LG stops making Blu-ray players, marking the end of an era — limited units remain while inventory lasts
LG stops making Blu-ray players, marking the end of an era — limited units remain while inventory lasts
Digital streaming is displacing the last remnants of physical media.
Digital streaming is displacing the last remnants of physical media.
In a disappointing turn of events, FlatpanelsHD reports that LG has ended production of its Blu-ray player series, which includes the UBK80 and UBK90 models. With limited stock available, prospective buyers should act quickly to secure the last remaining units before they are sold out.
After Samsung and Sony's departure from physical media, LG was one of the last major manufacturers of Blu-ray players
Welp, we're one step closer to the "you will own nothing and be happy" future tech companies want for us.
I've been actively avoiding it forever, but my peers are all-to-eager to give up any control or ownership of anything.
It's really a cultural problem, and most of the people receiving the short end of the stick aren't realizing it.
There's a lot of stuff that isn't really efficient to own individually. I need a power drill one day a year or less, it's just gathering dust in my closet the rest of the time. I bet most of my neighborhood does the same.
I often dream of a local community center of sorts that lends out tools, and other such things, maybe for a small yearly fee. They could spend to get something robust, good quality that lasts for a long while. And the whole neighborhood could benefit. Sort of an expanded version of a library? I guess none of that is very profitable.
🏴☠️
On one hand I'm happy less plastic shit will be produced and consumed. On the other hand, this is leading more towards dystopian timelines where we can never own anything anymore.
This is all preventable with basic digital ownership laws, but governments are instead bending the knee.
I just pay the iron price and download everything
Sony and Panasonic still make Blu-ray players... Sony just stopped making the blank media IIRC
And in all that time I never once owned a Blu-ray device.
At the beginning I was pissed at the DRM. And by the time that was solved streaming was good enough.
Streaming will never be a satisfying model for me - I need ownership and lack of DRM.
That said, I don't see much of a point in DVD or Blu-Ray either, hard drives are smaller than one DVD's case while fitting orders of magnitude more.
Been waiting for over ten years now for hdd prices to go down significantly to replace my broken 4 TB drive. Now I don't have any money or energy to rip the rest of my DVD collection.
One of the points of DVD and Blu-ray is the additional material. I don't see a lot of streaming movies with commentary tracks and the like and sometimes commentary tracks are as good as the movies themselves.
The DVD commentary track for Spinal Tap is done by Spinal Tap as if they were re-watching the documentary about their lives, complaining about how everything was distorted by Marty DiBergi, and spending a lot of time debating whether or not virtually everyone you see in the movie is dead now.
The DVD commentary track for Cannibal: The Musical was recorded while they were getting drunk. Matt Stone accidentally turns off the recorder at one point and they don't realize it for a while.
The DVD commentary track for UHF is virtually indescribable, but involves Weird Al knowing the exact address of every location where they filmed (in Tulsa) and cold-calling a very confused Victoria Jackson to interview her about the movie.
Additionally, the DVD for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension treats the movie like it was a docudrama and talks about the "facts" behind the film in all different sorts of ways.
There are lots of others that are just interesting, but those four alone make the extra things on DVDs worth it.
Problem with streaming is you're effectively renting.
If the source of the stream wants to change their terms, there's nothing you can do aside from jump ship to the next business maximizing profit.
Unless you're smart enough to use free streaming services, that is ;)
Edit: i found the website www.3Donlinefilms.com and they have many native 3D movies and 2D movies that they made into 3D and it's great!
There's still no streaming for 3D movies yet tho :,( i still need to rip the 3D blue rays to my PC if i want to watch them in VR... fandangonow had a quest app to stream 3D movies but it doesn't work anymore and it was a US only option. Hopefully the apple vision pro stuff makes it happen faster globally!
I assume there will still be less prominent brands making them, just as there are still DVD players being made.
Possibly, haven't considered that. My main concern is that media releases will no longer target physical media, leaving streaming / perpetual renting as the only option. VCRs were still manufactured after the major brands stopped production, but VHS releases largely went away.
The Alien: Romulus VHS Release notwithstanding lol.
Hopefully they'll still be made for people without access to high speed internet.
