1. Blu Ray Is Dead

    Mon 05 October 2009

    HD-DVD may be dead, but Blu Ray is just as dead. The whole concept of optical media is dead. Honestly, who is still burning CD's or DVD's nowadays? (If you are, why for Christ sake? I can't think of a single good reason) And at 10 euros ($100) for a single Blu Ray disk, you must be totally bonkers to buy one of them recorders.

    I mean, let's face it, CD's were really cool in an age where 650 MB was way more than the 40 or 80 MB hard drive in your computer. It made a difference. That was already less so with a DVD, with a capacity of 'only' 4 GB. However, in the early years of the DVD, you could backup your entire hard drive on two, maybe three disks, since a hard drive averaged around 4 to 10 GB at that time.

    Then finally came Blu Ray and HD-DVD. A whopping 25 GB on a disk. No shit!. You mean, like I need no less than 40 Blu Ray disks (400 euros) and an eon of burning disks to backup one of my 1 TB hard drives that cost me like 70 euros?

    What must they have been thinking when they developed Blu Ray? As a backup medium it is useless, but it was ofcourse intended as a carrier for movies, I know. But why should I go outside, through the cold and the rain to go to some shitty video store that only has last years block busters? Why bother with 40 Mbit downstream and the Internet at your disposal? Downloading a movie will take me as much time as going to the video store and selecting something so dreadful even the DVD player will refuse to play it. What else is there to choose from. The Internet provides us with the most rare and obscure but most beautifull movies you ever saw. And the more main stream movies can be obtained in full HD 1080p.

    Current Internet connections are of such quality, that physical media such as Blu Ray disk are becomming irrelevant. A normal DVD is downloaded within 20 minutes at 4 MB/s. And when Internet connections will reach 100 Mbit or 12 MB/s, even a HD 1080p movie will be downloaded within the hour.

    Storage is not a problem. If you can store 40 HD movies on a single 1 TB disk, then you will pay 1,5 euros for each movie. Beats any Blu Ray disk in price and time. If you even care about them that much, buy or build a NAS and store them on some redundant storage.

    In time people will do with DVDs and CDs what most people already do with CDs: rip them to some format your computer understands (to transfer it to your MP3 player) and get rid of that CD that will become scratched and useless even if you don't touch it. No, you don't want to transcode your HD movies to some iPod or something, but you may want to stream it to your media player in the living room? A jukebox full of films, just as you have a jukebox full of music.

    Give the CD, DVD and Blu Ray a little push, and let them fall into the grave. It is an outdated technology for a problem that existed 10 years ago. The Internet has made it irrelevant. Be done with it.

    Tagged as : blu ray dead

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