[HN Gopher] Is Sony's 140MB MiniDisc Drive the Next Betamax? (1996)
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Is Sony's 140MB MiniDisc Drive the Next Betamax? (1996)
Author : ecliptik
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-06-13 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| analog31 wrote:
| I loved the idea of a high fidelity dropout free recording
| medium, hated the transfer process (analog). As a result, made a
| bunch of recordings and never did anything with them.
|
| Got a little tascam pocket recorder when it came out. Loved the
| transfer process (usb). Still did nothing with the recordings.
| Turns out you have to be a really good musician to make a
| tolerable recording.
| k__ wrote:
| MiniDisk and ZIP drives where pretty cool.
|
| It was like a regular disk, but with >100x capacity and writable.
|
| Sad that their creators failed to commercalize them right.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Still got a stack of Zip disks somewhere, full of Uni
| coursework and old design projects. The drive, in translucent
| plastic (to match the iMac), died long ago.
|
| Back in the day, 100mb was a breathtakingly large amount of
| storage - more than 80 floppy disks!
| D13Fd wrote:
| ZIP was fairly successful until writable CDs came along. The
| biggest problem was the click of death. I remember collecting
| multiple drives in the late 1990's trying to find one that
| didn't have that issue.
|
| I guess they could have done a more open standard, but I'm not
| sure it would have helped them. I recall Superdisk was a
| slightly more open standard around the same time (maybe a
| little later) and it went no where.
| k__ wrote:
| I fondly remember a friend of mine having an external ZIP
| drive, he carried around with a bag of disks. You could hook
| it up to any PC.
|
| But, CD burners got cheaper quickly and soon we wouldn't use
| it anymore.
| danieldk wrote:
| I loved my ZIP drive. At home, we had a flaky 56k6 connection.
| Since my dad worked at the university where he had a 100MBit
| connection, I would sometimes tag along with him, bring a stack
| of ZIP disks, and download a Linux distribution and a bunch of
| other new stuff.
|
| _Put this on a Zip disk, send it to your lawyer
|
| File me under "Funky"_ - Beastie Boys
| FatalLogic wrote:
| Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines always correct? This article
| provides the answer
| sackerhews wrote:
| I remember the Sony MiniDisk audio recorder/player. You could
| record digital audio, but couldn't transfer it to your computer
| in digital format.
|
| Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to
| record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital
| version of it on your computer.
|
| This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
| ssharp wrote:
| How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the
| mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into
| a serial port.
|
| Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm
| cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's
| mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that?
|
| I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool)
| during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my
| productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running
| computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was
| obviously before CD burners were affordable.
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| I assume they are talking about the USB-enabled MD players of
| the early 2000s
| sackerhews wrote:
| Correct!
| userbinator wrote:
| _USB wasn 't around in the mid-90's_
|
| USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996, which is very much "mid 90s".
| Then again, it wasn't very popular and at 12Mbps for "full
| speed", it would not have been very fast.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think some Minidisc players had digital audio as SPDIF or
| TosLink.
|
| I'm not certain though; it's 20 years since I last used mine,
| and I wouldn't have had anything to connect it to except
| analogue audio.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| For sure they had! Had a Sanyo MD player and I certainly
| did digital audio transfer via Toslink.
| masklinn wrote:
| > How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the
| mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged
| into a serial port.
|
| Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage
| onto "data" MDs.
|
| While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the
| software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the
| poorest I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even
| the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty
| shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter
| dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.
| benbristow wrote:
| Was hoping someone would mention SonicStage. Sony forced
| you to use that awful software if you wanted to add music
| to your Walkman flash memory based MP3/4 players before
| they eventually gave up and let you just drag-and-drop as
| if it were a USB stick on newer models.
|
| That software made iTunes on Windows feel fast.
