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Industry Agrees On Next Gen Unified DVD Standard

Posted by Hemos on from the making-it-all-agree dept.

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.

5 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. oOooO.. more fodder.. by bo0push3r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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? :)

  2. This is positive news ... by FonkiE · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 ...

  3. Re:27GB on each side? by onion2k · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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

    --
    http://twitter.com/onion2k
  4. Guns and DVDs by Goldenhawk · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    --Brandon / Split Infinity Music

  5. Flawed point... by Kjella · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings