Welcome to !bluray, everyone! Infomational thread

You're free to talk about Blu-ray entertainment releases, using the discs for making back-ups or any other discussions about Blu-ray media in general.

If you got more information to add to this thread, feel free to DM me or reply to this thread to have it added.

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Blu-ray discs are the successor to DVD discs and the competitor of the former HD DVD format. The main variants of the Blu-ray discs are capable of storing 25 GB (single layered), 50-66GB (dual layered), or 100-128GB (BDXL). They are commonly used for home releases of films and shows (along with the still popular DVD format), or used for long-term archival through the use of M-DISCs. Blu-ray players are required to play these discs, although video game consoles (the PlayStation 3, the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, the Xbox Series X|S and the PlayStation 5) nowadays have Blu-ray player functionality built-in. Discs are still capable of region-locking like DVDs but with simplified regions (A, B, C). Although most discs (especially 4K Ultra HD variants) have relaxed on region-locking the content.

M-DISCs are discs (both DVD and Blu-ray) capable of being written once and kept in storage for a longer period of time, making them ideal for long-term data storage for back-ups of important data.

Blu-ray films are currently released in two main formats: regular Blu-ray films with usually a transparent light or deep blue case, or 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs with a usually black case. A handy resource to get to know more about technical information of films, is https://www.blu-ray.com/

4K Ultra HD discs tend to contain video material with a resolution of 3840x2160 (either native, or upscaled to said format from a lower resolution master) and can contain a higher colour bit depth compared to regular 720p or 1080p standard Blu-ray discs. The Ultra HD Premium standard has specific requirements regarding the actual disc consumers do receive, along with the master (the original source) of the material prior to putting it onto a Blu-ray disc.

Colour depth as described before, is classified in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range), and HDR (High Dynamic Range). Common standards of HDR are HDR10 (the most common variant), HDR10+ (using dynamic metadata for adjusting), Dolby Vision (using dynamic metadata for adusting; although licensed as some Blu-ray players or TV sets can not display them such as Samsung TVs) and HLG (backward compatble with SDR).