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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

"Blu-Ray has five years left" - Samsung

You are right! I would like at least some hard media for backup purposes for security reasons.:cold:
 
CrewPix.com said:
This is an interesting read.

I wonder what will replace Blu-Ray?!? Perhaps another color of 'Ray'? :-)

"Samsung has said that it sees the Blu-ray format only lasting a further 5 years before it is replaced by another format or technology. "

The article is here.
Click to expand...

I don't think Red-Ray would be future proof also, unless you can upgrade the laser or have swappable SSD or HDD?
 
Interesting debate. I'll contribute my experience.

Opticals are nearly dead - three of my four computers don't even have optical drives in them. If I really need one (to load an OS), I use a USB external drive.

I didn't start buying DVDs until it was possible to copy and transcode them. Since that technology became available, I've bought quite a few. All of them are copied, transcoded, and backed up. I haven't touched the originals since.

I was going to buy HD but didn't because of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray war. So I didn't get HD anything, including a TV or projector. Now that the war is over, I waited until it was possible to copy and transcode Blu-Ray. Now that we're at that point, I'm hesitating to buy a drive because I know my only use for it is to copy and transcode movies. Seems like a really, really inefficient means of information delivery - master, DRM, print, sell, read, hack the DRM, possibly transcode, store, play. I'd like to cut out all that garbage between master and store that provides no value added (except the sell part - I'll happily pay for what I own).

In addition, having all those DVDs transcoded has made me realize that the visual quality of motion pictures isn't all that important to me. I'd rather watch an SD movie in the corner of my computer monitor with good sound than an IMAX with bad sound. Of course, an IMAX with good sound is better yet. I have yet to find a movie theater with good sound *or* good visual quality.

The bottom line is that the industry committed suicide with me. By having a format war and infecting their material with DRM, they spent *years* not getting any money out of me. I'm not quite sure what it would take to get me to make the investment to go beyond DVD quality at this point, much less get me back to theaters.
 
guys... ive been buying blu ray movies for 8(low) - 14 - 19 - 22(max) us dollars Brand new.. from amazon.. wtf are you talking about? I buy them and i throw the discs like i throw my dvds around.. they are freggin cheap. i just bought a bulk of 28 flicks for 500 bucks w/shipping?? wtf are you guys talking about? :s and i watch them on my $400 ps3 that i bought TWO years ago. I got a 2 in 1 deal play video games and blurays.
And now the ps3's have gone piss cheap. esp if you buy them in bulk from china. i got my cousins 20 ps3's.. put an order for 289 bucks ea.- not to mention i buy an extra hand gear too for that same price - straight from sony's factory in china. they treated me like a reseller or a retailer..

I honestly am gonna keep at it until the next big thing comes. by the time the new thing comes.. the new movies are gonna hit it.. till then.. im enjoying all the current movies and awesome games on my nice 42" sony bravia.
 
Tom said:
I disagree.

In 2000, a 20GB harddrive cost $300. Right now, that will buy me 1.5 terabytes.
.
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where can you get 1.5 terabytes for 300 bucks?
 
I just got a 1TB external USB on sale for $129.
 
In 2000, a 20GB harddrive cost $300. Right now, that will buy me 1.5 terabytes. The trends favor massive HDD storage capacity at your average, tech-savvy home, with most devices eventually linked - ie, desktop in the bedroom linked to the TV in the living room, etc.
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You call someone having the brain in the bedroom and the screen in the living room "savvy"?
If you are economy savvy, I doubt you would keep many ultra powerful electric devices switched on for one simple task as watching a movie... one thing that you can do easily with just an even more savvy normal player, connected to a screen and.... surprise: both, + you in the same room, plus friends... on the sofa. Isn't it just better?

