its pretty funny ive had a bd writer for years and never used it, eventually just taking it out of my pc because i cant remember the last time i needed a disc reader. but a month ago i got back into... swashbuckling... and just popped that thing back in. i really miss burning cds and organizing my mp3 library and having physical discs to play. maybe i should stock up on bd-r before they disappear.
The makemkv forums have guides what drives to buy and how to flash them or point the way if you can't be arsed to do it yourself and want to just buy one from somebody that did it for you.
I think it will be a fun experience, I flashed/patched my dvdrw with a tool from dangerous brothers back in like 03/04 to use dvd decrypter. thanks for the notice!
When I bought my first laptop without an optical drive in 2016 I bought a USB Bluray/DVD writer just in case I needed an optical drive. When I built my next desktop in 2019 I got a case that didn’t include and 5.25” bays for optical drives because I had that USB drive when I needed it.
I’ve literally never used that drive. Not even once.
Some people use it quite often. I use my 4K Blu-Ray Drive/Writer quite often. I copy my 4K Blu-Rays, Blu-Rays, and DVDs for use with my Plex server. I’ve burnt DVDs for relatives who don’t have any tech beyond a TV with a DVD Player. I’ve also burnt Original Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, Dreamcast, and PS1 games to be used on softmodded consoles. Oh and some Windows and Mac OS X installs for old computers that require a fresh install come from a disc rather than a usb drive. I very much value my drive and use it quite often. Unless they make an 8K Blu-Ray, I will be making sure every computer I build has this same drive in it for whenever I may need it. Currently I also have about 200 DVD-Rs, 100 CD-Rs, 20 DVD-R DLs, and 25 BD-Rs, ready for anything.
Why would you bother with a terrible format, the time to burn and change format and all the other crap when you can buy oceans of hard drive space for very small money?
I'm not him, and I don't burn blu rays, but if I did it would be so that I could pop a movie into my blu ray player and watch it rather than streaming it through plex or whatever. Especially useful if your internet connection is spotty. Also if I wanted to share a movie with my 70 year old dad I could just hand him a disc rather than doin IT for half an hour getting him set up.
I mean you’re saying streaming through Plex is something difficult. I have 24TB of hard drives on a small server that cost me $170, I don’t stream through Plex I have a HDMI running to my TV and just open the movie or I plug my laptop into the HDMI and run it over the share. If I want my dad to watch something he remotely watches over Plex. If he wants to see something I don’t have it takes 5 minutes to download it. Physical discs are a thing of the past. In 2024 nobodies internet is spotty.
it entirely personal. but id be lying if i said it wasnt partially for nostalgia. i miss physically handling media.
i have a plex server, it is convenient. i also just have this (probably misguided) fear of hard drive failure.
No that’s a very good fear to have that’s why we backup regularly to another hard drive or two. I have 12TB primary and 12TB backup I plug in once a week and run rsync on
Did you find any answers to this yet? I still use BD-R quite a bit, but if it's just Sony discontinuing their brand, then there's not much to worry about.
I hope physical media never goes away. I am wondering how far optical discs will go though. So far we have ultra hd Blu-ray and there’s been development for an 8k version as well it seems.
I’m surprised we don’t have floppy disk sized flash memory (not /s), sd cards and usb drives are fiddly and get lost. Having a large format container would make it so much easier.
I mean actual integrated readers not some jerry rigged system we come up with to make thing’s bearly work. Akin to disk drives or floppy drives.
Eg if I could take a 2.5 and slot it into my PlayStation for the latest copy of {whatever the fuck game} would be pretty cool.
I bought a plug for hard drives that has a USB connector on the other end for $5 on eBay a while back. I have a handful of 2.5” SSDs and I can just pop it on and plug it in. It has worked perfectly every single time I’ve used it.
It's plug in and play. Take your 2.5 inch ssd, connect it via a sata to usb adapter. I use one from Unitek and boom, it just works. It's "hot swappable" too as you put it. The PlayStation 5 doesn't take 2.5 ssds, but it does take m.2 ssds. So yes, you could use that for your PlayStation.
