Over on their substack [ObsoleteSony] has a new article: The Last Disc: How Blu-ray Won the War but Lost the Future.
In this article the author takes us through the history of Blu-ray media and how under Sony’s stewardship it successfully defeated the competing format of the time, HD DVD. Sony started behind the eight ball but through some deft maneuvering managed to come out on top. Perhaps the most significant contributing factor was the inclusion of Blu-ray drives in the PlayStation 3.
The person leading the Blu-ray initiative for Sony was Masanobu Yamamoto, whose legacy was the compact disc. What was needed was a personal media format which could deliver for high-definition 1080p video. As the DVD format did not have the storage capacity required, new formats needed to be developed. The enabling technology for both Blu-ray and HD DVD media was the blue laser as it allowed for more compact encoding.
Sony’s Blu-ray format became the dominating format for high-definition personal media…just as physical media died.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for writing in about this one.
I’d love to see commercial physical media get more love.
plenty of love for physical media in Japan. Tower Records is alive and well over there, with over 60 locations.
And there are a bunch of second hand record stores from chains like disk union to small stores.
Not to mention HARD OFF which is absolutely crazy. I got a LD player And like 10 LDs in Japan for under $80
There’s an admittedly small but very passionate community of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray fans out there! Check out Reddit and blu-ray.com (unofficial site).
A 4K UHD BR disc absolutely blows the doors off the quality you get from the low bit rate 4K stream on Netflix and Friends.
I am collecting High Definition Audio Blu-ray! Dolby Atmos, some remixed Quad, and remastered classic rock. Dolby True HD format is lossless and stunning.
I recall some vague memories about blue ray being delayed a few years due to patent issues around blue lasers. Apparently the royalties were deemed too high. But I never knew any details.
After I saw that DVD had non skippable intro’s, and accuses everybody who bought and played a disk of piracy I simply refused to buy into the format. And that attitude suck around with the blue ray players.
Always made me angry that my DVD’s included this but “my friend’s” pirated movies didn’t.
A couple times I rented a movie, burned a copy explicitly so I could ignore the unskippable ads at the front, and then broke and threw away the copy. Dumb, but so satisfying.
Here in the Netherlands it’s always been legally allowed to make a personal copy of rented music or video’s.
This also reminds me of the VHS tape days. I once rented a movie, and then I got an unexpected visit from a nephew that same evening, so I did not have time to watch the movie before I had to return it the next day, so I attempted to make a copy, with no other intention then to watch the movie once after the rented tape had been returned. But it did not work because of macrovision. So short term, I paid for a movie I could not watch. I was still quite young back then and it was yet another moment to realize, that if they don’t play fair, then why should I?
Benn Jordan has been a musician and recording studio owner and has made several video’s over the “entertainment industry”.
In one of his video’s, he “accidentally” found out his music was being sold via itunes, had to go through a lot of trouble just to find out which company actually collected his royalties, and by the time he finally got around to claiming his royalties, the company was bought up by Sony and his money was “gone”. I’m not sure if this story is also in the video below, but Benn Jordan has got plenty more to say about “Riding the Gravy Train” (Pink Floyd, Have a Cigar, 1975. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_Cigar ).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ
So anybody, please tell me where I can download a car and a house. What about downloading a girlfriend?
Tell me,if I buy a car did I need also to pay for every kilometer passed and monthly fee? No,the car is already MY and I can do with it whenever I want .Also, if I made one car did I all my life get royalty from it and no need of made another car?Or I need to make car sell it,make new car,sell or to live from one car forever .Also why when both copyrights and patents are both Intellectual property copyrights are free to apply,protected by the state and last 70 years after author dead,patents are paid,need to be protected by your self and last 10-12 years (mostly ).When patents and not rights drive progress of humanity ,of there no patents we will be still in the caves and have no any art for rights .
I’m glad that commercial 4K/UHD blu-rays (films etc) and matching BD drives are still being produced.
As long as the required production fascilities are available there could be a re-vival for optical media.
Who knows what the may future hold.
If BDs with great storage capacity are invented eventually,
they may become an alternative to flash storage again.
Especially as companion media for books, those CDs, DVDs or BDs are more economical than SD cards.
They also are less likely have “bit rot” if well produced. Flash cells age.
