Technology

It's the thing Sony does best.

The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!

4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.

Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.

But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).

I prefer my 10min of unskippable download time and watching it in 4k with a proper bitrate.

And five minutes of ads.

40 seconds?

More like 10 minutes

For internal desktop drives, I have the WH16NS40. After flashing some open firmware on it, it works perfectly for playing and ripping BRs. Looks like I'll be picking up a spare in case this one dies.

The MakeMKV forum has a lot of good tips and instructions on selecting and configuring BluRay drives.

I’m surprised that usb Blu-ray drives are as expensive as they are still, low supply and mostly only niche demand I guess? Was hoping to get one to make some copies of my physical media, but spending $100ish for a usb drive hurts haha

I guess now’s the time to pull the trigger

What's the make and model number? The link is funky if your AMZN location isn't set to UK

I'd have no issue with digital media if there was a way to actually own it. Everything is either streaming only or ridden with DRM that can only be played within their app. Blurays, assuming you can decrypt its DRM bs, are the last bastion of media ownership left.

Storage is cheap for what you get.

A DVD movie ripped to MKV is 3-5GB.

A 12 terabyte drive is ~ $100. That's... 2400 movies (if my math is right). My current movie collection is about 300 movies, 500GB of storage (I've ripped some stuff to MP4).

Having a backup of 12TB would cost perhaps $100/yr (Im paying less than that for backup of my 4TB storage).

Alternatively you can replicate your library with friends and family, pretty simple to do. Drop a mini pc with a drive in it running Kodi/Casaos/Freedombox, whatever, behind the TV at everyone's house, for less than 20w of power you have a replicated media player.

Inb4 drive failure

Jellyfin (Or Plex if you have to deal with the "Spouse Factor") + Radarr and Sonarr + Usenet

Perfection, no annoying physical media to worry about, but you still get to keep the data you...uhh.."acquired"

I wish there were more/better/good choices for streaming video. We already have decent solutions for audio, games and books/audiobooks, yet video seems to be lagging behind, hugely.