In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era.
The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.
All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.
All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.
If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.
The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.
So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.
The only viable option for reliably keeping data is to care.
Keep several copies in different locations or on different services. Use these storages regularly so you always know they are accessible and working, or at least check them once in a year. If one of them goes bad (service discontinued, media unreadable, technologically outdated, whatever): find a new location for your data and copy it all over.
Everything else isn't reliable long-term storage, but a lucky shot that might work for you in 50 years, but might as well irrecoverably go down the drain in the meantime.
That said, maybe one in 1000 people here is going to successfully stick to a regimen of regular backups all the way to their old age. That's the HN crowd, not the general public who have never heard of the Rule of Three. People get distracted with life, or become incapacitated, or find themselves moving across the country, or make mistakes.
Without recordable Bluray, it's all much more difficult. Discs don't need regular checkups the way magnetic, cloud and electronic media do because they have fewer issues drying out, rusting out, suffering head crashes or suddenly vanishing due to someone else's corporate decisions.
It depends. Cheap pressings of optical media experience bitrot. I'm certain some of my bootleg DVDs are functionally unreadable now but were usable in the past.
From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
I think that's much shorter than real life outcomes.
Just last week, I was looking for some old data. I dug through a small collection of cheap CD-R backups from 30 years ago (hard to believe the tech is that old!). Probably 12 discs in total. No problem physically reading any of them. The only issue is that one of them was recorded in an old pre-OSX Mac format that my Linux laptop struggled with, but I was able to access it on my 2015 MacBook.
I didn't want to sound like an advertisement, but I use M-disc media. It's basically Bluray, but should last a couple centuries. The M actually is for 'millennium', but I wouldn't bank on 1000 years.
I have a Verbatim M-DISC BD-R that I torture test. It was one of the first ones I burned. I burned it in 2018. I flex it all the time, use it as a coaster on my desk, leave it out on my patio in the sun for weeks at a time. I rinse it off with pool water and wipe it off with paper towels. It has yet to lose a single bit.
If this 20ish gigs of data hasn't had a single bit of corruption, I doubt most of the other discs in climate controlled storage in multiple locations have had much errors either.
There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
I also hope to last decades, so to me there is a world of difference between media that lasts 30 or 40 years, and media that lasts 100 or 200 years. For better or worse, as long as we both avoid accidents, an M-disc will outlast me.
From my research into it some time ago - BDXL quad layer(128GB) BD-Rs are made basically in the same technology as M-Disc, so they should last hundreds of years, so that's all I've been using for my archival needs so far. Getting them from Amazon japan is pretty cost effective too.
It depends on the dye used. Older CD-Rs had a really bad dye formulation. Better formulations were created but most of us just bought blank disks based on what was cheapest not what dye was used.
Even the newer ones will still degrade quite rapidly in direct sunlight, so the method of storage is also important (spindles in your bookcase that get hit by sunlight = bad).
FWIW I archived all my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs when the oldest ones were just about 15 years old and aside from one ultra-cheap disc where the top was literally flaking off they all read fine in ddrescue.
I was part of an effort at my last job to archive some of the source code for our oldest projects(from the 90s), they were all on CDs stored in a vault with an external storage company, we retrieved the boxes and found that 1 in 5 discs didn't read at all. The blue verbatim discs had a 100% success rate, but any disc with that green hue underside was a toss up whether it would read or not. Interestingly though, over hundreds of discs I found that either the disc read and would rip correctly all the way, or it wouldn't work at all in the first place.
Practically all the CD-Rs I burned on good media have lasted over 20 years now. Only a few have had noticeable issues of the ones sold as "archive-quality" media.
Sure, almost all my cheap ones have died out, but even some of those are still pretty OK.
I could read several QIC-02 tapes after ~15 years (~'90 to '05). I tried again after 20 years and the tapes jammed. I guess the tensioning system lost it's elasticity.
HDDs I had from ~1997 started to accumulate bad sectors after ~10 years. HDDs from 2010 are still good today, but just to be safe I'm using RAID5 with different batches of drives and 2 offline backups.
