TheImpressiveXSony will cut around 250 jobs from the recordable media business manufacturing hub and will gradually cease production of optical discs, including Blu-ray discs.
TattorackWelp… There goes physical media…
db2Yep, I’m sure it’ll be gone Verbatim.
Take your upvote
JoeKroganIts an old code but it checks out 😅
It’s just one company, it’s not all the Blu-ray production stopping. I think the last time I bought any Sony recordable media was CD-Rs for my MP3 CD player in the mid 00s.
HolyhandgrenadeSony owns the blu-ray format. I’m worried.
Why are you worried about Sony owning the blu-ray format?
They can DMCA the encryption keys and boom – instead dead format.
What? No. If I write data to a Blu-ray it’s not encrypted. This comment makes little sense.
It is if it’s a commercially bought product like a movie, for instance, and without media being sold on it, the media would be basically dead for most people
You really don’t understand how bd-r/bd-rw works, do you?
If they’re decreasing their production, it could mean that physical media is ending. If so, that fucking sucks because you can’t own anything anymore
You thought blu ray sales would just continue forever?
AnUnusualRelicThere’s still the super-DVDs, or whatever they were called.
mega-discs
They do not own it, they did co-develop it.
Snot FlickermanI guess hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical somehow?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
All media is still, technically, physical media.
Even when you stream it locally and don’t have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.
Still there for the duration. Being encrypted just makes it akin to being inside a locked box. Being in RAM is like it being transferred in an escrow service.
I guess. Technically. I don't usually count encrypted without the ability to decrypt as useful, but, I'll give you the up arrow because technically correct is the best kind of correct.
Thanks, my point is simply just that data is still physical, no matter what.
A document locked inside a box that I personally don’t have a key to doesn’t make the document inside of it non-existent, just inaccessible to me, personally.
No, the data is not physical, it is either magnetic or electric.
Since most people still store their media on hard drives most media is purely magnetic.
In a solid state drive storage chip the data is stored electronicly.
Thanks, my point is simply just that data is still physical, no matter what.
Turn off the PC and see how well that no-matter-what applies…
A document locked inside a box that I personally don’t have a key to doesn’t make the document inside of it non-existent, just inaccessible to me, personally.
What’s the point of having inaccessible data?
storing a movie in RAM does not count as having a physical copy of the movie. While RAM is a form of physical media, the data stored in RAM is volatile and temporary. A physical copy of a movie typically refers to a more permanent and tangible form of storage, such as on a hard drive, SSD, USB flash drive, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc.
the term “physical media” typically refers to portable physical media, such as floppy disks, optical media, and other solutions such as tape.
ChillPillhard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
All media is still, technically, physical media
No one is arguing this. You’re making the strawman arguement. The not-so-subtle undertone of the article is clear.
Quoting the article:
The planned job cuts come amid a decline in demand for traditional storage formats such as Blu-ray discs, with streaming services now the norm.
…
The electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also gradually cease production of optical disc storage media products, including Blu-ray discs, according to the sources.
You will not be allowed to legally own tv shows or films and you should learn to like it. As I can tell from many of the other comments here, not many of us are fans of that idea.
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Well not ANYMORE!!! Not since Best Buy stopped carrying physical media!!!
/s
This isn’t a hill I care enough to die on.
I’ve never bought a series in any format. It’s always been piracy and for at least the last 5 years catch and release.
What I mean is, I don’t want to keep series in any case.
That said, now I think about it, if I didn’t pirate everything then keeping copies of what I’d paid for world feel important
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
Watch the other millions of hours of media that’s been released in the last 100 years
You are very much missing the point for the sake of a pedantic argument.
Someone else already perfectly illustrated the point in a comment below, so I guess I’m spared the effort.
steal_your_faceI always preferred the rips fork Blu rays though. They had the highest quality video and audio and stuff. This sucks so much =(
How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
ZFS FTW
I upgraded my datahoarding server to a pair of 18TB hard drives on ZFS with mirroring a little while back. It’ll be several years before I need to upgrade again, but I expect that when I do, SSDs will be cheap enough to go that route.
Already have a 10Gbps fiber connection to that server, so the hard drives are the bottleneck.
Commercially pressed discs don’t last forever, but longer than burnable discs. IIRC, they used to say 50 years for CDs, but in practice, it was a lot less. More like 20 or 30 if you store and handle them nicely. Easily less than 10 if you don’t.