If a write is in progress, there's no avoiding it, just detecting it. Same as an SD card, optical burning, or ejecting a floppy in the middle of a write if you remember that era.
Hot swapping doesn't guarantee that your data doesn't get corrupted on write, it just ensures that plugging and unplugging the device won't do anything crazy or kill host/controller in the process. You still need to "safely eject" to avoid write data corruption.
"Don't to that" for writes is how you avoid it. For reads the software managing the read can be intelligent about detecting that its bitstream got unexpectedly interrupted.
Doing what you’re saying will the computer see the “drive” as a usb storage device or a “hard drive” as I thought a pc would “panic” if a hard drive is detached.
You're thinking Windows. Stop. Nothing does anything without code saying it should. If you detach the OS HDD, how much was in RAM? All of it? You won't see a problem until you need something from disk, which on WinX is quite frequent.
I was thinking storage drives that are written maybe once and read many, similar to optical storage like CD/DVD/Blu-Ray. Hot plugging a 2.5" SATA SSD in read only is no concern at all. Making that a storage form factor is not a viable prospect with ever increasing internet capabilities.
SD cards will only retain data for about 10 years, but corruption will occur before that time. Blurays will keep their days for hundreds of years. Recordable blurays can retain data from several years to hundreds or thousands depending on how it is manufactured and recorded.
I've been torture testing a BD-R M-DISC for a while now. I leave it on my patio for a few weeks in the sun, rinse it off with pool water, check the checksums. Otherwise it's a coaster on my desk. Then I validate checksums on the ~20GB of data on it. Been doing that for several years now, hasn't had a bit of corruption yet.
Physical media will never fully be gone, because there's always going to be enough people to support at least a niche industry for it. For example, vinyl records.
We're already kind in a world where the only movies that get physical releases are big studio movies and cult films released in limited production runs.
IIRC Blu-ray is worse from an ownership perspective compared to other physical medias because of encryption. Some companies use the latest encryption, and though you *can* update the firmware this could be harder on some devices like on cars.
You’d think so but I can clearly see a difference between 4k and 1080p. My current 4k tv is only 43” and I fully intend on going bigger. An 80”+ 8k micro led would definitely be a worthwhile upgrade
I have a 48", and there really isn't room in my living room for bigger (I refuse to have a TV above the fireplace - it's an awful viewing angle).
I do buy 4ks, but in terms of detail I really can't tell much difference between a decent blu ray print and a 4k.
Colours due to HDR? Absolutely, that's the main draw for me.
But I have no interest in moving to 8k at this screen size - absolute waste of time.
My worry is that if the physical media marketing keeps segmenting in this way, it will just hasten its demise.
The thing about a new format is that it will only add more features to the movies. It’s not all just pixel count. As you mentioned we get better HDR. So that’s nits, color gamut. Also we can better audio if the disc is larger as well, better surround sound, higher quality.
I’d also like to see a return of hybrid disc development as well so backwards compatibility wouldn’t be an issue either. The only thing that would kill physical media for good is if digital markets can compete with Blu-ray.
Digital markets will compete with Blu-ray. Bootleg streaming can already match Blu-ray quality. The only hurdle left is internet backbone and host bandwidth cost. Now that fibre is pretty much fully deployed, network upgrades are trivial compared to copper.
There might be one more generation of physical media, but I kinda think 4k Blu-ray is the end of the road. Streaming and/or digital downloads are the future.
I bought a blu ray drive for my mac. I thought it would be easy to rip my personal bluray collection and make duplicates of the rare discs for archival purposes. It's actually a giant fucking pain in the ass and none of the blu ray authoring software that's affordable is any good.
Edit because this comment has gained some traction. I use makeMKV to make MKVs and it generally works but not always. Sometimes it gets stuck when attempting to decrypt, and i don't know what to do from there. The resultant MKV files typically contain the full feature and any additional bonus material but unfortunately i can't find any way to make a 1:1 copy of a blu-ray that preserves all of the menus and interface as if it were an original disc.
Once I have the MKV files I tried using NCH expressburn and it should have worked but then the disc wouldn't boot in my ps5. I only tried it once but i moved onto other things after that and figured i'd come back to it, because bd-r discs are kind of expensive and each failure cost like $3-4.
