12mo ago

How long til Blu-rays get phased out

Basically just the title. With DVDs getting tossed to the wind it made me wonder when will blu-rays go? I'm gonna miss bloopers and extra scenes

Edit: A bit confused but the general consensus is that in some areas BRs have already began to be phased out while in others they're just trucking along perfectly fine. It'll be that way until they stop being profitable to the studios who make them. Is that correct? I don't think the 8k argument is valid imo since that's really niche currently.

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I foresee them making a comeback as more and more people realize that streaming services are terrible.
- Media-bound formats are even more terrible though. File-based ones are much superior for longevity.
  
  Agree that video files burned on blu ray would be ideal :D
  Jokes aside: physical, unchangeable media do make sense imo.
- But the people who release BRs are either the same people selling streaming subscriptions, or will be bought up by them. For example, Disney is no longer releasing BRs anymore.
  
  Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
  Unless I can buy a BluRay, I’m not paying for a movie.
- Cable TV definitely phased out until streaming came alone.
  What can be better than streaming for the general public? Most will just subscribe to every service anyway.
  
  As piracy becomes easier, I’d imagine piracy will be the best option for the general public. At least until streaming services offer a better alternative.

Keep your physical media. Don't be Charlie Brown assuming the football will be there every time.
- Better yet, digitally back up your physical media in multiple locations because no media lasts forever, especially optical Media.
- There are problems with physical medium as well. My father and I enjoy physical CDs, in my opinion they are the best. Yet my father's collection is over 20 years old so disks are degrading. My collection was destroyed during a house break in, they threw them on the floor and stomped on them, fucking hooligans. So I stopped with physical media such as CDs due to this
  
  Long term storage hasn’t improved since tape drives

The most realistic answer is - as long as movie studios deem it to be profitable to continue releasing them. I think there will always be niche companies like Criterion that will release physical media. I mean, vinyl LPs are still being produced to this day, so really it’s all about demand.
Personally, I am surprised that DVD format has lasted as long as it has, in regards to current technology. The majority of TVs available today are 4K, to which 4K UHD Blu-rays match the native resolution. 4K UHD is 4x the resolution of a standard Blu-ray(1080p), which are over 4x the resolution of DVDs (480p). So, they are really quite outdated/obsolete unless you still have an older 1080p or 720p TV and have a good player with upscaling.
- I still remain unconvinced that 4k is really all that hot though. I prefer projecting onto my living room wall and anything above 1080 is pretty much imperceptibly different at a distance... Most families have a similar distance setup and 4k isn't anything but a label at that distance.
  Large 4k monitors that you're going to sit right in front of can definitely be appreciated but for movies I think 4k is already over the retina density.
  
  Try making a Microsoft Paint image with a single pixel wide line, and then offset it by one pixel halfway through. Then put that up and see how far back you need to sit to see the break merge into a single line.
  There's also some interesting tricks that emulator writers are working on for using those extra pixels to make more CRT-like effects on modern displays.
  
  You just haven't seen a great 4k Samsung tv with a movie on 4k Blu-ray that was actually native 4k and not upscaled. If you did you wouldn't be saying this right now. https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD-ripping-service/the-real-or-fake-4K-list/
- DVD is "good enough" for a lot of people.
  Especially when you factor in the distance/screen size ratios that the average house uses (and that not everyone is watching with perfect vision).
  Also, good quality SD content, shot on good lenses, still looks pretty damned good. Sure, you're not going to get the same level of fine detail.
  My Name Is Earl is a good example of this.
- So DVD 1080 torrents are upscaled? I didn't realize DVDs were so low resolution.
  
  NTSC formatted DVD is 720x480
  PAL formatted DVD is 720x576
  
  It blows my mind that the 28 year old DVD format (720x480 resolution) is still being sold and consumed. I can walk into my local Walmart today and at least 40% of disks including brand new movies are on DVD. They look noticeably worse on even HD TVs (1920x1080) and no amount of fancy upscaling is going to make them look good on modern 4K UHD TVs (3840x2160).
  
  Yup. They’re ancient tech. Basically two cds stacked on top of each other.

