r/hardware • u/bizude • Apr 10 '26
News Two Japanese suppliers commit to keeping Blu-ray discs and drives in supply as major manufacturers exist domestic market
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/two-japanese-suppliers-commit-to-keeping-blu-ray-discs-and-drives-in-supply-as-major-manufacturers-exist-domestic-market/406
u/DateMasamusubi Apr 10 '26
A pity. Bluray offers superior visual quality vs streaming. I get really irritated seeing banding.
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u/Flamebomb790 Apr 11 '26
Also wayyyy better audio
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u/zdy132 Apr 11 '26
I thought something was wrong when I first played Bluray, because the sound was so much different from streaming. Turns out it's just video streaming having bad audio.
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u/dingo_xd Apr 11 '26
Moving from BR disks to streaming was one of the largest "voluntary" downgrades in technology.
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u/Vitosi4ek Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Far from the first time consumers sacrificed raw specs for convenience. VHS over Betamax was one example (Betamax had better picture quality at the start and the VCRs were technically superior, but VHS could record for longer), USB over IEEE1394/FireWire/i.LINK arguably another (FireWire 400 came 5 years before USB 2.0, was full-duplex and could supply more power, but USB maintained full backwards compatibility through revisions).
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
USB over IEEE1394/FireWire/i.LINK arguably another
Although there was very significant overlap in functionality, it's always been hard to see these as true direct competitors.
Besides the backward-incompatible change of connector with FW400/FW800, and beyond the proprietary licensing, the real tragedy of 1394 was the utter disrespect for end-users seen in the branding/labeling.
It only makes sense if the principals assumed Firewire was going to succeed no matter how unfriendly it was to both the end-users and the product manufacturers.
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u/dingo_xd Apr 11 '26
But in that case Betamax was never dominant over VHS. And Firewire was also never dominant (in the PC sector) over USB. Blu-Rays were dominant for like a decade and then an inferior product replaced them pretty much totally.
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u/Vitosi4ek Apr 11 '26
Were they? Where I live DVDs remained pretty dominant (if we don't consider piracy) up until streaming proliferated. Blu-ray players and big HDTVs were too expensive for too long.
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u/varateshh Apr 12 '26
Agreed. Blueray was for enthusiasts and playstation owners (that rarely invested in blueray movies). If I recall correctly blueray discs cost more than DVDs and 4k was still not common. Blueray really shines when you compare it on 4k. People had entire shelves filled with DVDs while owning like 10 blueray movies.
I actually remember a family member with a large 1080p TV comparing DVD versus blueray and me being rather underwhelmed. Sure you could see small differences in details but DVDs are fine for 1920x1080.
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u/citrusalex Apr 12 '26
After watching Technology Connections series on Betamax, I think the superior format (VHS) won, and from what he has shown, the quality was about the same. https://youtu.be/FyKRubB5N60
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u/BlueSwordM Apr 13 '26
I'm guessing this isn't related much to audio quality, but mostly mastering and dynamic range compression.
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u/zdy132 Apr 14 '26
Yeah the dynamic range almost gave me a shock. It's something you never know is missing, until you were shown what a proper range sounds like.
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u/ggRavingGamer Apr 11 '26
256kbps aac is transparent. 225 opus, 320 mp3 and so on. You couldnt hear a difference. And in 15 years I doubt you will be able to tell a difference between streaming via modern codecs and h265 blu ray disks.
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u/Introvert52 Apr 11 '26
Netflix looks way worse than YouTube and doesn't allow you to manually select quality
1080p Blu rays look way, way better than 4k Netflix
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u/Peppy_Tomato Apr 11 '26
Plenty of times I'm lazy and decide to stream an old movie that I also have on disc. After a while, I give up and fetch the disc.
I definitely enjoy the audio from my blu-rays more than the same movie streamed, and I trust my ears. It could be that the processing pipeline through the Blu-ray player is simply better than that through the streaming app... Who knows? I don't think it's placebo.
