Sony Ends Blu-Ray, MD And MiniDV Media Production – Hackaday

With the slow demise of physical media the past years, companies are gradually closing shop on producing everything from the physical media itself to their players and recorders. For Sony this seems to have now escalated to where it’ll be shuttering its recordable optical media storage operations, after more than 18 years of producing recordable Blu-ray discs. As noted by [Toms Hardware] this also includes minidisc (MD) media and MiniDV cassettes.We previously reported on Sony ending the production of recordable Blu-ray media for consumers, which now seems to have expanded to Sony’s remaining storage media. It also raises the likelihood that Sony’s next game console (likely PlayStation 6) will not feature any optical drive at all as Blu-ray loses importance. While MiniDV likely was only interesting to those of us still lugging one of those MiniDV camcorders around, the loss of MD production may be felt quite strongly in the indie music scene, where MD is experiencing somewhat of a revival alongside cassette tapes and vinyl records.Although it would appear that physical media is now effectively dead in favor of streaming services, it might be too soon to mark its demise.Important to note that this is the end of blank writeable media production. Stamping of discs (such as those for all prerecorded media) can continue.So who will still be making dvd+r media?Do we have to make a lifetime purchase?Seeing as there are still companies making CD-R, I doubt you need to worry about DVD-R suddenly becoming unavailable. Just expect prices to rise as the bigger manufacturers drop out.As for making a lifetime purchase, maybe scale that back to a decade purchase. In that time it’s quite possible you’ll be using a newer technology, even if it seems unthinkable now. Consider people who bought a pallet of 1.44 MB floppy disks 15 years ago when they started becoming scarce. I bet most of those floppies went unused.Also consider the people who bought stacks of CD-R* media when that was still a thing, and found that the blank discs went bad after a couple of years…This is quite true. However, the ones I have seem to be holding up quite well after 15 to 25 years of storage in a dark and dry cabinet. I test a few every 5 or so years, in addition to the very few I actually use.Based on my current usage patterns, I probably have a lifetime supply of CD-Rs and DVD±Rs. I could use a few more RW ones and some more BD-Rs, though. These were bought when quality ones were still relatively easy to identify and find.I was in shock when I went to use some after a very long time, and so many were bad.Some people are actually making money (or at least were until quite recently) selling new old stock floppies.The linked article on Tom’s Hardware reads “Sony has announced it will end its recordable Blu-ray Disc media production in February”. To me this doesn’t sound like it will affect prerecorded movies and Playstation games.Agreed. I assume they will continue releasing content on disk because the profit margin is considerably wider vs a blank disk. And there are many more blu-ray players in the world than blu-ray burners.Simultaneously finding out Sony still makes recordable MD’s and will stop making them soon all at the same time is a strange feeling lolthey are mostly only in Japan where the format was super popularI guess I should buy a bunch now. Not that I really need them as I have a bunch of used discs but their prices will probably only increase in the future.This is bad new, Bluray remains one of the most feasible methods of archival storage for end users.Huh. I was under the impression that recordable disks in general aren’t archival.anything is archival. blueray M discs are quite resilient in a safe.20-50 years for normal discs
If you can score genuine M-discs, 1000 years!By the end of 50 years… let alone 1000 years. Who will care? At least at the home level of archiving 🙂 . I won’t know of course, but I bet all the things I care about now, will be deep six’ed by someone when I am gone. That’s why I don’t care anymore. I keep everything I want to keep spinning (disk space is super ‘cheap’ ) and have HDD backups (which roll in and out of use) on-site and off-site. This method provides all the ‘long term’ that is needed. No need for ‘long long long’ term storage here. Still, it is sad to see an era of optical storage regulated to museum status like CRTs, manual adding machines and such.I agree the use cases are limited and not very profitable. But I can imagine this would be culturally valuable for archiving things like family histories, anthropological research, or niche movies.But in that case, just ‘keep the data spinning’ somewhere, so to speak. It is the best way of making sure the storage media never goes obsolete. For example, my mom&dad transferred all their kodak slides and scanned photo album pictures to .jpg files and I have them all spinning on our computer now (my sister also has a copy). I can also see our kids, storing our data (plus, now, my parents data) for ‘historical’ reasons (pictures, movies, family records, and such) as well. HDDs and even SSDs are relativity cheap…Now for NASA storage needs… That is on a whole another scale… How they keep track of all the project/pictures/video/downloads of missions must be quite a thing to manage for ‘long term’ storage from the creation of NASA until now.Super cheap he says.https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Performance-Gaming-3-5-Inch-Internal/dp/B0CYQXNCVZ/?th=1But will anyone be able to read them in 1000 years? Or even 20?1000 years, most likely not. If you want data to last that long, burn it into a chunk of quartz with a laser. 20 years will probably be fine considering that you can still buy new 3.5″ USB floppy drives today.When the media starts going obsolete, you just need to copy the data to whatever replaces it.I was so totally fed up with the “entertainment industry” previously, and when they introduced the DVD with non skippable warnings that I’m a pirate and other garbage that I never bought a DVD player (for movies) myself. I was already accused of pirating, so I became one. Up to 10 or so years ago this was even legal here in Europe. So I don’t care much about the demise of it’s successor either.And sony… CD rootkit scandal, proprietary memory sticks, cancellation of “Oter OS” is what I can easily recall. I assume they had more of such, but sony don’t get a capital s from me no more.Even what you are doing is ‘obsolete’. Somewhere on the net is a site that has the movie/music/whatever that you want to view/hear for free anyway. No need to ‘pirate’. And takes up none of your own disk space to boot. The internet has truly become a bottomless pit of information/entertainment…. for good and bad, it is what it is.Until it suddenly isn’t. Which is why I obsessively write anything I care about to recordable optical media, purchase physical music CDs and (very occasionally) movies on BluRay that I care enough about to want to own.Yeah exactly – storage is cheap and the future is uncertain. Save & organize everything; become your own librarian.Until uv led and lasers become cost effectiveUv ray discs would hold as much as a hard driveThat way you can actually fit that 128+gb worth software on disc and not need to download the rest online, and less bug fixesUntil uv led and lasers become cost effectiveUv ray discs would hold as much as a hard driveThat way you can actually fit that 128+gb worth software on disc and not need to download the rest online, and less bug fixesPlease be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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Source: https://hackaday.com/2025/01/24/sony-ends-blu-ray-md-and-minidv-media-production/