Cinephiles Rallying To Physical Media (theguardian.com) 110
An anonymous reader shares a report: Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all. Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they've spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming's limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.
Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer -- supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.
And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists -- especially when it has champions. Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution."
Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer -- supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.
And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists -- especially when it has champions. Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution."
Blu (Score:4, Insightful)
Not being able to play blu ray on your computer without buying more software isn't helping.
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Yeah. I bought a program that rips Blu Ray from my Linux desktop onto my file server, then I can play them on my Shield TV in the living room. Saves me from buying a dedicated old-school blu-ray player or annoying media player software that half the time ends up getting weird splash screen advertisements or cross product promotions even though I paid for the damn thing.
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The Shield looks like the best thing out there. If I upgrade to a higher resolution projector that would be my first choice for streaming. I have any number of Macs running linux that can rip video to a NAS device.
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It's pretty hilarious that the best set-top device you can buy for media playback, is one that was released 4.5 years ago and hasn't had a hardware update since.
It really does show how Nvidia cares about making quality hardware, and that nobody else does at all in this space.
Re:Blu (Score:4, Informative)
4.5 years ago? The original NVIDIA Shield TV was launched in 2015. It turns 9 years old this year.
The Shield is really starting to show its age at this point (the Android TV home screen lags hard on 4K displays), but NVIDIA made a couple of key technical decisions with the SoC that have kept it relevant for so long. Making sure to include a cutting-edge media decoder block with full 8/10-bit HEVC decoding support, as well as VP9 Profile 0 support, has kept it from being obsoleted by newer video codecs. AV1 is just now taking off, and even then it's going to be years until it's commonly in use for home media (be it legit or pirated media).
Though NVIDIA was also the beneficiary of a free SoC porting, thanks to Nintendo. Since Big N paid to get the Tegra X1 ported from TSMC 20nm to 16nm, NVIDIA hasn't needed to take the risk of investing in a major new revision of the SoC to keep production going. Otherwise, they would have needed to stop selling the Shield TV since 20nm is no longer available.
And not to discount their software support, either. 9 years of updates on an Android device is practically unheard of. Even flagship Android smartphones aren't getting that kind of support!
It's a side project that has been far more successful than it has any right to be. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that NVIDIA will build a successor based on the Switch 2's SoC.
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4.5 years ago? The original NVIDIA Shield TV was launched in 2015. It turns 9 years old this year.
There was a product refresh in 2019 [nvidia.com], which is what I was referring to.
Re:Blu (Score:5, Interesting)
4K Blu-Rays not only require specific software, but only 6th through 10th generations of Intel CPU because the only approved method of playback requires the dropped SGX instruction.
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Are you asking if your disk player has an old no longer available Intel CPU in it? No it's just for PCs of course.
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It all depends on the source material, and the display. 4K with HDR on an OLED TV is glorious.
That said, I think a lot of the 4k bitrate just goes toward encoding film grain...
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That said, I think a lot of the 4k bitrate just goes toward encoding film grain...
For older films, yes. Newer stuff shot on digital has much finer digital noise that is easier to encode.
But really, film grain does wreck the quality you can achieve at lower bitrates - it doesn't encode efficiently. Trying to digitally erase the grain makes things look terrible too, so it's better to preserver that grain as accurately possible. The eyes are much more forgiving of accurately reproduced grain than an uncanny valley textureless world.
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Looks like blu ray in being tight fisted with patents, saying "you must pay more or do without".
World: We choose to do without.
Blu ray: Let's not get hasty, fellas!
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Faster and easier to just use bittorrent.
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I like the reasonably legal option. I know, thanks to DMCA it's *technically* illegal to circumvent for copying, but ripping to private library not for sharing still seems reasonable.
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There's a couple of free programs that will usually play Blu Ray move discs.
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I've never been able to get it to work, but Leawo does, though it can be a bit unstable (and the interface is terrible).
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Any not on a sketchy web site?
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VLC isn't generally considered sketchy, but it can be tricky to get to work with Blu-Ray.
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Not being able to play blu ray on your computer without buying more software isn't helping.