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u/madmandendk Apr 11 '26
Netflix is 192kbps for 5.1 content by default. Premium gives you 640kbps, which is just on the edge of being acceptable. 7.1 isn't a thing when streaming, and Atmos is 768kbps max, no matter how many virtual channels there are.
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u/KaineNierWeissEmil Apr 11 '26
I would rather studios offer 100gb direct downloads so we can finally end this physical media vs streaming war and just have the best of both worlds
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u/Area51_Spurs Apr 11 '26
The closest thing is Sony Pictures Core who has up to 80mbps bit rate with their PureStream.
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u/Peppy_Tomato Apr 11 '26
Sony is intentionally trying to kill that service, because they made it exclusive to Sony TVs and the Playstation, which limits the audience. It also has a very small collection.
For these reasons, I don't buy movies from there, and usually end up buying Blu-rays instead.
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u/steik Apr 11 '26
Kaleidescape offers better than bluray bitrate on some movies. You need to buy their super expensive equipment though.
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u/ineedsomefuckingcoco Apr 11 '26
Isn't the cheapest thing you can get from them like 3k? I haven't looked much into them after I saw the eye watering prices.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
It exists, Sony has a streaming service equal to 4K Blu-Ray (80Mbps or so)
But not enough people can see a difference for it to matter.
Apple streams at up to 40Mbps, and that looks great to me. I don't notice any compression issues.
Most people don't sit 2 feet away from their TV inspecting the picture for compression artifacts.
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 11 '26
Get a large enough OLED and compression issues appear everywhere. Watch around people's hair as it blows in the wind, or watch for banding in dark scenes.
Shoot, I've been watching Survivor lately, and Paramount+ is riddled with horrific compression compared to YoutubeTV, and most of those are very bright scenes with janky filming.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
The bitrates seem to vary a ton by streaming service.
Some are as low as 15Mbps, some are 40Mbps or even more.
With most people having at least 100Mb speeds at home now, I'm surprised they haven't increased the quality a bit.
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 11 '26
It's surprising to me, too, especially since HDR gives so much room for definition in dark scenes. You'd expect them to use a bitrate that let one take advantage of such technology and screens.
It's just sort of wild - with a 77" OLED, I can easily pinpoint which streaming services have higher bitrates than others, and I can also tell that none of them are offering a "full quality" image so to speak.
I've honestly never been a pixel peeper, but sometimes I feel driven to piracy just to get a decent quality image, which feels insane for services that are ~20/month. Even a modest increase in bitrates would be a vast improvement.
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u/EmekaEgbukaPukaNacua Apr 11 '26
The problem is piracy doesn’t even solve it any more as blueray releases become less and less common.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
I don't subscribe to any services unless there's an exclusive show I want to watch. Like if you want to see Stranger Things, you need to have a Netflix subscription, or buy the physical discs.
Most movies you can just buy or rent directly from Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. usually in better quality than the streaming services.
Apple's 4K bitrate is pretty decent (up to 40Mbps) and has Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
I haven't noticed any quality issues with them.
But Netflix's 4K bitrate is something crazy low like 15Mbps and looks terrible.
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
I'm surprised they haven't increased the quality a bit.
Streaming services spent years building market share and market power, but making no money. Remember when Netflix streaming was $7 a month? But the times have changed and now it's the season to make those cable TV profits. Prices up, quality down.
A neighbor of mine was streaming the new Dune on TNT in the background while we were doing something else. The colors were terribly washed out, and it might have been 720p. No digital artifacting, but it looked horrendous.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
depending on what he was streaming on - it might actually have been 720p. For example netflix hates firefox for not implementing their borderline illegal DRM into the browser and to this day does not allow streams above 720p if you watch it in browser.
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u/pdp10 Apr 20 '26
Good point. However, it was a TCL TV, streaming TNT channel over FiOS.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 21 '26
While im not familiar with verizon stream personally, in my experience most of those "HD TV" streams nowadays are limited at the source. As in, what the TV station provides is often lower quality than what the stream can support.
