Interesting to see that demand for optical drives is increasing, although apparently it’s only in Japan: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/optical-drive-demand-surges-amid-windows-10-retirement-japanese-users-switching-to-windows-11-are-buying-up-blu-ray-drives
Still, hopefully that means Bluray writers stay on the market for a bit longer.
There are rumors that the last two makers of consumer computer blu-ray drives have ceased production. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the actual reason sales have surged in Japan, as physical media is still quite popular there.
That’s quite possible, unfortunately…
What’s the use case? I haven’t had an optical drive for all least 10 years and can’t say that I’ve missed it. Not even once, I think.
Backing up Blu-rays and watching them on your device.
Unlike with music, you can’t buy DRM-free Blu-ray quality movies outside of Blu-ray. If you stream a show or movie, even if you have “bought”, you don’t own it.
Retro gaming and media rips.
You can literally pop a ps2 game and just play with pcsx2, don’t even have to rip it. Given the recent pushes towards “you’ll own nothing and fuck you if you don’t like it” it isn’t surprising to me that a company is offering a path back to media ownership.
Based on the specs for the machine, that’s the goal as well. I wouldn’t consider a 16 GB kit sufficient for much else than a media/web machine anymore, and that’s the default on the advertised rig
I have several use cases, a big one being that it gives me an alternate storage medium for backing up home photos and videos. Obviously there’s caveats on how long BD-Rs last (although M-discs should outlast me) and the issue of needing a player in future, but it gives me more peace of mind knowing that I can backup these sorts of things to different storage types (external hard drives are all well and good until they’re corrupted by power issues or user error, or you want to keep a copy at a relative’s place and it’s a multi-hour trip… with optical media you can just keep adding discs to the offsite backup as needed and update the external HDD less frequently).
The other major use case I have has already been mentioned - backing up Blurays that I’ve bought (or, in the case of a few shows I like, being able to compare the DVD vs Bluray frame by frame).
Blue-ray drive? Wild.
Smart. Kids are really hyping physical media again, akin to when 80’s kids brought vinyl back in the 2000’s.
This would make a great Kubuntu 25.10 system.
Does it run Linux?
Why wouldn’t it?
Sometimes they use the oddest hardware in such a machine for which only windows drivers exist, at least for the moment. Hardware shops manage to fuck this up especially with wifi cards.
unsupported hardware, firmware bugs
Do you use Blu-rays tho?
My parents would always say Blu-rays are waste of money and they just rent some ordinary DVD from the store instead.
DVDs are stuck at a low-quality 480p resolution versus 1080p or 2160p, so Blu-Rays are indisputably better.
480p
That sucks. Maybe I wasn’t caring much because I was watching those videos ripped and imported to VLC through iPad (in 2013).
Compression is also a factor, uncompressed (or least a higher bitrate rip) DVD rips don’t really look particularly terrible. Plus, if you’re watching on a phone/tablet or modest sized tv/monitor (32" and under) it really isn’t that big a deal for the most part.
4K Blu-rays look stunning on a good OLED TV. I tend to pick up movies I really loved the visuals of in 4K Blu-ray (Interstellar as an example).