| tyingq wrote:
| The very first player, the MZ-1, had S/PDIF digital outputs:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/1mn81tN
|
| But it had an "SCMS" copy protection scheme:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Copy_protection
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| The Trinitron TVs, monitors, WalkMans, and DiscMans were
| awesome. Then, they screwed the pooch in the mid 90's. Their
| support sucked and their products started sucking.
|
| And then rootkit scandal.
|
| Now, they're a cheaper Bose.
| monkpit wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
|
| Don't forget about this! The CD rootkit thing was what really
| soured my opinion of Sony.
| wdb wrote:
| Imagine working for SonyBMG and needing to put music on their
| site and you had to avoid the copy protection lol
| willtim wrote:
| I have lots of hybrid SACDs and I cannot extract the high-res
| content for playback on computer/phone without my clunky Sony
| Blu-ray player. This is of course by design, but I do wonder if
| it also helped to kill the format before it even properly
| landed.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| > This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
|
| One day I couldn't transfer my legally, newly bought Sony Music
| CD to my Sony MD player for mobile use (on my also expensive
| car and mobile MD players) because of DRM.
|
| That's when I decided I don't care anymore. What's the point if
| after all that money Napster and the newly released iPod
| provide a better experience.
| acomjean wrote:
| I have a 5 disc cd /md shelf radio. You could copy cds to mds
| with a few button presses. I used that a lot at the turn of
| the century.
|
| I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms
| is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux
| jack.
|
| I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc
| format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD
| Data but it was terrible).
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
| jetrink wrote:
| I loved my MiniDisk player, but the arbitrary roadblocks that
| Sony put up for how you were allowed to use the device and the
| poor quality of the management software were so infuriating
| that I vowed not to give Sony another cent for ten years. (I
| stuck to that promise too, even avoiding the temptation of the
| beautiful PRS-505 e-book reader. That turned out to be a good
| decision when the first Kindle came out shortly after.)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not that the Kindle has especially been a model of embracing
| open standards and user flexibility. But at least it's
| popular.
| Tostino wrote:
| Sometimes it's just about not being stuck with a
| paperweight.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Oh yeah definitely, but the GP was specifically talking
| about the manufacturer throwing up arbitrary roadblocks.
| Tostino wrote:
| Those arbitrary roadblocks can often be the reason a
| device becomes unusable after it isn't "supported" any
| more. But yeah point taken.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| The PRS-505 supports ePub. Can't remember if that was
| after a firmware update or from the factory though. And
| even after the Sony ebook store closed down they let you
| transfer everything to Kobo. And you can still sideload
| ePubs on with Adobe Digital Editions.
|
| Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality
| soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi
| to fall back on.
| dotancohen wrote:
| You might like the Nook. I've been rooting e-ink Nooks for
| about nine years, and the latest model can install Android
| apps without root! I mostly use it for studying with
| Ankidroid.
| nextos wrote:
| Sony sadly has a long history of limiting devices in crazy
| ways. Their beautiful ebook reader was a disaster from a
| software perspective.
|
| Paradoxically, since they are a conglomerate some divisions
| have sane policies. Their mobile phone one is among the few
| manufacturers that release kernels and make it easy to self-
| compile your own AOSP.
| irontoby wrote:
| Really wishing I would have realized that before buying my
| Sony Bravia TV a few years ago. It's basically just an
| output device for my Roku, I don't want/need any of the
| built-in smart TV junk but a recent update now causes it to
| reboot just about every time I turn it on.
|
| The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least
| the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has
| hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so
| that I won't make the same mistake again.
| dustymcp wrote:
| I remember buying mine, then them saying they would'nt
| support apps on it anymore, then a month later the
| netflix app stopped working, was great timing i ended up
| getting a pirate box instead. Never again sony, never
| again.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Hmm, my PRS e-reader is still going strong and I remember
| choosing it over a kindle, specifically _because_ it had
| fewer restrictions on how I use it. It could read PDFs and
| ePubs, DRM-free, which I believe kindle couldn 't at the
| time. Not sure how the landscape has changed.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
|
| Honestly, I still did and still do love their headphones. For
| the money, Sony is probably the best bargain out there by far.