Hard drives go bad over time; I don’t like trusting spinning platters much over 7 years. They can be OK, but they can suddenly stop working whenever.
SSDs are about the same as spinning platters.
I think we are talking about archival storage rather than storage in use. In which case hard drives can last decades.
I wouldn’t trust it that way, no. They might last decades. They also might not. It’s a gamble on any single drive, or even a few mirrored drives.
File system also matters. Modern ZFS has error checking that can handle some level of bit rot. Older formats generally don’t.
If it’s over 7 years or so, I want to get the data off of there.
Hard drives break down from use, not from sitting around. We aren’t talking about SSDs which while they don’t break down will experience data corruption over time. It’s not really a gamble at all with mirrored drives.
You’re also telling me things I already know. I already use ZFS. I agree that you should be using something with data integrity protection. Though ZFS isn’t always what you want for archival purposes.
Magnetic platters absolutely do break down from sitting around. Bearings and other mechanics can also go bad. For those things, a professional recovery operation could still get the data if you’re willing to pay, but the drive itself should be thrown out.
Edit: keep in mind that with bit rot, the drive may superficially function just fine. Your data may even be 99% correct. That 1%, however, could cause unrecoverable problems, such as videos that glitch in the middle.
That’s why you use multiple drives with bitrot protection. Modern SSDs and HDDs have protections against bitrot built in, including internal checksums.
If you are running your hard drives once in a while, then bearing failure isn’t really a concern. You probably should be doing that anyway to refresh the data and make sure it doesn’t degrade. Regardless people have had 10 year old drives of older spin up first time. It’s not likely you are going to have a mechanical issue on multiple drives anyway.
If you refresh an SSD once every couple of years it will last decades.
You keep doing this thing where you presume I don’t know about some issue. Rather I know about these things, but they have fairly easy mitigations or are already solved.
You keep doing this thing where you presume I don’t know about some issue
Maybe because you way overestimate the reliability of old drives. Yes, 10 year old drives can work. Doesn’t mean you should trust them with anything other than getting the data off of it.
captainastronautDamn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
I've started building mine up again, too, because too often a movie I want to watch isn't available to stream and purchasing a physical copy costs less than a digital copy.
Movies are not sold on recordable media, they are sold on pressed discs. There are a lot more manufacturers than just Sony too.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
TheGoldenGodI’ll be sure to buy extras, since it’s clear this is yet another push towards the consumer market not deserving to own their media.
Apparently “recordable media” here means the kind you can record on at home, e.g. CD-R, DVD-R.
? . . . as opposed to - ?
As opposed to the discs movies are sold on.
Ah! Yes. Hm. Well then . . . where do distributors get theirs from? Not Sony, presumably?
Pressed discs have a completely different manufacturing method
? Did not know that. I assumed they were essentially WORMs but otherwise identical. Do they not use the same laser or something like that?
Pressed discs (like movies) are physically… pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.
Wow just like vinyl, sort of huh? That’s fascinating, I never considered it.
Exactly like vinyl!
This is why when when CDs originally came out, the industry kept saying “soon CDs will be super cheap since they’re so much cheaper than manufacturing tapes!” (which really DO need to be dubbed linearly, even though they can be done at like 10x speed in digital high-speed dubbers) before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.
This is also why they kept trying to make laserdisc (and RCA’s CED) be a thing, since they were cheaper to mass manufacture by stamping than prerecorded video tape’s slow dubbing process.
before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.
Heh, well i dunno about ‘happy’, i mean they did get sued. I think I still have my check for $7 somewhere . . .
5 Music Companies Settle Federal Case On CD Price-Fixing
Federal Trade Commission announces settlement of antitrust case against nation's five largest music companies; says there should now be significant price cuts for compact discs; two-year probe found music companies used illegal marketing agreements to end price war, inflate prices of compact discs and sharply restrict ability of retailers to offer discounts; FTC officials estimate consumers were overcharged $500 million over last four years; no fines will be levied in settlement, but companies agree not to make any such marketing agreements; lawyer representing one of music companies says companies decided to settle case because disputed marketing agreements are becoming outdated since they do not apply to sales of CD's on Internet; photo (M)
I would have loved laserdiscs. The large format for art, all futuristic lookin’ - but all media degrades so maybe M-disc in laserdisc size? We’ll probably have crystal storage before then i guess.
- as opposed to +
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