I fear that the death of physical media releases for movies is not far off now.
Ownership issues of streaming or DRM-encumbered digital releases aside, it’s a shame because Blu-rays are typically so much better quality, and as a movie buff there’s no substitute. Triple the bitrate of streaming versions is not uncommon.
Anecdotally, on streaming services I find that original content (e.g. Netflix originals) are good, but licensed content is often complete crap—low bitrate, SDR, often limited to 1080p, horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes. Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.
I just moved into a place with no storage, which leaves me wondering what to do about my DVD collection.
On the one hand, even finding a DVD player that still works can be an uphill battle, and 480p looks like shit when it gets upscaled by a modern TV.
On the other hand, there are 100 titles that I already own outright. I don't have to chase down which service they're on or sit through all the ads it injects. I know that they'll always be there, even if a reality TV exec buys a prestige studio and starts deleting their backlog over in pursuit of some handwavey Hollywood accounting.
I should probably donate them and save my space for things I actually use, but I have a hard time committing to this world where we're perpetually renting access to our cultural heritage.
> I just moved into a place with no storage, which leaves me wondering what to do about my DVD collection.
2 options:
- Rip them all and serve yourself using Jellyfin or Plex.
- If you don't want to go to the effort of ripping a hundred DVDs, you can, ah, take a trip to the high seas. Your legally-purchased DVDs serve as a license, for which the digital versions count as allowed "backups".
I bought a cheap Blu Ray burner from Microcenter for less than $50. Flashed with an image I found online and it rips DVDs and Blu-rays no problem. I did all that because I'm in the same boat you are: I have a ton of media and it's too much trouble to dig it out and move it around when my wife wants to watch something.
DVDs I would rip and donate personally, purely because if you care about image quality they are just not going to look very good on modern TVs. Maybe if you have any special editions, cool box sets, or stuff with sentimental value then hold onto just those?
I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.
> horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes
I don't know if Netflix just hates me, but I get that on all their stuff. It's to the point I pirated Midnight Club to watch it instead of just using my Netflix account because the show was unwatchable using their service.
Just last month I bought a Blu-ray 4K player and several discs because of the extra features you get on the disc that don't seem to be available on streaming. For example, the disc for Coco, a movie I love dearly, has a feature about the film's Italian heritage among others.
("Film"? Yes. If anyone objects, I will "dial" my phone so we can discuss.)
Streaming platforms would do well to incorporate more bonus features into their releases.
OK, you sometimes get some trailers, promotional featurettes, etc. But nothing like the cool stuff I remember from the best DVD and Blu-ray discs. Interactive elements, themed menus, director & cast commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc... I miss that stuff!
I have started building a UHD Blu-ray collection too now the price of discs has come down a little vs regular Blu-ray. They’re fantastic.
I have a new annoyance though: many new movies are offered in Dolby Vision on streaming services, but the UHD BD release is only HDR10. I saw a comment on Reddit from someone involved in the industry who said that the additional work in getting the different metadata in line on discs is often just skipped. On streaming they can just serve different files for all combinations of resolution and HDR offered.
It’s annoying because if I’m paying a premium to get the best-of-the-best option, I want it to actually be the best.
> Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.
Is it really? My experience has been that 4K downscaled seems to make for a very solid resulting 1080p image. I've been kind of thankful for 4K streams in that way.
I generally do freeze-frame comparisons of stills in landscape/conversational scenes, however. It might be different for jittery action sequences?
If it’s a good 4K stream then yes, it’s fine. The problem is many of them aren’t, whereas damn near all Blu-rays look spectacular even upscaled 1080 -> 4K. Bitrate is the issue, not resolution.
Maybe it's better now, but Blu-Ray looks substantially better in how color gets encoded. It's not a limit in the format, there just isn't enough bitrate in streaming to get dithering-like effects to go through.
Apple is pretty much the only company that cares about this it seems, I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between 4K HDR content available on iTunes/TV+ vs Blu Ray.
If you subscribe to Paramount+ in the TV app, you get the entire library in a higher bitrate compared to actually using Paramount+, it’s incredible how unwatchable some shows were bc P+ basically just thought 1080p 8mbps H264 was good enough for everyone.