BluRay has evolved a few times since being released. The storage capacity keeps going up, which allows for 4K & 3D discs to be made.
DVD got replaced because it couldn't hit the 1K mark. There was SuperBit DVDs, but they didn't catch on. The picture size was still limited to 720p.
BluRay still has a lot of life left in it. It will be a long time before the market demands 8K recordings. And will there even be physical media for movies and TV by then?
- On the other hand BluRay really came too late to become popular as a data storage medium. Outside movie enthusiasts there aren't really a lot of users of the format so player hardware will likely not benefit from corporate customers as much to extend its lifetime.
- DVDs were also commonly used as external data storage prior to flash storage becoming the predominant method. Anyone still have their spindle of dvds with a Win XP backup lying around?
  Blu-ray doesn't have that advantage. The only major commercial applications it has been used for is movies and games, and games are already breeching the size that even a 4k blu-ray can hold, and have long since required faster data transfer speeds than blu-ray is capable of(this is why even with physical games, the game has to be installed to the console)
- Why not just put the movies on a SD card? The price is similar and the card is smaller. That's what games do now, right?
  
  Retention, or the lack thereof, when cold-stored.
  In term of SD or standard NAND, not even Nintendo does that. Nintendo builds Macronix XtraROM in their Game Card, which is some proprietary Flash memory with claimed 20 year cold storage retention. And they introduced the 64 GB version only after a lengthy delay, in 2020. So it seems that the (lack of) cold storage performance of standard NAND Flash is viewed by some in the industry as not ready for prime time. Macronix discussed it many years back in a DigiTimes article: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120713PR201.html.
  And Sony and Microsoft are both still building Blu-ray-based consoles.
- DVDs had a maximum resolution of 576p. The Superbit DVDs by Sony were DVDs that had no extras so that they could use the entire space on the disc to maximise the bitrate. I think this was only beneficial to those with very large TVs.
- I’m guessing the eventual outcome for the niche market of people who want to own physical copies of media will be some form of flash storage—which seems a better option all around versus a fragile optical disk.
  
  Optical disks might be fragile but cheap flash storage (like USB sticks) is much more fragile than that.
- I'm still wondering why PC videogames weren't ever released on Blu Ray, installing 120GB off a Blu Ray is much less annoying than having to download the same amount.
  
  The norm is to download several 30, 60 or even 120GB updates afterwards. You then end up with an inconvenient DRM disc that has to be inserted for your game to run. When instead you could buy it online, download it just like you would've ended up doing and then never have to worry about damaging a Blu-ray disc.
  Don't get me wrong, I love physical copies of games... But in the era of never ending updates, live service games, indie games, and games broken at launch, I definitely understand why most of us don't prefer them anymore.
  
  That would require computers to still have Blu-ray drives as default
  
  How would the game companies profit from releasing fully complete and mostly bug free games on BluRay? Without a profit motivation it will never happen.

They are coming back like vinyl. Zoomers are realizing streaming plarforms can pull the plug
- It occurs to me that I could totally put a short movie on a vinyl record. It would display "buffering" for quite a while though.
  
  The concept of vinyl still blows my mind... The fact that you can recreate every possible combination of sounds and etch it in grooves on a thin piece of plastic, then you can drag a needle across those grooves to hear the sound combinations again...
  How does a person even create something like that? It's mind blowing.
  
  There was the Japanese VHD (Video High Density) that was kind of that. https://youtu.be/fCWLaAwr3sM
  
  Theoretically you could get it with little to no buffering by writing an analog TV signal to the disk, no?

I'm eagerly awaiting the demise of Blu-Ray so I can finally get use of my HD-DVD player.
- Nah, HD-VMD is gonna make a big comeback I tell ya
  
  How about those Universal Media Discs (UMDs) used on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the PlayStation Portable

From where I sit physical media is experiencing a huge surge in popularity. So I think bluray is here to stay, and will see more usage in the coming years.

They are hardly anywhere now.. Best Buy is phasing out their remaining physical movie sections this year.
- That makes sense, to be fair. Movie catalogs are more of a "long tail" product. It's not economical to stock 1000s of titles in 100s of locations, but it's a crappy shopping experience if they only have a few titles. So, even those who do still buy physical media won't frequent Best Buy for them.

