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
Yesterday I was happy to own lots of Blurays because my internet was down.
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.
You just made me notice that my laptop doesn’t even have a DVD.
They are hardly anywhere now… Best Buy is phasing out their remaining physical movie sections this year.
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 So, they are really quite outdated/obsolete unless you still have an older 1080p or 720p TV and have a good player with upscaling.
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.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.
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.
It’s already gone. Hard copies are dead, long live the downloadable file.
Which blu rays?
Is it even possible to stream 8k video now?
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.
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.
There was the Japanese VHD (Video High Density) that was kind of that. https://youtu.be/fCWLaAwr3sM
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.
I think it was done with wax cylinders first, somewhat earlier! So at least for vinyl, there was strong technological precedent.
In the early days, it was quite a simple device! Sort of a cone to focus sound waves, with a membrane at the end attached to an engraver that carves wax. I bet it was quite hard to make those mechanical systems reliable, but I can sort of see how someone goes from “sound is a pressure wave in air” to that device!
Theoretically you could get it with little to no buffering by writing an analog TV signal to the disk, no?
And just like that, you’ve invented laserdisc.
Reinvent the wheel? No, it’s time to reinvent outdated media formats!
Hey, the tape drive never even went out of style!
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.
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.
Disney has already killed theirs off in Australia. But at the same time most of their stuff is rubbish so I guess I’m not missing out on anything
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.
Till the next upkeep phase
