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

oOooO.. more fodder..

[bo0push3r]

In addition, the adoption of a unique ID written on a Blu-ray Disc realizes high quality copyright protection functions.

wonder how long it'll take for some 15-year-old to be tried as an adult and tossed in the pokey for cracking this one...

15 minutes.. a day maybe? :)

These could be excellent backup devices.

[thesolo]

Provided there is ever a way to record these on your own like a regular CD (without spending thousands, that is), these could be excellent for archival purposes.

Currently, my only solution for backups of my drives are other drives. Sure, tapes work, but they take far too long. Being able to dump the essentials from my hard drive (being a 3D designer, that's easily 30 gigs of textures, models, etc) onto one disc would be a lifesaver.

Let's just hope these things aren't so crippled by the time we get them that their apparent benefits aren't overshadowed by idiotic "protection" schemes.

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.

This is positive news ...

[FonkiE]

For those who bought either DVD-R(W) or DVD+RW nothing changes. Todays players (standalone and DVD-ROMs) can play your discs fine. DVD-R plays everywhere, I have found no player, where it doesn't work.

To the future: This new format is a next generation format. 27GB per layer is a very cool capacity. Combined with MPEG2 and AC3 whole seasons of 'startrek' may be on one disc. But on the other hand: have you looked at the sizes of DVDs lately: they are big like nearly 9GB. Viewed at 27GB from this side it's actually small. It's the bare minimum ;-)

The physical problems with DVDs are scratches. The more capacity there is on the disc the more problems you get.

What I like about this announcement is that all major players are on the list, this is positive: nobody will have choose the "better" format, this is also the negative thing ;-) They will have full world-wide control over the format, things like region-protection will probably be better enforced, because of their monopoly in the market.

To those who need DVD-R right now, nothing has changed, buy a player, I've seen discs as cheap as $3 ;-) And the DVR-A-03 is very cheap too.

For those who want a DVD-video recorder: WAIT for this new format, this will really enhance the VCR experiance: direct access and capacity ...

Re:27GB on each side?

[onion2k]

I watched Snatch 5 times on Monday... wonder how they'd interpret that

They'd think you've got took much spare time.

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.

Re:scratches,MPEG2 vs MPEG4

[JoeShmoe]

Because MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 have two very different design purposes.

MPEG-2 was developed for highest quality video. On the consumer end, DVDs use bitrates around 8-10Mbps and on the professional end MPEG-2 4:2:2 is something huge like 45Mbps. The compression makes it more managable but it's really just a cursory thing, throw away redundant frame area, etc.

Now on the other hand MPEG-4 was developed for highest possible compression. Your basic DivX file is around 1Mbps or so and looks pretty darn good. But the compression doesn't ramp up...I think it tops out at around 4Mbps. That's probably sufficient for most consumer applications but the professionals need more.

MPEG-4 will continue to be the format of choice for streaming video or other things where bandwidth cost and availablity is the main issue. But MPEG-2 will continue to be the choice in closed systems like cable networks, tv studios, digital theaters, etc.

- JoeShmoe

.

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