If we’re thinking in 25, 50 or 75 time frames then that’s important.
(Yes, I did have read some companion disks of computer books from the late 80s.
They were 5,25″ floppies, over 30 years old at the time and still readable.
So it’s not too far fetched too assume that people in 2055 or 2075 do have a BD drive and an similar interest into software archeology.
They might be interested in a physical copy/snapshot of Wikipedia from 2025, from the time before the great AI crysis and information wars.)
Also, in certain fields, true read-only media are more secure than flash storage, also.
Because they can’t be used to secretly transport information away from workplace.
That’s why Audio CDs and discmen are still sought after there.
From a security point of view they’re harmless by comparison.
There are reports that DVDs manufactured 15 or 20 years ago are rotting already. Maybe a bad batch, maybe cutting corners.
The issue with BD for data is that unlike CD and DVD readers, there was no push for faster drives as use case in the PC area was replaced with CF and SD cards and USB pen drives. BDs in videogame consoles are so slow all data needs to be copied over to hard disk (MGS4 in PS3 was painful). Anything DVD related, including mastering software and blank disks, was dirt cheap. I cannot tell the same for BDs. A blank BD may cost the same as 50 blank DVDs
IMHO, a lot of focus away from the genius behind both DVD and Blue Ray, Masanobu Yamamoto.
I wish Apple, too, was headed by Steve Wozniak and not by Steve Jobs, but it was what it was, iPad was the last revolutionary/noticeable invention Apple had, and basically not much more since.
Never bought any BlueRays, btw. Why? Because the players I looked at were pricey (plus all the additional extras paid buying the disks themselves), and I figured meanwhile might as well stock up on them dirt cheap DVDs coming off closed rental places for pennies.
IMOHO, SOny royally screwed up by making BR players incompatible with HD DVD. Monopoly-shmonopoly, if it is not backward compatible, people like me will just wait out and see what happens next. I waited and ripping arrived, so there, logical answer to any deep-entrenched monopoly of any kind.
If I recall, there were some combo units but they didn’t stay on the market long (and were pricey)
Wasn’t there a copy of Power DVD 7.x that could play both BDs and HD DVDs?
It wasn’t just a software issue. You also needed a dual format drive to actually read the media.
Yes, I have one of the lg combo drives and had the power dvd 7 software back then (limited version came with the drive, I bought a full license), but they dropped hddvd support from newer versions even if you had the licence for the hddvd version :( These days I just use makemkv to rip them, but you miss out on the original menus.
There was a combo player made by Samsung ( BD-UP3000 is the model # if not mistaken ) for both formats along with the LG drives for the PC ( I have the player and 2 of the drives ). I copied all of the HDDVD’s that I have a long time ago for my personal use on my HTPC. I keep the physical copies just in case if I wanted/needed to make another copy in the future.
Samsung made combo BD/HD-DVD players. I have one.
“IMOHO, SOny royally screwed up by making BR players incompatible with HD DVD.”
On other hand, I’ve never seen a VHS and Video 2000 combo VCR either.. ;)
Seriously, though. They were competing standards, it’s no wonder.
One used Java technology, the other one Java Script.
The laser wavelenght was a bit different, too.
These players had to cheat to play back CD/DVD already (had to squint; 650 nm/780 nm).
Because the red laser wavelenghts weren’t exactly compatible with the blue/violet laser beam (405 nm).
Optical tricks or a secondary laser were to provide backwards compatibility.
And that’s just the technical side.
Licensing fees and region code locks made things more difficult.
To this day, the regional code for DVD and BD must be selected separately.
For DVD, it’s in the drive firmware foremost (except RPC-1 drives which are free). For BD, it’s in the player software.
At the end of the day, it’s better to have separate players that do their job properly.
Also, DVD players don’t check a list for a kill switch.
BD players do. They check the BDs and deactivate/brick themselves if they suddenly read their own ID in the black list stored on a recent BD.
In principle, at least. Not sure if BDs really ship with such a list.
But the concept as such exists to my knowledge.
Probably as a final measure to protect HD/UHD content.
Speaking under correction here.
Blu-ray didn’t have to be “backwards compatible” with HD DVD, neither Blu-ray nor HD DVD had existed long enough in the market for either of them to be considered a well-established “backwards” (legacy) format like DVD.