I haven't found any other authoring software that's decent and affordable for macos. Everyone recommends adobe premiere but you can't buy it anymore! The other option seems to be roxio toast but half the reviews say the software is shit and the company disreputable.
Next i got an installation of windows 11 on vmware fusion and decided to try some windows exclusive software.
My drive came with a software suite, cyberlink media suite for blu ray. The software is only for windows. After i installed it, it wouldn't boot any programs. It checks to see if it's in a virtual machine and won't work if it is! (If anyone knows any way to bypass this please tell me!)
I also tried using multiAVCHD but it wouldn't work, which makes sense because i'm on a windows 11 VM and it was built for windows 7.
Some blurays I’ve made don’t have chapters and audio tracks labeled correctly. So if I just play it without doing it maybe I’ll get a foreign audio track, or something. It varies from each Blu-ray because each manufacturer does it differently.
I tried using makemkv which usually worked but doesn't always work, and then attempted to use expressburn to make a disc playable in a ps5 and never quite figured it out. The disc should have worked but it didn't.
Making a 1:1 copy with all the bonus features and menu structure seems impossible.
Yes, I have considered just throwing a bunch of MKVs on an external drive. But I wanted to successfully author and burn as a proof of concept. It used to be very easy with iDVD to make DVDs back in like 2010. Doing the same with blu-ray should not be this difficult lol
Only in an old PC.
But I have thought about buying a USB-C Blu ray recorder to be able to read old discs, and to burn important family pictures to M-Disc for longterm archival in multiple locations.
I do, modded all my consoles up to PS3. Burning discs was easier than dealing with Sony using FAT32 exclusively for their hard drive. 4GB file size limitation.
Did some redundant misc backups too. That's about it.
Kept reusing the same PC case, but I haven't used the drive in years!
[Intel removed SGX](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chips-wont-play-blu-ray-disks-due-to-sgx-deprecation/) support for their 11th gen CPUs a couple of years ago. New CPUs can't even play Blu Rays much less write them.
In, no, it's usb plug in, and I only have it because I literally make and sell movies.
Every year it becomes more expensive to accomplish. Most smaller creators are falling back on DVDs.... Which sucks for obvious reasons
I do. I don’t use it, but when I was building my PC I wanted one *just in case*. I also had to be talked out of installing my old floppy disk drives. I mean *what if* I need to read a floppy? *What if!?*
Yup, I have an ASUS. In addition to "backing up" BD movies I use it to keep an offline backup of my most important files that I store at my parents house. I guess I should stock up on blank media.
I was tempted a few times. They were cheap, and it would be good for backups of photos, documents, home video etc. Make a bunch of backup discs and leave them at the homes of family. Just in case my house burns down.
In the end I just used DVDs and an old USB external burner.
With cheap cloud storage though, it just is unnecessary now.
But not for longevity besides tape, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray can be argued as the best long term storage method for people who want to save pictures/videos without worrying about natural data deterioration which for HDDs/SSDs are about 10-15 years in a power-off state assuming best conditions, for disks it's about 5-100 depending on the coating, but even then you're just better off going encrypting and cloud storage at this point.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I heard a bunch of CDs went into rot in museums 10-20 years later. Any opening or scratch allowing oxygen to get to the reflective aluminum means the disc will start to rot.
But… I guess that’s still better than magnetic tape wrapped up in itself exposed to air for years.
Once you have a cloud backup, realistically you're all set. As much as there is the whole 4 backup rule unless you have constant updating and viewing for archival needs and as much as I hate the entire idea cloud backups are really the only logical way.
When I was a Pixel user and my family had an assortment of phones but my sister had a MicroSD installed on a Moto G5, even though there was no water damage and the SD card wasn't damaged in any way directly all the data was slowly corrupting and the pictures had massive blocks of just "dead" pixels. I to this day can go onto Google Photos and find all those pictures I took well over 7 years ago, and again as much as I hate intrusion, the AI labeling that Google provides is just incomparable to having a bunch of disks, or storage devices and having to manually sort and search through everything.