Apple are setting a good example for sure, I use them a lot for rentals if it's something I don't know if I want to physically yet, or otherwise just want to watch there and then.
Their original content on TV+ looks and sounds incredible, and while you do sometimes come across licensed stuff on iTunes that is only 1080p SDR, I don't recall any time I've bought or rented a movie from there and been reminded of the 700MB DVD rips I used to download as a teenager. I'm sure there are some stinkers, but it seems far less prevalent.
It has always pissed me off that the media industry plays it both ways. Out of one side of their mouths, they'll say you only own a license to watch whatever content, not the content itself. Then when a new media format comes out, they say out the other side that you only own that piece of physical media - you need to buy a new copy to keep up. It's a tangible good when it suits them and a digital one when it suits them.
I was in film school in the 00s. At the same time that kids were getting sued into oblivion over piracy, media executives would come be guest speakers at our class and would be gushing about how cool it was to watch a movie on their iPod on the way there. They were participating in the same piracy they were trying to ruin other people's lives over, and they were completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
I thought about this in the case where someone scratches their media. They own the IP, remember? All publishers should have been required to replace damaged media for the material cost plus shipping.
Nothing's stopping you from playing the media you already own, so no.
Even when studios stop publishing Blu-Rays, I'm pretty sure you're still gonna be able to buy used (and dirt-cheap) Blu-Ray players for a long, long time.
I don't think this is part of any larger plan at all, except to discontinue products that consumers have basically stopped buying, which is what any business does.
Bro, we're all part of the tech world, especially the web, where the goal is often to get users to make recurring purchases (like in SaaS). Isn't it hypocritical of us to expect others not to do the same when the software industry is driving this whole trend?
I tried to embrace BD-Rs for backups, and to some degree they are useful, but ultimately I have given up on them.
The 25GB discs are cheap, and have enough space for a considerable backup (depending on your needs). It's also possible to put 4K h264/h265 videos on one and play them on some players, but this isn't very convenient compared to other options.
The 50/100/128GB discs are far more expensive per GB, and have an awful failure rate for writing.
Write and read speeds leave a lot to be desired. Fast enough to stream video, but that's about it.
And consumer writable optical media has a poor lifespan, and will probably become corrupted within a decade.
I have moved on to LTO tapes. A single LTO-6 tape is about $10, and holds 100x more than a basic single-layer BD-R. Read and write speeds over 1gbps. Not appropriate for everyday access, but perfect for large long-term backups.
If I want to move files from device to device, especially multimedia, I just use a flash drive.
With video games at least there are still DRM-free digital purchases (as opposed to film and TV). I haven't bought a physical video game since like 2010 but still buy many games regularly that are DRM free—I don't necessarily buy the most mainstream games, though.
The primary value of Blu-ray to me is on a good home theater system the audio is going to be so much better than a stream.
The visual fidelity on a good 4k streamer is hard to tell the difference between Blu-ray (you can, it’s just not glaring), but even the sound on a DVD beats any streamer.
I never understood why they encode stuff that way. Most streams that I've looked at devote literally 98-99% of the bits to the video, and the audio stream is just scraps.
The film's sound department worked really hard on that stuff! It doesn't take much -- 500 kbit/sec can sound amazing if they encode it well.
I would guess that the number of people listening to this media on anything higher quality than the built-in speakers on a 65-inch TV is minuscule. They’re optimizing for sound on an iPad, not a full surround sound setup.
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
There are compelling reasons to own physical media: video & audio bitrates are about 10-20x better than online streaming. Many movies are not available on streaming when you'd like to watch them. And in many cases, like with It's a Wonderful Life, streaming services have been butchering classic movies.
Why spend hours sorting through Netflix' low quality catalog when you can watch a movie you love whenever you want?
> Why spend hours sorting through Netflix' low quality catalog when you can watch a movie you love whenever you want?
Because I would rather watch something I've never seen before?
I've heard a story on Reddit of a guy watching Big Trouble in Little China everyday for years, but usually people wanna watch new stuff. I guess people also rewatch shows like Friends and The Office, but do they really "watch" it or do they just play it as background noise?
