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Sony to Stop Manufacturing Blu-ray Media, Effective February 2025

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I just was forced to buy another week of prime.

There is nothing I want to watch. Except the cooking show from Mr May.

Without good movies, without cheap media I did not have any need for an optical drive. Also there is no software for the optical drive. So why bother with a blueray.

Starting a random film and hit pause after 30 or 45 seconds. The longest I watched was around 15 minutes. About some nonsense.

I never owned a single MiniDisc, BLUERAY, DVD. I had many CDR and audio CDs. A woman hit my car and crashed it around 5 years ago. That was the point when the demand for audio cds was over for myself. Even burning audio cds was a hassle, especially with the software.
 
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I just was forced to buy another week of prime.

There is nothing I want to watch. Except the cooking show from Mr May.

Without good movies, without cheap media I did not have any need for an optical drive. Also there is no software for the optical drive. So why bother with a blueray.

Starting a random film and hit pause after 30 or 45 seconds. The longest I watched was around 15 minutes. About some nonsense.

I never owned a single MiniDisc, BLUERAY, DVD. I had many CDR and audio CDs. A woman hit my car and crashed it around 5 years ago. That was the point when the demand for audio cds was over for myself. Even burning audio cds was a hassle, especially with the software.
You are the exception rather than the rule. Most people have interacted with and used optical media of some kind. Many of us still overwhelmingly prefer physical media to digital distribution..
 
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@Operandi
Streaming quality and bitrate can be improved, and there were some high bitrate sources (Sony's Bravia/Pictures Core is supposedly "30-80Mb", though unclear if nerfed since originally introduced).

Streams can be captured, or someone might start offering simple downloads.
Whether someone actually will, that's another question.
Whatever "Bravia/Pictures Core" is its just indicative of the problem. Content silos that get more expensive and restrictive (pay more for less) and consumer's having control over nothing.
 
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This is the real reason you average fan of movies, TV, ect. should care. Picture and sound quality are thing but the way streaming is structured the consumer has no ownership of anything, and its cost prohibitive for any service to have access to everything and unlike music if the actors and crew don't get paid nothing is going to get created so constant transfer of rights from service to another and things just outright disappearing is only going to get worse. Streaming is is always going to be crap experience if you are interested in anything that isn't of the moment, its only going to get worse and more expensive over time. I don't care about collecting physical media and I've never even owned a physical DVD or Bluray but I own tons of Bluray movies simply because its the only way you can actually own any of it.
Exactly, anyone who likes to watch movies at home should be caring about getting better quality, and if streaming services are the only option while they keep shuffling around content between rights holders the worst thing is when the content just disappears, it ends up being lost media if there is no way to stream it and no option to own the physical media.
I collect some DVD's and blurays but some of the limited edition discs are too expensive or are sometimes UHD/4K only.
 
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@Operandi
Streaming quality and bitrate can be improved, and there were some high bitrate sources (Sony's Bravia/Pictures Core is supposedly "30-80Mb", though unclear if nerfed since originally introduced).

Streams can be captured, or someone might start offering simple downloads.
Whether someone actually will, that's another question.
Streaming is nowhere near the quality of disks. Go look up the bandwidth of, say, HDMI for 4k60 content, then add in HDR, then figure out how they get that to you on a vastly slower internet connection.

Compression is particularly bad for audio. Dear god, the difference for something like John Wick, streaming VS blu ray, its like I went from a 20 year old pair of PC speakers to an audiophile setup.

Eagle eye-d viewers will also notice the color and pixel compression in the video, newer formats are better but its still noticeable, a 4k stream for amazon or netflix still has worse picture quality then a 1080p blu ray.

1. Sony is killing consumer recordable media, not the discs used to sell movies on, which are "pressed" in factory with content on them.
2. Regular Blu-ray is dying anyhow, Ultra HD Blu-ray will still be around for 4K content.
3. Blu-ray was launched in 2006 and turns 20 next year...

Then again, som people still buy movies on DVDs, a format from 1996...

Tonight Show Wow GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Regular blu ray still significantly outsells 4k blu ray. You can play regular blu ray on PC easily enough and you can rip its contents for simple home viewing. And a regular blu ray has better picture and especially audio quality then a 4k stream from any provider.

4k blu rays, OTOH, you have to conduct various black magic trials to get the video off of them.

DVDs can play natively on PC and have even less DRM on them, thats why people still buy them.