I saw a 5.25" 360K floppy that was used daily to boot a 8086 until 1997 (I have no ideea how old it was, but it really was a 360K, not a 1.2MB, re-formatted low density). I have early 1990s 3.5" 1.44MB FDs that still work. Late floppy disks were mostly singe-use bad.
The biggest problem with tapes was the ISA-based controller. No such troubles with HDDs. PCIe to PATA or USB3 to PATA are still available today. I wonder how long QLC SSDs will hold data? Is it turning into a "buy new - copy old data - keep 1 year - repeat" ?
I've thought about this a bit, as well. Simply as neither physical nor "cloud" services can really be expected to last.
The solution, in my mind, is that there should be an open source standard of "grouped media items" which can be easily imported / exported between services (being: a diy home server, or a cloud service, or a "burn to disk" program, etc.) which then allows for easier redundancy and updating.
For a very simple example, you could use a zip file that you upload everywhere and put onto USB/CD-ROM. But whatever the system is, it would have to be easy and attractive to use.
I'm trying to go about doing that with building digitapes[0] but I don't know how to really build "a standard" other than building something and hope that it becomes status quo.. (I'm also getting way too into work recently, so I need more time and energy to work on it)
It's a little bit embarrassingly unfinished in all regards. But eventually I want to make a system where an app allows you to easily share your files onto S3, which you can easily download onto a disk, which you can easily connect to mirror on YouTube, etc. All open source and independently connectable.
How about make a copy to an external drive? If you want to be sure do 2. Check them every 5-10 years, replace as needed when connectors get discontinued (eg Firewire -> USB-C).
Bonus: Keep backup with external cloud service.
No need to make overly complicated. No need to do Bluray.
I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.
I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years.
Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine.
Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration.
I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.
I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions.
DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them.
Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify.
I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.
24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement
16-bit is (IIRC) 96 dB of dynamic range, going from well below human perceptual noise level to above damage threshold.
24-bit is good for headroom when recording/mixing but useless for listening.
If there's any difference between a 16-bit and a 24-bit version it's either because they're actually not the same (different mixing/mastering^) or they're just poorly mixed/mastered from the start and don't use the full 16-bit (or 24-bit for that matter) dynamic range: if you by and large use only 2/3 of the bits to actually convey a signal change then it may say 16-bit on the tin but it's actually 10-bit or something, (and for 24-bit it's only using... 16-bit!) and the remainder bits are just wasted space.
^ I find that quite frequent on vinyl vs digital: vinyl sounds better not because of some inherent property of the medium but because the mastering (and sometimes even the mixing) is simply not the same, presumably because it doesn't cater for the same audience/use case (vinyl at home for amateurs/enthusiasts/audiophiles, digital for a much wider variety of users, listening conditions, and listening hardware)
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones
Not going to question your subjective experience, but I do not think most people will hear any difference between 16 and 24 bit playbacks under normal conditions, even with fancy headphones.
"120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.
16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever." [1]
"
It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions. Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.
None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space.
"
> Not going to question your subjective experience
Read enough glowing product reviews from "audiophiles" on nonsense like $100 electrical sockets and $75 Ethernet cables and you'll start to question everything.
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement
Audio quality is famous for having an extremely strong placebo effect. Unless you did the test double blinded, your anecdote has a good chance of being wrong.
It isn't obviously noticeable when 99.9% of people could not tell the difference. Take Pet Sounds which was mixed in mono onto analogue tape, hiss and all. Most people do not have magic ears.
I thought I'd read studies on this, but it turns out it was on sample frequency rather then bit depth.
However, seeing as in audio bit depth only affects dynamic range, you'd have to be listening to something with an extreme dynamic range to hear it. I can see why higher bit depth is useful in recording, but not in playback.
> The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
>Nor can anyone hear the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit file, all else being equal.
While we don't know the exact dynamic range of human hearing, we do know it to be above 96dB.
Either way, using these 96dB in 16bit requires careful mastering.