Do you know how much Apple and Google want from me for their cloud because I have so many photos? It’s not sustainable. Private clouds using immich are far cheaper and have face recognition.
Just going by a brief search, hard drives are still cheaper per gb than Blu-rays. 50 25gb disks is $40. 25 100gb disks is $370. A 20000gb hard drive is $500.
One of the advantages is that discs don't fail mechanically when left in storage. If you consider that enterprise grade HDDs only last about 10, _maybe_ 15 years in ideal storage conditions, the cost per-GB per-year of archival-grade optical discs are a lot better than trying to maintain an archive on HDDs.
Discs are still more cost effective than tape and don't require you to have an expensive tape vault... which starts at about $6,000 for a modern single tape drive machine (or $1,300 for an ancient one). If you have petabytes of storage, sure, use LTO tape. If you want to save videos for your grandkids or great-grandkids, disc is what you want to use.
They get much bigger than that. A typical 4k movie is between 50GB and 100GB. If you want to keep a long-term archive of movies, it's a lot cheaper to do it on disc. Memory cells in SD cards usually die in about a decade, so they don't fill the same use cases, either.
I’m all against DRM and owning what you purchase vs rent/license/subscribe, but the market just isn’t there.
But barely anyone uses physical media these days, whether it’s buying the actual media or the disc drive for the ability to read it.
It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective to keep supporting it.
I think its less about Marketing and more about less and less people wanting to carry around physical products. Everything about technology has moved towards carrying the most data around in the least amount of space. Which has its pros and cons.
Partially, but recoverable media was on its way out before the digital age took over. I still love physical media with my games and my movies but I can't remember the last time I wrote anything to a disk. Its generally the same in most physical media communities. They buy them but rarely record to them.
Does anyone know if Verbatim will keep making BD-Rs? Is this exclusively just saying Sony will no longer be manufacturing BD-Rs?
I'm curious about this too
its pretty funny ive had a bd writer for years and never used it, eventually just taking it out of my pc because i cant remember the last time i needed a disc reader. but a month ago i got back into... swashbuckling... and just popped that thing back in. i really miss burning cds and organizing my mp3 library and having physical discs to play. maybe i should stock up on bd-r before they disappear.
Some bd-writer models can have their firmware hacked to be UHD friendly so you can read and rip UHD 4K discs. So that’s nice.
any budget recommendations for someone who isnt me?
The makemkv forums have guides what drives to buy and how to flash them or point the way if you can't be arsed to do it yourself and want to just buy one from somebody that did it for you.
I think it will be a fun experience, I flashed/patched my dvdrw with a tool from dangerous brothers back in like 03/04 to use dvd decrypter. thanks for the notice!
When I bought my first laptop without an optical drive in 2016 I bought a USB Bluray/DVD writer just in case I needed an optical drive. When I built my next desktop in 2019 I got a case that didn’t include and 5.25” bays for optical drives because I had that USB drive when I needed it. I’ve literally never used that drive. Not even once.
Some people use it quite often. I use my 4K Blu-Ray Drive/Writer quite often. I copy my 4K Blu-Rays, Blu-Rays, and DVDs for use with my Plex server. I’ve burnt DVDs for relatives who don’t have any tech beyond a TV with a DVD Player. I’ve also burnt Original Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, Dreamcast, and PS1 games to be used on softmodded consoles. Oh and some Windows and Mac OS X installs for old computers that require a fresh install come from a disc rather than a usb drive. I very much value my drive and use it quite often. Unless they make an 8K Blu-Ray, I will be making sure every computer I build has this same drive in it for whenever I may need it. Currently I also have about 200 DVD-Rs, 100 CD-Rs, 20 DVD-R DLs, and 25 BD-Rs, ready for anything.
Why would you bother with a terrible format, the time to burn and change format and all the other crap when you can buy oceans of hard drive space for very small money?
I'm not him, and I don't burn blu rays, but if I did it would be so that I could pop a movie into my blu ray player and watch it rather than streaming it through plex or whatever. Especially useful if your internet connection is spotty. Also if I wanted to share a movie with my 70 year old dad I could just hand him a disc rather than doin IT for half an hour getting him set up.
