Because it is dirt cheap compared to HDDs where I am, I will be storing my movie collection in Blu-Ray. And partially because I think spinny media is cool.
I currently got two secondhand options for the drive:
- Pioneer BDR-209EBK
- Panasonic UJ272
The drive will be plugged into my server (6th gen i5-6600, old desktop) via SATA. It will probably only read the disks I write so DRM is not much of a concern.
The disks will mostly be used as archival storage. Most of the time, they will be transferred to SSD a few days/hours before streaming, though sometimes they may be played straight from BD-R
Aside from that, most of the Blu-Ray writing software I found is GUI. So I’d also appreciate something I could control via web or CLI
The drives should work fine, for standard blurays and self wrote disks. There are a mature cli utilities and often the gui version is just a frontend for the cli tools. It is just an optical drive otherwise.
Arch Linux Wiki : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray
Check out makemkv, which has a cli option, and their forum for compatibility for 4K blurays. Newer bluray drives have additional protection for 4K if I understood correctly.