Will Blu-Ray eventually go away

[Ferzerp]

The big improvement I'd like to see in Blu-ray is faster load times. I never use blu-rays, when I buy films I extract the film to mkv and put it on our NAS - sometimes re-encoding it to reduce size depending on the film, but man is that initial load slow if you do play off the media.

You can thank the DRM (and the speed of your player) for that.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yes Blu Rays will eventually go away, but physical media won't go away for a long time.

 

[Red Storm]

In my world everyone jumped from DVD to streaming. Nobody I know owns a bluray player. A few have PS4's, but they use them strictly for gaming.

Sure quality may be better on bluray, but streaming has worked just fine for me. Physical media just feels like the old way of doing things.

 

[steppinthrax]

They announced it for next year, and they will be increasing the disc size possibly to 100gb, while also improving compression so everything still fits on a single disc.

lossy or lossless compression?????

 

[zinfamous]

VHS never died, so obviously BD will not.

 

[zinfamous]

In my world everyone jumped from DVD to streaming. Nobody I know owns a bluray player. A few have PS4's, but they use them strictly for gaming.

Sure quality may be better on bluray, but streaming has worked just fine for me. Physical media just feels like the old way of doing things.

I still have my PS3 which I use strictly for BD playback.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

you can't come even CLOSE to bluray quality right now streaming, and it's not going to happen any time in the real near future, so bluray will be around for a while.

I think the $64,000 question is when and where will the consumer say "this is good enough".

Currently streaming is still limited in quality, so there's a need for a higher quality physical media like Blu Ray. And streaming won't be close to fast enough to manage 4K quality for a long time to come, so there looks to be a need for the successor to Blu Ray whatever it's called when it gets here supposedly in 2016. But will that be the end of it? Are people going to look at 4K and be satisfied or are they going to keep pushing forward to 8K or beyond?

 

[IGemini]

Yeah my edit missed your reply. I don't pay much attention to storage media standards, I didn't know they already had BDXL and more in the works. A BDXL @ 128GB would be enough to hold most films @ 4K on its own I would think.

4K is doable even on 50GB. HEVC retains the same quality as VC-1/H.264 at half the bitrate. Even 1080p films didn't always fill a 25GB disc.

Streaming is great for convenience but you're still subject to view only what they have contracts for. The physical media will still be in demand as a result.

 

[mmntech]

I don't think BD is going to die anytime soon. However, it's going to get pushed further to the sidelines as a niche product for videophiles. Much like CDs and LPs have for music.

How about 4K, Does blu-ray support it????

The issue I have with media formats is they have a finite capacity. As resolution increase so does the demand for a high capacity disk. With streaming there is no capacity requirement. The only issues with streaming is the size of you pipe.

In theory, it does. HEVC/h.265 is a more efficient codec that can cram 4K films at 24fps onto a 50GB disc. Both the PS4 and Xbox One should be able to handle it with only a firmware update.

Stand alone players might be a different story. They probably lack the processing power to decode h.265, assuming the read speed is fast enough to begin with.

 

[BoberFett]

Eventually all media will be streaming. Whether its from a source server or your own cloud. Physical media is at its end. Unless we start buying movies on micro usb cards, I don't see where it has to go. I do see it going to: buy a movie, save it to your cloud. Buy a CD, save it to your cloud. Buy a video game: access it from their cloud.

I certainly hope not. Streaming selection is shit. Is there a lot of stuff to stream? Sure. But not necessarily what I want to watch. Streaming gives too much control to asshats who would love nothing more than control how you watch entertainment.

 

[purbeast0]

I think the $64,000 question is when and where will the consumer say "this is good enough".

Currently streaming is still limited in quality, so there's a need for a higher quality physical media like Blu Ray. And streaming won't be close to fast enough to manage 4K quality for a long time to come, so there looks to be a need for the successor to Blu Ray whatever it's called when it gets here supposedly in 2016. But will that be the end of it? Are people going to look at 4K and be satisfied or are they going to keep pushing forward to 8K or beyond?