| But I'll never own another Sony product with a mircorprocessor.
| Not a phone, not a camera, not a receiver/amp, not a laptop
| computer. And I still won't buy music under the Sony label.
| Thank you Muse for signing with WB!
|
| It's a good thing that I bought my MiniDisc player in 2004,
| just a year before the rootkit fiasco. Because I loved that
| device.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Their phones used to be great. I had many Cybershot and
| Walkman branded Sony Ericsson feature phones over the years.
| The Walkman ones had good media features/speakers, and the
| Cybershots gave you good optics, a real flash, and generous
| megapixels for the time. Second only to the high end Nokias,
| until Apple started to eat everyone's lunch.
| Theodores wrote:
| It was the record companies and not Sony specifically. They had
| to play by the rules. You probably ended your relationship with
| Sony for plenty of reasons that came together in these changing
| times. Flat screens came along and you probably got out of
| gaming too. I have an uncle who once had everything Sony. But
| now, no. That TV is LG and his music setup is Apple.
| ratww wrote:
| _> It was the record companies_
|
| Sony _is_ (and already _was_ back then) a record company.
| They were a huge chunk of the group making the rules, and
| were in a much better position than any other electronics
| company to fight them.
| flir wrote:
| The Sony media tail was wagging the Sony hardware dog. That
| was the whole problem - they hamstrung their own products.
| End result was that they burned their own brand to the
| ground - there was a time when Sony hardware was cool.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| What's really sad is that the entire reason Sony bought
| the media companies was to prevent them from interfering
| with new Sony hardware innovations. The record companies
| resisted the audio CD and the studios resisted Betamax.
| Sony seems to have forgotten this after Akio Morita
| stopped running things.
| Steve0 wrote:
| Well, it wasn't "the record companies" as a whole. The
| creative nomad player was during the same period and had no
| such limitations. Sony, being a record company and a hardware
| company, limited their players in this way. And basically
| paved the way for other companies to take over the market.
|
| Sad because their walk-man was basically the standard before,
| and sony makes some good hardware.
| tw04 wrote:
| Sony's media group has been an absolute cancer to the device
| group. To this day they make some of the best hardware on the
| market. To this day I won't buy any of it beyond the
| PlayStation because of how horribly they screw it up with DRM
| and associated restrictions.
| Black101 wrote:
| > To this day I won't buy any of it beyond the PlayStation
|
| It doesn't help much if you still buy the Playstation...
| tw04 wrote:
| How does it not help much? I've probably got a total of
| less than $2k invested into PlayStations and games in my
| entire life. If I were to add up all the electronic devices
| I've purchased in my entire life that could have been Sony
| but weren't it would probably be pushing 6 figures.
| labster wrote:
| Nah, it's okay, GP will serve in the fifth column of the
| Console Wars.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you want to screw Sony, there's no better way to do it
| than to buy a Playstation and use it only as a dumb media
| player. They make money licensing games, not selling the
| console itself.
| Lammy wrote:
| > This was the end of my relationship with Sony.
|
| SONY got the bad reputation but you can thank the western
| record companies for this with their reaction to Sony's earlier
| DAT format. Check out "An Open Letter To Japan" in this 1986
| issue of "Billboard" (page 9):
| https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80...
| marban wrote:
| Spent my first money from designing Web sites on a Becker in-car
| MD player along with ~20 original MD releases. Added a 6-disc
| autochanger a year later. Class act.
| axiolite wrote:
| Sony hamstrung Minidisc by enforcing separation between audio and
| data. While the audio MDs became widely available and pretty
| cheap, the data MDs were rare and expensive. It's largely the
| same reason standalone CD recorders failed in the market, while
| PC CD-R drives were wildly successful.
