Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning | TechSpot
Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning
We must cut all options for the end user to own anything, let'em pay subscriptions instead.
In a SONY board meeting, probably.
Why are we suddenly selling more NAS grade HDDs?
Eh, I doubt many people are burning their own Blu-ray discs - this does not apply to discs you buy that already have films on, those are manufactured differently, and are still being made.
But even if you do archive your personal data onto Blu-ray discs, there are still other manufacturers besides Sony.
This really isn't a big deal.
Nah, probably just didn't sell enough, with USB sticks around and all.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone use the format. CDR saw a lot of use, but who needs bluray nowadays?
Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it's just not worth it from a financial perspective.
The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.
This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.
Ironically Japan is just now phasing out floppies, so there'll still be a market for a while.
A NAS is mostly geared for online media storage, whereas disks are for offline.
Ironically those who own their own NAS and hoarding data are amongst the more likely to be burning their own Blu-rays
I mean sure, but Jellyfin and HDDs exist, and are much more convenient than burning a Blu-ray that you have to put in a drive to watch.
Optical disks tend to be used for offline archival storage more than movies (IIRC they'll still be printing out Blu-Ray movies, just not blanks).
This is not as big a deal as you think. Blu-Ray production itself isn’t ending, they just aren’t making any more rewritable Blu-Rays. Most people aren’t going to be burning stuff to Blu-Rays. You’ll still be able to buy Blu-Rays if you want a physical copy of a film.
I find it kinda funny Sony tried so hard to own the standard so many times thought they eventually got it but then the Internet made it irrelavent almost instantly.
I don't like Sony.
Am with you. Their midrange phones still have headphone jacks, though. I like that.
Yeah their phones do generally still do things like microsds etc which is very nice I also like the psp but I've bought so many Sony products that develop weird faults straight after the warranty and the fact they alway push propriety cards etc.
Its a weird company where divisions seem to actively sabotage each other I just don't trust them at all.
Sony phones are pretty great for stuff like this tbh
There's a few things that suck. They need to extend their software support, their naming is dreadful (yes I know it follows the camera division naming, it's still dumb), and they try to charge Apple/Samsung prices despite not being in the same dominant market position. But overall their Xperia division actually puts out some good stuff IMO.
I've never had a need to burn a blu-ray. When bd-r's hit the scene with their obscenely priced recording drives, it was only maybe a year or two before flash memory had already become cheap and fast enough that any volume of data large enough to justify a BD was better served on a 16/32gb thumbdrive unless it needed to be distributed in volume, and I've never needed to make enough identical copies of something to justify the $200-$300 that the first drives cost.
It sucks losing an option but I actually doubt most anyone will notice. 3rd party manufacturers will keep making disc's for a while anyway, Sony is far from the only company doing this technology.
I use archival blurays for cheap, deep storage for decade plus usage, not something I'd trust to flash memory or even a hard drive. Tape is an option of course but that's pricey.
Don't fret, Verbatim will still be making recordable BD-Rs. However, this will mean that there will be no more 128GB BD-Rs, we'll be stuck with only 100GB BD-Rs (Sony is the only company that makes 128GB Blu-rays).
I recently ordered a pack of 128GBs from Japan. I'd recommend you do the same, because the prices are gonna skyrocket.
The 128GB blurays have always been very expensive. The smaller discs are cheaper per GB.
Will this mean PS5 games in coming years would come in two disks?
Update: never mind they were always using 100 gb
Bluray disk cost 25$ for 50gb and usb flash drive cost 5$ for 64gb
Damn, a 50gb blu ray costs 2€ in my country.
for 35€ you can get 512gb flash drive. kinda insane to think about that. maybe even cheaper but that was just what I found from my local store
Yes, flash memory came a very long way, when current nodes of 3nm going to be old enough for mass producing growth memory, there's gonna be 5tb microsd cards probably, since we're already having 2tb ones https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-worlds-first-2tb-microsd-card-is-here-what-you-need-to-know
This is just blank writable discs, movies and TV shows on bluray will continue to be produced... for now.
As long as there are people for whom streaming compression isn't acceptable, there'll be a market for Bluray movies/TV shows.
It's okay, in 75 years Japan's government will still be keeping them alive. That's why you can still buy floppy discs on Amazon.
Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.
Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
Are you sure they were BetaMax and not Betacam SP? Beta SP (as it's more commonly known) is a high quality format that was still being used by TV stations when I was working them as late as the 2010s. There were a few other later much higher quality formats like ED-Beta.
Also, I believe some camcorders also used Beta formats.
Nonsense. Plenty of American businesses still rely on them too.
I still use floppy disks from time to time. There are several USB floppy drives in my shop at work for when the network has issues and we have problems posting G Code to our mills.
Shits crazy I can still buy compact flash cards, and zip cards
I sort of understand still selling CF cards. They were used in high end photo and video equipment until not too long ago, and they have storage space comparable with smaller SD cards and USB drives. Plenty of equipment using CF is still perfectly good and still worth using.
