Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Sony

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month (tomshardware.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the end-of-an-era dept.
Sony will ship its last batch of Blu-ray recorders this month, according to Kyodo News, ending the company's decades-long run in a product category it helped create. The recorders targeted exclusively the Japanese domestic market, where households used them to record broadcast television. Sony had already stopped manufacturing the devices and recordable discs about a year ago, and the final shipments are clearing out remaining inventory.

Kyodo attributes the segment's death to the rise of streaming services. Sony will continue selling Blu-ray players "for the time being." The broader Blu-ray ecosystem remains intact. Asus, LG, and Pioneer still produce PC drives in internal and external USB form factors. Panasonic and Verbatim continue manufacturing Blu-ray media. The format turned 20 last year, having debuted at CES 2006 -- one year before Netflix launched its streaming platform.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month More

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month

Comments Filter:

  • Pioneer sold off their division months ago to a company that just wanted the patents. I am fairly sure LG and ASUS also stopped. The folks who use makemkv have been buying up the last drives that can handle UHD discs (native or with a firmware mod).

    The standalone blu ray player market has a shrinking set of model options and also no new 4k options for the last few years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Large scale storage is getting so cheap keeping ones movies or any other data on hard drives is very affordable and makes whatever is being stored much more immediately on hand then when it is on a disk. I got a 26tb HDD for about $10 a terabyte a few months ago, that's a lot of space for movies or anything else.

      • > keeping ones movies or any other data on hard drives

        Where do you get the movies to "keep" ? I'm genuinely curious, because I purchase games to keep using gog. What is the movie (or music - bandcamp?) equivalent?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          I have a substantial physical collection that's all digitized because I don't want to rummage around in a huge physical collection of movies just to browse my selection to find something to watch. There is also movie piracy which has gotten ridiculously easy to do and is increasing in popularity due to all the anti consumer stuff streaming platforms have been hoisting on us. I know I don't find paying more for less and with ads to be a terribly good deal relative to how things were with streaming a few year

    • Yeah, streaming really killed that industry. It must be about 10 years since I last bought a physical copy of a movie/tv show. I don't even have any of my BR players hooked up. Easier to stream than to find the dang remote.

    • We had a Sony BD player from IIRC 2015. It was fucking awful - an underpowered CPU that took about 10 secs to boot the system (it was just a disc player with no HD, wtf was it doing?!) and could barely run its own UI along with cheap build quality that meant it died after 5 years. But then Sony quality has been going down the pan for years. However I have another Sony DVD player from the early 2000s when they still made good kit that is still going strong.

      • Yea I feel like they got super cheap in both build quality and processing. They used to make really nice DVD players (and VHS and S-VHS players for that matter.) At some point they became commodity items and no one wanted to pay a lot of money for them anymore. China ate their lunch.

        The very first BRD players, while better build quality, also had awlwful start and load times. They never really got great, but there was a time when the 2nd and 3rd gen machines were OK.

      • You need to keep in mind that the entire bluray menu system was in Java. That alone was fun for performance.

        • You need to keep in mind that the entire bluray menu system was in Java. That alone was fun for performance.

          Java (with recent JVMs) can be performant, but the processors in most BluRay players were cost optimized (i.e. cheap and slow), and there was little to no interest in optimizing the software by most manufacturers as the consumers bought by price.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Malc ( 1751 )

      I have a decent drive; I don't have a decent enclosure for it. It's old, but it's got a parallel ATA interface and the enclosure has USB 2 and FW400 interfaces, which were never really good enough. I wish I could find a full size enclosure with PATA->USB-C or some other adapter for PATA that would fit inside a modern enclosure.

  • Audio formats seem to have a thriving nostalgia market where vinyl, CDs and even cassettes have seen a resurgence of both new players and new media being produced. I guess there is no equivalent in the video market.

    • Audio (or more specifically, music) is not like other arts, even performing ones. We enjoy experiencing a piece of music over and over again, re-living the feeling it gives us. We tend not to do the same with video.

      Perhaps this kind of appreciation of the art extends to the technologies that deliver it.

  • I have 2/3rds of a spindle of blank blue ray discs. In 2010 I bought a PC tower and added a read/write blue ray drive to it. Turns out writing blue ray disks were about as useful as a ZIP Drive from the 90s. Can't win them all I suppose.

    That 2010 PC is still chugging along though primarily so they kids can play old games, do homework, surf the web, and watch streaming video.
    • I actually just bought a 4k reader/burner for ripping my 4k movies to my NAS, so am atypical, but yet agree as I too have a spindle of blank blu rays with no use case... transferring large files is either better done over the net or with a thumb drive or SD card. Can't guarantee a PC on the other end would have a disc drive to read them these days.