Another new development is that companies are putting out what I call fake DVDs which are scary. My understanding is that to put the letters "DVD" on a disc that specific requirements have to be met and one of those is that the DVD will play on all units labeled as "DVD" capable. That is no longer the case as I've come across DVDS that specifically state that they will not properly play on a DVD player that has recording features or are used on PCs. And sure enough, the DVDS wouldn't play so I simply ret
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You can't play it, but you can rip it easily enough!
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Ditto. I had a hard time getting VLC, with all these addons, to, play my decade old Avatar 1 Blu-Ray movie in my PC's new BD drive. I gave up so I tried bloated PowerDVD trial, but it wouldn't play through my VGA cable because of lack of DRM. Frak it all.
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Leawo BluRay Player [leawo.org] is free.
Lifespan (Score:3)
I'm curious: I've read many times that pretty much all organic optical media has a certain lifespan, 15-20 years at most, normally less than that. And I'm almost sure that as we go higher with storage density, the problems gets even worse, so CDs may survive longer than e.g. Blu-Ray disks. How do fans deal with this? Or they are not thinking that far?
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I copy all my physical media to a server for safe keeping and easy playback throughout the house.
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Thank you, came here to say this. This is so obviously the solution. Have a proper RAID set up, update failing discs, and you're all set for the future.
Re:Lifespan (Score:4, Informative)
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Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays â" Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) Notes 19/1 [canada.ca] claims: DVD and BD (read-only, such as a DVD or Blu-ray movie) : 10 to 20 years which is even worse than BD-RE, rated 20 to 50 years.
I've not been able to find any research on the topic.
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How about the 'natural experiment' of people having 40 year old CDs and 27 year old DVDs that work just fine?
Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.
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> Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.
Certainly, I have seen such odd things too.
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The Canadian research was "skeptical" when compared to all the others out there.
The French Navy came to a very different conclusion, as did NIST
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> I've not been able to find any research on the topic.
There are loads, top google resuls include this one with links to more:
https://www.loc.gov/preservati... [loc.gov]
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> explain to me why a number of commercial DVDs that own are failing after less than 20 years
Because they are made badly, over in the USA it's well known that WB for example used poor quality factories for years and years. The USA is littered with shitty poor quality discs, outside the USA our WB discs are totally fine.
What kills a pressed disc generally is the construction allowing the relective layer to corrode. If the disc uses aluminium as the reflective layer then oxygen will corrode it. Poor laq
Re:Lifespan (Score:5, Informative)
There was a plant in England that made CDs (retail, none of this "organic" stuff) that made CDs for Deutsche Grammophon in the late 80's / early90's that had some kind of defect that have bits of the aluminum substrate degrading to the point it can't be read anymore.
I have a friend with hundreds of these. Avid CD collector with 10,000+ titles (not a joke, typo or hyperbole.)
Other than that.. retail CD and DVD, and Blu-Rays are pretty much good for decades. How many? Dunno, but I have late 80's CDs that are still good. In all this time, I've had one hit by cd rot, and I sent it back to the vendor and got a replacement from a different vendor.
Conversely, last year I have a disc in a Ranma blu-ray volume have a factory pressing defect. I took so long to play the particular volume after purchase that the retailer (RightStuf) refused to exchange it. I bought an entire new volume from a different vendor. no skin off my nose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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PDO used a faulty laquer formulation.
Those discs disnt use aluminium, they used silver which is much more longer lasting than aluminium. However in the PDO case the laquere was not able to stop sulphur traversing through it, and the CD booklets were made from... paper with a high sulphur content.
Now most paper has no sulphur content.
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Certainly longer than the lifespan of streaming, which can disappear without warning when your service decides to drop a title, or goes out of business, or changes its terms, or raises your rates enough to get you to drop it...
As a general rule, renting anything you will use more than once is a bad idea. There's a reason so many people get rich running businesses that own stuff and then rent it to other people, who are usually NOT getting rich by renting stuff. Think about it. Young people have been severel
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So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.
I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.
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I'm curious: I've read many times that pretty much all organic optical media has a certain lifespan, 15-20 years at most, normally less than that. And I'm almost sure that as we go higher with storage density, the problems gets even worse, so CDs may survive longer than e.g. Blu-Ray disks. How do fans deal with this? Or they are not thinking that far?
