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.
It’s very easy to make digital copies of physical media. The resulting copy is likely to be as high quality as you can find, and as portable as any digital copy can be. Pop it in a folder and point Jellyfin at it, and it’s available anywhere.
It’s also the easiest legal way to get a good digital copy.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
After spending all that money and effort to kill HDDVD. 😆
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.
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.
Or… they’re stopping production because there’s very little demand. Nah, that can’t be it.
That makes this even more depressing. Sailing the high seas is the life for me.
More hard drives. RAID, rotate them out when they fail, more backups too. lol
anyone remember when the argument for digital goods was " We wont have to waste money on boxes, printing, media, storage, or shipping! So your goods will be cheaper than ever, and everyone will still get a more profitable cut!"
Pepperidge farm Remembers, because Pepperidge farm called bullshit on the argument back at the very start, and said they would get rid of physical media, not lower prices, and that we would lose ownership of our purchases… and the internet poopoo’d me to hell in back calling me paranoid and stupid for it.
and look where we are.
and its so goddamn fucked up I don’t even get a single molecule of serotonin from being right about it.
I dunno. Steam did it well enough. I was buying cheap games for years. I could get a kick ass GOTY game for like $5 while GameStop was still selling it used on consoles for $20.
You do realize you don’t “own” anything on Steam right? Every dollar you give them is towards a “subscription” to play the game.
Apparently “recordable media” here means the kind you can record on at home, e.g. CD-R, DVD-R.
Ah! Yes. Hm. Well then . . . where do distributors get theirs from? Not Sony, presumably?
I’m perfectly fine with storing media on flash drives. Optical disks just adds an unnecessary step between me and enjoying my movies.