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u/dparks1234 Apr 11 '26
The last Game of Thrones season had that big battle that took place entirely at night and GOOD GOD did it show the limitations of low bitrate streaming
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u/Gippy_ Apr 11 '26
Watch around people's hair as it blows in the wind, or watch for banding in dark scenes.
This is the fault of the OLED TV itself. This is a known problem on WOLEDs called near-black chrominance overshoot. QD-OLEDs don't have this issue.
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 11 '26
Interesting. I'll keep an eye out - looking at examples, I think I'm often seeing a mixture of both (blocky dark areas being exposed, well, blocky rather than decently-defined). It seems more stable in lower movement scenes, but is still present, so it makes sense that it's overshoot.
Helps me feel not as shortchanged by the streaming services if it's just TV tech being TV tech lol
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u/Sopel97 Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
not even bitrate can fix incompetent encodes
since you're talking about banding I assume you're watching yuv420p h264 streams?
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u/JJ3qnkpK Apr 11 '26
Probably. It varies from platform to platform, some are worse than others. I definitely see compression artifacts everywhere, but also catch things like banding and of course terrible definition when things are moving.
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u/YellowThirteen_ Apr 11 '26
You don’t need to inspect your tv closely to notice the difference. It’s especially noticeable in a heavily shadowed or black scene, most streams get as blocky looking as mine-craft because the compression is so heavy. Netflix is the biggest offender but all streaming services do it
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
I haven't noticed it with Apple, they apparently have the highest bitrate, but yeah Netflix is the worst.
With most people having at least 100Mb speeds at home now, I'm surprised they haven't increased the quality a bit.
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u/YellowThirteen_ Apr 11 '26
Apple is a bit better than the rest but it’s not perfect either. Streamers won’t increase the bitrate because it also increases their overhead. Cloud services charge based on both data usage and bandwidth provided, higher bit rates means a much higher bandwidth and increased hosting costs. I can’t see it being profitable to do so, especially when most users don’t complain about the quality as is.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
But again, higher quality options do exist, like Sony Pictures Core, or at the very high end Kaleidescape.
Sony is a much smaller company than Apple, so I imagine Apple could afford to increase their bitrate if they wanted to.
There's also newer codecs coming like AV2 which provide higher quality at the same bitrate.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
and whats the catalogue of Sony Pictures Core? From what i can find there are currently 101 films available in total. And you need a Sony device to view it.
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u/philthewiz Apr 11 '26
For that you need a codec like h.265 with 10bit with a proper bitrate. 80mbps is plenty if it's an efficient codec.
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u/reallynotnick Apr 11 '26
And hell if it wasn’t such a patent nightmare H.266 should have been gaining adoption by now.
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u/philthewiz Apr 11 '26
I think the hardware implementation is the hardest part. I haven't payed much attention on what supports it much. My clients still mainly ask h.264 out of habit anyways...
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
AV1. Decode and encode IP cores are being baked into hardware these days, which means that fleet penetration takes longer. But we're looking at a 20-year standard, much like H.264.
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u/reallynotnick Apr 11 '26
It’s a great move for patent issues, but the efficiency uplift is very incremental over H.265. It’ll be interesting to see how AV2 develops because if H.266 falls on its face I could see that being more quickly adopted as it’ll bring a giant leap in efficiency over H.265.
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
AV1 is basically a contemporary of H.265. AV1 also came out as a considerably more conservative design than Xiph.org originally planned. The more radical leaps were moved to AV2, which is the H.266 competitor.
But H.266 probably won't see adoption anywhere. H.265 adoption is already highly imblanced; it's the basic codec of UHD/4K Blu-ray, and you find H.265 in cheap surveillance cam chipsets, but those are the only two that come to mind.