I just was forced to buy another week of prime.

There is nothing I want to watch. Except the cooking show from Mr May.

Without good movies, without cheap media I did not have any need for an optical drive. Also there is no software for the optical drive. So why bother with a blueray.

Starting a random film and hit pause after 30 or 45 seconds. The longest I watched was around 15 minutes. About some nonsense.

I never owned a single MiniDisc, BLUERAY, DVD. I had many CDR and audio CDs. A woman hit my car and crashed it around 5 years ago. That was the point when the demand for audio cds was over for myself. Even burning audio cds was a hassle, especially with the software.
The only thing I stay subbed to Prime for is the Trio of jeremy james and richard. I so wish I could get the grand tour on blu ray though......

Especially for preservation. At some point stuff has been edited, like the grand tour south africa episode, Feed The World, where Hammond gets Alan sugar mixed up with Trump, the text "he means donald trump" was edited out for unknown reasons sometime a year after its release.

This is the real reason you average fan of movies, TV, ect. should care. Picture and sound quality are thing but the way streaming is structured the consumer has no ownership of anything, and its cost prohibitive for any service to have access to everything and unlike music if the actors and crew don't get paid nothing is going to get created so constant transfer of rights from service to another and things just outright disappearing is only going to get worse. Streaming is is always going to be crap experience if you are interested in anything that isn't of the moment, its only going to get worse and more expensive over time. I don't care about collecting physical media and I've never even owned a physical DVD or Bluray but I own tons of Bluray movies simply because its the only way you can actually own any of it.
Disney is one of the worst offenders, you ever see hwo they've butchered the Star Wars movie on disney plus? Absolute Garbo.

A streaming world is a world with 0 consumer rights and excessive spending along with loss of any "purchases" you make. After the last decade of media conglomerates falling over themselves to censor "problematic" shows and split content among as many services as possible, physical media stands out as a far superior method of viewing.
 
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Is there future for a different storage format to deliver media cheaply?
Cheap flash drives should be no issue, honestly, given the price of a movie. But that'd be a big DRM nono.

Go look up the bandwidth of, say, HDMI for 4k60 content, then add in HDR, then figure out how they get that to you on a vastly slower internet connection.
This comparison is misleading as hell because virtually all movies are chroma downsampled out the wazoo (chroma 4:2:0) drastically lowering bandwidth requirements. That is beside the facts that bluray is also lossy compressed. It's just a question of bitrates in the end.
 
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This is just Sony copying Ngreedia and creating an artificial shortage to drive up prices. Watch, you be able to buy them for years, just at ridiculous prices, for a thin plastic disc that really costs a penny.
 
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Streaming is nowhere near the quality of disks. Go look up the bandwidth of, say, HDMI for 4k60 content, then add in HDR, then figure out how they get that to you on a vastly slower internet connection.
If Sony's thing really is 80Mbps, that's not bad even for 4K.
And consider internet bandwidths, and codecs in general, improve with time. There's already an initial trickle of h266/VVC hardware and software support.

Compression is particularly bad for audio. Dear god, the difference for something like John Wick, streaming VS blu ray, its like I went from a 20 year old pair of PC speakers to an audiophile setup.
Not sure what you mean. Audio is a solved problem. 1.5Mb DTS is more than enough, as is 640Kbps AC3.
I'm assuming non-Bluray formats are even more efficient, like AAC and Opus.

Eagle eye-d viewers will also notice the color and pixel compression in the video, newer formats are better but its still noticeable, a 4k stream for amazon or netflix still has worse picture quality then a 1080p blu ray.
A question of bitrate, and encoding tweaks.
If one considers 1080 BR satisfactory, you commonly get around 30-35Mbps, and sometimes less.

DVDs can play natively on PC and have even less DRM on them, thats why people still buy them.
I'd guess most DVD movie buyers use a standalone player hooked to a TV.
 
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When I see BR and I think any type of BR. Is anyone making a distinction?
Well, the original Blu-ray discs don't do 4K for video, so I presume there's a huge difference for people who buys physical media.
However, if you use them for storage, there's no difference in available space, as long as you go for discs above single layer.
If it's just recordable media, were Sony a big manufacturer?
I haven't been following in recent years, but in the DVD days tier 1 manufacturers/brands were Taiyo Yuden, Verbatim/Mitsubishi, TDK. Tier 2 maybe Ritek, CMC, Moser Baer...
Sony has always produced a lot of media, I mean, they own a huge movie production studio and publisher after all.
They used to be among the top tiers for recordable media at some point as well, but it depends a bit where you live, as I don't think they where sold everywhere.
I know I used them for testing CD/DVD burners back in the day when I did group tests at PCW and TrustedReviews, but I also used Verbatim. Taiyo Yuden was impossible to get in the UK back then and I've never heard of Moser Baer.

