Digital streaming is displacing the last remnants of physical media.
In a disappointing turn of events, FlatpanelsHD reports that LG has ended production of its Blu-ray player series, which includes the UBK80 and UBK90 models. With limited stock available, prospective buyers should act quickly to secure the last remaining units before they are sold out.
After Samsung and Sony’s departure from physical media, LG was one of the last major manufacturers of Blu-ray players
You can sound the real warnings when Panasonic and Sony stop making them.
But the writing is already on the wall. You used to be able to go into any supermarket and have a whole aisle for DVDs and Blu-rays, and now it’s like a single rack of things that came out recently. People have spoken with their wallets, and these things will go the same way as CDs before them.
Now we just need to get back to a streaming service that doesn’t suck.
NOT a streaming service. Rather - DRMless purchases. GOG did it, Bandcamp did it, now we need it for films. If not available, I would rather buy a DRMed version to correspond to the one I downloaded.
But yeah, sad for those who are into collecting, the physical experience and extras.
DRMless. Purchases.
Seems to be an either/or situation right now. I’ll happily take the first one though.
Yeah, exactly - I specified that. Back when I had some money for media, I bought games on Steam (because they weren’t on GOG, sadly) and had pirated copies correspond to this. That seems about as fair as a rip corresponding to a DVD but without clutter and inconvenience.
Never had a BR disk of mine
Welp, we’re one step closer to the “you will own nothing and be happy” future tech companies want for us.
Not owning just means you don’t have to pay anything. Have at it. World’s free now
You wouldn’t download a car? Well maybe yes.
Hell yeah!
CATCH A RIIIIIDE!
Maybe when 3D printers become much more capable.
Yeah, I would download a car.
You’d have to be a special kind of stupid not to download a car and instead pay the thousands of dollars + dealing with scumbag dealerships.
Or just your average American.
I’ve been actively avoiding it forever, but my peers are all-to-eager to give up any control or ownership of anything.
It’s really a cultural problem, and most of the people receiving the short end of the stick aren’t realizing it.
There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t really efficient to own individually. I need a power drill one day a year or less, it’s just gathering dust in my closet the rest of the time. I bet most of my neighborhood does the same.
I often dream of a local community center of sorts that lends out tools, and other such things, maybe for a small yearly fee. They could spend to get something robust, good quality that lasts for a long while. And the whole neighborhood could benefit. Sort of an expanded version of a library? I guess none of that is very profitable.
Some libraries literally do this already, expect they do it completely for free.
🏴☠️
On one hand I’m happy less plastic shit will be produced and consumed. On the other hand, this is leading more towards dystopian timelines where we can never own anything anymore.
You can own DRMless media instead. BluRay was already more restrictive than DVD, from what I understand.
Eh. A few more steps to rip the content, but not bad really.
Now UHD Blu-ray is a different story. There are a limited number of drives that could do it before their firmware was patched.
I find buying DVDs just to rip the contents impractical anyway. If I were concerned with ethics - I’d likely do like I do with Steam games and buy a DRMed version corresponding to my DRMless download. Because I’d rather not deal with a disk taking up space or needing to be disposed of, not to mention potential scarcity if it is no longer in print.
Agree on Blu-Ray. Also, weren’t there region restrictions?
Yeah, it is frustrating that the license is tied to the physical disc. Especially when they won’t send you a replacement for a damaged disc.
I personally buy, rip, and keep the physical discs of my collection which is now well over 1,000 titles. It’s a lot of work, and takes up a lot of space, but it’s also a hobby I enjoy. I’d much prefer if I could just buy a license for the film and watch it or store it however I want.
You know, this might actually be a decent application for NFTs.
I wouldn’t want that, NFTs are wasteful and also very much public.
I see the value in disks if you’re into collecting the physical pieces, but if you’re not into that, I don’t find it a good way to own - for me that would be useless pieces of plastic occupying space. Very much not for everyone.
Ripping them is actually really easy if you have a compatible drive.
This is all preventable with basic digital ownership laws, but governments are instead bending the knee.
I just pay the iron price and download everything
Bring back the MiniDisk!
I had a Minidisc recorder I would use for field audio recordings back in the 90s and I really loved the format. Small, portable, didn’t fuck up like a DAT but was close enough in quality to work in most instances, and basically indestructible.
You could probably drop a Minidisc from the top of a skyscraper and put it back in the player after dusting it off and there wouldn’t be an issue.
A nas is your friend.