With CDs, it is not possible to e.g. make a song quieter than the others in the CD without losing this 96dB range. There's no "ReplayGain" metadata in the discs; the format is aged and not fancy at all.
The mastering would have to be basically non-existent for it to use a dynamic range larger than available in 16bit, and would mean noone would ever hear the quieter parts.
If we're talking unmastered recordings for archival, yes 24bit is very useful. For final mastered copies released for listening it's completely untrue that 16bit doesn't offer enough dynamic range.
The way the “loudness wars” work is by reducing the dynamic range to be far narrower than what’s available at 16bit, which gives the impression of loudness even though the loudest sounds are no louder.
Lets say the mastering process compresses the recording extremely to a 42dB (8bit) range - outputting that to either 16 or 24 bit will make zero difference. The audio will still have a dynamic range of 42dB.
When you say play, do you mean something else other than reading the disc?
I can't remember if I've tried to play any Blu-ray disc recently, but I know for sure that they can be read. I have a recollection that you might need some software to "mount" the disc so that normal media players can work with the disc.
I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.
And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
You're making an assimilation fallacy and falling to grasp the technical reasons such as proper deinterlacing, frame rate matching, ineffective motion compression, and generally poor upscaling techniques.
If you decrypt and grab the pristine content of a 4:3 or 16:9 DVD, then process it properly through Handbrake or such, it will look fine.
I did this purposely for a couple of rare old movies because the VHS and streaming copies looked terrible. The DVD versions in various regions are much, much better and came out as playable artifacts I can put on an 4K or 8K output device. They look cleaner than when I play these than with a DVD player because of the extra computational effort that went into the filtering during the transcoding process.
For movies that simply aren't available in Blu-Ray and the latest, best version of them is on DVD, that all sounds great of course. But if it's a more-common movie that came out on Blu-Ray, you can probably get a rip of that online quite easily.
Also, the parent seemed to be talking about simply popping a DVD into a drive and watching that directly. What you're talking about sounds very interesting, but also a fair amount of work and compute time. I've never used Handbrake, but I would assume the ripping and transcoding process would take a fair amount of time.
It's not just the interlacing, the main problem is the terrible resolution. Upscaling can only do so much; it's not going to make 480p video look decent on a 75" 4k screen.
As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
> As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film
Doesn't matter when they remaster it to be way too dark or screw up with colours and tone mapping to give it a "more modern" tint.
Some are also re-cut from original aspect ratios (whether 4:3 or CinemaScope) to be equal or closer to 16:9.
e.g The Wire on DVD is 4:3 (as originally shot) and has been re-framed to 16:9 on BD. They did a a seriously good job at it but it really changes the impact and/or mood of some key scenes. And that's when it goes well.
On the other end of the spectrum I've seen 2.55:1 movies butchered into some lazy [anything-between 1.77 and 2]:1 crop + autopan conversion "remaster". Those are 1080p alright and not upscales but are a totally shoddy cash-grab job.
Really? Any well-known examples? Why would they do such a thing, unless they either 1. don't have the original film any more or 2. are just being cheap?
I don't think anyone upscaled a dvd recently for release on BR though, was mainly an issue right around when BR came out in the rush to get content out. Same with UHDs, today it shouldn't be as much of an issue.
Mine is a 1080p model. I have seen 4K TVs at friends houses but I can't say I miss it. Somehow the when you watch some old non HD it still looks good when projected on a wall. Sure it is not highres but the image seems smoothen the image instead of having a pixelated or badly upscaled result. For example these last few months I have been watching a lot the ER TV show and I wasn't the least annoyed by the lower res.
Isn't ER from the 90s? Most TV at that time was shot on videotape, not film, so there's no way to get an HD version of it, so if this is the case, you're seeing it in the best possible rendition already. Going through a projector probably helps actually, by making things smoother than they would be with upscaling on a 4k-res TV.
If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
> Isn't ER from the 90s? Most TV at that time was shot on videotape, not film, so there's no way to get an HD version of it, so if this is the case, you're seeing it in the best possible rendition already. Going through a projector probably helps actually, by making things smoother than they would be with upscaling on a 4k-res TV.