Is there future for a different storage format to deliver media cheaply? I don't like the future that we are heading to. Streaming might be convenient and have a low entrance cost, but you do not always get the best quality.
Not that I'm aware of, at least not in the consumer space. There's been loads of reports about various holographic type stuff, but nothing has ended up being announced as a consumer media format.

I never owned a single MiniDisc, BLUERAY, DVD. I had many CDR and audio CDs. A woman hit my car and crashed it around 5 years ago. That was the point when the demand for audio cds was over for myself. Even burning audio cds was a hassle, especially with the software.
Sounds like you used the wrong software or hardware. Post say 2002/2003 something like that, I never had an issue burning a disc. I mainly used Plextor or Panasonic/Matsushita drives.

Cheap flash drives should be no issue, honestly, given the price of a movie. But that'd be a big DRM nono.
It's possible to copy protect something like that too, just like what you can do with an SD card, so no real DRM issue.

This is just Sony copying Ngreedia and creating an artificial shortage to drive up prices. Watch, you be able to buy them for years, just at ridiculous prices, for a thin plastic disc that really costs a penny.
Considering most companies have stopped producing BD drives/players, how is this artificial shortage? It's just the same as no-one makes CD-ROM/CD-RW drives any more, since there simply is no demand for it. Yes, you can still get DVD-ROM/DVD-RW drives/players, but for how much longer?
 
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So what you're saying is that I should sell my house, barrow heavily and use all the money under my mattress to buy Blu-ray recordable media. Then sell when there is no more stock for a huge profit !?!?!? :roll::wtf::nutkick:

Naturally I'm just kidding. That would be crazy,....HDDVD for the Win !!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
 
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Sounds like you used the wrong software or hardware.

It's a software issue. And I suspect also a DRM issue. I suspect it'S also Windows only hardware problem.

For creating cds and dvd there was basically only this software after several years
gnome did not really had a decent burning or authoring software.

Blueray never had any software to play from. I knew that before. That was the main reason I avoided it totally. None of those laptops had an option for blueray anyway from ASUS for those gaming laptop I used.
I used windows vista for 3 days in my life. Windows 7 / 8 / Millenium I never used. I came back to windows 10 pro with my desktop system. Most of my hardware ran gnu linux and still do. I do not know why I did not play with windows 10 home oem on my asus g75VW laptop.

DVD implies you want to watch a film. I hardly know anything worth watching. Anime stuff is not sold here.

I had a lightscribe drive and lightscribe media but I never got it to work. That lightscribe was some fancy unachieveable invention where you could write text and pictures on the surfaces from optical media. I tried it sevearl times - It never worked.

I did burn some backups on DVD. Most got quite fast reading errors. Excpet for audio cds for my car radio - I never really had any real use for WORM - optical media.
 
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I still buy physical media of some particular favorites, but mainly more of audio CDs than DVDs or BDs. Thankfully, those are still in production even to this day despite the advent of streaming and digital purchases. Hell, vinyl and tape is coming back into vogue to some degree.
 
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There are pros and cons with having contents in digital or physical format. I do feel they made this decision because,
1. Sales of physical media have slowed down given the convenience of digital content which one can access easily.
2. Cut out the man in the middle (brick and mortar stores) and distribution cost so that they can maximize profits.
3. Prevent resale of media which deprives them of revenue/ profits.

I do think this negatively impacts consumers because you can't own the content anymore. You may have paid for it, but always at their terms and conditions of use, which may include them pulling it from your online "library". We have seen this happened quite a few times now.
 

Vamp898

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I tested Streaming several times, but the Image Quality and the Sound Quality is just so low. It doesn't matter if Amazon, Disney+ or Netflix. Even on 4K (i have an 1gbps Internet Connection) the image quality is often just horrendous.

Mostly on par with YouTube.

