Blogs Is it time to bin your optical drive?

I have both Netflix and HuluPlus accounts and while my internet is supposed to be unlimited, my bandwidth does get throttled for the rest of the month once I reach a certain threshold. At that point, I might as well give up streaming a movie at any reasonable quality. So in order to be able to watch more movies/shows, I set the quality at lower settings to get more views without reaching my cap. I live in a very rural area so access to uncapped/unthrottled Cable Provider/Fiber Optic internet is not an option. Besides, if I want to really want to watch a movie in High-Def, I buy the Blu-Ray Disc and play it on my TV, not on my PC.

I also enjoy playing older games that require a disc in the drive to play. Most probably have CD cracks available somewhere on the net, but I have enough junk on my computer as is without having to download more files from the hard media to play it.

 

You have a point with this article. I thought about my optical drive and what I use it for, and I cant think of anything in recent memory except install windows. I never knew about that tool so I will give it a go when my new SSD arrives, and also give it a go at work.
One other thing though, I never buy a new optical drive when I get a new PC, I just reuse my old one since there is nothing wrong with it and you cant really get many designs of optical drives. I think I am on my 4th PC now with the same drive, Although when I get a mobo without an IDE connection, I might have trouble reusing it.

 

Got a BR drive at Christmas, having only used an external DVD drive for a year or two.

Didn't use it much, but when I did want to (install games I had on DVD, rip a CD etc) using the external was painful, and I'm very pleased I chose to get a drive (it being BR is a bonus )

 

These are still cheap. I'm talking large 3way stereo speakers along the lines of a pair of Visaton Classic 200 or Dynaudio Excite X36. You know, speakers that are made for listening to music primarily in your big livingroom.

 

Right so I need to spend 2 grand on a set of speakers in order to be able to pick up on the discrepancies caused by audio compression.

 

Easy, get a IDE to sata converter or you could even splash out on a new cutting edge sata CD/DVD drive like I did a few years ago and that's been in my last two builds and I have no intention of ditching it

 

I built a new computer last month and didn't even bother to buy an optical drive and so it doesn't have one.
USB thumb drives can do everything nowadays.

 

i haven't had one for all the five years I've been building comps, they are useless I hate CDs.

 

My Optical drive is going nowhere anytime soon.

I still buy the majority of my music on CD as quite frankly I enjoy having something physical in return for my money.

In the back of my mind I don't like the idea of having all of my music/media tied into a service that could possibly disappear or prevent me from accessing the very media I paid for (however unlikely).

I can see the benefits to buying digitally but for all of the albums I have purchased recently (bar one) it was cheaper (or at least the same price) to get the CD. If I want to play it in my car I just rip it in lossless and stick it on a USB stick pen.

 

I think it's safe to say optical disks today are pretty equivalent to floppy disks about the time Apple stopped bothering to include them in their machines. They've done the same with optical disks now in case you missed it; quickly scanning the thread I was a bit surprised to find no mention of the new DVD-less iMacs.

Of course, Apple are motivated here by their vested interest in getting people to consume as much as possible in their own online channels, but still... it's sending a message to the mainstream that those scratched clunky noisy disk things are a thing of the past.

I don't have a CD player, but I still buy CDs for immediate ripping from time to time (especially if it's directly from artists at gigs; it's nice to have both a physical memento and the feeling your money went straight into their pocket). To varying degrees most of us will at least continue to have something around that they can rip the odd disk with for a while, but the use is definitely fading.

 

I like my DVD Drive. It gives me something to play with whilst waiting for games to download from steam.

I like having a button to press.

 

Why would I bin it? It works just fine and comes in handy from time to time.

 

I'll just drop this technical analysis on why CD Audio is more than enough for essentially everyone in: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

So no, your vinyl as a medium is nothing impressive: they just made the original vinyl master copy have a nicer sound than your CD. This is simply because the average idiot with a CD has a terrible audio setup (with bass boost at max) and they have to account for that when mastering for CDs, and now MP3s.

This is much the same reason for why SACDs sound better than CDs even when downsampled to CD quality (there was a blind test conducted by engineers a while ago with several hundred people and the randomly inserted 44.1kHz/16bit sections into an 88.2kHz/24bit song, the results were a 49% success rate, i.e, statistically no better than blind guesswork).

In fact, one could argue that Vinyl has worse sound quality from being damaged by the playback device over time compared to digital media.

This goes back to my original point: Give us well-mastered tracks ffs! Or a choice at the very least: not everyone has a shitty laptop speaker setup!

 

I dont use it much but for blu-rays and the old dvds I have it is great.

Not having one just cuts your opportunity to buy films cheap from the supermarket, to borrow DVDs or music from your friends, play old games without having to buy them again or install windows without having to buy something extra. Most of what you suggested requires some tech competence too but I will assume you are directly targeting bit users

I really dont understand your hatred - they aren't great, but its doing you no harm just having it sit in your computer until you need it.

 

I have an external drive, only used it once when installing Windows.

 

NO. I totally disagree for two points.

1) Not everyone has what I would consider to be a decent internet connection. Mine can only get 2 or 3 Mbps on a good day and it drops out completely for a minute or two a couple of times a week. Not to mention the dropouts caused by high winds on a regular basis. When will we get BT Infinity? No idea, "Eventually" says BT.

2) The quality of streamed or downloaded 1080p movies is terrible compared to BluRays simply due to the poor compression. A 50GB BluRay vs a 2 or 3 GB download. No comparison at all. You probably don't notice the difference on a small laptop screen but it slaps you in the face on anything larger than 30" or so. Cartoons are fine because they are easily compressible but action films are a big problem.

Downloads also take up a vast amount of bandwidth and hard drive space. I would rather have BluRays on a £20 shelf from IKEA than downloads on a £50-70 hard drive.

I also have the option of selling my collection or letting a friend borrow something. Try doing that for something you've bought from iTunes.

However. I do agree with you about downloading music and games. All of mine are now downloads. They don't take up much room and there is no difference in quality.

 

Nah, not yet

 

I haven't had optical drives in my primary machines for at least 6 years. I still have one in my server, for ripping and the occasional burn for some legacy machine os that I can't install from usb... but I just got rid of that last machine that is not usb bootable so that won't even be needed anymore.
Optical has pretty much been dead for me for quite a long time.
A system I thought of is have kiosks in shops for software, and uncompressed movies and music. Use the kiosk to select what you want, pay, plug in your usb stick and it will copy it on. Or, even if that is too frightenign for publishers, just have it like a vending machine that sptits out a read only usb flash rom stick with whatever content on it. DIE optical DIE!

 

Thanks for the link btw, it'll be much easier for me to throw that at people rather than try to explain Nyquist's Sampling Theorem by myself.

I think Apple has been trying to work on this with their "Mastered for iTunes" program - encouraging recording engineers to not brickwall every single record they go through.

 

The so called "next gen" consoles running @ 4K it will be just UPSCALING, just like they did with PS3 (all games are 720p MAX), then the GPU on console just perform UPSCALING. Believe me, the same crap will happen with PS4. The games will be 1080p, then it will UPSCALING to *fake* 4K ! Don't be fooled, because running real 4K now is costly and no way a mere $399 console will do that!