New Laptop: DVD Or Blu-ray

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One of the build options for a laptop I’m looking at buying is DVD vs Blu-Ray. I’ve never used Blue-ray before, so is there some compelling reason, as a Linux guy, to want to get Blu-ray?

37 thoughts on - New Laptop: DVD Or Blu-ray

  • I wouldn’t outfit a computer with blu-ray

    (Sent from iPhone, so please accept my apologies in advance for any spelling or grammatical errors.)

  • Blu-Ray. I’ve never used Blue-ray before, so is there some compelling reason, as a Linux guy, to want to get Blu-ray?
    First of all, is this going to be your desktop or a server? If the later, can’t see the point for blueray. One of the compelling reasons against is that only movies use it. Second, it has dmr crap in it that might require binary only spyware to work. Third, they behave like Android phones in that they keep pushing new releases but no firmware updates for older devices; you have to keep on buying new devices which only change from old one by having brand new spyware. If I were to read in my blueray movies – legal to do FYI – I would do so somewhere else or find external drive that can read it.

    On the positive side, blueray sounds cooler than DVD.

  • W dniu 20.08.2015 o 13:26, Mauricio Tavares pisze:

    I used to use Blu-Ray as backup device.

  • Personal preference. Who uses blu ray? Who uses DVDs?

    Anyway.

    (Sent from iPhone, so please accept my apologies in advance for any spelling or grammatical errors.)

  • Despite my whimsical reply above, there are some good reasons I wouldn’t do it. (And the person was posting from a phone, so if they dislike typing on them as much as I do, I can easily understand the brevity of the answer.)
    :)

    Anyway, I wouldn’t use a blu-ray for storage because flash storage can give you as much space, more cheaply, and far faster. That is, it’s going to be much faster writing to a flash drive or USB connected drive than to a blu-ray disk. As for using for multimeida, the media itself is still expensive, and I
    remember the last time I looked into this, it was still problematic to play it on many versions of Linux. The codecs used to play them probably aren’t completely legal in the US (though that’s just my guess, no research–I
    just assume that content producers continue to bribe our politicians here).

    The only reason I could see to do it would be to watch movies on blu-ray—see above, last time I checked (which was probably over a year ago) it was non-trivial whereas it is pretty trivial to watch DVDs on Linux now.

  • In that case, the concern about drm is null and void. That said, how did that work out for you? I thought about doing that because of the sheer capacity but my experience using DL DVDs for backup was not as good as the original claims. Retention was not good after a year or so, which led me to use hard drives instead with a slow rotation policy and keeping hardware to read it (poor man’s futureproofing).

  • W dniu 20.08.2015 o 13:52, Mauricio Tavares pisze:

    Well, retention was not an issue in my case (that were monthly backups, we didn’t need to keep old backups). But eventually capacity became a problem. Recently we have switched to RDX.

  • I bought a BluRay for my Thinkpad and my Desktop.

    Very rarely use them, but on occassion I do.

    When I use them, I use them to rip movies via MakeMKV but honestly that is the only BluRay use they ever get. And mostly the desktop, the laptop doesn’t have the memory to encode hi def in reasonable amount of time.

    Unless you want to rip movies, which may violate certain laws in certain geographical locations, there’s not any point that I can see.

  • Which RDX? This:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX

    ?

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Get neither: nowadays an optical reader is just a relic of the past, making your laptop heavier and reducing (ever so slightly) your battery life.

    Stefan

  • I do have BD, external though (USB; Buffalo BRXL-PC6U2 which I would highly recommend). I use it whenever I need to read [often somebody’s else BD] or write big chunk of data onto something [very convenient dimentions if you need to send it elsewhere]. I used it to make image of Windows system my laptop came with (after I added all I may need on Windows), so I
    can restore my laptop from that BD. I doubt I will ever need that, as I
    wiped the system in favor of FreeBSD (which is single system on my laptop). I do not use BDs for backups though, I backup everything, including laptops to bacula backup server.

    Just my $0.02.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • How much memory do you think would be needed to do that?