  • Their time is up... (Score:3)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:07PM (#65982446)

    I haven't touched my BRD recorder in years. I used to sell videos I made on BD-R and DVD-R, until I started monetizing my YouTube channel, which brings in far more viewers and income with zero work once the video is uploaded. I used to buy printable BRD discs, jewel cases, print an insert for the jewel case, mail the disc...it was a lot of work for not much return. Late 2000's.

    YouTube has democratized the distribution of independent videos. Their revenue split for ads is still the best deal out there. I just don't know how there is enough drive space in the world to accommodate the amount of video that is uploaded every minute to that service. One source says every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YT. I just can't see where that all goes. Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives? Will the whole thing collapse under its own weight? They don't seem to delete anything except videos that run into policy violations or copyright claims.

    Fun story: I was at NAB (The National Association of Broadcaster's conference) in Las Vegas when the winner of the two dueling HD disc formats was picked. It was down to BluRay Disc championed by Sony, and HD-DVD by Toshiba. The studios decided to throw their weight at the BluRay Consortium during that show, and instantly the HD-DVD booth become a rather sad ghost town. BluRay wasn't great for independent producers, there were clauses that stated that for commercial discs you HAD to include encryption, even if you didn't want to, making doing a production run at a disc facility very expensive. It was a licensing scheme designed to make money for the consortium. So I stuck to making BRDs myself as a work around, since my numbers were so small. BRD works for the major labels but it was a terrible format for us small time folk. It was easier to make VHS tapes, you just sent a master to a dupe facility and they cranked them out. Of course, VHS was complete garbage as a format, but it was what we had. Fun times, and now ancient history, thank god.

    • Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives?

      I remember reading some years ago that Meta (then Facebook) was using Blu-ray to archive old posts, photos, etc. as a cheap storage solution. They've probably moved on now, but it still seems like a pretty cheap way to archive materials.

  • You CAN record over-the-air... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:34PM (#65982484) Homepage

    Over-the-air HDTV is still putting out up to 18Mb/s per channel. It's some of the highest-quality streaming that there is, and it's free!

    I've been recording it with entirely legal equipment for about five years now, use FFMPEG to crush the huge files down to H265 or H264 for action shows where movement shows some artifacts at H265. But mostly we just watch the shows within a few weeks, lots of room on the SSD of the ultrabook that controls the TV.

    http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug [brander.ca]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Malc ( 1751 )

      H.265/HEVC shouldn't have trouble with movement. That's an issue with either the implementation (codec) or with its settings.

    • I used to have a Sony Blu Ray player. I discovered about 10 years ago that I could record TV, compress it with H.264, fit about 6 hours of 720p content on a DVD-R, and it would play on that Sony player. Not perfect quality, but the goal at the time was to be better than VHS, which was easily achieved.

      Eventually I learned about Jellyfin and that player got stolen, so I hardly care about any disks anymore. But my point is that modern compression makes Blu Ray data density unnecessary.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Depends where you are. In the UK the BBC implemented a shared bitrate system, where all their HD channels share a pool. I think it's only about 20Mb or so for several channels, with bits dynamically allocated based on the content.

      The result is very, very poor quality video. Detail is lost, making skin look pasty and hair look like a bad wig. They seem to run films through some sort of filter that removes grain too, presumably to get the bitrate down.

      I haven't subscribed to Netflix for many years, but it use

  • Asus, LG, and Pioneer still produce PC drives, Try finind some new production ones and there are none. there are old stock and used ones.

  • I have tin ears and failing eyesight, but I can still tell the difference between streamed video and audio vs. what I've ripped from discs.

    My modern desktop PC is in a modern case that has two drive bays (you can still buy them - Fractal Design Define R5), and is equipped with a flashed Blu-Ray drive that can handle UHD discs.

    It's a bit of a hassle, but I can have whatever media I want where I want it, when I want it, the way I want it. Hunting down media is a fun hobby, too.

  • They're still SOLD, but they're not being produced. The prices for drives is spiking very quickly as remaining stock dries up.

    I have two spares in the closet; they're about to become unobtanium.

  • ....still make? Or are they purely in the media business, owning movies and music to rent?
  • Never had the need to record a Blu-ray Disc but I watch 4k UHD discs all the time. The bit rate is just so much better from a player for both audio and video than it is for streaming, even when the provider has 4k/HDR available. Plus I have some discs like Westworld thatâ(TM)s not available for streaming anymore because of bean counters. Streaming has its conveniences but there are times when you still want to have am ownable version that doesnâ(TM)t require a network connection.

Slashdot Top Deals

Measure twice, cut once.

Close