Industry Agrees On Next Gen Unified DVD Standard

scsirob writes "According to this press release the DVD recording industry will end the DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD-RAM mess and standardise on a new technology called 'Blue Ray'. Blue lasers are used to record up to 27 GB on each side of the DVD. This initiative is backed by all major players in the industry. The article contains many technical details." Several other people noted that the BBC has coverage as well. Yah for non-company specific industry standards.

Comments

FMD or Blu-ray first to market?

[Novus]

The interesting question is whether this will make it to the market before FMD does. Both have roughly similar specs as far as size is concerned, but Constellation brags about transfer speeds of up to 1 Gbps compared to the 50 Mbps of Blu-ray (of course, the 1 Gbps figure is "potential" speed. Both should have hardware on the market in a year or two.

Either way, I think that whoever is first to get a really high-capacity (tens of GB) consumer-level removable optical storage format on the market will be the one who defines the new standard, unless the later competitor is a lot cheaper or better.

Guns and DVDs

[Goldenhawk]

MPAA Lawyer downloads enough of the movie off of one of these file sharing utilities and uses an application to 1) extract the watermark, 2) correlate the watermark with the store the disc was sold at and 3) identify the individual to whom the disc was sold. MPAA lawyer dispatches law enforcement to Joe Nobody's place of residence.).

Wonderful. So I suppose you'll be required to pay credit for the DVD, not cash, so you can be tracked later? Might as well force you to present valid picture ID to purchase the disc. And if you choose to sell the disc later, what happens if the purchaser decides to use it illegally? So will you have to register with the government as a DVD Distributor? After all, the anti-gun lobby in the USA tries to do the same things for transactions involving guns. So are DVDs as dangerous as firearms? It sure sounds like it.

This kind of Orwellian nonsense rarely happens, at least in the USA. Gun laws are one exception. I suspect it's simply because there's a line (public safety, or waste of tax dollars, etc.) that hasn't been crossed for most consumer purchases, even when they cost some corporation some money. The average American citizenry, taken as a whole, doesn't vote with their dollars and ballots for this kind of nonsense, even when corporations do, and in the end, it's the government, NOT the corporations, that do the arresting. Enough stories of this sort of nonsense get around, the government HAS to pull back, despite what some MPAA lawyers want.

Not for the casual copier

[ajs]

The casual coppier who rips a DVD, converts it to divx:-) and sends it off to the world is not really the concern of the big studios. They want to own the Asian market, and right now it's owned by the bulk-coppiers.

Of course, all a unique ID gets them is to know where the bulk coppier in question got the first DVD. I can see it now: "yup, we're certain that Mr. Smith bought this DVD with a stolen credit card from Amazon and had it shipped to a field in Thailand. We'll get right on it!" ;-)

MPEG2 vs MPEG4

[muchandr]

My understanding was that MPEG2 has following
properties:

* Its still operates on fixed-size rectangular
block in a musguided attempt to ease the
hardware implementation (Not sure about the size
for MPEG, but JPEG's is 8x8. You've all seen 'pixellated' JPEGs that happen because of
this at high compression ratios)

* it is based on a conventional FFT

whereas MPEG4 was a 'container spec' with extensible codec, where the default codec
is already wavelet-based and does not require
fixed rectangular areas. If this is so, MPEG4
should be superior to MPEG2 in all instances.

Flawed point...

[Kjella]

It ramps out at around 4Mbps for a standard TV signal because there's very little more to encode, have you *looked* at a video at 4Mbps? A HDTV version (about 6x the pixels) would use 6x the bitrate (the maximum setting is 6Mbps at the moment, but that doesn't have anything to do with the actual encoding algorithm, it's just a noumber set as an upper limit on a scale because 99.999% don't need any more than that at the moment.)

Broadcast production have a different set of requirements, they'd rather compress it as little as at all possible (for editing, archival purposes), and they don't want to deal with multiple formats. They just want a line to go camera -> editing -> sender (oversimplified) without hassle or loss of quality. This goes for TV studios and also for digital theaters.

Contrary to your +5, Insigtful I think the cable companies would like to give you 100 channels instead of 25, or PPV, or broadband.

Kjella

Re:What has caused this?

[IronChef]

Laserdisc was hardly an "expensive fuckup." It was a niche market, yeah, but just because a market is a niche doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing.

There were many LD buyers, and at the format's peak you could get nearly ANY movie on it, and CHEAPER than VHS, which was still primarily a rental format. Let's see... Die Hard on VHS for $100, or on LD for $50? Many LDs were down in the $30 range, when VHS tapes were always expensive because they were made to sell to video rental stores.

Laserdisc let me watch near DVD quality movies when I got my player back in '90. (!) My rich brat friend had been there years before, too.

I have since switched to DVD and never looked back, but LD was sweet "back in the day."