You just made me notice that my laptop doesn't even have a DVD.
- It's why god invented external drives. :)

I'm going to assume you understand the most basic principals of our mode of production, so I'll give you an educated guess as to when, not why, since that's the question you asked.
In 2034, if we follow the DVD timeline. However if it's the only remaining physical media used by distributors, I'd guess it lasts decades longer.
I hope we graduate (or revert, depending on how you look at it) to tape, as collectors would be better off with a medium that's built to last.
- Why do you say Blu ray isn't made to last compared to tape? I would think it was the reverse
  
  Oh, you're right. I looked it up and some of these archival blu-rays are claiming they can outlast tape, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  Now I'm going to have to look at what an M-DISC burner would cost and compare it to my aws glacier bill.
- Oh D-VHS, we didn't deserve you.

Yesterday I was happy to own lots of Blurays because my internet was down.

The problem is that the market isn't there to phase them out. Streaming and digital purchases have filled in most of the consumer demand that physical media would. There may not be the market for a Blu-ray replacement the same way there was for DvD.
There is also the question of whether optical media would be the preferred medium. An SD Card may be preferred over an optical drive, especially as it is more space efficient in a lot of different types of devices.

Well, there's the ultra-hd bluray that seems to be trucking along fine, and regular bluray is still chugging along well enough for studios to be releasing them.
But, they'll get phased out either right beetle before they start failing to make profit, and/or when the various entities of the movie industry figure out a way to force people into their streaming services. Now, I don't see them making laws happen that require us to subscribe, but it is possible that they could manage to shut down enough alternatives that a majority of people that are convinced they need access to shows and movies to get through life that there's no other way. At which point, the final nail would be eradicating new physical media.
But, as long as they can make profit from both physical and streamed media, they'll keep milking them both.

Not until there's an 8K standard and 8K players.

It's well on its way there already. Many large stores are already choosing not to sell them (Best Buy, you suck). I will always purchase the Blu-Rays though as long as I can. I would never trust my movie collection to the studios or streaming services.

I hate the DRM, and I haven't bought a single one.. But, the bitrate on BD's is higher than streaming services, so its actually better for fast action scenes (where streaming services are more likely to appear blocky)
- You can stream REMUX rips if you have the bandwidth and are willing to pay for a Debrid service, and those are BluRay quality. It's possible to stream BluRay quality, it's just that the main players aren't willing to offer the service since it costs them more bandwidth and most users won't care about the difference and will complain that their shitty internet/devices can't handle it.

I don't want blu-rays, I want DVD. Less anti-consumer stuff going on there (although not for lack of trying, just a bit less technical know-how at the time it was made).
- I don’t want blu-rays, I want DVD
  HD-DVDs were neat. More reliable, too.

Which blu rays?
Is it even possible to stream 8k video now?
- I've only seen 4K REMUX streaming as the top quality option, but there's no reason why 8K streaming would be impossible. You could even set it up privately with Jellyfin.

Till the next upkeep phase

It's already gone. Hard copies are dead, long live the downloadable file.

i haven't seen a blu-ray in at least a decade, what are you on about?
- There are these things called "stores", you may have heard of them.
  Target and Best Buy are just NOW talking about phasing Blu Ray out in 2024.
  In 2014? Frozen sold over 7 million copies. Guardians of the Galaxy? Over 3 million.
  Everyone with an Xbox Series X (2020), Xbox One X (2017) and Xbox One S (2016) has a 4K Blu Ray player. Same for the disc based PS5 (2020).
  
  While a decade is a stretch, there are some barren areas for Blu-ray Discs.
  A few months ago I wanted to build a collection of Blu-rays as a conversation starter in my living room. I checked out well over two dozen Best Buy, Target, and Walmarts in a ~50mi radius (DC area) to find any that had a reasonable selection for sale. I was incredibly disappointed with how much effort I had to put in for this.
  It seemed that DVDs were still a higher priority in my hunt.
  
  In 2014? Frozen sold over 7 million copies. Guardians of the Galaxy? Over 3 million.
  Ahh, so just 2 or 3 years ago.
  
  There are these things called “stores”, you may have heard of them.
  How long til stores get phased out?
  
  i don't have a single device with a disc drive in it like what you're referring to

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