It makes sense that VHS production ceased, since DVD's are better in every metric, cheaper to produce, and eventually became the bigger market after players got so cheap. I would've thought blurays would continue that trend, but if these sales statistics are anything to go by, it's possible DVD could outlive Bluray as a viable market. I assume DVD's occupy a sweet spot between good enough quality and affordability.
And MORE prominent brands, as Sony still makes them and Panasonic still makes the best ones.
Wonder if the PS5 will be the last mass-produced Blu-ray player?
Xbox can play Blu-ray as well, iirc. Still though, your point does stand. Let's just hope that All-Digital consoles don't supercede physical media consoles.
Or they might just make all disc drives extra attachments you have to get separately in the future.
Floppy drives died decades ago, yet you can still buy the drives and disks, brand new. This end of production will create a void, and it will be filled by someone else. No innovation will occur, but that's not necessarily a bad thing here.
I should probably get a blu ray ripper
I bought a 5.25" bay LG one for my PC and installed libredrive on it a year ago. So far all I've done with it is burned a few CDs for a friend with an old car lol
I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we'll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.
Oh, and paying through the nose for someone's cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI.
That's what "they" want. lol. Everything seems to be pushing that way for sure.
Though I am a little less pessimistic about spinners fully going away until all-flash datacenters are the norm. I've also had some running for close to 10 years, and they're going strong (I've also got much newer ones as well)
I forget the article I posted here months ago, but there's a new optical format which is in the multi-TB range. Not sure if/when it'll be commercially available, but maybe that will come about?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/optical_disc_breakthrough/
That's technically promising, but I can't see it being a mass-market item since most people don't care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.
Blurays are too small for backups anymore. It would take hundreds of them to backup all of my stuff. If you want long term backups, you have to spend a couple grand on a tape drive.
I disagree. You're the exception, not the rule.
If you're looking for something to write once read nearly never, just get 3 USB drives with the same thing written on all three of them
My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn't regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they're all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.
Fuck LG, not like they made good BR players. I've sworn to avoid buying their shit since they discontinued support for a BR player within a year of release, which back then meant you wouldn't be able to watch any BR movie released after a certain date due to new DRM or whatever. They just up and decided to not release new firmware for units still under warranty.
What are we supposed to use now? DVDs?
For physical media, yes actually. Plenty of DVDs still getting made and sold today, throught the world. Nollywood and Bollywood Films, latin american dvd collections, Japanese Anime collections, etc. Several different DVD player companies too.
Honestly, i wish some of those companies sold pen-drives or mini-ssds with the media, but that was never tried. Imagine a theme-shaped ssd stick with pixar movies for instance, too cool to exist. But a 4Tb HD with files will do for me.
I'm surprised they lasted this long honestly
I won't be concerned until the only manufacturers left are Chinese brands no one in the West has ever heard of. We're not even nearly there yet.
What brand would you recommend for a blu-ray burner?
For long term storage of my several TB of "family photos and videos" of course.
Or any other way to do "cheap" long term storage without maintenance (burn and forget). I heard that hdd are not reliable for long term unmaintained storage like that so I thought some form of optical storage.
One that is capable of burning M-disks. They are available in sizes up to 100gb and are supposed to last a few hundred years. They can be read by most Blu-ray players made after 2011.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Of course, this is more suitable for genuine family photos and videos. For "family photos and videos" you could use any Blu-ray disk, but I doubt it's the cheapest way to store them.
When CDs were introduced they were touted as essentially eternal and damage proof. Id take M discs xlaim with a pinch of salt
Never had a BR disk of mine
You can sound the real warnings when Panasonic and Sony stop making them.
But the writing is already on the wall. You used to be able to go into any supermarket and have a whole aisle for DVDs and Blu-rays, and now it's like a single rack of things that came out recently. People have spoken with their wallets, and these things will go the same way as CDs before them.
Now we just need to get back to a streaming service that doesn't suck.
NOT a streaming service. Rather - DRMless purchases. GOG did it, Bandcamp did it, now we need it for films. If not available, I would rather buy a DRMed version to correspond to the one I downloaded.
But yeah, sad for those who are into collecting, the physical experience and extras.