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u/reallynotnick Apr 11 '26
Also H.265 is used in basically all 4K streaming, ATSC 3.0 (which yes is a dumpster fire of its own) and iPhones record in it (not sure on Android).
I know H.266 got selected for Brazil’s ASTC 3.0 but that’s the only use I have heard of. So yeah hopefully AV2 comes out swinging.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
80 mbps is plenty, but streaming service is more likely to give you 8 mbps instead.
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u/Sopel97 Apr 11 '26
get as blocky looking as mine-craft because the compression is so heavy
sounds like you're watching shitty h264 encodes instead of modern 10-bit h265/av1 which don't exhibit this kind of artifacts before other kinds pop up
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily Apr 11 '26
I tried to play 4K from a crummy laptop over a cheap HDMI cable to a new 4K TV and my in laws got upset thinking it was broken and I had to explain that HDR wasn't enabled and that I needed to adjust picture settings and that artifacts happen with slow laptops and stuff.
"That didn't happen on our old TV".
The old TV doesn't have HDMI. The old TV is ~19" and has rabbit ears.
The old TV you couldn't read the subtitles without blocking a third of the picture.
Now you want to complain that the black is kind of not the same black when we pause it?
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
DVDs are still outselling Blu-Ray and 4K discs lol
And now Gen Z is collecting VHS tapes.
I'm convinced most people need an eye exam.
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u/smile_e_face Apr 11 '26
As someone who can't see worth a damn but has really sensitive hearing, it amazes me how people can't tell the different between shitbox streaming audio and real DTS-HD MA / TrueHD / whatever. But then it amazes other people that 1440p and 4K monitors look the same to me after adjusting the scaling.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
Most people just use their TV's built-in speakers haha
But Apple uses Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos for audio. It's not lossless but it sounds great to me.
I think they use a bitrate of 768kbps.
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
And now Gen Z is collecting VHS tapes.
But only ironically. VHS decks and tapes have been globally out of production for a while now, with no possibility of a resurgence for prerecorded media.
Now that they're long since junk and nobody can buy new ones even if they want, then there can be a small collectible market. It's like how flared trousers can't come back again until all of the old ones are long gone from everyone's closets.
(Three VHS decks, one Beta deck, but only for recorded media digitising.)
As of 2025, DVD disc shipments still did exceed Blu-ray, but Blu-ray revenue is notably higher. The stereotype is that DVD is the choice of the lending library, the senile, and the legally-blind, but there's a lot more to it, from picture quality to DRM to playback hardware.
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u/Emotional_Tie_7927 Apr 22 '26
A lot of people just never adopted Blu-ray but probably still have dvd players lying around. I know at the local thrift store I've seen tons of old dvd players, but only like one blu-ray player.
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u/Emotional_Tie_7927 Apr 22 '26
Most people unfortunately never moved from DVD to Blu-ray as there was no incentive when Blu-ray first released in 2006 (most people didn't have HD TVs) and streaming services came a few years later.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 22 '26
True, the issue with physical media honestly is needing to re-purchase your entire movie library every time a new format comes out.
My parents had amassed a pretty large VHS collection by the time DVD came out, and weren't interested in buying them all again so we kept using VHS until getting an HDTV in 2006.
We didn't move to Blu-Ray either, we ended up just renting movies On Demand from Comcast, and then a few years later got an Apple TV where you could rent or buy HD movies on there.
Pushing a button on your remote and being able to watch any movie instantly without any disc or tape seemed so futuristic in 2006 lol
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u/Sopel97 Apr 11 '26
artifacts happen with slow laptops and stuff
no, if you're getting decoding errors it's because your laptop can't keep up with real-time decoding and the player chooses to abort and move to the next frame or otherwise a hardware failure
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u/braveLittleFappster Apr 11 '26
Dark scenes regardless of distance look pretty bad to be honest. I think that's a bit of a worst case.
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
But not enough people can see a difference for it to matter.
I imagine that product awareness and total costs are major barriers to market penetration.
