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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."
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.
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- More compression. Needs
CPU horsepower somewhere (drive? your desktop
CPU?), but CPU horsepower is dirt cheap today.
- 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...)
Can you imagine how confusing Starwars would be if everyone's lasers were the same colour?
...does Joe Six-pack understand the differences between DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM? Do _I_ understand the differences between these formats? Do you? Does the recent el-cheapo DVD player I bought play 2-layer disks? Do I know? WILL I know until I try to put one of them in and find that it won't play?
And now we're going to have TWO competing high-definition DVD formats? And HDTV itself, or do I mean "digital TV," is six or is it eight different formats, which are high-definition, except when they aren't, that is they are high-ER definition but not HIGH definition, only you can't get the high definition, and all the digital TV formats are about to become obsolete...
Anyone who buys ANY HDTV or DVD gear until the dust settles has gotta be nuts.
But you sure have to be amazed at the complexity and ingenuity the industry is using to shoot itself in the foot.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually, people are buying HDTV for DVD players now. Progressive scanning DVD players, that is. 480p is technically a DTV standard and you can only watch 480p on a DTV or HDTV. Most people who buy HDTV (and I sell a lot of HDTV) buy a progressive scanning DVD players. (you can get one for like $170 now)
Also, the 16x9 formats usually have an enhanced mode for widescreen DVDs. So there's a lot of reason to have an HDTV now and use existing DVD technology. 480p is still pretty sharp compared to the crap we watch over cable.
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Why not make the next shift encompass both technologies?
So you're suggesting they use a purple laser instead?
*ducks*
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I cannot believe these industry "expert" groups. They claim that the main reason for using red lasers is cost. However, they seem to "forget" that using a low-bit rate technology as opposed to a blue laser actually will INCREASE costs since supporting MPEG-4 will require higher processing power, and thus more powerful and more expensive silicon.
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).
So now the REAL REASON why they (the content providers) still want to pursue red-laser: They get to give consumers a low-quality version of the video image!!! By doing this they feel they are protecting their investment, while in reality they are simply giving consumers a low-quality solution.
If and once they provide this stupid red laser approach for high resolution video, what they effectively will have done is invite third parties to come with competing high-quality products (which sadly will probably will never be supported with popular content since there is a monopoly among the content providers and media player producers), OR some hackers will come up with a scheme to rip high-quality video out of HD broadcast (for TV or movie theatres) and distribute it in a competing format themselves over the Internet. In other words, Napster all over again because for the same reason as before: they industry is NOT thinking about what consumers want, and what consumers want is a high-quality display system to match their new TV.