This is a new announcement to the one last year regarding consumer writable Blu rays being discontinued, I would believe this is them halting production of Blu Ray discs.
The page only says “Blu-ray Disc media” without further qualification. Only MiniDisc is qualified as “recordable” on the page.
That being said, there are other Blu-ray Disc manufacturers, and I don’t see the production of Blu-ray discs ending anytime soon. There are new titles being released all the time: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/releasedates.php
The writing is in the wall. The big physical retailers have either already been need physical media sales in store (e.g Best Buy) or have slashed inventory/stocking.
A MiniDisc community member based in Japan contacted Sony just a few months ago and confirmed that they were still producing one model of blanks (the MDW80T, which is (was?) still sold at retail in Japan and are the blanks used for most Bandcamp MDs (which themselves are usually prepared by a company called BandCDs in the UK)
Happy to discuss MD more if people have questions!
Mass-produced MDs were stamped (or molded) just like CDs were. There was nothing new here but stuff like the codec and the packaging -- the media itself had more in common with a CD than it had differences. They were strictly read-only.
Meanwhile, recordable MDs were a whole different magneto-optical thing, full of neat tricks.
AFAIK, there haven't been any mass-produced MD albums for a rather long time.
But there have been some recent albums made on recordable MDs -- slowly, one at a time -- whether new, NOS or recycled or whatever.
Readit News
Ownership issues of streaming or DRM-encumbered digital releases aside, it’s a shame because Blu-rays are typically so much better quality, and as a movie buff there’s no substitute. Triple the bitrate of streaming versions is not uncommon.
Anecdotally, on streaming services I find that original content (e.g. Netflix originals) are good, but licensed content is often complete crap—low bitrate, SDR, often limited to 1080p, horrible block artifacts especially in dark scenes. Given the choice between a 4K stream and a 1080p Blu-Ray, I’ll take the Blu-ray in most cases.
On the one hand, even finding a DVD player that still works can be an uphill battle, and 480p looks like shit when it gets upscaled by a modern TV.
On the other hand, there are 100 titles that I already own outright. I don't have to chase down which service they're on or sit through all the ads it injects. I know that they'll always be there, even if a reality TV exec buys a prestige studio and starts deleting their backlog over in pursuit of some handwavey Hollywood accounting.
I should probably donate them and save my space for things I actually use, but I have a hard time committing to this world where we're perpetually renting access to our cultural heritage.
2 options:
- Rip them all and serve yourself using Jellyfin or Plex.
- If you don't want to go to the effort of ripping a hundred DVDs, you can, ah, take a trip to the high seas. Your legally-purchased DVDs serve as a license, for which the digital versions count as allowed "backups".
Doesn't every blu-ray player, Xbox Series X, and some of the PS5s play DVDs?
I am kind of amazed that DVDs are still on sale. I guess they still sell enough to warrant it and enough people don’t care how bad they look on even cheaper TVs, but given how little the average person cares at all about physical media these days, I wonder who is actually buying them in 2025.
I don't know if Netflix just hates me, but I get that on all their stuff. It's to the point I pirated Midnight Club to watch it instead of just using my Netflix account because the show was unwatchable using their service.
("Film"? Yes. If anyone objects, I will "dial" my phone so we can discuss.)
OK, you sometimes get some trailers, promotional featurettes, etc. But nothing like the cool stuff I remember from the best DVD and Blu-ray discs. Interactive elements, themed menus, director & cast commentary tracks, deleted scenes, etc... I miss that stuff!
I have a new annoyance though: many new movies are offered in Dolby Vision on streaming services, but the UHD BD release is only HDR10. I saw a comment on Reddit from someone involved in the industry who said that the additional work in getting the different metadata in line on discs is often just skipped. On streaming they can just serve different files for all combinations of resolution and HDR offered.
It’s annoying because if I’m paying a premium to get the best-of-the-best option, I want it to actually be the best.
Coco does have some great extra features about its Mexican heritage.
Is it really? My experience has been that 4K downscaled seems to make for a very solid resulting 1080p image. I've been kind of thankful for 4K streams in that way.
I generally do freeze-frame comparisons of stills in landscape/conversational scenes, however. It might be different for jittery action sequences?
