Optical discs were sold to businesses as a near-eternal solution. And then they do this... Are they serious?
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Honestly surprised, i thought blu-ray m-disc was moderately popular
I’d never even heard of it, I feel like cheap large flash drives and streaming killed the main use cases for these.
M-disc is for long term storage, which flash and hard drives are not suitable for.
i think that's it. We used to use CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to record playlists and movies, respectively. Data hoarders today will prefer multi-hard drive servers over burning everything to Bluray, and for one-time file transfers, we have flash drives and online file shares. I just can't think of a use case for BR-R that isn't better served by a different technology.
I believe Blurays are still a very good medium for long term data storage, like a cold offsite backup.
Isn't that what tapes are for.
Sure, if you have enough data to make the cost of a tape drive worth it.
When the tape drive fails and eats your tape in the process, you better hope you have a second backup or you'll be crying salty salty tears.
I worked in the service center for a tape-drive manufacturer and I would routinely see the drives we got back for repair. They were often taken apart by the customer in a frantic and desperate attempt to get their cassette out. The cassette was almost always still in there though, with multiple feet of tape snagged and wound around everything.
Yes, but at much higher cost.
Tapes themselves are cheaper, but the drive (and potentially operating cost?) can definitely be higher for the industrial stuff
Presumably when we're talking off-site backups we're talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.
Not as profitable as charging someone licensing fees ?
I just hope that Verbatim will not stop producing its M-Discs following the Sony trend
Welp, so only 🏴☠️ it is.
fortunately, this change does not affect Bluray movies you can buy at the store. This is only about recordable Bluray drives, which basically no one uses on a consumer level.
I'm pretty sure some people use them for backups.
I'm sure they do, but I feel like even on r/datahoarders, I only ever see people talk about masses of HDDs, tape drives, or cloud storage.
8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.
There are dozens of us!
So patents last 15-20 years... regular Blu-ray patent has already expired I guess, but Ultra HD Blu-ray is the current patent, releasing in 2015... so another 6 to 11 years before consumers can do whatever they want with the technology.
Would be outdated by then by the next new thing though.
That is if there is still an optical drive market in the future.
Sony never made a big deal of how the PS5 can play Ultra HD disks the way they did with DVD and Blu-ray. Ultra HD sales seem a lot smaller than previous renditions. You also have a lot of content being kept behind the streaming paywall rather than getting released.
I don't think there will be a large enough market to support 8K, backed up by the fact that a specification has been written but no one wants to go forward with making the disks and drives.
And my TV is still a cheap full HD (2K) screen from 2011, so I've got no reason to buy media in higher quality
Full HD/1080P is 1K. If you meant better than 1080P though, then more power to you.
The number refers to the horizontal resolution. FHD is nearly 2K pixels wide, just as 4K resolutions are nearly 4K pixels wide, although FHD is the typical term for the resolution and QHD is more commonly called 2K instead than FHD
Okay, but, 4k has literally 4 times the number of pixels that 1080P does, 3840 horizontal("4k"?) versus 1920("2k"?), and 2160 versus 1080 vertical. We are not so far from breaking the "1000pixels" interpretation completely; "13k" would be 12,480 pixels wide.
Seems to me that marketers are trying to conflate "k" and Megapixels, but if we started using Megapixels for Displays, the side-by-side numbers would look truely pathetic(versus what "seems common/attainable", not what's "percievable".
Already broken
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8K_resolution
8K resolution refers to an image or display resolution with a width of approximately 8,000 pixels. 8K UHD (7680 × 4320)
I mean, I agree its already broken, but proponents of this "it's x thousand pixels wide!" non-sense will point out that at least it rounds up to that number, so I opted to point of the vaule at whict that excuse, too, breaks down. 4k has 4 times(2x2) the pixels as 1080P, and 8k has, well shit, 16 times(4x4) the pixels as 1080P. Someone shit the bed with this non-sense.
Apparently the "official" standard defines nothing beyond 8k. Go figure.
This only applies to Sony products, right?
I use Buffalo drives and Optical Quantum BD-Rs for archiving. It doesn't sound like that will be affected.