An (already heavily compressed) 4K BluRay has 130mbit/s. Compared to RAW, this is already dropping more than 90% of all information. But compression works quite well, you can drop an insane amount of information before it getting too obvious. With HDR BluRay, this gets to a limit (Even the HDR10+ barely reach beyond 8bit which is just a joke, but thats a different story) so BluRay have been hindered by limitations already.

But Streaming Services push down the bitrate down to 30mbit/s (!) (That is less than most of my FullHD BluRay), and that shows. Not with every movie, but more than enough. Especially Live Concerts with intensive light shows and high quality close ups instantly show the limitations.

Sadly most people forgot how good things did already look 15 years ago. I've showed some FullHD BluRay to a friend and his response was "Wow, 4K BluRay really look bettter than 4K Streaming". You should have seen his face telling him, that this is an FullHD one.

Somehow we managed to step backwards in technology and everyone is just fine with it. Well do how you want, i rather stop watching movies than paying greedy companies destroying an industry to give me pixel mud.
 
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Regular blu ray still significantly outsells 4k blu ray. You can play regular blu ray on PC easily enough and you can rip its contents for simple home viewing. And a regular blu ray has better picture and especially audio quality then a 4k stream from any provider.

4k blu rays, OTOH, you have to conduct various black magic trials to get the video off of them.

DVDs can play natively on PC and have even less DRM on them, thats why people still buy them.
4K discs are not any harder than a regular Blu-ray, you just need to find a drive with right firmware or find a compatible drive that you can flash yourself.
Disney is one of the worst offenders, you ever see hwo they've butchered the Star Wars movie on disney plus? Absolute Garbo.

A streaming world is a world with 0 consumer rights and excessive spending along with loss of any "purchases" you make. After the last decade of media conglomerates falling over themselves to censor "problematic" shows and split content among as many services as possible, physical media stands out as a far superior method of viewing.
If you "look around" you can find 4K Blu-rays of the original films. There is two version out there; one that is de-noised to clean them up slightly one that preserves all the film grain but both were made from high quality scans of the original film and look great.
 
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It is unclear whether this means that no Sony movies will be released on disk anymore.

The original Japanese source slightly favors an interpretation that only recordable media are meant.
 
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It is unclear whether this means that no Sony movies will be released on disk anymore.

The original Japanese source slightly favors an interpretation that only recordable media are meant.
It is recordable media. This article and pretty much everyone that picked it up made (intentionally or not) it sound like they were going to stop doing physical media releases for movies which isn't the case (yet anyway).
 

Vamp898

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I just read the original on the Sony Homepage


The subject already says 記録 which means record. The article then only covers recordable media. The production of BluRay did not stop, neither the production of BluRay Player.

I feel so stupid. I have an JLPT-N1 and didn't use it. But at this point, I highly distrust Sony for several reasons. Having been a loyal customer for years shows.

But even if Sony would stop production, there are enough companies still making BluRay that are not Sony. There's are still more than enough companies making Vinyl.

As long customers buy, it gets produced. You don't want it to disappear? Then buy your favorite movie/live show instead of streaming it (when possible)
 
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As long customers buy, it gets produced. You don't want it to disappear? Then buy your favorite movie/live show instead of streaming it (when possible)

Sometimes excessive prices get in the way, though. More than $20 for a disk movie when the online version is $12.99 isn't what I have in mind.
 
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Sometimes excessive prices get in the way, though. More than $20 for a disk movie when the online version is $12.99 isn't what I have in mind.
Maybe, but the disc version is always in your collection for you to watch anytime you feel the need. Online crap isn't. It can be taken away at a whim and you can't do anything about it.

I say no thanks. If publishers want my money, they better be making physical media. I don't mind paying a little bit more for the disc.
 

Vamp898

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Nothing wrong with DRM-free downloadable files.
DRM-free downloadable files and i will never buy a BluRay again.

I am _not_ a fan of physical media. All my BluRay get inserted into my BluRay player exactly once, to land as an MKV on my credit card sized SSD where all my Movies and Live Shows are. I then put them into one of those CD Storage Folder Box things (i think you know what i mean. Those square fake-leather boxes with zippers) and get stored away for the rare case i'd ever need to rip them again.

Some companies in Japan offer Music Videos as DRM-Free download and the sound quality is very good (much better than on YouTube), but the image quality is horrendous. Look at this
1738215920836.png

Thats a joke. We're almost there, so close. I don't want the native render, i am fine with the stripped down version that is used for the BluRay but give me at least that. If that is possible, i am happy to not need to buy a BluRay Disc
 
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