The End of Blu-ray

I don't know about normal Blu-Rays going anywhere, but UHD has clearly been a mess and a failure. Too many devices either can't play them or can't play them correctly.
I'm sure this forum is probably filled with "from my cold dead hands" types, but I'll legitimately be surprised if there's a physical successor to 4K Blu-Ray.
The future of extremely high quality audio/video might not be via Netflix streaming, but could instead just be via HQ digital downloads. Those can support multiple languages, legit HQ audio, and decent bitrates.
 
Video compression and less than ideal quality streaming is still a thing brah. Blu-Ray isn't going anywhere. Samsung probably just doesn't want to pay the royalties.
 
Either a physical disc or flash drive will be required for future 8k.

I'm not in the majority, I have a dedicated theater so I'll always use a disc or whatever least/uncompressed media is around. I don't see me making the jump to 4k due to the extreme cost. You can get pseudo 4k for a reasonable dollar value but true 4k projector with lens memory is still $8,000 or so (haven't checked in a while).

I enjoy streaming as well but that is just on my 1080p TV. If it's a real movie I watch in my theater as you might expect.

My teenage children watch everything on their phones unless we watch a movie together even when they could watch it on a TV or computer in their room they still watch on their phones.

Physical media will decline but it won't go away.
 
If you carefully read the guys article, you may come to the same conclusion I did: He just made up a bunch of shit to explain why he streams and doesn't buy physical media. Samsung was a convenient headline to get you to click on it.
 
Yeah, I'm having a good giggle reading some of these responses. There will always be enthusiasts who want the highest quality experience, of course. But every one here is pretty out of touch with your average consumer. With media, easiest always wins, and streaming is easiest.

I don't think we're out of touch with the average consumer to be honest - I think we're all well aware that to the average Joe, a $300 Walmart TV and a soundbar is good enough for them. And I'm not blaming them for that, as we all have different interests. I also definitely understand the allure of streaming and am also a pretty heavy streaming media user. On the other hand, what I would say about enthusiasts is that we're frustrated with the average consumer, because those folks are who dictate the direction of entire industries, much to our chagrin. I'd prefer having my games on media too, but that is hard to do these days and that ship has sailed.

I think many of us who are frustrated with the direction of some of these industries do so from an informed viewpoint - we all know that almost every single business on earth is trying to find ways to get us all to pay monthly fees for stuff, and we all know what happens when we're all locked up in monthly fees and other options are eliminated. They'll just keep raising prices and when prices get too high, they'll start splitting their offerings for "budget conscious consumers" and have lower service tiers which cost more than the higher service tiers from previous years but give far less value.

On a sidenote, I laugh every time I go to the carwash and see them trying to pressure sell me into paying a monthly fee for unlimited carwashes, ranging from $30/month to almost $60/month. The sad part is, the lane for the unlimited club members is always full.
 
This whole Bluray generation has just passed my old ass by and I never even blinked. I've never owned a Bluray player or disc. I still copy some DVD's for the kids and watch probably 80% of everything I watch by downloading, viewing and discarding. The other 20% is watching straight TV. If I can figure out how to watch something without commercials, that's the way I go as much as I can as I loathe commercials and advertising. Only streaming I do is when I'm watching regular youtube. I pay up the ass for Direct TV but don't spend a dime on streaming services or physical Bluray. To each his own dinosaur pie I guess.
 
This whole Bluray generation has just passed my old ass by and I never even blinked. I've never owned a Bluray player or disc. I still copy some DVD's for the kids and watch probably 80% of everything I watch by downloading, viewing and discarding. The other 20% is watching straight TV. If I can figure out how to watch something without commercials, that's the way I go as much as I can as I loathe commercials and advertising. Only streaming I do is when I'm watching regular youtube. I pay up the ass for Direct TV but don't spend a dime on streaming services or physical Bluray. To each his own dinosaur pie I guess.
Watch a blu-ray on your PC and get your mind blown by high quality video/audio. You have everything you need except for a blu-ray player and they are fairly cheap for the PC.
 