    Congratulations, Alice. You’re the sole nerd here to mention that this was possible. I’ve never ripped a flick before, but I could imagine doing it, so it’s good to know it can be done with Linux.

    I’m suprised no one yet has mentioned authoring movies. Maybe the software to do this isn’t available for Linux???

  • An uncompressed 4:2:0 frame of 2K video takes about 2.5 MiB of RAM. If you represent it as 4:4:4 during recompression instead, it’s 6 MiB. An H.264 encoder might need a dozen or so frames in RAM at a time to do the inter-frame compression, so you’re talking about something like 30-100 MiB of RAM.

    Some encoders are inefficient, and grab a gig or so of RAM, but I expect that’s only because they can get away with it these days.

    It’s possible to be much more efficient, evidenced by the fact that so many smartphones and digital cameras have H.264 encoders in them. You don’t imagine they have a gig of RAM sitting around just for the H.264 encoder, do you?

    The main thing you need for fast video encoding is one of:

    a) multiple fast general-purpose CPU cores
    b) lots of GPU pipelines, or
    c) a dedicated hardware ASIC (or equivalent in die space on a SoC)

    It’s all down to processing power, not RAM.

    Video encoding is a big reason that the Intel Core i7 made such a big splash about 5 years ago. It’s one of the few desktop applications that can make effective use all those fast cores. GPU encoding has also made great strides recently.

  • I use Openshot Video Editor on a weekly basis to cut and edit my m/c-instructoring clips and then post to Youtube. ;-)
    I’ve more or less abandoned Pinnacle since I discovered Openshot. The encoding stuff is so much faster on CentOS than Windows…

  • Sorin, authoring a movie usually refers to actually creating a disc (e.g. DVD/Blu-Ray with chapter marks and what not). It’s the step that comes after you’ve shot and edited the movie, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_authoring. As far as I know K3B, Bombone DVD and DeVede are capable of authoring DVDs. K3B (version dependent)
    should even be able to create Blu-Ray discs so that they are playable on standalone players.

    Kind Regards Chris

  • [I guess were doing top-posting on this sub-thread. Okay, why fight it??]

    Chris, I didn’t know that either. In fact, Sorin answered the question I was thinking of when I posted it. It’s really counter-intuitive, even misleading, that “authoring” means burning the DVD… or maybe it means that in the context of DVDs, but means something else in the context of film/video production. (But then in that latter context, “producing”
    means “supplying or arranging the funding for”, which is also misleading.) When someone says they authored a book, to me that doesn’t mean they only printed it, bound it, and put a cover on it. Well, it’s not something worth pounding to death. People had to have been happier before there was language. :)

  • *snip*

    Fair enough, but the CPU on that thing is only a dual core, so it really is academic. Point is the encoding on it is slow, especially when using WebM. Desktop is the place to do it for me, so that really is the only place I benefit from the Bluray drive.

  • Ken, I’m sorry, I had no intention of fighting anyone. I was simply under the impression that you might have actually referred to DVD authoring
    (creation of the disc, chapters, burning etc,but I understand where you are coming from. I completely agree that the terms interpretation completely depends on the used context. I really did not have any intention of stirring up something. I thought there might have been some confusion and I
    might be able to help resolve the confusion. All is good now ^_^.

    Wish everybody a nice weekend Chris

  • not the burning, but the mastering process that consists of turning plain video file(s) into DVD or BluRay format, with menus and stuff, that’s whats referred to as Authoring. Maybe it should be called Publishing, or something, I dunno… I prefer to call it Mastering.

  • Why do you believe that there *isn’t* a LaTeX macro for Bluray mastering?

    There’s also an Emacs mode and a Perl CPAN module for it.

  • For 6, at least, it’s in the nux-desktop repo, I don’t know about the others.

    BTW, are you familiar with pkgs.org? (That’s what I used to get the information, just go to pkgs.org, type openshot in the search box and it gives distributions with a package for it.

  • Thanks.

    No. Never used it before. Did look at another similar service but could see only Fedora and Mandrake? versions.

    Thanks again.