Major releases still coming out, and enthusiasts collecting discs.
BluRay was possible because of the invention of the blue light LED to pump the laser @ 405nm. Before that, they were using red lasers over 600nm. But now we have LED lasers at 210nm that could double the data density on a disc media.
Somehow in 2026 blu-ray is still the highest quality method of watching content outside of theatres and piracy
If you get 4k Bluerays, often higher than theaters which are often only 2K Resolution.
I remember its rival, HD DVD, and how Microsoft bet on HD DVD. The Xbox 360 had an expensive add-on that enabled the use of the discs. No games supported it.
Meanwhile, the PS3 shipped with a Blu-ray player in it and retailed for about half of what Blu-ray players were going for, in 2007. Just like PS2 helped push DVD adoption (though it was well on its way when the PS2 came out), the PS3 definitely contributed to Blu-ray. Both formats offered promising results, but only one was given away with every PS3.
And for some brain dead reason the PS5 doesn’t have a dedicated media remote you can actually buy.
Xbox does.
The PS5 does have a media remote. It is available for sale at most retailers that stock PS5 controllers.
Seems to be available everywhere in the US - even on the official Sony site, but in the EU it’s only in the less reputable stores.
That is a bit odd. Maybe it doesn’t sell that well in the EU. Here in the UK pretty much all the major retailers sell them, plus the PlayStation Direct store.
The German direct store has it too, but they don’t ship outside of Germany 🤷🏻♂️
Sony is weird with localised stuff
That’s weird. When I bought my PS2 (not PS5, this was when the PS2 was new… ish…) I bought a media remote for it. The PS2 was replacing our first-gen DVD player, which was struggling with dual layer discs. So I had to get one that my mother could use. And she was perfectly fine using a game system as a DVD player, as long as it made sense and had a remote (she would not use a controller). And the remote was cool, it had the same colours and styling of the PS2.
Weird that the PS5 doesn’t have one.
I specifically bought a second-hand PS3 to use as a Blu-Ray player. And to play Journey, which was PS3-only at the time. Other PS3 games didn’t really appeal to me, I already had everything I wanted on PC. But for Blu-Rays the PS3 was indeed an excellent player.
Microsoft didn’t really bet on the HD-DVD. It was a separate add on supplied at cost because that was the best deal they got from either consortium.
In contrast, Sony was absolutely shipping the PS3 as a loss leader to get drives out there, similar to how Sony used the PS2 to make DVD’s standard.
Well, Sony was on the Blu-ray board or whatever it was. So that may have helped.
Every time I decide to watch one, I am blown away by how much better it looks than anything you can stream. In particular with dark scenes, where streaming often looks so poor due to artifacting. No contest at all.
I’m more shocked that so many have given up on physical media in the name of convenience, tbh. Not only does it look better but I can buy it once and not have to care about how the corpos decide to shuffle content this week or next.
Even the best streaming services (Apple TV+) have like 20-30% of the bitrate of a 4k Blu-ray
Video compression has its limits. A modern BD release has a bit/pixel value of around 0.5 - 0.7, while streaming copies are around 0.1 - 0.2. You’re going to lose detail even if you use AV1 or H265.
Then you also have the problem that certain content (naval/oceanic scenes, storms, jungles) doesn’t compress as well.
IMO we are also starting to see lower “returns” with every new codec generation. MPEG4 ASP (Xvid) to H264/AVC was a massive jump. H264 to H265 (or even AV1) was IMO a much smaller jump.
The jump was/is the same: Same quality with halve the bitrate.
Got to disagree with you on that one. It was universally true for the move from ASP/H263 to AVC/H264. It’s not the case with H264 to H265 on a universal basis.
You can forget about such results if you’re dealing with grain (and preserving it). Things are a bit better with “complex” content (oceans, snow storms etc), but you’ll be struggling to get 50% space savings (more so with pre 2005 content).
The general bitrate level is also a massive factor.
Low bitrates, sure, even more than 50%. But you’ll still be dealing with artifacts.
Medium to high bitrates (i.e. targeting a “near transparent” encode), you often won’t be able to replicate a H264 encode at 12 Mbps (1080p 24 FPS) with a 6 Mbps H265 encode. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t; I find you often need to go with 9-10 Mbps.
Haven’t tried H266/VVC. For AV1 the x4 increase in encode times didn’t seem to be worth it at high bitrates. Although for low bitrates AV1 seems to be modestly better than H265 (for far worse encore times).
This is all for CPU encodes at the “VerySlow” preset (1/2 for AV1 if I remember correctly).
To add: some of the “magic” of AV1 is the grain analysis and synthesis. This allows you to get good results at lower bitrates, in particular with grainy footage, because you aren’t storing the grain the classical sense – you synthesize it when playing back the file, using a profile generated during encoding.