|
| It was a fast and durable format. If they had come out the
| parallel-port or IDE based drives which wrote on the same audio
| MD blanks in the mid-90s, it could have displaced floppy disks
| and remained the standard until multi-gigabyte thumb drives came
| along.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Ha, I never thought about digging on old articles on this topic.
|
| - Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992
|
| - Windows 3.1 ... by Microsoft ..., released on April 6, 1992
|
| In windows 3.1 days floppies were the norm, jaz and zip were
| expensive and not so common.. minidiscs would have been so damn
| crazy cool as main storage format. So many alternative
| timelines..
| lxgr wrote:
| My thoughts exactly when I got my first MiniDisc recorder: "Why
| are we still using floppy disks instead of this?"
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't know about you, but in my area we started to see more
| MDs around the Sharp 722 days [0]. Later on Sony started to
| make them more afordable and featureful. That's quite a few
| years of void there.
|
| [0] apparently 1998 http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sharp_MD-
| MS721+MS722.html
| eliaspro wrote:
| Oh the nostalgia... I bought an 701 when it came out. I
| spent soo much time adding proper metadata to the music on
| my MDs, I feel like I could still use the device blindly
| because it is ingrained that deep into muscle memory
| although I haven't used it anymore since 22 years.
| orev wrote:
| Magneto-Optical drives were also available at that time, and
| were designed for data storage. The problem was they were very
| expensive, and needed a SCSI interface at the time when
| personal computers mostly had IDE.
|
| There really was no good solution to the interface problem
| until USB and SATA came along.
| dghughes wrote:
| There was no good solution because there was no need for it.
| People weren't downloading, creating, or storing large
| amounts of data. Most of the stuff would fit on a floppy and
| you'd still have 90% of it empty. Any games would be on
| floppies you wouldn't dream of filling 10% your 420MB hard
| drive with 10 floppies at 1.44MB each.
|
| Most people didn't even have a computer and those that did
| were not on the Internet. Even images were rare in the early
| days of the Web. Music was not a thing yet or at least not
| the ability to download it.
|
| In 1996 I think the most files I had were either email or
| Corel Draw files (of nothing really just fun).
| basilgohar wrote:
| *424MB drive
|
| I dreamed of having one back then, but not before I dreamed
| of having a 340MB one and running Stakker on it.
| lxgr wrote:
| Reminder for everyone wanting to indulge in some MiniDisc
| nostalgia: There is now a webapp that allows sending MP3s to
| WebMD recorders over USB:
|
| https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/
| gambiting wrote:
| For a second I was very confused what does a medical advice
| website have to do with MP3s ;-)
| cs2733 wrote:
| Mid 2000s I had one and loved it. Used it with a good mic to do
| the audio side of video recordings for art school projects. This
| combo produced _very_ good quality audio compared to your average
| handheld camera.
| trollied wrote:
| Another discussion from yesterday
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469891
| protomyth wrote:
| Sony's Entertainment Division probably had more to do with
| killing it than anything else. If the data drives were available
| with the music drives we probably would have seen some adoption
| given what was competing as external storage back then.
| rualca wrote:
| I agree, minidiscs were a RW media format with a 140MB capacity
| that popped up in a time where 1.44MB floppy disks where still
| extensively used and the next-day thing we're CDRs/CDRW, both
| of which made it prohibitively time-consuming to write anything
| at all and were relatively fragile and inconvenient.
| protomyth wrote:
| Remember Zip Drives and the click of death? MD would have
| been amazing especially if you could have just bought the
| same MD as the music.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I had a 25-pin parallel port version of Zip Drive. It
| worked great, but it was SLOOOOOOWWWWWWW. Burnable CDs were
| more practical not too long after & then I only used it on
| computers w/o a CD-ROM.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Funny how this format keeps coming back into some sort of
| limelight every so often ...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The minidisc is the most "aesthetic" format ever made they
| simply looked cool, and today the have a retro futuristic look.
|
| Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs are awesome but they just
| look boring.