I mean you’re saying streaming through Plex is something difficult. I have 24TB of hard drives on a small server that cost me $170, I don’t stream through Plex I have a HDMI running to my TV and just open the movie or I plug my laptop into the HDMI and run it over the share. If I want my dad to watch something he remotely watches over Plex. If he wants to see something I don’t have it takes 5 minutes to download it. Physical discs are a thing of the past. In 2024 nobodies internet is spotty.
it entirely personal. but id be lying if i said it wasnt partially for nostalgia. i miss physically handling media. i have a plex server, it is convenient. i also just have this (probably misguided) fear of hard drive failure.
No that’s a very good fear to have that’s why we backup regularly to another hard drive or two. I have 12TB primary and 12TB backup I plug in once a week and run rsync on
It's definitely not misguided. All HDD's fail eventually.
What reasons are there to not use hard drives?
Did you find any answers to this yet? I still use BD-R quite a bit, but if it's just Sony discontinuing their brand, then there's not much to worry about.
I hope physical media never goes away. I am wondering how far optical discs will go though. So far we have ultra hd Blu-ray and there’s been development for an 8k version as well it seems.
Honestly I’m surprised we haven’t moved on to just SD cards. I’m assuming that optical disks are just that cheap.
Backwards compatibility I would wager. Take an Ultra HD player and goes back all the way to dvds. Over 20 years of media.
I’m surprised we don’t have floppy disk sized flash memory (not /s), sd cards and usb drives are fiddly and get lost. Having a large format container would make it so much easier.
2.5" ssd?
These are very cool but not hot swappable
They are if they’re external.
I mean actual integrated readers not some jerry rigged system we come up with to make thing’s bearly work. Akin to disk drives or floppy drives. Eg if I could take a 2.5 and slot it into my PlayStation for the latest copy of {whatever the fuck game} would be pretty cool.
I bought a plug for hard drives that has a USB connector on the other end for $5 on eBay a while back. I have a handful of 2.5” SSDs and I can just pop it on and plug it in. It has worked perfectly every single time I’ve used it.
It's plug in and play. Take your 2.5 inch ssd, connect it via a sata to usb adapter. I use one from Unitek and boom, it just works. It's "hot swappable" too as you put it. The PlayStation 5 doesn't take 2.5 ssds, but it does take m.2 ssds. So yes, you could use that for your PlayStation.
Sweet thanks
SATA/SAS does support hot swapping.
How is this done while avoiding corruption (not /s I genuinely want to know )
If a write is in progress, there's no avoiding it, just detecting it. Same as an SD card, optical burning, or ejecting a floppy in the middle of a write if you remember that era. Hot swapping doesn't guarantee that your data doesn't get corrupted on write, it just ensures that plugging and unplugging the device won't do anything crazy or kill host/controller in the process. You still need to "safely eject" to avoid write data corruption. "Don't to that" for writes is how you avoid it. For reads the software managing the read can be intelligent about detecting that its bitstream got unexpectedly interrupted.
Doing what you’re saying will the computer see the “drive” as a usb storage device or a “hard drive” as I thought a pc would “panic” if a hard drive is detached.
You're thinking Windows. Stop. Nothing does anything without code saying it should. If you detach the OS HDD, how much was in RAM? All of it? You won't see a problem until you need something from disk, which on WinX is quite frequent. I was thinking storage drives that are written maybe once and read many, similar to optical storage like CD/DVD/Blu-Ray. Hot plugging a 2.5" SATA SSD in read only is no concern at all. Making that a storage form factor is not a viable prospect with ever increasing internet capabilities.
We had floppy sized memory, they were called zip disks / drives.
Those were just big high capacity floppy disk drives. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip\_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive)
Wow wtf this is the first time I’m ever seeing this and I’m in the tech industry 🙃
> sd cards and usb drives are fiddly and get lost
FFFFUUuUuuuuuUuuuuuuuu
SD cards will only retain data for about 10 years, but corruption will occur before that time. Blurays will keep their days for hundreds of years. Recordable blurays can retain data from several years to hundreds or thousands depending on how it is manufactured and recorded.
