In an era where many films and albums are stored in the cloud, "streaming anxiety" is making people buy more DVDs, records – and even cassette tapes.
Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs: How to stop your films and music from disappearing::In an era where many films and albums are stored in the cloud, "streaming anxiety" is making people buy more DVDs, records – and even cassette tapes.
Bullshit. Piracy is the only thing preserving it. Why? Because as a PC user 4k HDR Blu-Rays are forbidden for me anyways to play legally despite owning them.
Most Blu-Ray disks have DRM encryption. There simply doesn't seem to be a (legal) decryption mechanism on PC, probably to avoid people ripping the movies.
I was under the impression that software like PowerDVD could play 4K HDR media if you're using Windows.
And at the end of the day, it is also (generally accepted as 'probably') legal to decrypt the media using whatever other methods available as long as you are only doing so to back up or enable viewing for yourself.
I have a Blu-Ray drive myself, which can read 4K discs format wise. But the DRM industry forbids me from playback. There is no software playing it back in 4K HDR format, unless I crack the disc.
In my country (Australia) you're allowed to break the DRM for interoperability purposes. We could legally use deCSS, back when DVDs were state of the art, if we wanted to play them on our Linux computers
I don't think blue ray is nearly as easy to break I just double checked. Not quite "super easy, barely an inconvenience" but quite do-able
This doesn't apply to every country and some of the laws have to be stretched. I interpret this industry boycott of an entire platform as an abandonware situation. You don't give me the opportunity to make a deal in the first place.
Yeah it sucks if your government just rolled over when asked for strictest copyright.
I'm pretty sure VCRs and tape backup got it legal in the US to move media you have right to watch between media
Australia got its law on circumvention through American diplomatic pressure, we refused leaving out the interoperability clause. Others under the same pressure didn't push back
But there is a regulation prohibiting breaking the DRM.
And obtaining a program that can decrypt the disk and save the file while having keys to latest disks is hard.
I've run into a similar issue, I built a media PC for my living room which includes a 4K compatible Blu-ray drive. After spending an hour trying to flash it's BIOS in Linux, realizing Windows would take 2 minutes to do the same task, then finally testing a disk, I find that DRM ruins that. All my 4K disks will not play because it's a crapshoot if they do play. It will rip them no problem, but not play.
I could fix this by using Windows, however I don't want windows on this system, it works quickly and with no annoyances in Linux.
So now I have to resort back to the PS5 as my player until I figure something out.
Nah. I'm sure there are multiple factors, as mentioned in the article, but another big thing preserving physical media is home theater enthusiasts. With a good system, the higher bitrate video and lossless audio on a UHD Blu-ray is noticable compared to most streamed content.