Red vs. Blue Lasers Complicate DVD's Future

bnavarro writes: "The EE Times is reporting that the DVD Forum's Steering Committee voted this week to approve the use of low-bit-rate compression for high-definition DVD. The DVD Forum's decision, made at a meeting Tuesday (Feb. 26) in Tokyo, to stick with a red-laser-based scheme but switch to low-bit-rate compression, came only a week after nine of the world's biggest electronics companies agreed to promote a blue-laser-based format for next-generation video and computer optical disks."

Comments

Re:I'm an idiot but...

[jimhill]

The color.

Light's color is a function of its frequency, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. Higher frequency lasers can read pits which are closer together on a disc substrate, allowing them to put more data in the same areal density as lower frequency lasers. Blue is better than red for this purpose.

Alas, it's also harder (read: more expensive) to make blue lasers and the industry has already spent a lot of money on reds, so a blue-laser technology would require the writeoff of existing gear AND the purchase of new. Not an easy sell these days.

But blue lasers are still expensive

[shoppa]

There are two ways to put more video on the disk:

1. More compression. Needs CPU horsepower somewhere (drive? your desktop CPU?), but CPU horsepower is dirt cheap today.
2. Blue lasers. The shorter your wavelength, the higher your recording density. But red lasers are widespread and cheap, while blue lasers in consumer devices are not all that well understood and there is a very limited supply at the moment.

If you're in the business of selling blue lasers, of course you want to promote method #2 above. But DVD companies are not in the business of selling blue lasers - they're in the business of selling content.

Of course, the decision to not use blue lasers impacts those who use the disks for purposes other than what the DVD companies want. If you want to store data on the disk, the "new" DVD compression doesn't help you any. And if you want to play the new DVD's on your non-DVD-consortium-approved player, the new compression techniques will probably make your attempts more complicated (if not more illegal...)

Re:The REAL reason why content providers want red

[mr3038]

BUT most important to consumers is the fact that MPEG-4 compression is just NOT SUITABLE for high-definition content which is meant to be seen on a decently large screen (29 inches and above). MPEG-4 simply produces too many artifacts (even today with low-bit-rate MPEG-2 you can see on cable how dark images in motion seen to leave a "ghost" behind).

I think this HD-DVD standard in question would use bitrates equal to current MPEG2 streams but with MPEG4 content. If your DivX video seems lower quality than MPEG2 DVD it might be that your DivX video has 750kbps bitrate compared to about 5Mbps bitrate of MPEG2 video. If you compare 1600x1200@5Mbps/MPEG4 with 768x576@5Mbps/MPEG2 stream it should be clear that the former one is much better.

And what comes to "ghosts" in low light scenes it's only issue with current encoder software. Basically current encoders are using linear comparision between original and compressed instead of logarithmic and they treat 2 to 4 in intensity like 244 to 246 even though the former one has 100% increase and the latter one has 0.8% increase. Obviously you're going to notice ghosting due to this in darker scenes only.

Though, I have to admit that when you consider the CPU power needed to even decode 1600x1200 resolution MPEG4 stream it might be cheaper to jump to blue laser. Not to speak anything about real-time recording/encoding! If only they could create single RW standard this time.