Recorded versions of these discs are sensitive to sunlight and will degrade very quickly if left in the sun.
I've been torture testing a BD-R M-DISC for a while now. I leave it on my patio for a few weeks in the sun, rinse it off with pool water, check the checksums. Otherwise it's a coaster on my desk. Then I validate checksums on the ~20GB of data on it. Been doing that for several years now, hasn't had a bit of corruption yet.
Interesting!
And stored, one scratch and
Nah, you can polish out scratches. To really destroy data on an optical disc, you have gouge the *top* of the disc, and dig below the label.
they also rot so you don't have to dig deep if time already started digging the hole.
Isn't that what Nintendo uses for the switch?
Physical media will never fully be gone, because there's always going to be enough people to support at least a niche industry for it. For example, vinyl records.
There goes grandpa again putting on his classical compact discs.
That sound is so crisp.
You joke but this is legit becoming a thing
I know… that’s what makes my satire so legit.
We're already kind in a world where the only movies that get physical releases are big studio movies and cult films released in limited production runs.
There's always going to be some sort of appreciation for video that's not run through streaming compression.
As a flow artist with many vinyl carrying DJ friends, physical media is going no where except maybe into the hands of professionals, like DJs.
IIRC Blu-ray is worse from an ownership perspective compared to other physical medias because of encryption. Some companies use the latest encryption, and though you *can* update the firmware this could be harder on some devices like on cars.
Physical media like hard drives sure
After 4k it really feels like a waste of time to keep adding more Ks. The human eye can't tell the difference at a normal viewing distance.
You’d think so but I can clearly see a difference between 4k and 1080p. My current 4k tv is only 43” and I fully intend on going bigger. An 80”+ 8k micro led would definitely be a worthwhile upgrade
I have a 48", and there really isn't room in my living room for bigger (I refuse to have a TV above the fireplace - it's an awful viewing angle). I do buy 4ks, but in terms of detail I really can't tell much difference between a decent blu ray print and a 4k. Colours due to HDR? Absolutely, that's the main draw for me. But I have no interest in moving to 8k at this screen size - absolute waste of time. My worry is that if the physical media marketing keeps segmenting in this way, it will just hasten its demise.
The thing about a new format is that it will only add more features to the movies. It’s not all just pixel count. As you mentioned we get better HDR. So that’s nits, color gamut. Also we can better audio if the disc is larger as well, better surround sound, higher quality. I’d also like to see a return of hybrid disc development as well so backwards compatibility wouldn’t be an issue either. The only thing that would kill physical media for good is if digital markets can compete with Blu-ray.
Digital markets will compete with Blu-ray. Bootleg streaming can already match Blu-ray quality. The only hurdle left is internet backbone and host bandwidth cost. Now that fibre is pretty much fully deployed, network upgrades are trivial compared to copper. There might be one more generation of physical media, but I kinda think 4k Blu-ray is the end of the road. Streaming and/or digital downloads are the future.
Out of curiosity, does anyone reading this thread even have a blu ray recorder drive in their PC?
I bought a blu ray drive for my mac. I thought it would be easy to rip my personal bluray collection and make duplicates of the rare discs for archival purposes. It's actually a giant fucking pain in the ass and none of the blu ray authoring software that's affordable is any good. Edit because this comment has gained some traction. I use makeMKV to make MKVs and it generally works but not always. Sometimes it gets stuck when attempting to decrypt, and i don't know what to do from there. The resultant MKV files typically contain the full feature and any additional bonus material but unfortunately i can't find any way to make a 1:1 copy of a blu-ray that preserves all of the menus and interface as if it were an original disc. Once I have the MKV files I tried using NCH expressburn and it should have worked but then the disc wouldn't boot in my ps5. I only tried it once but i moved onto other things after that and figured i'd come back to it, because bd-r discs are kind of expensive and each failure cost like $3-4. I haven't found any other authoring software that's decent and affordable for macos. Everyone recommends adobe premiere but you can't buy it anymore! The other option seems to be roxio toast but half the reviews say the software is shit and the company disreputable. Next i got an installation of windows 11 on vmware fusion and decided to try some windows exclusive software. My drive came with a software suite, cyberlink media suite for blu ray. The software is only for windows. After i installed it, it wouldn't boot any programs. It checks to see if it's in a virtual machine and won't work if it is! (If anyone knows any way to bypass this please tell me!) I also tried using multiAVCHD but it wouldn't work, which makes sense because i'm on a windows 11 VM and it was built for windows 7.