Until all of the digital copy protection mechanism kick in and you realize your software player won't even play a new disk without an update and maybe not even then. You're better off creating a media server and eliminating all of the copy protection but then you're probably creating a felony in the eyes of legal system that Hollywood bought.
Watch a blu-ray on your PC and get your mind blown by high quality video/audio. You have everything you need except for a blu-ray player and they are fairly cheap for the PC.
 
Watch a blu-ray on your PC and get your mind blown by high quality video/audio. You have everything you need except for a blu-ray player and they are fairly cheap for the PC.

I was going to reply with something like this. You don't know what you don't know until you see it. They are stupid cheap now days.
 
I went from Laser disc to DVD to Bluray and now 4K UHD BR. And I won't stop buying disks now or anytime soon.

I've had too many internet or host related issues in the past and there is always ongoing concern with non-physical media much the same as for Steam. If the service provider decides to close my account or they simply go out of business, all my digital bits & bobs go poof!

Also like me, you can always just buy the combo packs that come with 4K+BR or dvd+digital. Solves all your format / media problems in one shot.
 
Until all of the digital copy protection mechanism kick in and you realize your software player won't even play a new disk without an update and maybe not even then. You're better off creating a media server and eliminating all of the copy protection but then you're probably creating a felony in the eyes of legal system that Hollywood bought.
I will neither confirm nor deny the existence of RedFox AnyDVD HD that could be used to backup your blu-rays to your NAS.
 
There is still no easier and cheaper way to see many new releases than with Netflix Blu-ray service, or perhaps Redbox. I am still impatiently waiting for either of them to offer UHD Blu-ray rental.
If you sign up for Redbox's text messages, emails and use their app, you can get incredible deals on rentals. I too wish they would expand their 4k rentals faster. There are a lot of movies I'd like to check out before buying. That said, I don't care what others do, so long as they continue offering physical media (I don't see UHD Blu Ray quality streaming anytime soon due to bandwidth restrictions as well as the caps that many (most?) ISPs have.

Nothing wrong with streaming, but the quality is lower and for movies I want to watch more than 1x, want the best quality.
 
So, we're talking no physical medium at all??

Or are they just discontinuing Blu-ray since UHD Blu-ray is all the rage now..?
 
lol Bluerays are going to be the new Vinyl and make a comeback one day.
I do agree - that there is definitely a pretty big market for people that have a home theater. Streaming compressed files just won't cut it for someone that put $10-30k into their TV + Sound system.
I know that one day I'll probably make that level of investment. It won't be in the next year just because I'm not that rich (yet), but it will happen... And when that does, I won't allow compressed streaming files when I use it.
Except that Blu Ray and 4K UHD Blu Ray is better than streaming, while vinyl is not superior to a CD (no matter how many times Neil Young and Eddie Vedder claim otherwise.....though maybe they have 10,000 dollar turntable...the masses are playing records on turntables that are inferior to the one I sold in the mid 80s).
 
If they can figure out some form of digital distribution I'm all for it. Prime, Apple, and even Netflix have created the ability to download media and watch it offline. If that media was higher bitrate and included all the things blu-ray does now, I would say that's a perfectly reasonable alternative that costs the studios near nothing to implement (as it doesn't run on physical media) and then they would save on the cost on printing all the physical media as well on top of it.
You'd need to have no cap on data, because a blu ray is roughly 30-50GB and most 4k that I've got are 50-80GB. You'll chew through your data cap very quickly if you have to download a movie (and no, removing foreign languages doesn't make it significantly smaller.
 
The sad problem is most folks don't know what even 1080 is supposed to look like. A lot of cable providers default the lower channels to 720 and many folks won't bother to try the higher numbered channels with the 1080 HD content. They find the first channel that has their show and go "Cool, it looks great on my new 60 inch TV" Now they try streaming and that 480/720 stream looks like what they are used to and they think "Cool, I am watching HD streaming on my new 60 inch TV" So now they think, "Why do I need Blueray or DVD if when I have HD streaming for my new 60 inch TV?"