I'm just saying that after Bluray, the model will move toward network distribution and HDD or solid-state storage.
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Sure we may see an increase of that, but I still wan to keep a collection on discs, being them made of plastic, stone, silver or gold. And probably on the shelf, so I can grab them without neither searching in an archive, being it in hard disks.
Who said a colorful disc collection has to be the original cases and discs? I might have payed for original download and still consider my personal copies on the shelf "my" collection. They can be the archive, and whatever I keep on hard disk can be the daily bread.; or the other way round. There is usually place for both things in a thing called home. People keep what they like most, and in a good and nice place.
Economy is not all the story.

when I was a punk working at the pizza shop at 15, half my paltry check every week went to buying shiny new CDs
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If you pay per download music, and then make them your personal MP3 copies on blank DVDs, you have thousands of phisical albums safe for years to come on your shelf, with a global expense that is much smaller then buying them in the CD format as you used to do. It's perfectly legal and savvy.
The fact that tomorrow, one single trembling hdd may also keep them all inside, makes just another copy, suitable for when you go camping 75 days a year with your laptop. (But in this case, wouldn't you also have a bigger setup in this second home of yours?)

Last week I went camping, and I brought along my "Movies" 500GB external drive. It has something like 440GBs of mostly 720p and 1080p movies.
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It's fine. But home is different. I don't watch movies on a laptop if I have a bigger screen, even if I'm alone.
 
Everyone wants to have some sort of phisical backup.

The more durable, reliable, fast, and possibly not eating up too much space like those unnecessarily huge, 90% empty, original DVD jewelcases used to be...., well, the better.
That is quite satisfied. And from HD and beyond, with new codecs, it's all potentially good.

Let's think separately about codec and physical format. You can have payed for, original works on your preferred phisical format, and personal copies for different situations and pockets.

Playback is not much of a problem as it used to be. Not at all.
 
RE:"the model will move toward network distribution"
Not to sound crass but I agree with Tetsuo. Bravo! .I'm still waiting for 'Thin Client' computers that were promised to be all the rage in 1999. Never happened. Nor did 200 channels of Cable TV chocked full of goodies and promising to be the 'Internet Killer'. Right. I don't trust networks for anything but e-mail.
Forward thinking visionaries often get ahead of themselves with spin and in the long run, things tend to stay the same- close to the user, burned in a Blu-Ray or other archivally sound medium.HDD's can crash and burn. Similarly, 'smart homes' were meant to have been the norm by now. They aren't. Smart appliances yes. but they're rarely networked. Networking is the bane of fungibility. I like independence and networks are the epitome of oligarchy :ninja:


Tetsuo said:
You call someone having the brain in the bedroom and the screen in the living room "savvy"?
If you are economy savvy, I doubt you would keep many ultra powerful electric devices switched on for one simple task as watching a movie... one thing that you can do easily with just an even more savvy normal player, connected to a screen and.... surprise: both, + you in the same room, plus friends... on the sofa. Isn't it just better?



Sure we may see an increase of that, but I still wan to keep a collection on discs, being them made of plastic, stone, silver or gold. And probably on the shelf, so I can grab them without neither searching in an archive, being it in hard disks.
Who said a colorful disc collection has to be the original cases and discs? I might have payed for original download and still consider my personal copies on the shelf "my" collection. They can be the archive, and whatever I keep on hard disk can be the daily bread.; or the other way round. There is usually place for both things in a thing called home. People keep what they like most, and in a good and nice place.
Economy is not all the story.



If you pay per download music, and then make them your personal MP3 copies on blank DVDs, you have thousands of phisical albums safe for years to come on your shelf, with a global expense that is much smaller then buying them in the CD format as you used to do. It's perfectly legal and savvy.
The fact that tomorrow, one single trembling hdd may also keep them all inside, makes just another copy, suitable for when you go camping 75 days a year with your laptop. (But in this case, wouldn't you also have a bigger setup in this second home of yours?)



It's fine. But home is different. I don't watch movies on a laptop if I have a bigger screen, even if I'm alone.
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JFYI, I saw Asaka showing thier Bluray archiving system that they are working with Panasonic, that each container holds 50 or 100 bluray discs for archiving purposes.
Since writing to Bluray would be quite slow, they have created special low energy consuming RAID server system as buffer for the writing process, so you can quickly copy your contents to be archived to their RAID server and the RAID server would keep working to do the Bluray writing.

The whole thing might be expensive, but I'm talking to few rental companies to adopt this, so clients don't have to own the hole thing but rent the archiving system when they need it.