And there is plenty is space in the Caribbean Sea
Better buy Blu-ray PC drive
True, but I would expect a soon end of life for those too
That’s what I mean. Gotta get one while they’re still available and we’ll made. Otherwise it’ll be like trying to buy a record player or cassette player. Just knock offf clones of the cheapo models.
Sony and Panasonic still make Blu-ray players… Sony just stopped making the blank media IIRC
And in all that time I never once owned a Blu-ray device.
At the beginning I was pissed at the DRM. And by the time that was solved streaming was good enough.
Streaming will never be a satisfying model for me - I need ownership and lack of DRM.
That said, I don’t see much of a point in DVD or Blu-Ray either, hard drives are smaller than one DVD’s case while fitting orders of magnitude more.
One of the points of DVD and Blu-ray is the additional material. I don’t see a lot of streaming movies with commentary tracks and the like and sometimes commentary tracks are as good as the movies themselves.
The DVD commentary track for Spinal Tap is done by Spinal Tap as if they were re-watching the documentary about their lives, complaining about how everything was distorted by Marty DiBergi, and spending a lot of time debating whether or not virtually everyone you see in the movie is dead now.
The DVD commentary track for Cannibal: The Musical was recorded while they were getting drunk. Matt Stone accidentally turns off the recorder at one point and they don’t realize it for a while.
The DVD commentary track for UHF is virtually indescribable, but involves Weird Al knowing the exact address of every location where they filmed (in Tulsa) and cold-calling a very confused Victoria Jackson to interview her about the movie.
Additionally, the DVD for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension treats the movie like it was a docudrama and talks about the “facts” behind the film in all different sorts of ways.
There are lots of others that are just interesting, but those four alone make the extra things on DVDs worth it.
Been waiting for over ten years now for hdd prices to go down significantly to replace my broken 4 TB drive. Now I don’t have any money or energy to rip the rest of my DVD collection.
Problem with streaming is you’re effectively renting.
If the source of the stream wants to change their terms, there’s nothing you can do aside from jump ship to the next business maximizing profit.
Unless you’re smart enough to use free streaming services, that is ;)
There’s still no streaming for 3D movies yet tho :,( i still need to rip the 3D blue rays to my PC if i want to watch them in VR… fandangonow had a quest app to stream 3D movies but it doesn’t work anymore and it was a US only option. Hopefully the apple vision pro stuff makes it happen faster globally!
Have you tried Kodi? Maybe their Android app works.
I’ll look into it. Not sure what kodi does exactly based on their website.
It’s a media center app. To organize and play videos, TV, music and photos. With a nice interface for TVs.
It has settings for 3D content. I have no idea if works in VR but maybe you’re lucky.
I assume there will still be less prominent brands making them, just as there are still DVD players being made.
Possibly, haven’t considered that. My main concern is that media releases will no longer target physical media, leaving streaming / perpetual renting as the only option. VCRs were still manufactured after the major brands stopped production, but VHS releases largely went away.
The Alien: Romulus VHS Release notwithstanding lol.
Hopefully they’ll still be made for people without access to high speed internet.
It makes sense that VHS production ceased, since DVD’s are better in every metric, cheaper to produce, and eventually became the bigger market after players got so cheap. I would’ve thought blurays would continue that trend, but if these sales statistics are anything to go by, it’s possible DVD could outlive Bluray as a viable market. I assume DVD’s occupy a sweet spot between good enough quality and affordability.
There are still movies that get a VHS release, so I don’t see them completely abandoning disc media any time soon. Tons of people still use it to watch movies
Oh, nice. I knew Alien: Romulus was getting one, but it seemed like an outlier/gimmick than anything else.
It’s definitely a gimmick these days. I think it’ll be a bit before dvd/Blu-ray sales drop significantly enough to warrant discontinuing.
And MORE prominent brands, as Sony still makes them and Panasonic still makes the best ones.
Wonder if the PS5 will be the last mass-produced Blu-ray player?
Xbox can play Blu-ray as well, iirc. Still though, your point does stand. Let’s just hope that All-Digital consoles don’t supercede physical media consoles.
Or they might just make all disc drives extra attachments you have to get separately in the future.
I should probably get a blu ray ripper
I bought a 5.25" bay LG one for my PC and installed libredrive on it a year ago. So far all I’ve done with it is burned a few CDs for a friend with an old car lol
Floppy drives died decades ago, yet you can still buy the drives and disks, brand new. This end of production will create a void, and it will be filled by someone else. No innovation will occur, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing here.
Both the drives and disks are new old stock.