That is exactly what I am trying to say. While I have an overall lower max res, my viewing experience is much more consistent across all kind of contents. And it never feels as crappy as upscaled content.
>If you want to see what a modern 4K TV can really do, you have to watch it with something new, shot in 4K, perhaps in HDR if the TV can render that (this works best if the TV is OLED; LCD TVs don't have the brightness to really show HDR properly). Watching the same media on your 1080p projector should look noticeably worse than your friend's 75" OLED set.
I know I've seen it at friends place. But what I mean is I don't really feel it unless I compare both side by side thus it doesn't make my viewing experience less enjoyable. Ignorance is bliss I guess. And I much prefer the immersion of having an albeit lower res projected in the full size of my living room wall than 4K res in a smaller screen. It would maybe be different if I was watching ice hockey games and trying to follow the puck but I am not.
Star Trek TNG was shot on film, not tape, and they made a remaster that's available online. So you can see Captain Picard on their shoddy sets in very high resolution now.
Yeah, I've watched much of the remastered TNG version. The sets aren't shoddy AFAICT. There is one famous scene in the pilot episode where a patch of carpet under Data's seat is plainly visible, but that was because the frame size is larger: in the TV days, TV sets had a rounded-off picture and that part wasn't visible. The people filming back then never thought that their film would be scanned in 4K and the full frame would be visible to viewers.
The biggest problem visible on the TNG sets is the black cardboard pieces on the consoles in the rear of the bridge, used to block reflections from the lights. Those weren't visible after conversion to NTSC, but in HD they're noticeable. I'm not a director, but I wouldn't call this a problem with a shoddy set, but rather too many assumptions made at the time about how the video would be viewed. Surely, if they were filming a theatrical movie at the time instead of a TV show, they would have simply filmed it a different way, or rigged the lighting differently to avoid this problem.
You are right. I meant 'shoddy' in the sense that they just needed to look good on NTSC, so they were built with that in mind.
That doesn't just meant that smaller details weren't important, so they were left out. But also that if something in your set needs to fulfill a role in the story, you better make that thing big enough to be legible on an NTSC screen, instead of something more subtle.
Too bad 4k projectors are still so expensive. I bought my 1080p projector 8 years ago and it seems like not that much has changed since then when it comes to prices. 4k projectors are still much more expensive than comparable TVs.
I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches.
The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key
For games, the equivalent level of ownership comes from DRM‐free digital purchases. That means buying games from platforms like GOG, Itch, and Zoom Platform, and then backing them up. Steam is distantly behind in terms of user ownership—their installers are always DRM‐locked, but some games can be run DRM‐free after that—and Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even on the same planet due to their hideous DRM and online service tie‐ins.
"In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years.
Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently.
Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either).
By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago.
All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all.
—⁂—
¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure.
² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.
I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors.
These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings.
Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.
They've recently gotten very into visiting retro gaming stores and buying DS, Wii and other console games.
The death of physical media means the death of video game stores (eg. EB games), and the death of the second hand market, the very market which allows retro gaming stores of this generation to thrive.
The kids of my boys won't be able to experience the games of the next generation of consoles because their game stores will have been shut and entire generations of games no longer available unless said company decides to re-release them again.
That's just games.
Movies have a similar problem. I can see Archive.org becoming very popular for accessing what publishers have decided they no longer want, or care for, being available.
It's really too bad there isn't something like M-Disc with a 1TB capacity and the price of current BD-R discs. We're missing a good data archival solution these days.
Agree. LTO devices are crazy expensive. I hope HAMR will boost HDD capacities such that you will be able to use a HDD as cheap archival storage. I would expect you can get a good 10y from a HDD you keep off but scrub once a year. Long enough for storage capacity to have increased another order of magnitude.