"good enough" is totally subjective so there really is no finite answer imo. and as tech keeps progressing, "good enough" goes up as well.

the console market vs pc gaming market is a perfect example. consoles have been "good enough" for many people, while there are pc games who laugh at the console graphics because they are always steps ahead of consoles on their latest hardware.

 

[ultimatebob]

Of course Blu Ray is doomed. Tech doesn't stop advancing and someday people will be sitting around saying things like "Do you remember when everyone thought Blu Ray was high quality? Man, they were freaking barbarians!" Blu Ray discs will wind up the same way that Laser Disc and DVD ended up, in landfills in New Jersey.

They still make tons of DVD's, mostly for kids shows. Well intentioned grandmothers buy them for their grandkids, and then people like me have to rip them and put them on the kid's tablet/laptop/iPod.

Believe it or not, I've seen upscaled DVD's that look better than a Netflix or Amazon or Comcast "HD" stream.

 

[vi edit]

4k is meh. At least at this current point. I don't really care about resolution if the bitrate isn't there to back it. That's problem with Netflix. You can get away with it on smaller screens, but once you scale up to larger sizes it starts to show it's flaws. It's especially bad with sound. It's certainly no replacement for a well mastered, high bandwith audio soundtrack on a BR disk pumped through a capable audio setup.

 

[motsm]

lossy or lossless compression?????

All commercial Blu Ray video is lossy, chroma is subsampled to 4:2:0, and compressed with AVC or VC-1 (some early releases used MPEG-2) encodes. I believe it's expected the 4K format would bring 4:2:2 however.

So the kind of compression they are talking about is already in place now, they just want to improve it's efficiency. Much like MPEG-4 AVC, is much more efficient than MPEG-2, which was used primarily for DVD.

 

[squarecut1]

I have never had a blu ray player.

I agree streaming selection is awful but DVD quality is good enough for me. I don't need the see the pores on the skin of actors. I'm simple like that

 

[Ferzerp]

4k is meh. At least at this current point. I don't really care about resolution if the bitrate isn't there to back it

The high bitrate demos they have playing in stores on the 4k tvs are so pretty though!

 

[BurnItDwn]

Bluray is great.

I like my netfllix, hulu, and prime streaming, but bluray looks and sounds best. It is not too much different/better, but bluray players are cheap now, so its good to have one IMO.

 

[ultimatebob]

I'm surprised that we haven't had a Gen 2 Blu-Ray disk yet. The gen 1 tech is 10 years old now, so they should be able to cram 500 GB on a disk by now if not more.

 

[JimKiler]

Yeah my edit missed your reply. I don't pay much attention to storage media standards, I didn't know they already had BDXL and more in the works. A BDXL @ 128GB would be enough to hold most films @ 4K on its own I would think.

They had prototypes of 4 layer and 8 layer discs before the first BD players were ever released so they planned for the future.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Every media format prior has gone away; why would Blu-ray be any different?

 

[TwiceOver]

I have a player. Can't say I've ever played a Blu-Ray disk through it though.

 

[spacejamz]

will ISP's impose download caps in the future? don't some already cap at a certain limit?

 

[Nebor]

You guys saying streaming selection is terrible, have you tried vudu? Between them and Amazon streaming I've never been unable to find what I want to watch. And vudu can stream high quality 3d movies.

 

[TXHokie]

I have never had a blu ray player.

I agree streaming selection is awful but DVD quality is good enough for me. I don't need the see the pores on the skin of actors. I'm simple like that

I bought a bluray player 3 yrs ago. I think I played two movies on it and haven't touched it since. I agree that seeing the pores or strand of hair isn't going to add to the movies. Actually with so much computer special effects now, having the picture being super clear makes it a distraction. DVD quality is good enough for me as well.

 

[squarecut1]

I bought a bluray player 3 yrs ago. I think I played two movies on it and haven't touched it since. I agree that seeing the pores or strand of hair isn't going to add to the movies. Actually with so much computer special effects now, having the picture being super clear makes it a distraction. DVD quality is good enough for me as well.

Yes, somebody else I know also holds the view that too much clarity in picture quality is a bad thing. I tend to agree