Future of Blu-ray

roxics

roxics

Veteran
I like physical media. I think discs are a lot like a printed photograph(which I'm also getting back into). It's a tangible piece of work that can be easily lent out, gifted, viewed and discovered on a shelf.
I've never been big on backing up my home videos to DVD, mostly because of all the transcoding and effort involved when it's already a file on my computer I can easily watch. But I'm considering buying a blu-ray burner and making BD's of my home videos. I can always upscale my DV footage and my HD footage will natively work on blu-ray without resolution loss. While a file on my computer is easy for me, I like the idea that family members can find the discs on a shelf and watch them. Much more practical then having them dig through my computer hard drives looking for files they may not know are even there.

I think about this scenario every so often, because if something happened to me, would anyone know about all these home videos I shot of my son when he was younger or of my mom or anything else? I've posted some of them to youtube and shared the links with family members and friends, but again these links get lost in emails or facebook posts years after the fact. Virtual spaced gets bogged down in a lot of content over time. Even with search tools there can be a lot of wade through. But an actual disk sitting on a shelf that is properly labeled is something anyone can discover.

The same is true for movies. My girlfriend will get bored and want to watch a movie and will randomly put on one my DVD's or blu-rays even if I'm not around. But she wouldn't go through my computer looking for downloaded movies.

There is a lot to be said about things existing in the physical world on media that is easily accessible. Even an older non tech savvy person knows how to put a disk in a player. But even a tech savvy person like me would likely have to look around for a while on a friends computer to find their videos if I needed to, because these things can get buried. For this reason I think that even in this day of digital downloads, Youtube and Netflix, having actual physical media like blu-ray and DVD is still beneficial.

That said, if I'm going to start publishing blu-ray discs for home videos and such I want to know they are a stable platform. By stable I mean everything from the availability of players to lifetime expectancy of a burned disc to player compatibility with burned discs and so on.

It seems to me like blu-ray has gotten a slow start. I myself didn't buy my first blu-ray player till 2012 and I work in the video industry making client videos and such. I have never had any requests for them. Only DVDs every once in a while. So I've never actually burned a blu-ray. The two new game consoles Xbox One and Playstation 4 are both blu-ray players. As is the older Playstation 3. I've also heard that blu-ray sales were up in 2013 compared to the year before and something like 72 million US homes now have blu-ray players. Sadly I forgot where I read this.
So it seems like they are starting to take off a little more, even if more computers are shipping wtihout optical drives and macs like I use have never had a blu-ray option (sadly).

I don't think they'll ever be as universal as DVD was, but I also don't think they need to be. But I still wonder how much more popular they are going to get. Will people come back around to enjoying the ownership and benefits of physical media along side digital downloads and streaming services or is the mentality still along the lines of "complete replacement" of physical media with these later options?

Do you think blu-ray is going to get more popular or less popular or stay about the same as it is now?
Will potential 4K blu-ray options increase popularity or just confuse things?
 
roxics said:
Do you think blu-ray is going to get more popular or less popular or stay about the same as it is now? Will potential 4K blu-ray options increase popularity or just confuse things?
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I suspect HD blu-ray will slowly gain as more releases become blu-ray only and DVD gets dropped. Just about all blu-ray players will actually play any disk that size, from CDs to DVDs to BDs.

That said, I think 4k blu-ray will get even lower response than HD blu-ray. Most people just don't need it. If you're really close to the screen than yea, 4k helps. For example, if you have a projector with a 3+m screen in your home theater, and you're sitting 3m away, then yes, it helps. But most people are physiologically incapable of seeing the improvement because they are viewing from more than the screen diagonal away.

Did you like Skyfall, that latest Bond movie, in the theater? That was filmed mostly using Arri Alexas which max out at 2.8k; most of the "prints" (DCP) were 2k. My local theater, with the expensive Sony 4k projectors, showed a 2k DCP, and it was spectacular. But Roger Deakins films usually are.

On the audio front, HD blu-ray already gives you 7.1 lossless sound, which is a big step up from DVD. I don't see how 4k blu-ray can improve on that; lossless is lossless.

It doesn't seem that the consumer gets many benefits from 4k. That doesn't mean that it wont sell. Time will tell. But 3D didn't sell despite a similar industry push. Hmmm.....
 
Slightly off topic, but in regards to "I can always upscale my DV footage". That's been tried, and all it does is make the footage look like it was blown up when done in software. Blu-ray players, and many new DVD players, have upscaling hardware built-in - just play a DVD and it comes out the HDMI cable as glorious 720p or 1080p HD. I can watch wedding DVDs I've made (from 1080p source material) and I swear it's HD, it's that sharp! And that is on a 60" 1080p plasma. So don't worry about trying to upscale old footage, let the player do it for you.

Also, while I haven't tried this yet, I believe you can burn MPEG-2 DVD clips to Blu-ray, getting the max DVD quality along with the increased storage capacity of Blu-ray media.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
 
Yes I have put standard definition videos onto Blu-ray Discs and even both together on the same disc. The SD videos upres when played so it all looked good
 
Disclaimer: I've been working in the DVD and BluRay disc business since the days when you had to explain to people what a DVD was.