I bet there are a lot of folks that got 4k TVs this Christmas that are convinced they are watching 4K content when what they are really watching is 720 stuff because that is the channel numbers they are used to selecting.
They'd know if they watched a blu ray (arguably even Netflix). I watched the Oscars and kept wondering why it looked so bad...then I googled ABC's resolution and it all made sense.

Maybe. But the 4k pricing isn't too far out of line considering the higher level of work that has to go into a 4k disc to offer up superior video and audio. Most of my 4k purchases have been around the $27 mark with some as low as $20 and a few higher than $30. Not really that bad since most, if not all, 4k packages come with the 2k BD and a digital copy. The appeal for me on 4k is not the video but the audio. Think about the hours that have to go into creating an Atmos mix using a 6-channel master audio track.

Or even less. I've seen First Blood for 16 bucks, and I think it's normally 18 bucks, at Best Buy.
 
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Haha reminds me of one of my non-tech office friends from a few years ago. They had trouble with their TV service and asked me and another geeky colleague if we could take a look since they lived a block from the office. Turns out it was just a loose coax. No biggie. A couple of adjustments to the cable running into the box and every thing was good to go.

'Wow! I've never seen the picture so clear. What did you do?'

I looked at the channel and realized that Xfinity/Comcast had the same signal coming into 2 different channels numbers each. One was SD and another was HD. For example #24 was NBC in SD while #2xx (3 digits) was NBC in HD. The dude was watching the SD version of his channels the entire time!

Whoever had set it up the first time had it on the SD (480 - not even 720 HD!) channels and set the TV itself to stretch / widescreen mode (so it would fill edge to edge). Since they didn't watch alot of TV they never bothered scrolling channels all the way into the hundreds.
 
We're a tech savvy group here. I have a feeling most of us have encountered an MKV that you'd be hard pressed to differentiate from a Blu-Ray. Even including Atmos and DTS:X.
There's no real reason that couldn't become the standard. All it takes is some form of DRM, which is what the publishers want. Not all digital content has to be delivered via streaming.
 
Very nice. Besides your logical points, which are all solid, I agree we all need a system where we get to keep and collect a HARD COPY!
It is the essential element to collecting.
I'm all about the steelbooks. I only got one on Blu Ray (edge of tomorrow) and I could sell it for more than I paid for it (and will if a 4k version is released). That said, I immediately put an MKV on my NAS and stream it to my TV (but that stream is the same as playing the UHD disk).
 
The only problem I've seen with current-generation players is overheating from being placed in an enclosed cabinet. I expect most people around here rip their media with MakeMKV or whatever.

I can understand not being interested in 4k, but the quality jump from DVD/compressed garbage to Blu-Ray is actually quite nice.
I think 4k looks better, but more than that, the difference in price is small. I'm still shocked people are buying DVDs at all. I quit buying them more than 10 years ago. Nothing is future proof, but Blu Ray is certainly better than DVD...but yes, almost no movies are watched form the disk. I did watch Paddington 2 that way, but only because Kodi didn't work for 4k from my XBone...now i just use LG's player in the TV. MakeMKV is definitely a winner (though sometimes i have to use AnyDVD to kill the copy protection...not sure why MakeMKV barfs, in those cases, on it's own.
 
Amen. For the movie franchises I really follow, I typically go to the theater and also buy the Blu-ray. For any other movie I'm on the fence about, I'll just wait for the Blu-ray because 95% of the time, I can get the Blu-ray cheaper than paying for my wife and I to go to the theater AND I get to keep the movie.

I rip all my media to my Plex server and store my media away. When I built my last PC, I got the predictable comments like "LULZ WHY ARE YOU BUYING AN OBSOLETE BLU RAY DRIVE?!?!?!?!" I just laughed them off.
I bought a new Blu Ray Drive for my PC simply because it meant I could rip 4k Disks. That also convinced me to purchase an AnyDVD license again (and will probalby pick up MakeMKV once it's out of beta). The ability to rip all my 4k movies to my NAS makes that 100 bucks (probably could have done it for less, but it was worth it to be sure it'd rip them) and I didn't buy a 4k capable TV for another year (if not longer).