It only needs to last long enough for a single successful rip to my media streaming server. After that, the disc only exists to satisfy my moral and ethical obligations, so I really don't care whether the disc works, so long as it remains in my possession. Library copies are great for that reason: dirt cheap and only need to work once.
Once they're ripped, the discs go in sleeves that live in a storage box [amazon.com] in a closet (to minimize space used while keeping the discs intact for as long as possible just in case
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My CD collection is about 2000 discs; during the last pass, I had two titles that had mysteriously become unreadable. Both were decades old, and no scratches - likely due to oxidation somehow.
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No CD/DVD or bluray is organic. All of them are pressed out of polycarbonate and silver/aluminium.
You are confused with recordable CD/DVD.
Recordable bluray media are also inorganic (although increasingly rare organic types were about for a while) and they use several types of inorganic material, usually a metal alloy/composite that physically and permanantly changes when burnt in a burner.
There is an inorganic type of recordable DVD, the M-Disc that also uses inorganic recording material.
All re-writable op
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Nice to Know... (Score:1)
...I'm not the only one that develops a snit when their favorite is "leaving Netflix next week." Buy that disk, set it on the shelf, maybe build a multi-ton display case. You ain't getting "Battleship Potemkin" on streaming, and if you did, it would be remove before you could blink twice. Not fun having others controlling your access to your pics and or tunes.
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Well, name your poison, then, and chances are you won't get it on streaming, and if you do get it on streaming, it will disappear at the most inopportune time (like when you're on a 2 week wilderness camping trip and the highest tech you have is your photogrey glasses) and the damned thing disappears without you're having the chance to save it to disk. Buy the disk, rip it to digital, you're good to go. Take it in the coffin with you.
Home-Theatre influence (Score:3, Interesting)
Not surprised, everyone in the serious hometheatre sphere are all about the BluRays (including yours truly). No license expiry and best sound (not compressed).
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We need a "good as physical" streaming service (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think xack probably meant "DRM" in the context of "depends on someone else's server". The AACS protection on Blu-ray does not rely on an Internet connection, and in theory (i.e. ignoring discs and players breaking down) a disc bought today can still be played in a hundred years.
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Depends on the key.
For discs and players, yes, they will work in the future without an internet connection. For PC player programs, the keys expire after 2 years - the keys the player comes with will play all discs up to 2 years in
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The industry reserves the right to keep changing the format and selling you a new copy of the same stuff, in the new format. Streaming is the ultimate revenue optimizer for them. They can figure out what you want to watch, then figure out how to make you pay for it by moving it to a service you don't already subscribe to. Every 3 months you find you have 10+ subscriptions to cancel, and the 5th season of "Gunsmoke" is now only available through MGM++ which is like MGM+, but with the show you want to watch.
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We already have a "good as physical" streaming service. It's a local RAID array of movies ripped from the physical media you bought. I rip every single DVD I buy (I avoid Bluray like the plague it is) to my NFS server, and watch it from any computer in my house.
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>"I rip every single DVD I buy (I avoid Bluray like the plague it is)"
DVD is horrible resolution for modern screen sizes. And 4K is overkill for the vast majority of people and circumstances. 1080P Bluray is ideal. Why would you avoid it?
Re: We need a "good as physical" streaming service (Score:2)
"keep funding the copyright dictatorship"
Grow up kid, nobody owes you a movie. Period.
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> nobody owes you a movie. Period.
Oh, hello public domain
QED
My physical media (Score:1)
Is a zfs pool.
blu-ray.com (Score:2)
Bottom line, there's demand for physical media.
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Obvious solution: Download it? (Score:3)
This being slashdot, I'm surprised that no-one mentions downloads/rips and keeping the media on a NAS or equivalent. Seems like the obvious technical solution. If you keep upgrading discs every couple years, you can keep you stuff indefinitely.
Having said that, I believe I bought Star Wars about 5 times now for the full price (Cinema, VHS, DVD, BluRay, Streaming). Once for the IP and then a minor fee for each copy would be preferable. Same goes for books, by the way - a Kindle version and the paper copy each contain the IP costs. Why?
