Work to preserve physical media across all your entertainment. You give away your leverage as a consumer with every stream and digital "purchase" (because of course you legally own nothing digital from these companies, you lease the right to access them, until that company decides you no longer get that access, see Sony)
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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This is good news. I burn my some of my medias to DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Hi, I have some questions about this. I'm interested in storing movies and tv shows on Blu ray discs. If I burn video formats onto discs how hard is it to get those to play back on various different Blu ray players. I imagine it's simple when it's connected to a PC but what about through typical Blu ray players you might plug into your tv or a gaming console like a PS4?
As long as they are the right region format for the DVD player they should be fine. Ripped files don't really have region formats anymore, but you can add the appropriate one in most burners.
You can also get region agnostic players but that's probably harder to do now than just making all your media in the right format.
Thanks
Okay so I've just tested it. I took a DVD that was in PAL format and ripped it, when I burn it to another disc It now doesn't have any region protection at all so I guess the readers just totally remove it, so you probably don't even need to add a region.
I only have a PS5 to test it on and it worked okay on the PS5 I don't know about random crappy DVD players you got from the supermarket they might not work.
Also that was a DVD not a Blu-ray because I have literally no idea how you would even burn blu-rays, is it even a thing, regardless I don't think I can do it.
Wow awesome super cool to know thanks
I've had good luck with their stuff so I'm pleased
https://www.verbatim.com.au/products/m-disc-bdxl-100gb/
100 GB, and a lifespan of hundreds of years, it's hard to top that.
Mine usually have the life span of 1 toddler encounter
500gb for ~100 US dollars is not bad* (just saw it is AU). I don't think I'd ever need something quite so long lasting and will we even watch or interact with media the same way in like 40 years? Movies and screens may get phased out for holo or something no ones even dreamed of yet.
If the burner is cheap enough, or you can borrow one, backing up family photos in a way that will be viewable in hundreds of years time would be worth it to me.
I would not even be confident that the disc would be readable in 50 years' time except by certain archivists or hobbyists.
There are so many hours of music people wrote on Amigas or Atari STs that are just floating around out there on floppy discs that are still readable, but only by a very small number of people, so they will never be heard again, and it's been only 30 years.
Another example- right now I have family movies my parents took back in the 60s on Super-8 films. Super-8 isn't exactly impossible to play, but why would I get a Super-8 projector and a screen just to watch those even though they're watchable? That would be both cost- and space-prohibitive. Thankfully, I had them digitized a long time ago.
This is why you add a disc reader and a laptop, that can run directly from a power brick without a battery installed, in the safe. This way the next generations have a way to read it and transfer it to modern media.
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Not sure where you're from, but that website link is Australian and $150 AUD is about $94 USD at the moment.
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I still burn discs every now and then. Definitely glad to see I don't have to panic buy stockpiles of them now.
Verbatim is doing more than just keeping the formats on life support – it also unveiled new hardware at CES 2025. Its Slimline Blu-ray Writer lets you back up 4K video to Ultra HD Blu-ray and even comes bundled with antiquated Nero disc burning software.
This is the important part imo, given that LG and Sony both pulled out of the USB Blu-ray reader-writer market
https://www.verbatim-europe.com/en/blu-ray-writers/products/external-slimline-blu-ray-writer-43890
Means we'll be able to rip Blu-ray's into the future. At least, that's what I hope. Need to check there are cracks for these writers.
EDIT: Won't link to it here, but many Verbatim writers, UHD and otherwise, use Pioneer hardware internally and are therefore crackable.
What's the benefit of cracking the drive?
Probably that you can backup your own media
It's a bd writer, it can backup my media out of the box.
Edit: oh, I see. You mean "backup". Lol gotcha. Yeah, cracking would be needed for that.
Yaaarrrr.
M-Disc/Archive Blue ray discs are currently pretty much unrivaled if one needs WORM(write once read many) storage for important data.
Anything cloud is an issue in that regards, while a few options exist that somewhat imitate WORM to comply with regulations they are often expensive, harder to maintain and, if long term storage is required, prohibitivly expensive.
The next option, Tandberg RDX needs a far less popular writer, it's WORM media is far more expensive, far more sensitive towards exterior influences and it's much harder to make sure you will be able to read the data in 20 years.
LTO is nice, the tapes are somewhat cheap but the drives are extremely expensive - far to expensive for smaller businesses or consumers.
(And please for the love of god, normal exterior HDs,etc. are NOT backup media for long term storage, especially not WORM- which is important in times of ransomware attacks)
So in the end verbatim would be an absolute idiot to destroy this market. I work with a lot of smaller healthcare facilities and they all exclusively work with them - they routinely burn their data on a M-Disc that is then stored in a secure location, as they all need to provide their patient records for at least 10, mostly for 15, in some cases for 30 or more years. The doctors can literally go to jail if they do not comply with that.(And getting hacked or your building burning down is not an excuse)
As a CEO of a small company we also need to retain certain tax and accounting data for 10 years, some for 20 years. And even as a individual I have some stuff I legally must retain for 10 years.
And of course photos of important life events and some documents (insurance, mortgage) are also something I don't want to loose if the house burns down. Therefore the important stuff gets burned to a M-Disc three times a year and then locked into a bank vault quite a bit away.
What do people normally store one write one mediums I feel like I'd have a hard time working with write once items except for like maybe just music storage
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I have a stack of Verbatim blanks I bought years ago just in case they ever stopped being sold; I’ve actually used quite a few to create daisy disks and audio CDs.
Unfortunately I don't think Verbatim manufactures any quad-layer discs, so Sony was the only real option for 128GB disks.
Furthermore, M-Disc is still very pricey per-GB, and their non M-Disc BD disks aren't priced that much better. I've also recently got a spindle of Verbatim BDXLs that every single one would fail to either write or read at the layer transitions, so having a single option here is already proving to be painful.
Disc failure is the verbatim I remember, but I'm glad they're still around. My 2008 car has a 6 disc CD changer, and I have a few retro PCs which rely on CDs too. Yes, I know I can get adapters for CF cards and the like, but doing things the old way is the whole point.
Verbatim for the win
Can someone tell me, why weren't optical discs (mechanically, ergonomically) designed similarly to floppies? In a protective envelope with a window.
Sony PSP discs had something like that. More expensive and impractical from looks, the window part was always open and cleaning it from dirt is inconvenient if untouched for long. But then the cover for that window wouldn't break off, and the looks solve the problem of "looking obsolete" that arises with clueless baboon crowds. Sony engineering back then somehow evokes feelings in me.
Og CDs came in a protective case like that, as did some large optical discs. But I guess it was just cumbersome and needlessly expensive to make the hardware?
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Price. Once the industry retooled the production lines, CDs became dirt cheap to reproduce, and successive generations of optical media are only somewhat more expensive. Plastic shells and mechanisms cost money. CDs are probably the cheapest physical audio format ever (at least as far as production costs are concerned).
CD-ROM discs came in caddies early on. They weren't popular with consumers I would guess. MiniDiscs were designed with a protective caddie.
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Who is going to keep making Minidiscs though?
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