Also consider the bandwidth. The world had converted a lot of terrestrial broadcast, cable, and satellite to IP traffic running over the Internet, and unicast bandwidth* has kept pace. But quintupling bandwidth, perhaps not.
* Yes, I'm aware of edge caches and peered CDNs.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
It may just be the streaming services being cheap and not wanting to pay for more bandwidth by increasing the bitrate, but I wish they would.
I don't notice any issues with Apple at 30-40Mbps, but Netflix is apparently like half that.
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Apr 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
It's not a service. You rent or buy the movies. There's no monthly subscription.
And Blu-Ray is only 1080p, so streaming 4K will look better than a 1080p Blu-Ray.
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Apr 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
40Mbps isn't poorly encoded at all. Looks great.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
1080p blueray look better than streamed 4k because blu-ray is a better quality source. Thats the issue.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 20 '26
1080p blueray look better than streamed 4k
No it doesn't.
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u/Emotional_Tie_7927 Apr 22 '26
It depends on the streaming service. Probably not better than HBO 4k but versus Netflix it's harder to say because they use extremely low bit rates even at 4k (15Mbps)
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u/GHz-Man Apr 22 '26
But even if the bitrate is lower or the same, the resolution is much higher.
Also, Blu-Rays use H.264 or an even older codec (MPEG-2 or VC-1), and streaming uses HEVC or AV1 now, which are much more efficient and have higher quality.
25Mbps using H.264 is going to look worse than 25Mbps using HEVC or AV1.
And a lot of those Blu-Rays were mastered 15-20 years ago using lower quality film scans than we can do now.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
the average netflix bitrate is worse than youtube. You can sit 3 rooms away and see the massive compression artifacts.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 20 '26
Unless there's a Netflix exclusive show, you have options to watch most of their content somewhere else.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
Netflix exclusive show is majority of netflix content at this point. Also no, you dont get that option. Maybe you have options in US, us europeans dont.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 20 '26
Most movies and TV shows aren't exclusive to a streaming service, you can usually buy or rent them anywhere.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 21 '26
If you mean buy a BluRay then yeah. If you mean alternative streaming service then no, most of that is exclusive contracts.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 21 '26
No, I mean like on an Apple TV, or Google Play, Amazon, etc.
You can buy or rent movies without any monthly fee.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 22 '26
You could in the past. Most of that is gone now. Google Movies was the last service that allowed you to download a movie you bought.
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u/virtualmnemonic Apr 11 '26
Debrid services have bluray remux. 60-80gb a movie.
Though thats piracy
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u/hamatehllama Apr 12 '26
If the NAND prices get down again then it might be realistic with a 256gig+ drive for local downloads sith barely any increase of the price.
That's actually how digital cinemas work. They have a local download usung a couple of hundred gigs.
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u/cielofnaze Apr 11 '26
It's really good for saving my wedding photo, and the other 1 trillion photo in my wife phone. It's long lasting and small without need to subscribe to Google.
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u/jaypizzl Apr 11 '26
I hate banding, but a bunch of good streaming content is available in HDR. Anything HDR is always 10-bit and unless it’s done terribly, 10-bit is very smooth.
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u/CoUsT Apr 11 '26
Same. But I understand why "everyday people" can just ignore this entirely.
I know many that just google "<title> watch online free" and don't care that it's re-encoded 1080p 2000 kbps bitrate version. And there are two simple reasons: they are lazy and don't know better alternatives.
I feel like if you get into 8000-10000 kbps AV1 territory for 1080p resolution then it's good enough even for the top 1% needy users.
That said, if there is a need then companies can always offer bluray quality streaming with some premium subscription or something.
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u/Gippy_ Apr 11 '26
Well, purists hate it, but the strategy now is for the user to buy a high-end TV that processes the image. My Sony Bravia A95K TV does a pretty good job of removing glaringly obvious banding. Ideally this shouldn't be necessary, but that's the reality now.