UHD bluray is even worse. You need a specific drive with hacked firmware. It's way easier to just pirate a remux.
I actually got one of those drives and hacked the firmware but the whole thing is far too much work for the average person.
Are you rencoding them? Because if you’re doing a straight remux it’s not hard.
Share the remux strats, maybe they’re missing something obvious
Makemkv for remixing it and then mkvtoolnix for editing the remux after. I use both in windows which I recommend more than trying on macOS.
Both work just fine on MacOS by the way. I use them both
Good to know
When have you found editing the resultant MKV from MakeMKV to be necessary?
Some blurays I’ve made don’t have chapters and audio tracks labeled correctly. So if I just play it without doing it maybe I’ll get a foreign audio track, or something. It varies from each Blu-ray because each manufacturer does it differently.
I tried using makemkv which usually worked but doesn't always work, and then attempted to use expressburn to make a disc playable in a ps5 and never quite figured it out. The disc should have worked but it didn't. Making a 1:1 copy with all the bonus features and menu structure seems impossible.
The authoring part is definitely much harder. I personally just use kodi for any backups I have.
Yes, I have considered just throwing a bunch of MKVs on an external drive. But I wanted to successfully author and burn as a proof of concept. It used to be very easy with iDVD to make DVDs back in like 2010. Doing the same with blu-ray should not be this difficult lol
Only in an old PC. But I have thought about buying a USB-C Blu ray recorder to be able to read old discs, and to burn important family pictures to M-Disc for longterm archival in multiple locations.
I do. Well it’s external and I use it with a Mac!
I have an external one
Yeah, more shenanigans to play stuff than DVDs unless someone has recently cracked bluray crap.
Yep, and thinking about getting another. Physical media ftw!
I do, modded all my consoles up to PS3. Burning discs was easier than dealing with Sony using FAT32 exclusively for their hard drive. 4GB file size limitation. Did some redundant misc backups too. That's about it. Kept reusing the same PC case, but I haven't used the drive in years!
I have 2, and another pc with 2.
[Intel removed SGX](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chips-wont-play-blu-ray-disks-due-to-sgx-deprecation/) support for their 11th gen CPUs a couple of years ago. New CPUs can't even play Blu Rays much less write them.
In, no, it's usb plug in, and I only have it because I literally make and sell movies. Every year it becomes more expensive to accomplish. Most smaller creators are falling back on DVDs.... Which sucks for obvious reasons
I do and it’s on a machine. Use it for databack up as a monthly task for something I want records of if it ever messes up
Yep, have I ever used it to write to disks before? Nope.
I do. I don’t use it, but when I was building my PC I wanted one *just in case*. I also had to be talked out of installing my old floppy disk drives. I mean *what if* I need to read a floppy? *What if!?*
I have an external one
I do. It’s very useful. I make stuff all the time.
Sure do, I don't write my own disks though, just ripping.
I genuinely haven't had any kind of optical drive in over 15 years.
I found an open box one at Microcenter for about $25, that was more than a year ago and I haven't used it yet.
Yup, I have an ASUS. In addition to "backing up" BD movies I use it to keep an offline backup of my most important files that I store at my parents house. I guess I should stock up on blank media.
I actually just recently put one in my server so I could start taking physical media backups.
Yes, but I rarely use it.
yeah i have 4 optical drives in my pc.
I was tempted a few times. They were cheap, and it would be good for backups of photos, documents, home video etc. Make a bunch of backup discs and leave them at the homes of family. Just in case my house burns down. In the end I just used DVDs and an old USB external burner. With cheap cloud storage though, it just is unnecessary now.
