Meanwhile, vinyl is minding its own business…
Turns out pressing PVC into the shape of a sound wave is so cheap and so easy that people won’t stop doing it
I was thinking of having a vinyl backup of my current favourite playlist but it’s ten hours long so it could take some time
You’re going to have forearms like tree trunks by the time you’re done.
Only ten hours? Nice. I’m having trouble getting mine below 24.
I want it a nice even 17 hours, but I don’t want to change anything. Yes, I know that doesn’t work.
Just make a larger record, easy.
cheap
🗿
It’s not PVC, it’s vinyl.
Just need a couple to backup a few terabytes of data
Techmoan has entered the chat
Bluray is still alive and well because its the only format that has full quality basically 1:1 media encodes which ironically make up the backbone of full quality media piracy.
No streaming service will ever support 70Gb+ file sizes because they never bothered to implement multicast so it would shred their bandwidth or rely on predownloading which would shred the tiny local storage included on most smart TVs.
You could of course use jellyfin or any other file share protocol to DIY, but you’d better have a stable 100Mbps minimum upload/download speed lol.
Blu ray video is lossy compressed. Lossless video is huge.
Your mom is lossless.
Yeah she’s a classy lady
It’s still pretty good…but yeah lossless is like 1GB+ for 30 seconds.
Boy does it look good though.
They still make CDs and Blu-Rays you know. The others are obsolete technologies.
And DVDs (movies get released as DVD, BR and UHD4K) and Floppies (New Amiga releases with a physical release) and Cartridges (evercade)
Also cartridges (switch 2)
true, forgot about the switch (2).
It is just a license though
Some of them, not all of them iirc
I think all games, even those in physical media, are licenses to play them, is what OP means. You might be thinking of download carts, which doesn’t contain game data, but makes you download games.
Well yes that’s what I assumed they meant, a non-download cart wouldn’t be just a license, it would be the license and the game data
Right, gotcha. My bad.
I miss HDDVDs. Their better error correction will be missed more, soon, as this stuff degrades a bit.
No error correction could compensate for Warner Brothers discs…
Bluray is higher quality than all the streaming bullshit that’s usually lower than default settings x265. Also for anime the bluray is a great way to support the creator and used as a metric for deciding if a series gets picked up for more releases.
No! Sony bad!
Both of those are dying unfortunately
I like blurays but at some point we need go acknowledge the truth
Time to upgrade to reel-to-reel optical drives
My personal conspiracy theory is that Sony is trying to kill Blu-ray before it enters public domain. (2028-2030 or so). Single-layer Blu-rays are invaluable for my cold storage backups. So I’m going to keep buying them. And thanks to them, entering public domain, innovation will be possible once again. So, in all honesty, I don’t have that much to fear, as mega corporations also use blu-rays heavily for backups, together with tape.
How’s the long-term stability of Blu-Ray? I know we’re running into problems with magnetic tape and CDs degrading.
Magnetic tape depolarizes over time. CDs were organic and they would literally rot away. But as long as your Blu-ray discs are high to low (HTL)/inorganic Then you’re really set for at least 30 years as well, just like professional tape, but at a fraction of the price.
There’s M-Discs which are supposed to last 100 years I’ve heard.
I have 30+ year old CDs still readable.
I also have CDs that are this old. There’s a big difference between CDs that you can burn yourself, because those are using organic materials and the weak laser in your disk drive to burn them and professionally made disks, which are usually using inorganic materials and molds. The molds then are embossed into the datalayer of the CD, making it significantly more durable than organic discs.
all of those are digital
It’s meant to stand for “digital download”, but that’s what you get from trying to shorten everything to one word or less.
cassete tape, zx spectrum style:
Cassette.
At some point does it make sense to use Blu Rays?
I have a No Man’s Sky disk. Like 5% of the code on that disk is in the production game today. It’s online only, so I couldn’t even play it with the disk.
Cartridges do kinda make sense, you could patch the game on them (in theory), they can come in much larger sizes than disks too.
Side note: modern gaming is shit.
I bought Spyro and couldn’t even play it without agreeing to a privacy policy. It’s a single player offline game from the PS1 era. I installed The Sims 4, I can’t even play without an EA account. I tried Assassin’s Creed and you need an Ubisoft account to open the game.
Shit is fucking stupid.
Blu-ray for movies are great, they can store a lot more that DVDs
Blu ray for data is also fucking nice. I used to use those for data backups before thumb drives got decent capacity
Cartridges do kinda make sense, you could patch the game on them (in theory), they can come in much larger sizes than disks too.
If AI wasn’t making SSD prices so outrageous right now, an SSD-based cartridge system would make a lot of sense. They could be made in a variety of sizes, to accommodate games with different filesystem footprints, and if the SSDs in them have tolerable performance, they could be played directly off the cartridge, without needing to ‘install’ anything – just insert and go.
Pretty sure it has the 2016 version of NMS on it. Booted up a ps4 install with it to try and couch co-op only to look around and ask why the UI was so different from what I was used to. It had internet access we thought but it can’t have or it would have installed whatever the latest patch is. It was surreal seeing pillars of Emeril again.
But you point yes, gaming single player offline is a joke now with DRM requiring single player online. We ripped EA Simcity for this. Simcity died to City:Skylines because it became such a movement.
It is hard not to look at nms as an outlier.
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With storage redundancy, of course. Because eventually, your hard drive will fail.