But if this is really “good” or not is a matter of opinion. By definition you are storing less data than on, say, H265, so it’s a bit of a cheat. Personally I like the results. Encode times are still bad of course, but that will be less of an issue as time goes on.
Unfortunately AV1 encodes simply take too long for me at the 1/2 preset (equivalent to very slow) with a 8c/16t CPU.
I will probably give it another go on my next build (was planning an update to Zen6, but considering the price situation, I will have to wait another 2-3 years). And honestly my 5800X/3080 system is doing fine.
There are multiple AV1 encoders. SVT-AV1 was at least as fast as HEVC for the same quality/bitrate last time I tried.
That’s the one I used albeit it was older version even when I tried it in early 2025.
I always use the lowest “quality preset” (e.g. “slow”, “VerySlow” in x264/x265). The equivalent present in SVT-AV1 will was a number value (I believe 0 = placebo in x265/x264, I went 1/2).
Unless there have been massive improvements in SVT-AV1 in the last 12 months, you most likely get much longer encode time if you go with lowest quality preset equivalent in SVT-AV1.
Maybe I am missing something? Genuinely curious as I don’t have much experience with SVT-AV1 (I’ve done several hundreds of encodes of different levels of complexity with Xvid, x264, x265 over the past ~20 years).
Am I wrong to feel like Blu-ray was always something for the enthusiasts?
DVDs were good enough for most people, Blu-ray was more expensive and it didn’t feel like it ever dominated the market before streaming took over. I often see impressive DVD collections, I rarely see more than a handful of Blu-rays anywhere.
You’re also forgetting the precursor to streaming: digital movie downloads, like on iTunes. I’m sure that also helped Blu-rays never really take over.
Which, in some way, is a shame, because I distinctly remember watching a movie on a plain DVD on my parents’ HD TV in very early 2006 and thinking, “Wow, this somehow looks like shit!” and I know I would’ve felt differently if we had a Blu-ray or HD-DVD, but since this was very early 2006, they didn’t even exist yet.
For enthusiasts? No. But they were significantly more expensive and it just about took one to justify the price difference. Today there’s obviously a price difference but nowhere near as significant - uhd bd took that place. They never became the default like DVD did - where every PC has a player and things beyond movies (ignoring PS3 games) shipped on BD… So usage was obviously contingent on ownership of a player - outside of the PS3, that was a specialty device… And expensive. In its early years, <=720p tvs, fuzzy plasma, and dlp projectors were still commonplace. IMO it’s biggest failure was being ahead of its time. Today I have no idea why one would buy a DVD over a BD… But both have or are losing to streaming and soon we’ll own nothing.
Today I have no idea why one would buy a DVD over a BD
Having bought multiple DVDs (in combo packs with Blu-Ray) in the past year, it’s because, unlike Blu-Ray, they actually fucking play reliably on my computer. Blu-Ray is about 50/50 IME. (Entirely the fault of the DRM – not the physical material.)
That was before 4k streaming. One of those “you don’t know better” things.
I owned 1600 DVDs at my peak. And literally just watched one a few hours ago and the picture quality is a bit shit to be honest. Especially the subtitles look janky as fuck because they’re not text but images, pixelated images.
I’m currently slowly upgrading The Good Ones to Blu-ray and the Really Good Ones to 4k BD
But only the ones I know I want to watch in 10, 20 or 30 years. As long as I have the media and a compatible player no company can tell me I can’t watch it.
You can download subtitles online that are text based and mux them into a DVD rip if you want them to look good. Some players like KODI can even be set to automatically download and use the subtitles.
Yup, in my country it’s basically just in specialist shops. Thanks to SCART (universal European RGB A/V cable) and PAL (576p for movies), DVDs look better here than in the US, quite good up to about 40".
it didn’t feel like it ever dominated the market before streaming took over
HD-DVD was better error-correction (thus longevity) but Blu-ray (ugh. The name) had payola. Payola makes leaders.
I suspect the switching of horses from what’s better to what’s more popular derailed the adoption back then when we resisted shallow popularity better.
Most people didn’t have tvs with 1080p resolutions when blurays came out. It was all SD, and so dvds ruled the market.
Once HD tvs were common, streaming was now the common medium. And streaming looked better than the standard def dvds.
Blurays will stay niche on comparison for sure, but I can’t imagine anyone who is watching a dvd on a large HD (let alone 4k) TV is going to think the DVD looks good.
It was all SD, and so dvds ruled the market.
BDs had a licence premium porn makers didn’t want to pay.
There’s no way it was 2006…
That was my initial reaction as well! :/
It’s only the specific blu-ray format that came out in 2006 (first working 2005). Optical discs themselves could be said to have been used since the late 19th century.
laser discs were far better than tape, but tape had porn, sooo…
I seem to remember even prior to 2006, a “format war” between Blu-ray and HD-DVD…