I was also told by Panasonic person that 100GB bluray is on its way.
 
Tetsuo said:
If you pay per download music, and then make them your personal MP3 copies on blank DVDs, you have thousands of phisical albums safe for years to come on your shelf,
Click to expand...

Err no. All home writable discs use chemicals in their layers that react to the laser light to record the data. The trouble is that unlike professionally produced discs which having the data surface pressed from aluminium, the chemicals degrade and breakdown and the discs develop errors as a result and eventually stop playing. Its not unusual to have disc problems only 2 or 3 years after recording.

As for those who say internet downloads will take over, its rubbish for 2 reasons:

1. Home recorded discs simply aren't as attractive or have the archival quality of factory pressed discs.

2. Band width and speed aside, 3 obvious issues, the internet also suffers from line drops, errors in transmission, interruptions in service. Are we really going to surrender our viewing to the foibles of internet service faults? If I had to watch tv on my internet connection it would drive me nuts and how about a 3 hour download of a BR title only to find that part of the download is corrupted when you want to watch it back leaving you nothing to watch that evening? Internet is flawed an whilst great as a resource center it sucks as a streaming medium.
 
Alsone said:
...

2. Band width and speed aside, 3 obvious issues, the internet also suffers from line drops, errors in transmission, interruptions in service. Are we really going to surrender our viewing to the foibles of internet service faults? If I had to watch tv on my internet connection it would drive me nuts and how about a 3 hour download of a BR title only to find that part of the download is corrupted when you want to watch it back leaving you nothing to watch that evening? Internet is flawed an whilst great as a resource center it sucks as a streaming medium.
Click to expand...

I depend on the Internet for all my TV viewing. It is just a question of technology, and I had to get a better provider to get better service. Compared to broadcast towers, cables buried in the ground are at least as reliable. I had more transmitter failures when I watched over-the-air TV than I have ever had with my network connections. Satellites will also develop occational problems.

And corruption of part of a download just does not happen unless you use obsolete protocols. I am downloading ISO-images of DVDs all the time (the software for my servers is distributed that way), and have never had a bad image.

And even if there should be a problem, it does not take many minutes to transfer a gigabyte today. We are not living in the nineties any more, and connections are not getting any slower or more expensive. You get 10Mbit/s today for what you paid for 28.8k ten years ago.

While switches faster than 1Gbit/s are still expensive, that situation is not going to last much longer.

Especially if you want to distribute large volumes to many consumers, BitTorrent or some derivative will ensure that each chunk of data is received correctly or your client will ask to have it retransmitted. It also has the benefit that you save on server load and bandwidth costs, since all your customers will share in the job of distribution.

For distribution of free programming, the Miro player will use similiar technology. It works quite well, and is easy enough to use for even the technically challenged.
 
Kaku Ito said:
The whole thing might be expensive, but I'm talking to few rental companies to adopt this, so clients don't have to own the hole thing but rent the archiving system when they need it.
Click to expand...

I'm sure people will adopt if the price becomes reasonable. Many may be interested in such a system vs. tape archival simply because tape is viewed as obsolete, even though it really isn't. My biggest concern with such archival solutions is that the chemicals used on BD media are essentially the same chemicals that have been used for DVD and CD media for years. And we are now seeing that the longevity is nowhere near as good as the manufacturers had stated. So just like any other data storage method, these "archives" will still eventually need to be serviced and migrated to other forms of storage in the future. We also have to consider that the just as tape is fading away, so will the optical disc. In 30 years, the photochemical dyes in those discs will be struggling to hold data, perhaps even at a failing point. And the only hardware around to read BD media will be expensive specialty or legacy equipment.

I was also told by Panasonic person that 100GB bluray is on its way.
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Yeah, I'm thinking we'll see quad-layer per side BD media and the drives to read/write it sometime in the first half of '09. There were several manufacturers talking about such a thing at E3 and Siggraph. It's one of those things that has been "working in the lab" for a year or two now.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Unfortunately Blu-Ray has not been meeting industry expectations. Consumers can't see enough of a difference from SD DVDs.