I've never heard of a zip card. If you mean the old zip disks (I think the largest was 250MB or so), I can't imagine any reason someone would ever use one of these. Even new, zip drives were notoriously unreliable and not all that widespread. I had one, and I rarely used it in favor of CD-R or RW.
I have a BluRay drive capable of burning but I've never needed it for that. I've been mostly using it for my ancient cd collection.
I really wish there was a viable alternative for physical backups. Blu-ray just doesn't have enough storage space, tape is expensive, and hard drives need to be periodically read.
I've read about holographic WORM media, but I just don't think there's enough consumer demand for the hardware and media to ever be as affordable as blu-ray.
Once upon a time, I could back up all my important data to a stack of DVD-Rs. How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though? The "best" alternative is to build a second NAS for backup, but that's approaching tape drive levels of cost.
How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though?
By spending money. 100T is a quite a lot of data and big data sets cost money to properly maintain.
Checkout AWS S3 “Deep Glacier Archive”. It’s perfect for data you only “read” in recovery events, since you have to wait up to 12 hours to retrieve the data. I backup my Plex this way.
A NAS is supposed to be redundant. You can use offline HDDs as NAS backup.
I just double my HDDs and put them in RAID1. Not foolproof against data loss, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if I lost my Plex library. For important docs I add a cloud backup.
3-2-1 is the way to go.
25GB and 50GB disks written at blistering 10MB/s in the age of 100MB/s Gigabit Internet connected to storage (S3, Backblaze, etc. etc.) means that networks have completely obsoleted Blu Rays.
I'm surprised they still found a use of these things. Flash drives are also so much cheaper, faster, and more convenient.
I know for some secure purposes they still use CDs because they're a lot harder to sneak around than a flash drive. There are still some uses, but they're very niche. There's essentially zero purpose for personal use.
One TB capacity in a sd micro flash disk equivalent to twenty Blu-ray discs at 50GB, just no comparison in the growth of technology.
Oh well. I use memorex anyway
I use Maxell. Because I'm a cool 80s guy.
Uhm sorry to rain on your parade, but all the cool people made fun of Maxwell guys back then. Our Nakamichi ‘gons got fed TDK exclusively…
RIP
No no, these are for burning.
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RIP rip
Is this just Sony's own production of consumer writable Blu-ray discs, or is it like, Sony preventing other manufactures from producing them as well?
Just their own. Other manufacturers are fine.
It's just consumer writeable. Blu-ray movies will be fine, and other companies will be manufacturing consumer writeable Blu-rays as well.
Good. Flash storage is everywhere now. Why go through an extra layer of proprietary hardware and DRM when you can have direct access to the video files which can be read on any platform?
The DRM is extra awful with bluray, its usefullness is dipressingly lmited. Being propriatary makes it worthless as an archive medium.
I mean, as long as there is a hard copy archive option out there this is ok (cloud is already flirting with copyblight).
At least they're not enforcing Memory Stick on us again.
Did anyone ever burn their blu ray discs? There has been so many better options like USB sticks and external hard drives ever since the launch of blu ray.
Blue-Ray Discs are basically the only viable WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) that is available to normal and small scale professional users. The cheapest alternative, Tandberg RDX is a few hundred bucks per TB. And these are far inferior in terms of protection against outside influences compared to BD media.
And considering that a lot of professional data (e.g. tax reports) are legally required to be saved on WORM in a lot of countries it is indeed an issue, even more so in times of crypto/ransomviruses. None wants to loose their precious baby or wedding photos to a untimely virus. And no, normal Dropbox/OneDrive is no proper backup. And USB drives/external harddrives degrade over time, especially if not used.
Yes, they are the best medium for long term backups, as optical discs should be fine for decades. Hard drives and USB sticks are liable to fail within a few years.
That’s probably true. I just wasn’t aware blu ray had burnable discs until now.
Damn, the end of an era. I wonder how anime will be sold in Japan now if not on Blu-rays?
It’s recordable Blu-Rays, not the entire format.
Me, with a 200 Terrabyte usb drive, wondering why this is an issue.
I use BD-R for archival storage of important files. They're cheaper and easier than tape as well as small. I burn them in triplicate and throw them in the same case and as long as the same 3 bits don't corrupt I can recover. The shelf life on a blue ray sealed and stored well is a few decades which is better than most other media.
Where are you buying your Blu-rays? Every time I've looked into burnable BD-Rs they've been more expensive per gigabyte than a 3.5" SATA hard drive (which has the bonus of better data longevity and being rewritable).
A 200TB USB drive doesn't exist. What are you talking about?
Not going to put words in OP's mouth, and it's entirely possible they're either exaggerating, talking about a RAID array, or richer than God,
but the only place I know of to buy flash drives that big is Wish.com
whoooooooosh
How often do you lend your drives to your friends? A cheap way to send big files without internet connection was paramount for sharing information.
Very rarely. I tend to have shared text or Excel files to actively share and work on. Nothing in the hundreds of gigs.
Flash-style drives like SSDs and... drives from alliexpress aren't recommended for long-term storage.