Amazon sells new new stock of these, though I can’t speak to the quality…
I bought one of the USB drives you are referring to. I opened it to find a TEAC drive manufactured in 1991 or '92. It was likely an older external drive that was put into a new case.
They’re still being made new because there are still companies around the world still using them to this day.
Sometimes the innovation continues, just not in a way beneficial to the masses generally, like tape drives
I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we’ll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone’s cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.
Oh, and paying through the nose for someone’s cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI.
That’s what “they” want. lol. Everything seems to be pushing that way for sure.
Though I am a little less pessimistic about spinners fully going away until all-flash datacenters are the norm. I’ve also had some running for close to 10 years, and they’re going strong (I’ve also got much newer ones as well)
I forget the article I posted here months ago, but there’s a new optical format which is in the multi-TB range. Not sure if/when it’ll be commercially available, but maybe that will come about?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/optical_disc_breakthrough/
That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.
but those only last a few years.
Where do people get this information? Hard drives are very stable now (as are SSDs). All of mine are still going strong after 6+ years.
That was true a while back, but yes drives have gotten way better.
That’s just failure rate though, not data loss. You need your drives using a sane file system like zfs or using raid 1/10/6 where discs can do error checking as well to prevent silent data loss.
They also need to be powered on. Offline drives will lose data to bit rot over time.
What about btrfs?
ZFS is better.
What about it is better?
ZFS is unfortunately not in the upstream Linux Kernel :/
Btrfs is worse in many aspects but I like its flexibility of adding drives with different capacities over time.
How did we get becachefs upstreamed but not ZFS?
Edit: Nevermind, it’s licensing related
OpenZFS works just fine.
The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.
Blurays are too small for backups anymore. It would take hundreds of them to backup all of my stuff. If you want long term backups, you have to spend a couple grand on a tape drive.
I disagree. You’re the exception, not the rule.
If you’re looking for something to write once read nearly never, just get 3 USB drives with the same thing written on all three of them
My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn’t regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they’re all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.
It degrades from writes.
The device itself degrades from writes, but the data degrades anyway as long as it is not powered. The bits are stored as charges in tiny capacitors, and if you leave it unpowered this charge gradually leaks away, leading to data loss over the long term. The device needs to be powered up to be able to refresh the charges and preserve the data.
Are you sure? Do you have a link to more info on this claim?
If true, I want to know if its orders of years or decades od centuries or millennium
Accounts differ but most reports say a low number of years. Older flash memory is more stable than the newer stuff, because it only stored one value per tiny capacitor, so the charge had to drop by 50% for the bit to be lost. In newer flash memory they use each cell to store more than one bit, which means they need to make finer discriminations between charge levels, so there’s less tolerance for weakening charge levels. Many people report losing data after only a couple of years unpowered with modern devices. Some older devices can go for more than a decade. I don’t have any studies to hand but if you search for information about bit rot in flash memory you will find plenty of discussions online.
If you power up the device and read all the data, this will refresh the charges.
I thought it degraded from lack of power flowing through it.
Tape drives.
They’re pretty expensive.
Fuck LG, not like they made good BR players. I’ve sworn to avoid buying their shit since they discontinued support for a BR player within a year of release, which back then meant you wouldn’t be able to watch any BR movie released after a certain date due to new DRM or whatever. They just up and decided to not release new firmware for units still under warranty.
What are we supposed to use now? DVDs?
For physical media, yes actually. Plenty of DVDs still getting made and sold today, throught the world. Nollywood and Bollywood Films, latin american dvd collections, Japanese Anime collections, etc. Several different DVD player companies too.
Honestly, i wish some of those companies sold pen-drives or mini-ssds with the media, but that was never tried. Imagine a theme-shaped ssd stick with pixar movies for instance, too cool to exist. But a 4Tb HD with files will do for me.
I’m surprised they lasted this long honestly
Never really bought into bluray. DVD was still good enough on early HD TVs, and at the time where the really good ones became affordable, you could buy decently sized HDDs and later SSDs for little money. Ever since my video library has been entirely digital.
Right, but if you want a digital video library that hasn’t been compressed to hell by some streaming company then your only option is using Blu-ray as a source.
I think the appeal of blu-ray today is for large amounts of long-term storage.
For you or I who just save the files we’re interested in, it’s not that big of a deal. For the archivists who provide those files, it could be significant.
It’s really about quality imo. Not all 4k video is equal, and streamed video tends to be especially bad. It’s possible to download decent quality video files, but they are all from blue ray rips. If blue ray goes away, streaming sites might be the only remaining source for digital video files, and high quality digital video will essentially die.