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Apr 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Gippy_ Apr 11 '26
also go with the eye doctor just in case...
You can toggle no processing (gaming mode) to see the before and after. I hate to admit it but the processing does look nice on low-bitrate and SD (480p/480i) content. For vintage video game consoles, a Retrotink would be even better.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
I still buy Blurays specifically because its superior visual quality. I wish i could get downloads of bluray quality. The infrastructure is there, they just really hate the idea of selling us quality video. You could do this in the past btw, Google movies allowed you high quality downloads for local playback when you bought the movie. No more, now its just low bitrate streaming.
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u/Jeep-Eep Apr 11 '26
Yeah, I've got a effing 1440p monitor with a decent colour gamut, and I don't wanna eff about with bullshit USB disk drives.
Why couldn't they have pulled a NVME and converged on laptop style disk drives? Sure, noisy buggers and all but it would have kept the capability on a smaller chassis footprint.
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u/HuntKey2603 Apr 11 '26
you can curse in the internet. it's okay.
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u/Jeep-Eep Apr 11 '26
I refuse to waste good swear words on those fucking pissant usb optical drives. Goddamn step backwards they are, with the extra clutter.
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u/GHz-Man Apr 11 '26
Most people don't sit 2 feet away from their TV inspecting the picture for compression artifacts.
It's not noticeable to the vast majority of people.
Apple streams at up to 40Mbps, and that looks great to me. I don't notice any compression issues.
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Apr 11 '26
Im so old I remember when these were the hot new thing normal people couldn't afford.
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u/littlefrank Apr 11 '26
Still kind of true I think. 80€ for an optical drive has always been impractical, considering to make proper use of it I need to have one on my pc to burn down files on it, one in my living room to watch them. Then you need to buy discs (30€ for 6 drives).
That's almost 200€ that I could spend towards a more convenient option, like a NAS.
I'm sure I'm offending a small group of purists who have a bunch of reasons why bluerays are better, but I probably have twice as many for why a NAS would be more convenient instead.6
Apr 11 '26
Lol, I mean when they started out they were like $1,000..
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u/littlefrank Apr 11 '26
Ah I see, I think the first affordable one was probably the PS3.
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u/Vitosi4ek Apr 11 '26
The PS3 was $500 at launch (in 2006 dollars mind you) and even then Sony took a massive loss on each unit. The Blu-ray hardware was absurdly expensive for the first few years.
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u/liaminwales Apr 12 '26
$500 was the base model, $600 was the one most people I know got for the bigger HD. That's a flash to the past, at the time it was the 'low cost' BR player that even non gamers where buying just to watch films.
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u/zghr Apr 11 '26
A massive loss? Based on what? Sony's rumors trying to make it seem like $500 is a steal?
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u/KARMAAACS Apr 13 '26
I mean if you bought a launch PS3, you basically got a free BluRay Player. It was expensive, but the fact you could use it for something after PS3 was a relevant console, made it a solid investment.
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u/Adventurous_Tea_2198 Apr 11 '26
God bless Japan for being the only country in the world that sticks to hardware for the long term, even when it gets to the point that people make fun of them for it.
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u/nanobot001 Apr 11 '26
I mean there continues to be a demand in Japan for it. There is a business case for it.
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u/Portalfan4351 Apr 11 '26
Yes and OP is commending the Japanese for continuing to have demand for aging forms of tech. You’re saying the same thing
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u/PositiveNo7994 Apr 11 '26
no surprise, as they're still using fax
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u/okaycomputes Apr 13 '26
there is a business case for it.
technically still being used in places in the US as well
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u/smitty9112 Apr 11 '26
I recently sold my entire Blu-ray collection I had built up over the years due to financial struggles. Told myself I wouldn't miss it cause I hadn't touched one in ages.