Also, the DVD Forum isn’t an organisation like ISO, it’s a private company like the Blu-ray Disc Association, and they both impose weird regional lockout requirements on players to be given licensed access to the DRM.
Why bother? The amount of content released on HD DVD was miniscule compared to Blu Ray, and basically anyone who had any interest in HD DVD already owned a player to play it. At best, Sony would have to spend a lot developing support for a feature essentially nobody would use. There is no upside for them in it.
There were some combo Blu-ray / HD-DVD’players made. I have a blu-ray recorder drive that also plays HD-DVD’s
I fear the day, when something unforeseen happens and we might lose the data centers or access to them. Our civilization is moving to a form of stored knowledge that is highly decentralized on depending on third parties. Once those parties are gone, so are our repositories of knowledge (and entertainment).
In the past, we have learned from long gone civilizations by finding remnants of physically store knowledge (i.e. books, tablets, art, etc). But what will remain, if the data centers we rely so much are gone? Can any of us walk into a semi destroyed data center and find usable data belonging to him/her? Probably heavily encrypted, overly distributed and with what leftover technology will we be able to restore it?
Physical media is important, and in particular personal physical media we can actually own and use.
The companies owning your data and our shared knowledge, can eventually charge you $$$ indefinitely, or blackmail you for the data the keep for you.
The convenience of data centers is undeniable, but the future holds a scary surprise when, and if, those are ever lost.
We, the world, are losing ownership of knowledge and property when it comes to digital information and digitally stored knowledge
Even at the home level. Many people’s motto is ‘store your data’ in the ‘cloud’ . I at least like to keep mine spinning locally and physically off-site. I like my paper bound books, but I see some people download and read on their readers… So, you are right. It is a problem.
I’d store my data on write once/read many physical media if it was practical. But 25GB/50GB Blu-Ray is just to little space. Last time I backed up our family pictures on that medium it took 20 disks or so. And it was slow. Instead, I now backup on portable Terabyte HDDs. HDDs are not quite as ‘durable’ but are faster and a lot more space available…
So the only way society would adopt a new physical media is if it was cheap, fast, and lots of space available. Right now, that simply isn’t practical. Think we are just going to have to except the fact of non-physical storage medium is the norm going forward.
The days of spinning disc media write once read many are likely dead. Im not sure I would trust spinning rust HDs to replace them. Too many moving parts as potential failure points. Flash media is probably going to be the best bet. Buy a 2TB SSD today, archive your data on it, put it away in a safe. Should be good till the next generation of SSDs come about. Say in a decade we have 2PB SSDs, migrate all your data from the 2TB SSD to the 2PB SSD. This prevents bit rot as the SSD ages.
Maybe, but servers do use physical storage media, too.
What seems to be “the cloud” is just someone’s else computer.
In certain fields, high-end tape streamers and their tapes are being used, even.
They’re high-capacity media, surpassing both HDD and SSD storage by many magnitudes.
Thing is, someone is ‘paying’ to keep your data on a server in the cloud. Unlike a book, were it just sits on a shelf. Or CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray… Ie. It costs money to keep data spinning. Some one, some entity, must ‘pay’ to keep the data. It costs money to connect to the net to keep your access to the data…. Otherwise there is no reason to keep data around as it is just a drain on data center bottom line. Ie. In a sense, it is ‘not’ really physical medium in the sense of how it is used for this article.
It costs money to keep a book on a shelf too.
For example, let’s say I pay $20 a month per square meter in rent for my apartment. My bookshelf takes 1 square meters and holds 200 books, 300 pages each. Every page contains about 4 kB of data for a total of 240 MB for the whole shelf.
$20 for 240 MB of storage every month is a lot of money as far as hosting services go.
“It costs money to keep a book on a shelf too.”
Sure, but once we start thinking that way I think we’re messing up our own personality beyond repair.
By that logic, pets and people will be suddenly counted same ways (“bye bye, grandma, you take up too much valuable space!).
Or, we could charge overweight people more money for the monthly rent of their home.
Because their weight will put more stress on the structure of the whole house or the floor.
We could also start applying taxes for breathing oxygen, too, because people consume it – thus degrading air quality.
Then we’re on Spaceballs level in terms of satire, but for real this time. ;)
Not really… no one is paying to serve torrents. You don’t need cloud, just people sharing what they like.
