Wow I’m having a hard time believing that Sony of all people would abandon a technology
Damn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
I’ve started building mine up again, too, because too often a movie I want to watch isn’t available to stream and purchasing a physical copy costs less than a digital copy.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
Movies are not sold on recordable media, they are sold on pressed discs. There are a lot more manufacturers than just Sony too.
Right as I’m getting into minidisc too
You can get some pretty cheap used ones. At less than $2 each.
Yeah but the thing that helps keep them at $2 is a supply of new ones
I was just getting the hang of cassettes !
“Press Play on tape.”
(makes lunch)
“File found. Loading…”
(takes a bath, goes for a walk, reads a book…)
Ah the memories…
I think the data variant stores 1GB… good enough for archiving invoices and the like…
i can’t even remember the last time i saw an optical disc. it must be several years.
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as “used”. It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
I don’t want physical media because it’s a liability. It can get lost or destroyed very very easily, especially optical media.
Digital copies are portable, I can data hoard them, and, worst case, I can just re-download it.
Most people don’t know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They’re using the built in streaming apps or they’ve plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.
Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.
The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.
For me, physical media takes up more space. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it’s also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it’s physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don’t have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it’s unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
Which has its own downside, that being the up-front cost.
Blu-rays do not actually take up this much space: On a 1TB drive you can store about 10-12 4K movies. You need a backup and you need a second drive for your Raid setup. This takes up quiet a lot of space too.
Besides that: storing the movies on a Raid system is a lot more expensive. If I’d rip all of my blu-rays to a digital copy, I’d need like 12 TB of storage. In a raid setup with backup, that’s quiet expensive!
I meant physical size, not data size. With one computer with multiple 24TB drives, you can store hundreds or thousands of Blu-rays. To have that amount of physical Blu-rays, you would need a massive shelf - or more likely, multiple massive shelves.
True, RAID is more expensive, but it also ensures your data will keep working reliably - and it’s much harder to lose than a small disc. Doubly when you throw backups into the mix.
Modern hard drives come in 20 TB or larger. 4K movies don’t need to be anywhere near that big either with modern compression technology.
You have to know where to look assuming you have working optics.
I also don’t care to look
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I quit optical media around 03. Haven’t even owned anything with an optical drive for nearly a decade.
same here. the last optical drive i had was used to rip my girlfriends dvd collection about 12 years ago. all still here on hunks of spinning rust if needed, but the space consuming load of dvds went to the flea market.
They’re a very common form of personal backup. A few discs and an USB writer and you get a very long lasting medium for passwords, personal files, family photos etc.
Can also archive multimedia of course, the smallest discs are 25 GB and can pack a few films, a season of a series, or a lot of music.
i guess, but they’re not great for backup. Eps. R/RW optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged. You’d be better off with tape for long-term storage. or an M-Disk or some similar magnetic backup solution.
M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.
Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.
They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.
In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.
optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged
I beg to differ. I’ve been backing things up to optical for 25 years now with minimal issues. CDs could be easily scratched but it hasn’t been the case for DVD and BR.
M-DISK uses in-organic substances that make the discs mostly immune to exposure but it’s a more recent invention. Proper storage and handling still goes a long way towards protecting discs even if they’re not in-organic.
thin laptops and LED Disco Cases killed CD-readers anyways. it’s a shame to loose a cheap way of making media archives, but it is what it is.
Lose*
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Keep in mind that though this is a blow to the industry, it’s not like optical media is just yet dead. Hell, there are still new releases to DVDs coming out today.
the whole point is to stop you from owning physical media so they can arbitrarily raise prices by creating artificial cause and demand through artificial scarcity.
Damn, that’s some Qanon-level shit.
I mean, except it’s not a conspiracy. The death of physical media is an actual tragedy because digital media is nowhere near as free.
It’s to the point where much of the media I love is actually not available legally and officially for physical ownership, in some cases becoming actual lost media physically, and not available for purchase or even download anymore.
Companies absolutely want to control the consumption of media in more restrictive ways that they can control, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the actual truth.
DRM, always online, digital only, subscription services - they are all designed to remove you further and further from being an owner.
Everything from video games, music, movies…all entertainment media is moving in this direction and it’s an actual tragedy.
and the fact that they’ve already done it with the disney vault.
becoming actual lost media physically
Reminded me of that Cowboy Bebop episode where they so hunting for a VCR.
Or… they’re stopping production because there’s very little demand. Nah, that can’t be it.
If you think the demand isn’t there, you’re out of touch. It’s certainly true that many consumers are choosing digital content, but it’s largely driven by it not having inconvenienced them so far too.
Everyone I’m seeing who lost the 3DS and Wii U stores, or lost access to all the games in their account, or even people who purchased media they can’t download and access again is realizing how big this problem is.
I found 8 brands of DVD±R discs—none of them Sony—before I stopped counting. If you think one company stopping production is going to stop people from using physical media, or that demand hasn’t been falling for years, YOU are the one who’s badly out of touch.
Let me spell it out for you: as long as there is demand, someone will find a way to make money filling it. No company can remove a product category from the market just by leaving the market. Suggesting that a company choosing to stop making a commodity product is an attempt to prevent you from having access to said product is nonsense no matter what company and product you’re talking about, because such a plan could never work.
How many headphone jacks do you see today? All it takes is one big player, and adoption can fall just like that.
And yet you can still buy phones with headphone jacks. Because there is demand for them. The reason you didn’t see many is because the demand is a lot less than what Lemmy users would have you believe.
Jokes on Sony, they stopped getting my money years ago.
That makes this even more depressing. Sailing the high seas is the life for me.
But where to store it all now?
More hard drives. RAID, rotate them out when they fail, more backups too. lol
Sounds pricey. Discs are cheap.
MiniDisks too? Nooo!