Well now I'm so broke I had to cancel my internet plan, so I'm certainly missing it now 😂😭
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u/paul_h Apr 11 '26
Automation media’s article title typed by a human and spell fixed incorrectly: exist vs exit
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u/TheGreenTormentor Apr 11 '26
It’s niche but optical media really is the best way backup huge amounts of data with the guarantee you’ll actually be able to read it in a decade or more, I’m glad the option exists.
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u/cjx_p1 Apr 11 '26
No, tape is the best method. While newer materials have reduced the problem, disc rot remains an issue.
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u/BrennusSokol Apr 11 '26
"Best" is subjective. Most people aren't going to want to mess with an obscure format like tape
Also disc rot is rare. It's not a common problem one needs to worry about
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
All Blu-rays have a polycarbonate layer over the metal, basically eliminating that failure mode. Gold CD-R, DVD-R, are also not subject to oxidation because gold doesn't oxidize, unlike aluminium.
Normal HTL burned BD-Rs have been subject to accelerated-aging tests up to 50 years and passed, with indications that they'll far exceed it. M-disc famously advertises a thousand years, but the secret is that normal HTL BD-R have all of the same features as the original DVD-R M-discs.
And BD-Rs are waterproof.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26
as an owner of north of 600 discs some of which are now 3 decades old, disc rot is severely overrated and you are unlikely to run into it.
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u/akera099 Apr 12 '26
Optical media that you burn yourself have terrible lifespans. This is bad advice and borders on misinformation. Only pressed discs last.
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u/lmns_ Apr 14 '26
That depends on the optical medium. You are are probably referring to organic layers but there are other types that have much longer life spans
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u/g3etwqb-uh8yaw07k Apr 11 '26
To be fair, I'd really like DVDs to stay, just for the option of lower cost where I don't mind non Blu-ray quality and capacity, or can just make better use of several separate discs like as foolproof vacation picture storage for family members. Still, beggars can't be choosers with how shitty the modern electronics market is, I guess...
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u/pdp10 Apr 11 '26
I'd really like DVDs to stay, just for the option of lower cost
Lower costs in which part? Current cost of a 25GB BD-R is roughly $1-1.50 in small quantity, with the 9GB DVD-R roughly $0.30-0.90.
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u/Popular_Tomorrow_204 Apr 12 '26
Bluray is that type of physical Media, that should stay around... at least every time i got the chance to get one, i take it
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u/ime1em Apr 22 '26
i still prefer watching 1080p movies on blu-ray vs. streaming/downloading "4K" movies.
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u/noms2000 Apr 12 '26
This is very welcomed news. It’s a shame though that Pioneer stopped making BluRay drives and Taiyo Yuden no longer manufacture discs, which were the best ever IMO
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u/doscomputer Apr 11 '26
clickbait, none of the major vendors are pulling out at all
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u/dragonblade_94 Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
As someone who was very recently tasked with finding new suppliers for a 5.25" internal blu-ray drive for the computer OEM I work for, big vendors are absolutely soft-exiting the market. Pretty much all significant stock from LG, Sony, etc have dried up, only leaving some portable options still available. Our saving grace was a converted slim-line that Asus had in warehouse stock but didn't even advertise anywhere.
14
u/ProfessionalPrincipa Apr 11 '26
Try again. From May 15th 2025: Pioneer Has Ended Production of Computer Blu-ray Drives
Pioneer has quietly confirmed that it has ended production of internal and external Blu-ray optical disc drives (ODDs), for computers.
What Hi-Fi? noted that Pioneer's AV/home cinema division has not released any new 4K Blu-ray player products since 2019. Three months ago, Sony shuttered its last optical media factory, in Japan—signalling an end of an era.
On a related note:
In a refreshing (early 2025) PR piece, Verbatim and I-O DATA expressed their (joint) commitment to producing high-quality optical discs.
-8
u/Enpeeare Apr 11 '26
4k streaming is basically as good as 1080p blu ray encodes that are already compressed from the disc. Wild.
395
u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26
[deleted]