I did the same with Blu Ray/HDDVD...picked up a drive that could play both and picked up AnyDVD. My disks sit on a media rack in a closet.
 
We're a tech savvy group here. I have a feeling most of us have encountered an MKV that you'd be hard pressed to differentiate from a Blu-Ray. Even including Atmos and DTS:X.
I don't know what you're looking at, but my 4k MKVs range from roughly 50GB to 80GB, which is the same size as the file on the disk.
 
Blueray and physical media isn't going anywhere. Not until the national average internet speed cracks 10 megabits.
 
You'd need to have no cap on data, because a blu ray is roughly 30-50GB and most 4k that I've got are 50-80GB. You'll chew through your data cap very quickly if you have to download a movie (and no, removing foreign languages doesn't make it significantly smaller.

Therein lies my dilemma, I figure I would have to have roughly 100 TB of storage to hold my BR and 4K disk collection. I just don't feel up to building a NAS with enough capacity to hold what I already have, much less future releases.
 
TBH it has been dead for a long time. I cannot even remember the last time I actually built a PC that had a bluray player/writer in it. It was even more years than that since I actually USED a bluray player/writer in a pc. Sony basically killed it when they artificially inflated the price of the medium beyond any real reason, and then put so much DRM on them that they were basically unusable on pc and required a bluray player with online access to play the dang things.
 
Samsung had crappy 4K bluray players anyways... same with LG. I will still buy and enjoy UHD bluray. It's just better when you have a 7.2 surround and 75'' TV.
 
Physical media will be around for a long, long time. One day, though, it will be gone. Probably when everyone has access to gigbit internet.

Personally, I'll continue to buy 4k Blu-ray for the film's I love, as long as it exists, as streaming cannot compete with the quality and it doesn't eat into my data cap.
 
I rent the movies I watch from red box, I would totally m do digital rentals but for 3x the price of a $2 bluray red box rental?!?! I'm perfect fine getting off my ass and driving half a mile
 
I don't own 4K stuff, but I think they shot themselves in both feet by rushing it so soon after BR became a thing.

But yeah it does crack me up when my buddy talks about wanting a new 4K TV and all they do is watch cable or on-demand movies. Ummm about that...

I think physical media will move to a smaller SD card like format someday.

Streaming is great for convenience but most people know it's not the best it can get. Unless you're over 60 (like my Mom, mother in law, father in law, etc etc) that can't tell the difference between cable TV, DVD, BR, etc. My mom would still be rocking VHS if the players weren't so hard to come by.
 
I read this and think 2 things. 1. Samsung Players have always been garbage every time I've tried one. 2.they need to stop including the regular BR disc with 4K ones and lower the damn prices.
 
Sooo....


If I don't want over-compressed files for streaming services that have glaring artefacting, what alternate distribution format exists?

Tidal for Video?
 
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Therein lies my dilemma, I figure I would have to have roughly 100 TB of storage to hold my BR and 4K disk collection. I just don't feel up to building a NAS with enough capacity to hold what I already have, much less future releases.
Yeah you have way more movies than me. I've got 2.6 TB of 4K movies and roughly 1TB of Blu Rays (assuming I didn't forget to rip something) If I had 100 TB of movies, that'd be a huge NAS. I guess it's doable, but you'd probably need 15 bays (assuming 10TB drives) just to store them all and have some room to grow. Drives alone are probably around 3grand.

I guess the plus side is that the ocmplaints about must watch trailers is eliminated, no java (assuming 4k has that, I only ran paddington 2 on my XBone and don't recall) and, of course, easy access to your movies without grabbing a disk...but it's a big investment in hardware and time.