Note, my hedge is just to keep my data spinning locally with good HDD (or whatever is the current tech) backups. That will be good enough in my lifetime. No one will ready care about that data after a generation passes. I guess what I am saying I am at peace with this not having CDs/DVDs/Blu-Ray backups/archives for my use.
But archiving for posterity, general knowledge and historical events is another story. And keeping historical events objective, without changing it (it is, after all, in digital form), deleting it, or slanting it, recoloring it, adding color, reformatting it is another story entirely…
“I fear the day, when something unforeseen happens and we might lose the data centers or access to them. Our civilization is moving to a form of stored knowledge that is highly decentralized on depending on third parties. Once those parties are gone, so are our repositories of knowledge (and entertainment).”
Fear not, there are physical archives in very safe places, such as mountains and mines.
About every nation has a reservoir of such kind, as far as I know.
They’re containing copies of news papers and books on micro films, copies of audio and video material etc.
So at least the classics will be preserved for sure (multiple times).
Nowadays, they’re also hording digital media and playback devices.
They’re using file formats such as PDF/A, which are designed for archival purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
So in case of atomic war or natural desasters, something will remain.
As long as future people will remain be able to read and speak our languages, they will be able to rediscover our culture.
That being said, everyone of us can help preserving.
Not instantly throwing away old backup CDs/DVDs or HDDs is a start.
Things such as old Flash games or websites sometimes remained in browser caches, for example.
Keeping cover disks of PC magazines might help, too.
Instead of throwing them away, let’s just put them in a little cardboard box in attic, barn, cellar etc. :)
There’s a reason internet archive had a collecton of “shovelware” CD-ROMs and floppies (shareware/freeware discs).
These media unintentionally have become time capsules of the 90s (and 80s).
i still use cds and dvds as a distribution media, even if both endpoints are computers. but i’ve never seen a blu ray irl. i mean, surely i must have seen them on store shelves or something. but i’ve certainly never put one in my drive. not sure if i would expect it to work or not. definitely like the article says, winning dominance in a dying market
in other news, i still watch everything 720p.
I am ‘ok’ with just using thumb drives and portable drives. Thumb drives are a ‘cheap’ medium for distribution when necessary. Just recently, I copied a directory of model airplane plans on a $7 Sandisk thumb drive to give to another builder. Copy/Paste/Eject done.
this is the only thing i think cloud storage is useful for. even the flash drive is kind of clunky. i keep a few around for installing operating systems that i cant pxe boot. but i dont remember the last time i moved files around on one.
I collect physical media again because it is mine. It can’t be altered, or removed from my library and the picture quality is better than streaming.
2 things contributed to BD’s success:
1.Blockbuster’s decision to choose BD over HDDVD when they were still somewhat relevant. 2. BD’s promise of scratch resistance. Up to that point It was infuriating trying to watch a rental DVD just for it to freeze or skip due to scratches on the disc. I think Sony knew this and used it to their advantage.
to be fair optical drives are clunky and im not really sad to see them go. i do miss owning physical media, but i do like just having a drm-file i can back up to whatever media i want. its too bad the only place i can get that is the pirate bay.
One aspect of the HD DVD vs Blu-ray fight was that Blu-ray used Java and HD DVD I believe used Javascript instead. You have to know that at the time Microsoft was in an all out war to kill Java so it was pretty easy to guess which side they were going to take.
While I generally agree with the article there’s a missing part of the history. Sony lost the VHS BetaMax war previously not because of technical reasons, but it’s often said it was in no small part due to their staunch moral refusal to allow porn on their format. When it came to Bluray vs HD DVD they quietly dropped that objection. Although it receives little fanfare, had they not done so it’s very possible they would have lost again.
On a mostly unrelated note, during the mid to late 2000’s in broadcast media Sony’s HDCam SR tape was the defacto standard. Unlike the previous HDcam generation Sony never licensed the format to other tape manufacturers (Fuji, Maxell etc.) so were the sole maker. At one point they had three plants around the world, but for whatever reason decided to shutter 2 and bring all manfacture home to the plant in Japan.