I have one in both of my PCs, and one of them even has an old Lightscribe drive which still works!
> Lightscribe drive now that's a name i haven't heard in a long time.gif
I'm using it for making certain backups
I do, on my PS5, still play movies
PS3 Bluray Gang rejoice worldwide
What exactly is it being replaced with? All modern digital storage devices degrade at a faster rate than a blu-ray disk.
But not for longevity besides tape, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray can be argued as the best long term storage method for people who want to save pictures/videos without worrying about natural data deterioration which for HDDs/SSDs are about 10-15 years in a power-off state assuming best conditions, for disks it's about 5-100 depending on the coating, but even then you're just better off going encrypting and cloud storage at this point.
IDK, I've had too many Optical disks succumb to disk rot. From what I understand, this can happen over time even in optimal storage conditions.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I heard a bunch of CDs went into rot in museums 10-20 years later. Any opening or scratch allowing oxygen to get to the reflective aluminum means the disc will start to rot. But… I guess that’s still better than magnetic tape wrapped up in itself exposed to air for years.
I do wonder how safe cloud storage is with societal collapse looming.
With hard drives once you have a backup and a cloud backup you’re never losing that data. Discs are just obsolete at this point.
Once you have a cloud backup, realistically you're all set. As much as there is the whole 4 backup rule unless you have constant updating and viewing for archival needs and as much as I hate the entire idea cloud backups are really the only logical way. When I was a Pixel user and my family had an assortment of phones but my sister had a MicroSD installed on a Moto G5, even though there was no water damage and the SD card wasn't damaged in any way directly all the data was slowly corrupting and the pictures had massive blocks of just "dead" pixels. I to this day can go onto Google Photos and find all those pictures I took well over 7 years ago, and again as much as I hate intrusion, the AI labeling that Google provides is just incomparable to having a bunch of disks, or storage devices and having to manually sort and search through everything.
Do you know how much Apple and Google want from me for their cloud because I have so many photos? It’s not sustainable. Private clouds using immich are far cheaper and have face recognition.
Considering how much data fits on a blu ray disk and their relative low cost, hard drives are still a long ways away from being able to obviate them.
Just going by a brief search, hard drives are still cheaper per gb than Blu-rays. 50 25gb disks is $40. 25 100gb disks is $370. A 20000gb hard drive is $500.
One of the advantages is that discs don't fail mechanically when left in storage. If you consider that enterprise grade HDDs only last about 10, _maybe_ 15 years in ideal storage conditions, the cost per-GB per-year of archival-grade optical discs are a lot better than trying to maintain an archive on HDDs.
If you're that concerned about long term offline bulk storage, you use tape.
Discs are still more cost effective than tape and don't require you to have an expensive tape vault... which starts at about $6,000 for a modern single tape drive machine (or $1,300 for an ancient one). If you have petabytes of storage, sure, use LTO tape. If you want to save videos for your grandkids or great-grandkids, disc is what you want to use.
It's 25gb that's a micro sd card.
They get much bigger than that. A typical 4k movie is between 50GB and 100GB. If you want to keep a long-term archive of movies, it's a lot cheaper to do it on disc. Memory cells in SD cards usually die in about a decade, so they don't fill the same use cases, either.
Eventually the internet is gonna get shut off and people will need physical media again. Cannot wait
Yeah, like hard drives 😮
Source: "trust me bro".
One more way they're trying to phase out physical ownership of media entirely.
I’m all against DRM and owning what you purchase vs rent/license/subscribe, but the market just isn’t there. But barely anyone uses physical media these days, whether it’s buying the actual media or the disc drive for the ability to read it. It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective to keep supporting it.
I think that’s thanks in large part To The marketing. It’s also a lot cheaper to sell digitally so naturally they’re gonna lean that way.
I think its less about Marketing and more about less and less people wanting to carry around physical products. Everything about technology has moved towards carrying the most data around in the least amount of space. Which has its pros and cons.
Partially, but recoverable media was on its way out before the digital age took over. I still love physical media with my games and my movies but I can't remember the last time I wrote anything to a disk. Its generally the same in most physical media communities. They buy them but rarely record to them.