I believe Blu-Ray will be around for a while as there is not a cheaper/better technology to replace it. I also believe that the next generation whenever it arrives will be a solid state technology.
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Agreed. A buddy of mine has a $40k collection of SD-DVD. He was addicted to buying the weekly releases at Costco over a period of 15 years. I kid you not, when I say he still has releases (from 5 years ago that are still shrink wrapped - a consequence of having 2 kids and no time to watch movies). Now that Blueray has come out he's feeling a little resentment that the market expects him to reup on his "investment". He's thrown in the towel. He aint buying squat. He went from 2-4 dvd's a week to zero. I think the biggest hindrance to blueray is the success of SD-DVD. If something as successful as SD can be replaced what's to say that blueray wont meet the same fate - if so, why should consumers collect them? This kind of media is ultimately fated to the rental market and gamers.
 
Err no. All home writable discs use chemicals in their layers that react to the laser light to record the data. The trouble is that unlike professionally produced discs which having the data surface pressed from aluminium, the chemicals degrade and breakdown and the discs develop errors as a result and eventually stop playing. Its not unusual to have disc problems only 2 or 3 years after recording.
Click to expand...

I must admit that you are very right. Build quality is very low in about any goods made today. "Economy" wants this.
(Apart from my Red cameras and a little more)
Plastic, like anything made of plastic, in my opinion, is a real waste.
BUT, as I said, sincee a collection of personal copies is a copy of the originals that you also have in your home in whatever form, it's not the end of the world when you lose a copy. You just make a new one from the original.
Of course, this is not something to be happy about. To constantly replace everything - paying more times, possibly forever, for one very same thing, is one of the fundaments of this irrational economy that we are not much allowed to escape for the lack of sustained alternatives.
At least, while talking about formats, comfort and relative convenience, I'm sure one won't die in desperation for shortage of multimedia files.
A bigger problem is the format and the media on which to keep one's personal and work files. THOSE are much more important.

Today you produce your digital contents. Say a masterwork. Say whatever. Say it remains on digital format.
If blank discs are going to turn into piss in a few years, how are we supposed to keep such files for the posterity??????????????????????????????
Hard disk????? yeah, why not.
 
2. Band width and speed aside, 3 obvious issues, the internet also suffers from line drops, errors in transmission, interruptions in service.
Click to expand...

I experienced it one day in 8 years.

Are we really going to surrender our viewing to the foibles of internet service faults? If I had to watch tv on my internet connection it would drive me nuts
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You may be right, well really I don't know about this, but I was talking about downloads: Pay per downloads, to be precise. This doesn't suffer from connection problems, unless the connection is really off for a long time. Separate download and playback. Not streaming. just plain downloading. You do it when you have time and you can. Use it later.


and how about a 3 hour download of a BR title only to find that part of the download is corrupted when you want to watch it back leaving you nothing to watch that evening?
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It's very unlikely that if you buy a film online from the proper source it will be corrupeted.

About speed: If you like to use internet half seriously, you would have a fast connection a method. If you want to watch a specific movie one evening, get it at least some hours before.
And no, 3 hours for 1 hour movie is unlikely. If it's the case, you know it, and get it in advance.
Hey, If you buy the disc in a shop, you would do it hours in advance anyway, don't you?

Internet is flawed an whilst great as a resource center it sucks as a streaming medium.
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One thing is download and one thing is streaming.
I can't see why streaming can't be done excellently, though. If the line or the source are that bad, having a bigger buffer may cut the problem, I believe. It's a matter of software as much as hardware.
 
and how about a 3 hour download of a BR title only to find that part of the download is corrupted when you want to watch it back leaving you nothing to watch that evening?
Click to expand...

The world faced oceans of quality drops in videcassette for decades, and still people were happy to be able to record and see and by and rent videocassette.

So, if the thing generally works (I mean: streaming), and only rarely you experience a corrupted file from a legal source, well, you won't cry. You can change that infamous evening into something else or change movie. You got a collection ot them, afterall!
I think we all have bigger worries. Communication technologies are high enough to let you download a movie. Millions of people already do such things, it must be viable.
 
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