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a Kindle version and the paper copy each contain the IP costs. Why?
Because fuck you.
But I don't get why books, especially hardbacks, don't come with a download code. The last few CD I have bought have had them. One of them even came with bonus music.
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Its an 'ok' technical solution for grown-up nerds. (I know I am one, I have a NAS)
For the rest of the world the NAS ends up being:
1) Some very expensive cloud storage from Microsoft or Apple
2) A USB Harddisk plugged into the back of the chinsey home broadband router. The performance is abysmal probably can't handle more than one stream and they are one power surge from oblivion, and maybe even one power blip from oblivion if the filesystem gets hosed.
Of course the NAS isn't all you need, you'll also need a
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That's exactly what I do for all media: video, music and ebooks.
Driven by censorship and other abusive practices. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Streaming services have taken it upon themselves to reedit classic movies and TV shows however they find convenient, without so much as a disclaimer that they've changed the content, and even then they offer the material piecemeal or snatch it away without warning to goose demand. That kind of behavior - in addition to extreme cases, like the way you can't even get the original Star Wars trilogy through official channels - guarantees continued physical media demand.
This is why I buy DVDs/Blue-Rays as soon as they come out before the director, or anyone else, has a chance to mess with them. Sometimes the bonus features disc will include the original theatrical release. I have a DVD of Star Wars that includes the original theatrical release: No "A New Hope", Greedo shooting first, or Jabba the Hutt shit.
I will relisten to music but not rewatch films/TV (Score:2)
The advantage of physical media is being able to consume even if I don't have access to a streaming service that has the rights.
There is a lot of music that I have listened to over and over again (listening to Alternative Ulster as I type this) but very few movies or TV series that I will rewatch. So I have rarely bought DVDs or VHS tapes but have (at least years ago) bought LPs tapes and CDs.
I don't really understand why (Score:3)
But preferring physical media over local copies on your drives? I don't understand the appeal. Physical media has a lot more problems with degradation; not just because the media itself is prone to it (drives fail too), but because it's typically harder to back up, it's more difficult to notice subtle degradation, and error correction isn't really possible. If you have the actual video file on your local storage, then backups, integrity checking, and even error correction aren't really all that hard to set up.
There are a lot of other benefits, too. Less physical space is used; if you have a large collection of media, those discs add up, especially if you use individual boxes. Playback is easier, copying is easier, modification is easier... I could probably think of another handful of reasons but I think my point's evident. What exactly is supposed to be the appeal? I guess you have some pretty box and disc art if you're into that kind of thing... I mean I like retro computers and those don't have a ton of practical utility either, so if that's why, I can understand. But for practical purposes I don't really get why anyone would prefer physical media to a local digital version.
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If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.
But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.
Re:A Guess (Score:2)
Like audiophiles which must have the purest source to experience (or brag about) so too must 4k BR cinephiles...just a guess, otherwise I agree with you, space considerations is the main one why I dumped all my physical media.
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Some people fill their house with plants and artwork.
I like both, but I put plants in the garden. My house gets filled with my physical media collection.
I want to show it off! It's what people see when they enter my home. Those that try to cinvert me to streaming, well I show them titles they wont find on streaming.
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It's not a binary choice. One can have both hard media and digital media. They can coexist.
I have a large Criterion collection (in addition to other blu-rays) that I'm not going to rip, label, organize all the added features in addition to the film. I have better things to do with my time. I can just drop it into a blu-ray player and go. Space isn't an issue with regard to my curated book, film or audio collections. I'm not trying to amass a collection of one-time only to flex (as I see folks do on social m
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> But preferring physical media over local copies on your drives? I don't understand the appeal. Physical media has a lot more problems with degradation;
Do you ask people why the hell they still go to libraries? Why the hell a kid is reading marks off a dead tree?
If you do then you can stop reading here.
---
The appeal?
1. A drive looks boring. Totally boring on a shelf.
2. Any of my physical media has already outlasted many of the HDD's I have had the pleasure to scrap. HDD's are terribly fragile and wil
I've been hesitant to buy physical media since... (Score:2)
I've been hesitant to buy physical media since DVDs were replaced by Blu Ray. I have in my garage a massive DVD collection I built up over years but it's all too low resolution for me to enjoy on today's massive tvs the way I would like to now. Blu Rays just strike me as yet another media format waiting to be replaced by a superior format.