If you subscribe to Paramount+ in the TV app, you get the entire library in a higher bitrate compared to actually using Paramount+, it’s incredible how unwatchable some shows were bc P+ basically just thought 1080p 8mbps H264 was good enough for everyone.
Their original content on TV+ looks and sounds incredible, and while you do sometimes come across licensed stuff on iTunes that is only 1080p SDR, I don't recall any time I've bought or rented a movie from there and been reminded of the 700MB DVD rips I used to download as a teenager. I'm sure there are some stinkers, but it seems far less prevalent.
I was in film school in the 00s. At the same time that kids were getting sued into oblivion over piracy, media executives would come be guest speakers at our class and would be gushing about how cool it was to watch a movie on their iPod on the way there. They were participating in the same piracy they were trying to ruin other people's lives over, and they were completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
Even when studios stop publishing Blu-Rays, I'm pretty sure you're still gonna be able to buy used (and dirt-cheap) Blu-Ray players for a long, long time.
I don't think this is part of any larger plan at all, except to discontinue products that consumers have basically stopped buying, which is what any business does.
Considering the fact that many pieces of media in streaming services disappear all the time, I think we're fucked from a preservation point of view.
Deleted Comment
The 25GB discs are cheap, and have enough space for a considerable backup (depending on your needs). It's also possible to put 4K h264/h265 videos on one and play them on some players, but this isn't very convenient compared to other options.
The 50/100/128GB discs are far more expensive per GB, and have an awful failure rate for writing.
Write and read speeds leave a lot to be desired. Fast enough to stream video, but that's about it.
And consumer writable optical media has a poor lifespan, and will probably become corrupted within a decade.
I have moved on to LTO tapes. A single LTO-6 tape is about $10, and holds 100x more than a basic single-layer BD-R. Read and write speeds over 1gbps. Not appropriate for everyday access, but perfect for large long-term backups.
If I want to move files from device to device, especially multimedia, I just use a flash drive.
>The rate of decline in US physical video game software spending accelerated in 2024.
>Spending on physical video game software in the US has been cut in more than half since 2021 and is now more than 85% below its 2008 peak.
https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3lgj...
The visual fidelity on a good 4k streamer is hard to tell the difference between Blu-ray (you can, it’s just not glaring), but even the sound on a DVD beats any streamer.
The film's sound department worked really hard on that stuff! It doesn't take much -- 500 kbit/sec can sound amazing if they encode it well.
Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audience it pushes their video quality down to the next resolution down. And for a percentage of the audience that'll be a more noticeable impact.
Here's another oddity: there's no great ways to measure audio quality subjectively. It's kind of been done for voice telecommunications but for perceptual codecs and media sound? The tools are terrible. So, quantifying decisions about how much bandwidth to allocate are hard. Most companies still depend on trained individuals ("golden ears") to test audio quality and for independent testing you need A/B testing with a listener panel. For video quality we have accepted tools to measure quality. They're not perfect but comparatively, any time you see an audio quality test tool you'll see a substantial professional audience that will happily dismiss it.
All increases in quality, audio or video, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In audio the argument in favour of higher quality is far weaker than it is for something like HDR.
Why spend hours sorting through Netflix' low quality catalog when you can watch a movie you love whenever you want?
Because I would rather watch something I've never seen before?
I've heard a story on Reddit of a guy watching Big Trouble in Little China everyday for years, but usually people wanna watch new stuff. I guess people also rewatch shows like Friends and The Office, but do they really "watch" it or do they just play it as background noise?
Consider that new doesn’t mean good .
That being said, there are other Blu-ray Disc manufacturers, and I don’t see the production of Blu-ray discs ending anytime soon. There are new titles being released all the time: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/releasedates.php
Happy to discuss MD more if people have questions!
Mass-produced MDs were stamped (or molded) just like CDs were. There was nothing new here but stuff like the codec and the packaging -- the media itself had more in common with a CD than it had differences. They were strictly read-only.
Meanwhile, recordable MDs were a whole different magneto-optical thing, full of neat tricks.
AFAIK, there haven't been any mass-produced MD albums for a rather long time.
But there have been some recent albums made on recordable MDs -- slowly, one at a time -- whether new, NOS or recycled or whatever.