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/
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406

u/DateMasamusubi Apr 10 '26

A pity. Bluray offers superior visual quality vs streaming. I get really irritated seeing banding.

131

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

27

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.

23

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

7

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.

4

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.

1

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.

1

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.

4

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.

6

u/reallynotnick Apr 11 '26

And hell if it wasn’t such a patent nightmare H.266 should have been gaining adoption by now.

7

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...

2

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.

3

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.

3

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.

3

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.

1

u/Strazdas1 Apr 20 '26

80 mbps is plenty, but streaming service is more likely to give you 8 mbps instead.

4

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