A little history (skip if you want):
DVD was the most successful platform rollout of any consumer electronics. The adoption rate, disc sales, profits, were all great for the manufacturers and the content companies (a lot of the movie studios profits were tied directly to DVD sales). DVD had a lot of advantages, non linear search, bonus content, increased quality, it was a huge step up from VHS. Once manufacturing capacity peaked a decade ago, you could get a title out on DVD fully packaged for less than a buck each. Recorders were becoming standard on most PCs. It was as close to a universal standard as we've ever seen. This was the backdrop when HD came out and we needed a disc based HD media.
BluRay was late to get out and was muddied by the schism in CE companies that were split between HD-DVD and BluRay. BluRay won, but the battle cost a couple of crucial years where they should have been focusing on adoption. The other problem was that the studios wanted a copy proof format to stop the rampant disc pirating they were seeing with DVD. AACS was adopted as mandatory, but also cost $4500 per title to register and then another $.10 per BluRay compounding the already higher cost of manufacturing. If you wanted to make 1,000 copies you'd be spending $7 for BluRay or less than $1 for DVD. With a slow adoption rate of players this killed the BluRay business for small producers. For years I had clients with HD movies that couldn't afford to release them on BluRay. It's much cheaper now, but it's too late. iTunes and all the other streaming options have leapfrogged BluRay.

Today:
You don't need to have a BluRay player to watch good content these days. BluRay players aren't universally adopted like DVD. Most computers don't come with BluRay players. Macs can't even play them at all because of the AACS requirements. But…the best quality at HD is still on BluRay and you don't need a high speed connection to watch it or hope that Netflix or whoever hasn't pulled it off their service. If you want director's commentary or any other bonus content you're going to need to get it on disc too. One of the things that drove me away from Netflix was their switch to "rental versions" of DVDs that were stripped of the bonus content. I'm still pissed off about that. F.U. Netflix for killing that medium.
Commercial releases of BluRays still earn good profits for producers. So do DVDs despite what millenials think. There's still a decent market for discs, but it's not what it was when the only way to see a lot of the content was on disc.

To answer the OP's concerns, BluRays are pretty resilient but like any media including photographs it can and will degrade eventually, but the real question is that in 10 years or 1,000 years? At the same time hard drives fail and who knows what's going to be the future of the cloud services. If you're looking for a good way to make any data live, the best way is to have it live in multiple platforms and multiple locations. Make those BluRays and make copies for the people you think will want to see it later. Put it on your computer and catalog it on iTunes. Post it to YouTube and Vimeo. Spread it around. The worst thing you can do is leave it in only one place on one media.
For your own media, it sounds like you need a better catalog and interface. Having some movies on your computer isn't the same as having a home media center with all the movies in one place that you can access from your TV or PC.
 
I have a large Blu Ray collection and a 55" HDTV about 8 feet away. I'm anal when it comes to quality. The Blu Rays look great. Streaming 1080p via AppleTV looks pretty close. BluRay is better, but it's not enough to bother me and I don't believe anyone else can notice.

Most of the market are not video and audiophiles.

Google Fiber with 1000mbps is making a massive roll-out over the course of the next 12-16 months. Competitors will follow. Netflix and YouTube stream 4K. Compression formats are improving. We are rapidly moving to an all digital world. Apple skipped BluRay all together and said the future was streaming. This year there are major expected announcements expected from Apple, Hulu, Netflix, in Amazon in terms of further TV and movie offerings. There is talk of Netflix streaming movies within 4-6 weeks of theatrical release at an additional charge.

So, BluRay is fantastic format. But I do not believe it, or any physical medium, will be a long term solution. Like it or not, the future is service based streaming at rapid speed. I anticipate with newer and more efficient compression (h.265), faster broadband, and wider adoption that streaming delivery will actually surpass current BluRay quality. And with services like Google Fiber, your movies will be playing before many BluRay players have finished booting.

Consumers like streaming more: it's less clutter, more convenient, available on all devices, etc. Companies like streaming: no physical distribution costs, higher profits, ability to make post-release changes.

So in that sense... no. I do not think Blu Ray is a stable long term format. Who knows how well the discs will hold up over time, there is obviously greater risk of deterioration than digital. I get reports of non-working DVDs that I burned for video projects 11 years ago and have no backup of. Industrial grade discs will obviously be better, but don't count on store bought consumer grade home burned BluRay discs being reliable in 15-20 years. They may or may not be.
 
Erik Naso said:
I'm curious how a HD Blu Ray will look when uprezed on a 4K monitor. Anyone?
Click to expand...

It should hold up better than DVDs up-rezzed to HD since there is more data to begin with. In addition, many people can't see the difference between 1080p and 4K from a distance to begin with. And finally, up-rezzing tech has come a long way since the first Blu-Ray players. So I would imagine that uprezzed 1080p to 4K should hold up fairly well in most instances.

But this is just conjecture :)
 
Good question ... I'll be interested to see the answers you get. I've mulled the same issue of 'what if I were killed in an accident - would my family locate the correct directories on my numerous hard drives to retrieve our family videos?'.

I have heard that blu-ray discs have better error correction than DVDs - and for that reason may have a longer storage life.
 
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why not just load all the videos into one directory on your HDD, plus give to family on an external HD and/or a few flash drives?
 
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