|
| The Zip Drive also never looked as cool both the drives and the
| disks looked rather boring compared to the minidisc.
| the8472 wrote:
| Caddies aren't unique to minidiscs though, CD caddies were a
| thing too for example. Or do you mean the portable players?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:C.
| ..
| detaro wrote:
| Yeah, but they don't match the aesthetics of a miniDisc.
| The small size, more "modern" design (fully transparent
| materials, more colorful, ...) just looks more futuristic.
|
| Ironically it also helps that self-recorded MDs were the
| more common option, so the discs aren't covered in
| labels/printing. (I have one modern prerecorded MD release,
| and while the printing is neat in some ways, it doesn't
| have that futuristic side as much)
| xupybd wrote:
| Absolutely, if I could buy a reasonably priced MD player I
| would use that as my primary music source. I love the look.
|
| It's probably thanks to the matrix and the format being out
| of my reach as a teenager but oh so cool
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Yeah I don't know why but holding a semi transparent little
| plastic package with the disk visible inside thats about
| the same size a my Samsung 2TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD and even
| knowing that it only holds 140MB or so which is probably
| less than the SRAM cache on the SSD still feels like the
| future despite being nearly 30 years old at this point.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah I'd love it if someone made fake MiniDiscs out
| modern storage. Just having a cartridge would be awesome
| reassembled wrote:
| I think it's the fact that mindisc and CDs and other
| removable media had physical motion that some people find
| fascinating. As computers have become more powerful
| they've also become much less mechanical, at least at the
| human interaction scale. The physicality of human-
| computer interaction has almost been reduced to holding
| up a glass screen and either passively viewing or
| endlessly swiping, at least for many people.
| derekp7 wrote:
| It's like old movie that feature computers. The always
| show the open real tape unit moving the tape back and
| forth to indicate "working".
| mathewsanders wrote:
| Along with looking _really_ cool, I think there were some
| other benefits as well.
|
| Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that
| can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We'd go on
| road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge
| and just put it on the dash or whatever.
|
| Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time
| consuming because you couldn't just drop files and burn to
| disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when
| recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make
| more careful editorial choices in your mix.
|
| It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend
| had taken the time to make :)
| amyjess wrote:
| I could also say much the same about Magneto-Optical and
| Syquest disks. That aesthetic is just _cool_.
|
| (though I'd say that flash drives can be cool if you treat
| them as James Bond spy gear and get drives disguised as
| everyday objects or jewelry)
| Arubis wrote:
| Agreed; the minidisc nails the neotokyo vibe for me.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > The minidisc is the most "aesthetic" format ever made
|
| ... you are on to something here.
|
| (I mean, look at how many movies it shows up in :)
| TMWNN wrote:
| As Dogma1138 said, MiniDisc looks like the data format the
| future as imagined in 1970 would use. It could easily have
| appeared on _UFO_ or _2001_ or _Star Wars_ or as late as
| _Star Trek: TNG_.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > Star Trek: TNG
|
| I am convinced, if one looks hard enough a MiniDisc -has-
| to be found in some TNG episode :)
| dogma1138 wrote:
| I don't think these were ever used in a Star Trek show,
| maybe enterprise.
|
| Sony's memorystick flash storage did kinda look like the
| isolinear chips from TNG tho, back in the days where it
| was Sony or compact Flash/SmartMedia, the memorysticks
| also won on looks I swear I think that Sony was the only
| company that actually cared about how things looked in
| the 90's and early 2000's until Apple under Steve Jobs
| went through the whole look and feel first phase.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > maybe enterprise.
|
| Good call. That'd fit better with the "timeline", in that
| retro-futuristic way :)
| gambiting wrote:
| I think Mini Disc's ultimate and final evolution -
| Playstation Portable's UMDs - has inherited that trait. Yes
| they are slow, they are fragile, but _damn_ it was cool to
| have games ship on those tiny discs that actually worked in a
| portable console.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Surely vinyl is the most aesthetic format! But I grant that
| MiniDisc is the prettiest and coolest portable format ever.
