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  1. Hi ,this is my first post here so hope its in the right place.....when i burn a blu ray or hi def video (example a 2.5 gig movie ) i burn them on a 8.5 gig blank disc through a normal dvd burner,i have been thinking of buying a blu ray burner but not sure if the quality will be any better,what do you think ?
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  2. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    Quality has nothing do do with the size of the media,you can put the same video on a flash drive and it will have the same quality,the difference is that a blu-ray disc can hold 23.3 gb of video or data where as a dual layer disc can only hold 7.9 gb.
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  3. i was wondering if that was the case ,so i can save my money,thankyou
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    Saving money? Not if you just count the cost of the media.

    In the US, Verbatim brand DL +R discs, (which are just about the only widely available, reliable DL DVD's) are about $1.02 a disc from Amazon. Verbatim brand single layer Blu-ray (HTL) are about .92¢, so a bit cheaper, with nearly three times the room.

    Since you haven't jumped into Blu-ray burning yet, you will certainly save money by not investing in a Blu-ray burner. And at this point in the game, I'm wondering if anyone should. Hard drives should work better for storage of your media collection, and flash drives work well enough for the occasional use on a portable device or straight into a TV with a USB port. Blu-ray drives may eventually only have relevance as rippers for those movies you choose to get on a disc.
    Last edited by Kerry56; 13th Aug 2014 at 20:49. Reason: corrected basic multiplication error! good grief
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  5. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    I prefer using blu-ray discs since i can put a seasons worth(22) of a tv show and then when i feel like it i can pop it in my blu-ray player and watch it.
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    Originally Posted by Kerry56 View Post
    Since you haven't jumped into Blu-ray burning yet, you will certainly save money by not investing in a Blu-ray burner. And at this point in the game, I'm wondering if anyone should. Hard drives should work better for storage of your media collection, and flash drives work well enough for the occasional use on a portable device or straight into a TV with a USB port.
    They SHOULD work better, but they don't. Why?

    1) Hard drives fail. They have moving parts. Eventually they will simply fail. So will burnable media but if I lose one disc, it doesn't kill my whole movie collection like a catastrophic hard drive failure can.
    2) NOBODY makes backups. Nobody. I work in IT for a living and even the people I work with who should know better don't make backups of their media drives. Go to #1 above on a disk failure - catastrophic loss of everything.

    If someone out there actually does make backups or has some kind of RAID drive, then good for you for being the exception to the rule. But do note that while unlikely, it IS possible for home RAID arrays to suffer a catastrophic loss of more drives at once than the RAID can tolerate losing. The more discs you have the less likely this is, but it's not impossible, especially if your drives all have the same manufacture date. I read about a home user with a 3 disc RAID system who lost his first drive, plugged in a replacement and had the missing info rebuilding when the system suffered a loss of another disc. ALL data was lost. The only thing that saved him was a few weeks earlier he did a "what the heck, I'll test it" backup of his stuff to a cloud storage system and he was able to recover everything he backed up to the cloud, losing only a small amount of stuff put on the array since that backup. Yes burnable discs like BDs, DVDs can fail too. People just have to decide what their tolerance of risk is and make whatever decisions work for them. Some people may feel that hard drives work best, but without backups eventually they'll die too.
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    My point was not to ignore the necessity of backing up your media files, but rather the way one should do it. Since I jumped into Blu-ray burning back in 2008, I've been backing up originals and compressed files on Blu-ray discs for some time, as well as putting them on hard drives. But at this point in time, I'm not convinced that someone should invest in Blu-ray burning as a primary means of video storage. If you want to back up to multiple hard drives, this may be a better solution.

    Blu-ray burning has several pitfalls, the primary one being the unpredictability of the media. There are a few mid codes that have been proved to be relatively reliable over the last six years, but you can get an occasional bad disc even from known good brands. And DL Blu-ray is just a crapshoot other than the very expensive Panasonic made discs. Another problem with BD discs is proper storage, which takes a fair amount of room. I'm basically preaching to the choir in here, since you guys know all this stuff, but newcomers to the process can trip up on these things very easily, and most won't know where to research it even if they are so inclined.

    And this doesn't touch the main reason people are less inclined to back up to discs---convenience. Transferring files through home networks, using hard drive docks, or external drives of various kinds is making use of optical discs irrelevant. On most forums I frequent, burning discs is a quaint holdover from another age.
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  8. I don't see any real disagreement here. I for one have been moving away from *playback* of Blu-Rays simply for the convenience of not having to handle discs. I rip everything (except captures, of course) and only have to navigate to one of the hard drives on my HTPC to play anything.

    Point taken though about backups. Too few people do it conscientiously. Learned my lesson some years back (pre-BluRay), and some of those lost files have proved to be irreplaceable. Now all my media files are backed up on external 4 TB USB3 drives, which are only powered on to transfer files. In addition, I still burn backups to BD25, though I wonder sometimes if it's not just force of habit.
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  9. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    When i do blu-ray burns i always verify after and use verbatim,if my backup discs ever fail i always have the original,after 5 years of blu-ray backup none of the verified have gone bad,same with dvd and cds after 15 years,can't say much for flash drive and hdd reliability after that amount of time.
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