Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0180770794
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/11/1431206/sony-will-ship-its-final-blu-ray-recorders-this-month
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/monitors/televisions/sony-will-ship-its-final-blu-ray-recorders-this-month-exit-from-japanese-market-the-end-of-an-era-for-the-segment
Kyodo attributes the segment's death to the rise of streaming services. Sony will continue selling Blu-ray players "for the time being." The broader Blu-ray ecosystem remains intact. Asus, LG, and Pioneer still produce PC drives in internal and external USB form factors. Panasonic and Verbatim continue manufacturing Blu-ray media. The format turned 20 last year, having debuted at CES 2006 -- one year before Netflix launched its streaming platform.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/monitors/televisions/sony-will-ship-its-final-blu-ray-recorders-this-month-exit-from-japanese-market-the-end-of-an-era-for-the-segment
Nobody produces PC blu ray drives anymore (Score:2)
Pioneer sold off their division months ago to a company that just wanted the patents. I am fairly sure LG and ASUS also stopped. The folks who use makemkv have been buying up the last drives that can handle UHD discs (native or with a firmware mod).
The standalone blu ray player market has a shrinking set of model options and also no new 4k options for the last few years.
Re: (Score:2)
Large scale storage is getting so cheap keeping ones movies or any other data on hard drives is very affordable and makes whatever is being stored much more immediately on hand then when it is on a disk. I got a 26tb HDD for about $10 a terabyte a few months ago, that's a lot of space for movies or anything else.
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Yeah, streaming really killed that industry. It must be about 10 years since I last bought a physical copy of a movie/tv show. I don't even have any of my BR players hooked up. Easier to stream than to find the dang remote.
No nostalgia market? (Score:2)
Audio formats seem to have a thriving nostalgia market where vinyl, CDs and even cassettes have seen a resurgence of both new players and new media being produced. I guess there is no equivalent in the video market.
Re: (Score:2)
Audio (or more specifically, music) is not like other arts, even performing ones. We enjoy experiencing a piece of music over and over again, re-living the feeling it gives us. We tend not to do the same with video.
Perhaps this kind of appreciation of the art extends to the technologies that deliver it.
They still make those? (Score:2)
I have 2/3rds of a spindle of blank blue ray discs. In 2010 I bought a PC tower and added a read/write blue ray drive to it. Turns out writing blue ray disks were about as useful as a ZIP Drive from the 90s. Can't win them all I suppose.
That 2010 PC is still chugging along though primarily so they kids can play old games, do homework, surf the web, and watch streaming video.
Their time is up... (Score:2)
I haven't touched my BRD recorder in years. I used to sell videos I made on BD-R and DVD-R, until I started monetizing my YouTube channel, which brings in far more viewers and income with zero work once the video is uploaded. I used to buy printable BRD discs, jewel cases, print an insert for the jewel case, mail the disc...it was a lot of work for not much return. Late 2000's.
YouTube has democratized the distribution of independent videos. Their revenue split for ads is still the best deal out there.
Re: (Score:2)
> Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives?
I remember reading some years ago that Meta (then Facebook) was using Blu-ray to archive old posts, photos, etc. as a cheap storage solution. They've probably moved on now, but it still seems like a pretty cheap way to archive materials.
You CAN record over-the-air... (Score:2)
Over-the-air HDTV is still putting out up to 18Mb/s per channel. It's some of the highest-quality streaming that there is, and it's free!
I've been recording it with entirely legal equipment for about five years now, use FFMPEG to crush the huge files down to H265 or H264 for action shows where movement shows some artifacts at H265. But mostly we just watch the shows within a few weeks, lots of room on the SSD of the ultrabook that controls the TV.
[1]http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug [brander.ca]
[1] http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug
Re: (Score:2)
I have a couple BuRay players, including a Sony 3D player (yeah, I'm one of the 8 people with a 3D TV, got it as a refurb). Never heard of a BluRay recorder though. Not that I ever looked.
Re: completely passed me by (Score:2)
I get it. Some people just arenâ(TM)t discerning. They donâ(TM)t mind the sound quality of AM or FM radio over CDs or vinyl. They donâ(TM)t even notice compression artifacts on streaming services. They donâ(TM)t even notice that some content is not available online at all. Just go with whatever is served up at the time⦠until the internet goes down.
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I'm really picky about audio, but I don't really care about video quality.
Over my lifetime, audio has kind of always been good. Vinyl, high quality cassettes, then CDs. Low quality streaming audio is a step backwards. But I grew up on CRTs and VHS tapes - which, if you weren't there for that, was awful. DVD is phenomenal by comparison. So I've never felt a need for BluRay, 4k, 8k, or anything else beyond DVD quality. And now that my vision is deteriorating, I couldn't tell the difference anyways.
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I have a couple of USB drives for ripping discs and for backup. A few years ago you could get 100GB discs for around 100 yen (50 cents) each, which made them a decent option for cold storage backups. Now the prices have shot up on good quality discs, because they are out of production as well.
Moving to LTO now.
Re: (Score:2)
> Never owned a Blu-ray device or media.
The quality was great, particularly on the sound side (still better than the sound I get from streaming), but the DRM on Blu-Ray was a real pain, and there were numerous updates (thanks, Sony) that bricked many players and made some discs stop working. But, at least they solved the piracy problem /sarcasm.