Maybe drives will drop in price faster than you buy more 4k Movies ;)
 
TBH it has been dead for a long time. I cannot even remember the last time I actually built a PC that had a bluray player/writer in it. It was even more years than that since I actually USED a bluray player/writer in a pc. Sony basically killed it when they artificially inflated the price of the medium beyond any real reason, and then put so much DRM on them that they were basically unusable on pc and required a bluray player with online access to play the dang things.
AnydvdHD fixes that issue.
 
I looked at the channel and realized that Xfinity/Comcast had the same signal coming into 2 different channels numbers each. One was SD and another was HD. For example #24 was NBC in SD while #2xx (3 digits) was NBC in HD. The dude was watching the SD version of his channels the entire time!

Whoever had set it up the first time had it on the SD (480 - not even 720 HD!) channels and set the TV itself to stretch / widescreen mode (so it would fill edge to edge). Since they didn't watch alot of TV they never bothered scrolling channels all the way into the hundreds.

It is more sinister than that for Xfinity. SD is the DEFAULT option for their channels, at least with my mom's regular cable box w/o DVR capabilities. It drives me nuts every time I visit and decide to watch TV. After changing channels, you'll get a pop-up for a second or two with a " button " to " Watch in HD. " I have not found a menu option to default to HD. With my Dish Network equipment, HD is the default option and you'll never see the SD feed unless it is selected in the preferences. My only way around this was to get my mom a Harmony and program the HD channels into Favorites but she never uses the Harmony because it is difficult for her to fix things if there is a IR/RF misfire.
 
I don't own 4K stuff, but I think they shot themselves in both feet by rushing it so soon after BR became a thing.

But yeah it does crack me up when my buddy talks about wanting a new 4K TV and all they do is watch cable or on-demand movies. Ummm about that...

I think physical media will move to a smaller SD card like format someday.

Streaming is great for convenience but most people know it's not the best it can get. Unless you're over 60 (like my Mom, mother in law, father in law, etc etc) that can't tell the difference between cable TV, DVD, BR, etc. My mom would still be rocking VHS if the players weren't so hard to come by.

Facts:
  • Blu Ray came out in 2006 (9 years after DVD players went on sale in the USA).
  • 4k Launched 10 years after Blu Ray
My guess is around 2026 we'll get 8k and/or 3D without glasses.
 
Yeah you have way more movies than me. I've got 2.6 TB of 4K movies and roughly 1TB of Blu Rays (assuming I didn't forget to rip something) If I had 100 TB of movies, that'd be a huge NAS. I guess it's doable, but you'd probably need 15 bays (assuming 10TB drives) just to store them all and have some room to grow. Drives alone are probably around 3grand.

I guess the plus side is that the ocmplaints about must watch trailers is eliminated, no java (assuming 4k has that, I only ran paddington 2 on my XBone and don't recall) and, of course, easy access to your movies without grabbing a disk...but it's a big investment in hardware and time.

Maybe drives will drop in price faster than you buy more 4k Movies ;)

Bleh, I figured it wrong, I probably only have about 15 to 20 TB of stuff, that’s still a healthy sized NAS
 
I think Blu-ray will be around for a long time. There will always be a market for physical media. Not everyone has broadband internet. Internet service or services on the internet don't have 100% up-time. Don't get me started on the horrible compression quality of streaming services.
 
Bleh, I figured it wrong, I probably only have about 15 to 20 TB of stuff, that’s still a healthy sized NAS
4 bays would get your 30TB (plus one for parity). I bit the bullet and bought an 8 bay Synology last year. I'm only using 4 right now, but it's easy to add more (and I have extra drives waiting to be tossed in) and by the time I need buy more drives, I'm sure 16TB drives will be cheap. Also since if I'd built my own, I probably would have used Windows Server Essentials, but it's over 400, so figured I might as well part with 900 and not have to worry about setup or buying a new OS whenever support ends (2022 for the 2016 edition that was out at the time). Note that I bought most of my 8TB drives for around 140-150, which seemed reasonable.
 
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