this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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BluRay has evolved a few times since being released. The storage capacity keeps going up, which allows for 4K & 3D discs to be made.
DVD got replaced because it couldn't hit the 1K mark. There was SuperBit DVDs, but they didn't catch on. The picture size was still limited to 720p.
BluRay still has a lot of life left in it. It will be a long time before the market demands 8K recordings. And will there even be physical media for movies and TV by then?
On the other hand BluRay really came too late to become popular as a data storage medium. Outside movie enthusiasts there aren't really a lot of users of the format so player hardware will likely not benefit from corporate customers as much to extend its lifetime.
DVDs were also commonly used as external data storage prior to flash storage becoming the predominant method. Anyone still have their spindle of dvds with a Win XP backup lying around?
Blu-ray doesn't have that advantage. The only major commercial applications it has been used for is movies and games, and games are already breeching the size that even a 4k blu-ray can hold, and have long since required faster data transfer speeds than blu-ray is capable of(this is why even with physical games, the game has to be installed to the console)
Why not just put the movies on a SD card? The price is similar and the card is smaller. That's what games do now, right?
Retention, or the lack thereof, when cold-stored.
In term of SD or standard NAND, not even Nintendo does that. Nintendo builds Macronix XtraROM in their Game Card, which is some proprietary Flash memory with claimed 20 year cold storage retention. And they introduced the 64 GB version only after a lengthy delay, in 2020. So it seems that the (lack of) cold storage performance of standard NAND Flash is viewed by some in the industry as not ready for prime time. Macronix discussed it many years back in a DigiTimes article: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120713PR201.html.
And Sony and Microsoft are both still building Blu-ray-based consoles.
DVDs had a maximum resolution of 576p. The Superbit DVDs by Sony were DVDs that had no extras so that they could use the entire space on the disc to maximise the bitrate. I think this was only beneficial to those with very large TVs.
Iβm guessing the eventual outcome for the niche market of people who want to own physical copies of media will be some form of flash storageβwhich seems a better option all around versus a fragile optical disk.
Optical disks might be fragile but cheap flash storage (like USB sticks) is much more fragile than that.
I'm still wondering why PC videogames weren't ever released on Blu Ray, installing 120GB off a Blu Ray is much less annoying than having to download the same amount.
The norm is to download several 30, 60 or even 120GB updates afterwards. You then end up with an inconvenient DRM disc that has to be inserted for your game to run. When instead you could buy it online, download it just like you would've ended up doing and then never have to worry about damaging a Blu-ray disc.
Don't get me wrong, I love physical copies of games... But in the era of never ending updates, live service games, indie games, and games broken at launch, I definitely understand why most of us don't prefer them anymore.
That would require computers to still have Blu-ray drives as default
How would the game companies profit from releasing fully complete and mostly bug free games on BluRay? Without a profit motivation it will never happen.