At the time everyone knew that file based media was going to be the way of the future. It was already taking hold at the consumer end, but the much higher data rates for broadcast quality (SR was 880 Mbits/s) were much more of a challenge and still fairly unproven in comparison, none of the broadcasters were ready to upend years of working practice and fortunes in equiptment investment. Just after decommisioning two of the only 3 tape factories a tsunami hit Japan wiping out the only remaining factory. It was estimated that it might be up to 2 years before normal service would be resumed, and the remaining tape stock started to go for ridiculous prices as companies panicked.
This singular act probably accelerated the shift to file based media in broadcast by years.
This is a myth. You could get porn on Beta.
VHS won because it was possible to put more video time on a tape. From the start, VHS was 6 hours, and for a while Beta was less than 2. Even when Beta recorders finally allowed a long playing version, it was still less than 6 hours.
Most people really didn’t care that much about the small quality difference. If they had cared, U-matic would have won.
The other reason VHS won is that JVC (the creators of VHS) made it easy for anyone to get a license to produce a VHS VCR and charged low license fees for it whereas Sony was restrictive and proprietary with Betamax.
I don’t know if the linked article mentions it but the nail in HD-DVD’s coffin was Sony spending a couple of billion dollars in bribes to get a couple of major players to switch formats.
Yeah, that was a crazy move.
I wonder what the canceled Toshiba presentation about new HD DVD would have been about.
Didn’t those pay off deals in terms of disc manufacturing get announced at some major trade show right before HD DVD was also going to make a major progress announcement, but instead the format was basically cancelled?
Sad day for Toshiba and Microsoft.
Personally, I don’t think that’s so tragic, at all. HD-DVD had existed once, after all.
It was allowed to live, if we will. No matter how short that time was.
Meanwhile, the blu-ray disc is the superior medium, it caused the optical drive industry to evolve one more time.
If the format war of BD vs HD-DVD had lasted any longer..
Who knows if that had put an end to both formats or optical media in general?
I mean, the blue-violet laser technology still has potential.
It is worth not to be given up upon so soon.
If HD-DVD had won, who knows if blue laser technology ever had made it due to the increasingly competing flash technology.
The loss of HD-DVD also saved the DVD, maybe.
The ordinary DVD didn’t become obsolete, but remained the leader of the red laser technology and SD video material.
Because of this relevance, BD players are still backwards compatible with red laser formats such as:
DVD, Audio DVD, Super Audio CD, Audio CD, MP3 CD, DIVX/XVID discs, Video CD, Super Video CD etc.
HD DVD’s authoring format was far more straightforward and affordable to create discs, but the media surface durability was far inferior to Blu-ray’s almost miracle surface.
Wish that HD authoring would have survived but with the BD disc coatings.
Physical media is not going away. Streaming sites does have benefit like not having to devote a large shelf to my 4,000 disc collection but there are drawbacks. Some streaming sites don’t carry everything, I can’t find (for example) “Not Quite Human”, “Nelvanamation II”, and the series “Unhappily Ever After”, or the numerous Japanese anime that doesn’t have US streaming rights yet. I am not going to subscribe to 287 different services just to cover about 90% of the video I like to watch and there’s that 10% that are simply not streaming at all either due to being old, obscure, or screwed up rights.
Also some sites may occasionally drop a few movies when license are transferred elsewhere. I was in the middle of Star Trek movies rewatch when it vanished off Paramount+ list, I had to go to Youtube to finish the movies.
What about movies you buy to view online (ie on Amazon or Youtube)? They can go away any time and you won’t get refunded. No one can take away my DVD and 4K UHD collection because the rights changed hand. Finally upon my death, my collection can be worth something while digital purchases can’t be resold and most services frown on account sales.
I was one who jumped from DVD directly to streaming. I’m not even sure I’ve ever even watched one Blueray at someone’s house or something. I was streaming everything by about 2007 and the rest is history.
That’s okay. Both DVDs and BDs are on sale, also.
Having both isn’t bad. Sometimes, the SD material is of better quality, even, because it had been digitized/scanned before the film reels started to deteriorate.
Sailor Moon series is such a popular case, I think. The colors now have a pink tone.
In prior VHS or DVD releases, the colors were still correct.
Another thing is bad upscaling or aspect ratio.
Some DVDs have preserved the original 4:3 format of a TV series,
wheras cheaply made BDs have them cut into 16:9 format.Which means loss of viewing area.
