 2TB drives, so you didn’t even *need* to transcode the DVDs you ripped; you could literally copy the entire VIDEO_TS folder and have access to menus and special content, if you wanted to.

Hell, with Netflix’s 5 DVD plan, a 10TB NAS system (in RAID1 for redundancy) and about a year’s time, you could have just about every episode of every TV series you want stored away, your own local streaming service. Not that I’d recommend anyone do this, of course.

That’s the main issue with ripping a BD, storage space. It’s still not quite practical, unless you can throw some serious money into a NAS setup. You’d need hundreds of TB of online storage for any practical collection of 4k content (there’s no better, smaller format to transcode to, like there was with DVD ten years ago, for example).

[PlainName]

Is that supposed to be supported by the graph? It covers 6 years, not 2.

My mistake, sorry. I saw the 'Jan 15' and assumed a year, not spotting the much smaller a feinter print below 

[cdev]

For archival purposes - data as well as video, people need physical media to remain available.

Otherwise it becomes too easy to wipe out the past, wipe out knowledge.

[EEVblog]

I personally found DVD rather adequate for movies.  When DVD was new, I upgraded many of my VHS tapes to DVD version.  Seeing some of those movies on BlueRay disc in store-displays, I have not found the small incremental gain BlueRay has over DVD worth the extra $.

I remember watching Back To The Future on Bluray for the first time, the difference in detail was staggering!
I saw all new detail I'd never seen before.

[Halcyon]

When I buy a movie, I want it on a real, physical object that can't be taken away from me because I stop subscribing to a service, or the internet connection goes down somewhere between me and the server where the content is stored, or it otherwise becomes unavailable for some reason outside of my control.

I also want to be sure that it'll play continuously from start to finish, only stopping when I want to pause the action to get more popcorn or go for a p*ss. When I'm settled on the sofa with my wife, beer and cat, the last thing I want to do is get up to reboot some piece of network equipment.

Absolutely 100% agree. I want media that I can play when *I* feel like playing it, regardless if my NBN is down or not (which is a common occurrence). I can also keep it and play it forever and not be at the mercy of the streaming provider when they feel like making titles unavailable to free up some disk space on their servers. Physical media/rips stored on my NAS also guarantee it's 100% ad-free forever.

As a secondary thing, I enjoy the quality that Bluray brings. As Dave said, Back to the Future is a great example of what most people miss out on. Even on good quality rips, it's still not the same.

[Mr. Scram]

Absolutely 100% agree. I want media that I can play when *I* feel like playing it, regardless if my NBN is down or not (which is a common occurrence). I can also keep it and play it forever and not be at the mercy of the streaming provider when they feel like making title unavailable to free up some disk space on their servers. Physical media/rips stored on my NAS also guarantee it's 100% ad-free forever.

As a secondary thing, I enjoy the quality that Bluray brings. As Dave said, Back to the Future is a great example of what most people miss out on. Even on good quality rips, it's still not the same.

Welcome to the post 2015 era, where everything is a service and nothing is your own.

[Halcyon]

Welcome to the post 2015 era, where everything is a service and nothing is your own.

Yep! And I bloody hate it! Most rediculous thing ever (from a consumer point of view) but the companies are loving the on-going revenue stream.

Take Microsoft Office 365 for example, why on earth should a simple office suite of applications be a "service". I'll go back to an old-fashioned type writer long before I use any of that crap!

[aandrew]

From the above discussion you might think Blu-Ray drives were expensive, or exclusive to Sony.
You can find drives at less than $100 from LG and Pioneer at any computer retailer.

It's not about cost. It's about another bloody box on the cabinet that needs another damned remote to lose and most likely line of sight to the box to operate. It's about storing physical media, fingerprints on discs, kids stuffing the wrong disc into the wrong cover and user option overrides that make you watch the FBI warnings or in some cases entire trailers for movies ten years gone from public interest. It's about the eventual failure of the spindle motor or laser which requires a new unit to be purchased because you can't fix the damn things anymore seeing as parts are impossible to source, which means a new UI and remote to learn to use.

No thank you!

RAID6 in the basement running Plex, Chromecast plugged in behind the TV. Any phone or tablet or even laptop becomes the remote, one of which will be within arms reach since they're used for a lot of other things besides TV. Every movie I've ever owned is instantly available and searchable. No additional remote, no ugly box sitting on a shelf in plain view. The exact same access device (the Chromecast) lets me watch netflix or youtube or even home videos of Christmasses or birthdays past, all with the Exact. Same. Interface.

And it's $30. $30!

Physical media for entertainment is long dead. Broadcast and cable television is even deader and has been for much longer. Zero commercials. Zero ugly boxes. Zero shelf space. Zero hassles!

[BradC]

Regardless of how good a blu-ray is, you will NEVER be able to beat the quality of a high bitrate digital file on a hard drive.

I dunno. A good 70mm print will walk all over anything you have on your hard disk. Actually, a good 35mm print will also.