DVDs still exist. DVD players still exist.
so do dvd burners
I feel sad Radio Shack ran out of business bc now you have to be at least 30 years old to know you can still acquire rippers for $10 to rip/burn dvds, cds, and games. I still use my first Xbox and my latest PS5 as DVD players. The most expensive part is storage atp.
Dont lose hope yet. Im (barely) under 30 and have one of those.
Physical mediums aren’t gone - they are just all HDD and SSD now.
I switched from CDs to HDDs two decades ago. HDDs are still great as physical long-term storage.
Your digital is just HDDs and SSDs in someone else’s computers.I’ve still got my tapes.
This weird in context of the show. Skips is the oldest, as an immortal, and would outlive the rest of them. Labeling him as the newest media is off. It’d be more accurate if it were depicted as daguerotype outliving digital.
That one pierces the heart 😭
Where’s MiniDisk?
*MiniDisc.
UMD you mean, i don’t think MiniDisk were ever used to distribute games or even general software.
Not sure it was even used to distribute music. Was decent for copying a CD to it though…
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.
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.
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.
And Qobuz
deleted by creator
Then become gog costumer number one, you could say we pay with our wallets and for the change, Gog is right there.
but honestly, I like valve enough, me, personally, not to worry that much.
Steam seems to be one of the very few services (perhaps even the only one I know of) that hasn’t transformed its product by following the trend of enshittification. I have many games on Steam, purchased years and years ago, many of which are no longer available, but I can still download and play, having purchased them back then.
I really appreciate Steam, but from what I read every day, I don’t think “forever” exists, especially online. If we think of it in terms of “everything’s in the cloud,” well, the cloud costs money, so unless they somehow dispose of data, I don’t know if a company can actually keep every single piece of data “forever” while maintaining a good price and not losing out or burdening consumers.
The same goes for physical copies: I could lose them, break them, my house burn down, and I’d lose everything, whereas if they were in the cloud, I wouldn’t have any problems. The point is that consumers should be allowed, where possible, to export what they’ve purchased. Honestly, I think that anyone who bought movies or other content on some platform and then years later discovered that the company had removed them and they could no longer use them (or worse, the same content was on another paid platform) would honestly bother me.
You’re forgetting the two most important words:
I can still download and play
… so far.
all of those are digital
Cassette.
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:
modulated digital by same definition
They’re actually all analog, because they all get processed by your senses, which are analog.
But your senses are electrical impulses, which would be digital.
What exactly do you think analog signals are?
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.
I don’t have a source, but I do believe I’ve already seen articles about multiple studios reducing their bluray releases. I think there was one studio which wanted to completely stop all of them even.
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.
Cartridge is alive and well in the Nintendo ecosystem.
Many are just Game Key Cards.
Which are like Carts, but they need to download digitally. The worst of both worlds :D
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.
Alive, but well?
Nintendo has its own slew of ethical issues.
Backups can always use all of these. Doesn’t matter how scrappy it is a couple of hard drives with a parity in running true as/freenas or just Debian with Mergerfs will last you a lot of years.
Cassettes made a bit of a resurgence recently for audio cassettes though I would never want to return to those days for games.
You don’t have to play their game just wait it out Sony and Xbox aren’t doing so hot financially ATM.
Yup, been running my
plexjellyfin server for like 15 years on Ubuntu server off of an 80gb mechanical boot disk.10TB RAID II storage tho
I still have a 2008 2tbb harddrive from a western digital external in my stack. Mad how long they can last when you win the lottery
don’t worry, it will vanish soon and everything will be “in the clouds”
aren’t you excited?
Brother, I have those 40tb raid arrays at home. None of this crap will affect me. Oh and for games I don’t play those. But if I did I would stop buying Sony crap.
There are open-source PC games, completely free, and they are awesome.
Do you mind sharing some of your favourites?
Mindustry, Friday Night Funkin’, Xonortic, Luanti(former minetest), doom
There is an awesome list too which has a ton of stuff that would take me ages to list https://github.com/michelpereira/awesome-open-source-games
OpenTTD for transportation management is a favorite of mine.
Neat!
Wouldn’t that still be digital though? Just not on your computer and not in your direct control?
digital is pure semantics here, we are talking about control
Meanwhile, vinyl is minding his 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
Just make a larger record, easy.
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.
You’re going to have forearms like tree trunks by the time you’re done.
cheap
🗿
Just need a few to backup a few terabytes of data
Techmoan has entered the chat
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.