Other way round also exists, some BDs have preserved the original widescreen format of a TV series.
Thus, they provide the real experience first time as it was planned when the series was shot, but never made it on free TV.
In my personal opinion, both formats have their purpose.
DVD is okay for SD material that used to be available on VHS or Laserdisc.
BD is fine for movie fans who like to watch their beloved films and series in a decent quality.
I would even go so far that VCRs and CRT monitors still have their place.
Because there are niche movies and TV documentaries that never got a DVD release in first place.
Having a VCR in storage for archival purposes thus is a good thing.
DVD/VHS combo devices make conversion easy, for example.
Likewise, CRT video monitors or CRT TVs do make a good job at displaying PAL/NTSC-based SD material stored on video cassette, Laserdisc or VCD/DVD.
They handle the right color space and the humble shadow mask of an average CRT acts as an anti-aliasing filter.
There’s no de-interlacing necessary, also, which improves smoothness.
The Commodore 1084 or 1701/1702 is really good for such an application.
I think the biggest miss with bluray is not just the region locking but not having any computer playback support. MakeMKV is not blurry playback you have to copy the whole disc then play those files. I am talking about like just plug in a drive and navigate on the menu. They had some stuff locked to intel’s encryption ,but that is long dead. So, you don’t have a legit way to just put a disc in and play. Streaming is not just easy because it is instant ,but because it plays on every device. A lot of people don’t have tvs so they can’t play blurays.
“I think the biggest miss with bluray is not just the region locking but not having any computer playback support.”
There was support, Power DVD 7/8 onwards allowed BD playback.
However, advent of 4K/UHD material introduced content protection.
Power DVD required an x86 processor with special support (intel SGX?)
Such processors are now being discontinued and new releases of Power DVD nolonger support UHD playback.
Also, software-based BD players had to download new certificates from time to time.
Otherwise, new BDs couldn’t be played back anymore.
Standalone BD players don’t have this restrictions.
Also, they’re not very big. Why not have them next to your PC/Mac on the desk?
They’re barely bigger than an external USB BD/DVD drive and PC monitors have multiple digital inputs, anyway.
As a side effect, they make for a nice Android computer.
They often can run Android Apps, use USB mouse/keyboard etc.
Using a KVM for BD Player/PC makes sense. :)
What i found very astounishing is that there’s no physical storage agnostic replacement for the interactive layer of DVD or BR (menus, chapters…). You can maybe make an ISO file of a DVD or BR image, but not so much softwares will allow you to play it and render everything correctly, and even less (if at all?) hardware player (like BR player, TV set, Apple TV or any kind of streaming, IPTV or whatever kind of set top box). BR menu support is really poor in VLC.
Of course, Netflix, AppleTV+, Amazon and all have their own proprietary software to present video content with nice interactive user interfaces, but (to my knowledge) there’s no solution to have your own content available with interactivity and stored on a USB key, SSD, cloud…
I was able to use Cyberlink Power DVD 3 and Power DVD XP on Windows XP SP2 inside and Virtual PC 2004/2007 and it did play back movies on physical DVDs.
Having an region-free RPC-1 drive was helpful, too, I think. ;)
Unfortunately, not all software players are that cool.
WinDVD and the DVD player application on Mac OS X (Power PC age) are not as tolerant, maybe.
Especially the latter takes region codes very serious and keeps track of the number of changes of region codes.
Normally, it’s merely the drive itself which refuses to continue to accept a new region code after a number of changes.
Speaking under correction, it’s been years since I fiddled with this matter.
What I meant to say was that old Power DVD didn’t complain about the “virtual” CD/DVD ROM drive.
While I’ve used a physical DVD for playback, the physical DVD drive had to be passed-through by the VM software.
So the emulated PATA interface or the communications link between VM and its host was good enough here.
So it might also been possible to run a very good CD/DVD drive emulator instead.
Either on host side or in the VM itself.
Something in the lines of Daemon Tools, maybe?
Also, Windows 98SE allowed some low-level access and trickery via VXD..
And both Power DVD 3 and XP ran on Windows 9x, too. Up to Power DVD 6, I believe.
blu-rays are still fairly superior to streaming, i’m still buying them regularly. Nothing beats blu-ray 4k right now.