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I don’t doubt that digital is more accessible and readily available than other formats. The biggest problem is that few services allow me to download locally what I’ve purchased.
So, for me, you’re not buying anything, you’re just renting for the long term.
Honestly, I’m tired of buying digital only to suddenly find out I can no longer use what I purchased. For these services, I prefer self-hosting or any method that allows me to have a working copy locally. At least I can decide what to do with the digital content.
And Qobuz
It does streaming but can you buy and download mp3 or similar?
Yes, you can buy and download CD quality or HD quality (up to 24-bit, 192 kHz) FLAC from their store. From their homepage, there should be a link to the download store in the header bar: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
Ohhh, thanks for the new go to site. I buy lots of (digital) music and avoiding amazon has made finding what I want that much harder.
Just make sure, that you don’t buy anything with unbroken DRM. If you ever lose access, you can just get it back from the pirates.
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I know that’s not what you meant… But those are all digital…
The only one that is not a digital medium is “digital”, because it is not a medium.
It could be if we intentionally misinterpret the word digital
👉👈
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Guys, y’all did this to yourselves. You didn’t have to use Steam when it launched, but you did because it was convenient.
Physical media started dying the moment people flocked to Steam for PC gaming.
The public wanted this. A niche minority doesn’t. The overwhelming majority of game sales are now digital. Why would companies keep manufacturing discs when almost everyone is downloading their games?
And I know, I know, physical media is better for the consumer. I know about the EULAs, licensing, and the ownership issues. I’m not defending digital media. I’m simply saying: y’all made your bed, now sleep in it.
For the record, my entire game library is digital too, aside from some old Xbox 360 and PS4 games I still have on disc. I’m in the same boat. I’m no better than anyone else.
I just see reality for what it is.
If you want physical media back, stop buying digital games. Stop playing them. Delete your Steam account. Uninstall your games.
What the hell did you think these companies were going to do?
To say that Steam is the one solely responsible for this is misleading. That would mean only gaming is switching to digital only. Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc are also responsible for killing physical media outside of gaming
Agreed. Streaming services are a whole different can of worms that contribute to this issue.
But when I download a game on steam, I can do whatever I want with the file, and play it whenever I want. I can’t say the same thing when I download a game on my PlayStation
Correct. Sony is pure crap.
Physical media has the inherent benefit of being difficult to remove from the customer. Because of the several thousand years of precedent and “argument” has lead to the current protections many countries have.
Digital distribution of Digital goods has significant benefits to the customer and producer over physical distribution. A lot of physical game media at this point is basically a license key and a mostly working game that needs downloaded patches they were still developing while the discs were being printed. The downsides are the current legal mechanisms and that a lot of people involved in the producing would like to continue to eat and pay rent.
Don’t act like this guy.
Yes, I understand. This is the most common talking point I see when discussing this topic, and it’s completely valid.
Ownership is an important consideration. Unfortunately, the buying public has either decided, through ignorance or because they’ve been convinced, not to care about it.
Digital downloads are, by a massive margin, the preferred way to acquire games. The market has spoken.
Like I said, delete your Steam account. Don’t purchase digital games.
Otherwise, accept the fact that we’ve willfully surrendered our leverage to the corporations.
Cartridges aren’t dead yet.
Cartridge is alive and well in the Nintendo ecosystem.
A lot of Switch cartridges now only have license keys.
Well at least Nintendo themselves still releases full game cartridges and it’s not like you buy a Switch for third party games anyway. Nintendo only introduced the Gamekey card because third party publishers, especially Acti and Ubi, were releasing their own version on Switch 1 and not using consistent packaging labels to tell a gamekey from a full game cartridge apart so probably confused many consumers. Hence why Nintendo created an official version.
Many are just Game Key Cards.
Which are like Carts, but they need to download digitally. The worst of both worlds :D
Nintendo has its own slew of ethical issues.
Alive, but well?
Where’s MiniDisk?
*MiniDisc.
UMD you mean, i don’t think MiniDisk were ever used to distribute games or even general software.
Data md existed. If it had been included from the beginning, md would have been a killer. As usual, Sony decided to shoot themselves repeatedly in the feet instead.
No, music (unless you count Hi-MD) but except for cartridge i see no direct correlation between “games” or “general software” and the picture posted.
Not sure it was even used to distribute music. Was decent for copying a CD to it though…
True, but there’s bad digital like Amazon Video, and good digital like GOG.
Yes. The thing people actually don’t like is DRM, which can also exist on discs.
I’m torn. Like, there are two online medical equipment shops covered by my insurance. The one I use and Amazon. I’m the unusual event my supplier is having delays I can usually get equipment from Amazon in their standard delivery window.
Like, we’ve gotten bipap parts on there when a family member traveled across the country and left half of their ventilator at home. It was not cheap, but it was quick and that’s what they needed.
Like, there’s a good, necessary service under all the bullshit that other companies seem to be unable to match for reasons I don’t understand, probably having to do with paying and treating labor more fairly. If it weren’t life and death sometimes
After digital: Direct brain implantation. IE all your games are stored in memory. And I don’t mean RAM. It also isn’t YOUR brain.
Definitive way to curb RAM prices, just use people’s brains.
You could also sell part of your brain to openAI to offload part of their models for the cloud.
It’s the matrix book but instead of cpu power is RAM storage.
What like on the brains on Indian children in those Matrix tubes?
