Basically just the title. With DVDs getting tossed to the wind it made me wonder when will blu-rays go? I’m gonna miss bloopers and extra scenes
Edit: A bit confused but the general consensus is that in some areas BRs have already began to be phased out while in others they’re just trucking along perfectly fine. It’ll be that way until they stop being profitable to the studios who make them. Is that correct? I don’t think the 8k argument is valid imo since that’s really niche currently.
They are hardly anywhere now… Best Buy is phasing out their remaining physical movie sections this year.
They are coming back like vinyl. Zoomers are realizing streaming plarforms can pull the plug
It occurs to me that I could totally put a short movie on a vinyl record. It would display “buffering” for quite a while though.
The concept of vinyl still blows my mind… The fact that you can recreate every possible combination of sounds and etch it in grooves on a thin piece of plastic, then you can drag a needle across those grooves to hear the sound combinations again…
How does a person even create something like that? It’s mind blowing.
I think it was done with wax cylinders first, somewhat earlier! So at least for vinyl, there was strong technological precedent.
In the early days, it was quite a simple device! Sort of a cone to focus sound waves, with a membrane at the end attached to an engraver that carves wax. I bet it was quite hard to make those mechanical systems reliable, but I can sort of see how someone goes from “sound is a pressure wave in air” to that device!
Theoretically you could get it with little to no buffering by writing an analog TV signal to the disk, no?
Sure – but at what resolution (analog signals have resolution too)? At what framerate? A vinyl should hold about 440MB of data (both sides, normal vinyl), with a read speed of 167 kilobytes per second.
So actually… that’s less bad than I thought! You could probably get 240p video or better!
And just like that, you’ve invented laserdisc.
Reinvent the wheel? No, it’s time to reinvent outdated media formats!
The most realistic answer is - as long as movie studios deem it to be profitable to continue releasing them. I think there will always be niche companies like Criterion that will release physical media. I mean, vinyl LPs are still being produced to this day, so really it’s all about demand.
Personally, I am surprised that DVD format has lasted as long as it has, in regards to current technology. The majority of TVs available today are 4K, to which 4K UHD Blu-rays match the native resolution. 4K UHD is 4x the resolution of a standard Blu-ray(1080p), which are over 4x the resolution of DVDs (480p). So, they are really quite outdated/obsolete unless you still have an older 1080p or 720p TV and have a good player with upscaling.
DVD is “good enough” for a lot of people.
Especially when you factor in the distance/screen size ratios that the average house uses (and that not everyone is watching with perfect vision).
Also, good quality SD content, shot on good lenses, still looks pretty damned good. Sure, you’re not going to get the same level of fine detail.
My Name Is Earl is a good example of this.