I don’t own a 4k TV, yet, but someday I would like to watch the Lord of the Ring movies in 4K. It seems silly to buy the discs and a 4k player when I don’t anticipate buying a 4k TV anytime soon, but… I keep wondering if the physical disks or the player will go away before that day comes. Is this FOMO or a realistic concern?
It feels like FOMO but I don't work under the same rules you do.
The disks would be hard to find, but the high resolution content wouldn't; piracy. The disks would probably last for as long as you'd remember them, same for the player.
The player could almost surely be adapted to whatever display when the time comes. Will it? Dunno.
Finding a player wouldn't be too hard. We're not in niche format eras any more. There are standalone devices and consoles that can both make due
So the article that wants me to feel good about physical media being replaced with (DRM-encumbered) streaming contains embedded media which proudly proclaims:
This video is restricted from playing in your current geographic region
I can't see the next generation of the Sony Playstation console be as successful as the PS5 in my area if they abandon physical media altogether. A lot of people still use console games because they can sell and buy games second hand.
The price would need to go down to a spotify/netflix monthly subscription for people to use a console without physical medias in my area.
For those thinking about long-term data storage: first and foremost it's a process, not "a thing to get done".
Think about both a) migrating and b) growing capacity needs at the same time vs your usage pattern. It may happen that for your case any write-once media is simply never the best choice. (it will always take a lot longer to migrate a stack of CDs/DVDs/BluRays than to plug a new bigger drive alongside the end-of-live'ing old drive)
(and please appreciate the Venn diagram of `backup` and `long-term storage`; it's not 100% overlap)
Sony is not the sole producer of recordable Blu-ray media though, right? This concerns a Japanese factory and the BD-R I have in front of me says Made in Vietnam.
If I look up BDXL-R media available on Amazon Japan, the Verbatim disks say they're made by Mitsubishi Chemical. It could be that components come from Sony though.
In terms of just data, I haven't had issues with compatibility with Blu-Ray drives. Every drive has been pretty much plug and play in at least Windows and Linux. Discs have been immediately readable in both OS, and every drive has worked just plugging in USB or SATA.
Now, playback of DRM content? That's been a mess on Linux, pretty straightforward on Windows.
Sony is just one of manufacturers of Blu Ray media and as far as I know the others will continue manufacturing them.
Also, not sure what you mean - as a regular consumer you still have access to immutable media to distribute whatever you want - is there some specific example that you have in mind that you're worried about now?
Well no, OP said specifically "without immutable media society is vulnerable", nothing about publishing. If you want to shift the discussion that way that's fine, but don't say it's not about manufacturing when it clearly is.
If anything, you "shifted the discussion", who gives a crap if you can buy plastic disks when DRM and content delivery doesn't allow you to use them at high quality.
You mean, the BDXLs that I keep in a box? They rely on a 3rd party making them and another 3rd party making drives to read and write them I guess, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean?
There is no immutable media. The closest we have currently are carved stone (of which we have examples of some surviving thousands of years (the vast majority hasn't survived)).
I just buy internal high-capacity (at least 10 TB) HDDs and use an USB SATA controller. I use Borg backup for archival, at least 2 copies on 2 HDDs. It seems more reliable than DVDs.
As long as one never misses a back up, HDDs are fine. They're more laborious though. With the right optical disc, you can get away with just storing your discs in light-proof boxes and forgetting about them - with an HDD it's wise to copy the data over to a fresh drive at least every few years. Capacity, price and speed is the issue with optical media. With one M-disc, you get only 100GB, and the cost of the discs adds up.
But backups are easier to manage with HDDs because you have less media to shuffle around. So for M-disc to be competitive, it would have to be several times cheaper per TB than HDDs, but in reality the M-discs are almost 10x more expensive.
Depends on how much data you care to store. I'm just trying to store family photos and what not, I'm not generating TB's a year. 100GB is more than enough for a whole year of important data for my family. A 25GB M-DISC BD-R, two to mail one off-site to another family member, and we've got an offline backup of our most important files with geo-redundancy. On top of the local copy and cloud storage whatever as well.
The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.
All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.
All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.
If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.
The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.
So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.