Hardware Have you ever owned a blu ray burner? Do you use it if so.

[FAST6191]

In discussions of how dead is physical media then there are various things contemplated. One of them for me is how often is it written by mere mortals.

It occurred then that despite being all I am and very much still being active within computing I have never knowingly seen a blu ray burner, let alone used one.

A little while back I also visited a car garage attached to a dealer for what some might consider luxury cars (luxury leather, not so much luxury engineering underneath it all) and spun them off a bunch of audio system test CDs (not the first time I have burned off a CD but first in a while, and most of those others were for quiz nights or a friend that suffered the indignity of no line in by default and needing to take it to the dealer to liven up the aux port on the back of very custom CD player -- didn't have any nice FM rebroadcasters worth a damn in stock). For said nominally luxury cars it turns out most current models have an extensive media player/car control console (which is a piece of junk but I expected that) that does not include a CD player, and the handful of tracks I chucked on a test USB were actually more useful this last however long. At least until new models of said media players decided not to play .WAV format music.

 

[Jayro]

I wanna get one, so I can copy my Blu-ray movies I've bought with minimal re-coding. Then I can leave my originals intact. I will always keep an optical drive on my current computer, because I rip CDs and movies all the time. Sometimes a friend needs a new CD for their car. Or I'll burn a new MP3 CD for my own car. I just hate how expensive the Blu-ray burners are hovering around $80 still. The media isn't cheap either, even the 25GB single-layer ones cost a lot. :/

 

[Ryccardo]

No, I was gifted a ($ony) laptop (more expensive than Apple, poor quality, and worse than nonexistant support but that's for another discussion) for christmas 2007 with BD-ROM (read only) but never used it either; even if it could record I doubt I ever would have due to the cost of the discs compared to 50 packs of single layer DVDs (which aren't so big if stored in their original packaging and finding a working drive 20 years later won't be difficult)*

* I actually should start making backups to optical discs again - can't say I ever got burned (heee) by using an HDD but had a few close calls, and deleting files from a non-packet-writing disc isn't something you can do accidentally

Then in 2017 I bought a PS3 the day after a softmod was announced: since then I have bought exactly one commercial BD movie (which I watched for maybe 2 minutes to test the drive) and one BD game I already own the digital version of - both used