Nowadays if it isn't on one of my many streaming services I just pirate it. Odds are I probably paid for the movie at some point anyways back when I was buying DVDs.
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I bought into Blu-Ray early. So early that my display at the time was 720 only. That barely afforded me any jump in video quality.
When I upgraded the projector to 1080, that's when blu-ray worked for me. The jump from 720 to 1080 was scary good. And I'm stil there.
1080's good enough to see the fuzz on the fibers that make a sweater. Enough to see brushed steel. That's good enough for me. 720 and below was potato.
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That's the thing with technology though, it might seem good enough now but it always gets replaced. Just remember the claim attributed to Bill Gate's about computer memory, "640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
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Diminishing returns with video. Comes a point when my eyes cannot discern any added benefit. That signals the wallet to stay closed.
I've seen 4K end-to-end systems (capture, editing, playback). I really can't see any added benefit. 1080's fine for me.
My eyes are also 5 decades old and full of floaties, so there's that..
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Ha, I get floaties sometimes myself. I'll never forget the dinner table conversation where my dad and I both mentioned we got them, my mom thought we were lunatics.
I think Blu Rays will have a pretty decent life span for the reasons you've mentioned. It's just for me I think about the future development of technology and how we so often aren't able to predict when the big pivotal pieces of technology will appear. Just look at any 90's or earlier sci fi movie about the near future, you'll see all kinds of ga
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>"Diminishing returns with video. Comes a point when my eyes cannot discern any added benefit. That signals the wallet to stay closed."
^ This
Many people THINK they need more than 1080P, but 99% of them don't and wouldn't know/see the difference between that and 1080P upscaled to 4K. There were HUGE jumps in quality between VHS 480 to DVD 480P and then 720P. From 720P to 1080P was big but nowhere near previous jumps. From 1080P to 4K is mostly a yawn, unless you are viewing on a 200" display at 10 feet
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I couldnt rely on streaming. Being told what I can watch at any one time seems odd.
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If the only copy I can get my hands on is DVD, that DVD is better than an unavailable blu-ray.
I can enjoy the DVD.
Oh yes. For sure. I'd even take VHS over not having it at all.
Warner Disc Rot Fiasco (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised no one mentioned this yet. Below is the link to a very informative video on the subject.
In a nutshell: From 2006-2009 Warner used a company to make their DVDs that decide to cut major corners. So much so, people are now opening brand new packages and are finding the discs unusable. Again, never opened or played and are worthless. What makes this most heartbreaking is the realization that some of these shows have never had another release date on any form of media. Nor are they available via streaming.
https://youtu.be/ufALjleweoA [youtu.be]
Re:Warner Disc Rot Fiasco (Score:4, Interesting)
They aren't unique. Many DVDs, and CDs went through bad batches at some point.
Netflix Disc (Score:2)
>"In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service."
And I still have money sitting here, waiting to spend on some replacement Blu-ray-by-mail rental service. I had been a Netflix disc customer for many, many years and found the model to be convenient and reasonable.
https://www.dvdinbox.com/ [dvdinbox.com] seems it might be an option? Looks like they have no series, though. The other few options either have barely any discs or mostly not Blu-Ray.
I also buy Bluray when something is truly excellent and price is re
Nice to have it on the shelf but.. (Score:2)
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> and that might prove difficult in the near future
Far future.
It's going to be about 20 years before they stop making players at this rate and those players will happily last > 20 years with minor TLC. I use players from the 80's and 90's and apart from a bit of grease, a change of belt perhaps there has been no problem.
Should anything else go, like the PSU, well I'm savvy enough to either repair it or sell it on ebay for parts and get another one for a few quid.
I've seen this "you wont get a working
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I have my granddads Nikon F and a load of Prakticas. I have many fil cameras and my oldest is an Agfa Billy 1 (pre war) made 100 years ago.
I put 120 film in it lst year and took it on holiday. It gave me 8 HUGE shots on 120.