I disagree with the end of [ObsoleteSony]’s article when he says: “Now, the sharpest picture often comes from the cloud. The clearest signal is convenience.”
4K UHD BR are specified to support a max bitrate of up to 144 Mbits/s, when streaming usually max out at 30 to 40 Mbits/s peak.
Of course, quality also depends on the codec used, but the bitrate gap is huge here.
+1
The bit rate of UHD BDs is simply unmatched.
There’s no dire need to limit bandwidth on a physical medium, after all.
A streaming service always has to save bandwidth for maximum profits, though.
And no one’s mentioning the superior sound quality by a disc
4k blu rays are the only way to see movies in real 4K. Streamed 4K is a lie. If a movie isn’t using about 100 megabits a second, it’s not worth watching.
I like MILF genre but following the same logic one can say that if an actress in adult movie is over 14 years old, it’s not worth watching.
High resolution crap is still crap.
I’d rather watch a low resolution version of a good movie than a high resolution version of a shitty movie.
There’s a hell of a lot of high resolution crap being produced these days.
Why not watch a high resolution version of a good movie?
So many older movies shot on film that got a good remaster and 4K BR disc release look absolutely fantastic.
I have Space: 1999 on BD! 😃
And Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on UHD BD..
Because.. culture and such. 😅
Seriously, though – Space: 1999 looks really fine in HD. Silent Running, too.
I can finally see some details of the background props, for example.
That being said, I wouldn’t throw away the SD media, either.
Doesn’t hurt having both DVD and BD. For your favorite movies, at least.
The extras and the voice actors for the dubs might be different.
DVD releases used to have more foreign audio tracks, also.
or go to a cinema…
Hi there! I’d love to! But then please a pretty, snuggly, little vintage cinema from 20th century.
Modern cinemas are so large and antiseptic. Makes me feel lost somehow.
It’s like buying croceries in a large super market with a gigantic parking lot,
when you’re used to cycle to a small corner shop for your whole life.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the reason Blu-Ray won the battle is the same reason VHS won over Beta, the porn industry decided to go with VHS back in the 80’s and then Blu-Ray in the early 2000’s.
Porn providers sold whatever people would buy. Those providers didn’t care; it wasn’t that expensive to have machines of both varieties.
Most people bought VHS machines. Because there were more people with VHS machines than Beta machines, there were more people buying VHS porn.
I remember going in a Tower store; there was an area well over 100 feet by 100 feet selling video tapes. Near the center of the store was an isolated section no bigger than 10 feet by 8 feet where all the porn was shelved. There was no way that less than 1% of the shelf area was driving the video market.
People claiming that porn drove the format decision are promoting a perverted view of humanity.
Not just VHS vs Betamax, there also was Video 2000 (in Europe)..
You spelled bribes wrong.
“through some deft maneuvering managed to come out on top. Perhaps the most significant contributing factor was”
The most significant contributing factor was that they BRIBED studios to release movies on Blu-ray.
No one company should own any specifications like this.
HD-DVD was backed by a consortium of companies, as all things of the sort should be (when they can’t be straight up public standards like internet RFCs) – so that the motive behind it is not profit, and so no one body has unbalanced and unchecked control.
I was there, 3000 years ago, when we fought this war.
As my bitterness indicates, I was very invested in the losing side.
The majority of people that have DVDs and nothing else are either minimalists that could care less for bit rate and quality because that dont see it or know anything about it or BluRays weren’t available at the time. It’s really sad to see clueless and ignorant people choose streaming services over a physical copy cuz its easier. In some cases, thats understandable, but streaming is a quarter of the quality that physical gives you. Streaming gives you half the bitrate, a media library locked behind an account, and a greedy payment scheme to keep you extra locked in. The majority of viewers to this day still watch in 1080p which makes sense. The economy isn’t great. I’m sure anyone who could be rich together would start having fun more often with the high end stuff…like 4K UHD BluRays
I still have an extensive DVD collection that I can play back on my desktop PC. VLC makes playback so easy and it doesn’t care about un-skippable crap and other stuff.
And DVDs can be a cheap option as well. I bought every season box set of Breaking Bad from a big charity book sale a while back, cost me less than buying the whole series box set new and cost me a lot less than a subscription to whatever streaming service Breaking Bad is on for as long as it would have taken to watch through it all. And I can get things that just aren’t available on streaming.