| amelius wrote:
| I wish there were more posts about tape backup systems, and see
| some startup disrupt the market. Tape might seem slow to some
| people, but it's perfect for backup except the drives are too
| expensive right now.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Yeah, there is a sharp divide where you can get a LTO-3 drive
| like Ultrium 920 for as little as $40 used while LTO-5 (first
| to support LTFS) and newer quickly go into hundreds and
| thousands of dollars. I actually considered getting an older
| one but was concerned about continued availability of media.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| You can get the media, but tape software for windows is a
| nightmare. Windows server 2019 doesn't support tape without
| hideously expensive 3rd party software or unuseable open
| source backup "solutions" that presume you have fifty boxes
| to manage.
|
| Linux it works ok though.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Yes, that was my other concern, especially looking at
| long term storage - would I still find drivers for it (or
| the SCSI controllers) 10 years down the line. And even
| Linux has been purging unused/unmaintained drivers
| lately. As much as I liked the prospect of a little
| retro-computing side-project I ended up just burning a
| dozen BD-XL discs instead. Wouldn't really work for large
| volumes of data but this was just a personal backup.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| I was looking at LTO8 as a backup solution a single 30TB tape
| costs like PS90 but the drives cost around PS3000.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Huh, I just finished watching a youtube video on MiniDisc's rise
| and fall, with some twists along the way (featuring DAT, DCC, CD
| and eventually the iPod)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY
|
| What I didn't know is that it has had a bit of a resurgence in a
| niche of retro enthusiasts, with limited indie hip-
| hop/waporwave/future funk releases as blank media continue to be
| made by Sony.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Funny you mention DCC, I always though it to be superior over
| DAT as a DCC-player could operate audio cassette but I think
| their sales even dwarfed compared to DAT.
| cronix wrote:
| I was just about to post that video. It popped up in my feed
| the other day and was really good! I still have a minidisc
| player somewhere.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| Techmoan has quite the collection of MiniDisc players and some
| really interesting videos about them
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA
| neals wrote:
| Thanks for that link. Such a nostalgic trip through the '90s.
| rntksi wrote:
| Thanks for the link. The video was pretty informative.
|
| I'm not from the US, had a different experience. We went from
| tape to CDs pretty quickly, and had some niche MDs market.
| hypnoscripto wrote:
| Is this what Gamecube used?
| rijoja wrote:
| no
| rijoja wrote:
| What is with the downvotes? My answer is correct.
| hinoki wrote:
| GameCube used a mini DVD, but broke with the standard by using
| constant angular velocity instead of constant linear velocity.
| So the drive always spun at the same rpm, where regular DVDs
| spin slower the closer they read head is to the centre. This
| made them cheaper to make, and impossible to copy with a
| regular DVD burner.
| ytch wrote:
| I am doubt will blu-ray fall into the same problem.
|
| Producers add a lot limits for copy-protect (HDCP and others on
| UHD-BD). But will the popularity/convenience of streaming repeat
| how USB stick/MP3 replace MiniDisc?
| k__ wrote:
| Well, you can still stream for free online.
| danieldk wrote:
| I think convenience and price are the largest factors. Netflix
| costs less than a Blu-Ray for 'all you can eat' and you do not
| have to think about logistics (find/purchase a disk).
|
| Blu-rays do have copy protection, but AFAIK MakeMKV rips most
| Blu-rays without any issues.
| prvc wrote:
| I had no idea MDs could be used for general data storage. Has
| anyone tried this format?
| salamandersauce wrote:
| LGR has a YouTube video showing this drive off and it's use in
| detail. Seems kinda finicky.
| rhacker wrote:
| It's funny as I was growing up every few years there'd be tons of
| people ready to call it on the next betamax. It turns out ALL of
| it was. And it turns out that even owning a device that stores
| data at all is deprecated. Except for us devs (for now).
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