Death to Blu-ray
Thrift store shelves are emptying, and nobody’s coming to restock them. Here’s why the next few months matter more than the last two decades did for blu-ray.
Also this week:
Sony’s reviving the Cinerama Dome, Swaybox Studios workers won one of the largest animation union drives in recent history, Atari signed a 10-film deal with Universal, and a DJI clone company pulled its lookalike camera days after FCC come knocking.
Render Reel
A UK videographer built a free app that tells you when you can wipe memory card. Stow copies a card to two drives simultaneously, then verifies every byte on both destinations against the original. This is something macOS and Windows could never actually do on their own. It’s free and you don’t need an account. Worth a look.
Sony launches the FX5. A full-frame cinema camera with 15+ stops of dynamic range. First, the FX series supports Open Gate shooting and in-camera X-OCN recording, plus three base ISOs and AI-powered autofocus using human pose estimation. 5K at 60fps, 4K at 120fps. It costs €6,000 with the new XLR handle unit and officially ships in August.
Nvidia built AI tool that detects AI video with 92% accuracy. Footage compressed to 50% drops accuracy to 82% accuracy, which is exactly the compression level most footage you watch online is at. The Synthetic Video Detector processes 1080p in 22 milliseconds using two Meta vision transformers, and Nvidia’s already working with Wowza to bring it into live broadcast.
Sony to bring Cinerama Dome and Hollywood Arclight back from dead. The Culver City studio is in talks to lease the extinct venue, with Sony-owned Alamo Drafthouse likely operating it. The Dome, built in 1963 is the only concrete geodesic dome on Earth but has sat dark since Decurion’s 2020 bankruptcy. Amazon and AMC both passed before, but this year’s box office ( strongest since 2019) appears to have changed Sony’s math.
Swaybox Studios workers in Louisiana voted to unionize with IATSE, 71.4% in favour. 136 workers in favour across animation, and VFX which is one of the largest organising wins in recent film history. The stop-motion studio is currently making a $90 million Warner Bros. Animation feature.
Now is the best time to start collecting Blu-rays and the reason has nothing to do with nostalgia.
That’s the argument Josh Nichols makes in a piece on Longplay Tech worth reading in full.
His starting number should make you pause.
4K Blu-ray sales in the US rose 12% in 2025 which is far from a rounding error. It’s the same shape vinyl took a decade into its own supposed extinction, before the pivot from dollar-bin curiosity to boutique $30-40 pressings.
Nichols argues physical media isn’t disappearing at all. There are hosts of people who actually want to own something, and the pricing hasn’t quite made sense yett.
The tech case laid out is more concrete than most nostalgia arguments. Streaming delivers 4K at roughly 15–25 Mbps but a standard Blu-ray runs 25–35 Mbps.
A 4K UHD disc can easily clear 100 Mbps. And that gap is the difference between a carefully graded dark scene and a muddy smear of artifacts.
Over 150 titles vanished from Netflix in January 2026 alone but your blu-ray disc won’t care that a licensing deal expired. Nothing vanishes from your shelf unless you want it to.
The argument for acting now rather than later, is supply.
Two decades of Blu-ray and DVD collections are flooding thrift stores and resale sites right now and none of it gets restocked. Once the cheap copies sell out, that’s it unless a studio for some reason wants to run a reprint.
The problem is this:
The titles popular enough to justify a studio reprint, get premium 4K remasters at premium prices, and everything else simply stops existing in physical form at all.
It’s the same arc vinyl followed with dollar-bin records at thrift stores throughout the 2000s, then a slow climb back to “cool” through the mid-2010s.
New records now routinely run $25–40.
Nichols’ contention is that Blu-ray is sitting at that exact hinge point right now. The window he describes is open but might not be for very long.
Worth reading the full piece for his full buying guide.
Atari signs deal with Universal to develop 10 classic games into films. Titles include Asteroids, Breakout, Pong, and more, aimed at big-scale action-adventure. First up’s an original spec script from Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe, produced by Entertainment 360. Producer Guymon Casady: “the best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest.”
A director re-cut his film after Cannes reviews tore into its CGI, and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever.
Director Na Hong-jin re-cut his sci-fi epic Hope after Cannes reviews destroyed CGI creature work and the new version just became South Korea’s fastest-grossing film ever. The changes were small, but the ticket sales weren’t: 2.6 million in five days. A critic at IndieWire saw both cuts and found the second act now “played from beginning to end like one of the best action films in years.” Neon releases it in North America September 10.
A DJI clone company pulls Osmo Pocket lookalike after the FCC came knocking. Xtra stopped preorders for the Muse 2 Pro and started issuing refunds days after the FCC issued bans targeting companies selling undisclosed DJ copycats. The company won’t say where its tech actually came from. Hmmmm…
This week we’re watching:
A 1958 Douglas DC-6B, back on American soil for the first time in nearly 70 years, filmed this year from the glass nose of a WWII-era A26 bomber on a Bolex H16 loaded with Kodak Vision3.
Modern New York shot through 1950s glass, shrunk down to the exact grain and colour of the era the plane came from.
The iPhone footage they also shot alongside is worth seeing too.
Retail Therapy: The POV camera that lets you see what you’re shooting
The VibeLens MusicCam Pro straps a 4K camera to your head and streams live preview to your phone, finally solving the “point and pray” problem every action cam has had since GoPro.
55g, IP68, 32GB onboard. For the shooter who’s done guessing.
Available at vibelens.net.