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Toshiba, NEC Plan To Create Yet Another Optical Format
selderrr writes: "Dow Jones Newswires is reporting today that Toshiba and NEC are planning to propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will offer four times more storage capacity than current DVDs. In February, a consortium of nine companies, including Sony and Matsushita, announced a new format that would offer 50GB of data storage. While the Toshiba/NEC option is smaller at 40GB, it is cheaper to produce. The two disc formats will not be compatible." Related, coryboehne writes "The New York Times has a great report detailing the history of the DVD. According to the article digital videodiscs and their players have now surpassed the VHS in terms of sales for the first time (In 2001, $10.3 billion was spent on movies, 52% of this on DVD's, now compare this to 2002, $12.4 billion total revenue with 65%, going for DVD's) . Funny considering that DVD's are only in about a third of American homes (about 30 million households, and consider that a quarter of these homes have more than one player), compare that to the unbelievable amount of VHS players (about 90% of homes in the USA have a VHS player) and it quickly shows just how popular the DVD has become."
DVD stands for "Digital Versatile Disc." In it's infancy it was known as a Digital Video Disc, but everyone wanted the format for their own purposes, so the "V" was changed to Versatile. Now you can have video, audio, data, etc. all on one format and not have a contradictory name.
Is this really necessary? With 100GB hard drives becoming more commonplace, I think we're at the limit of what normal users need out of hardware. There is just no use whatsoever for 50GB removable discs. In 10 years, we will all still be using DVD+RW. Drives will be a lot faster, sure, but history has shown that there is just no application that requires more than the ample 4.7GB of removable storage provided by DVD technology
I think you just stated for yourself why 50GB optical discs would at least be wanted by some percentage of the population. They won't be needed for popular media (music/movies/software) for the most part (at least not for a while, who knows how much software bloat we'll see). However, when it comes to backing up data, do you really want your hard drive to require 10-20 discs to backup, or would you rather use 1 or 2 50GB discs to backup that 100GB hard drive?
Personally, I'm doing ok with CD-R for now, because the majority of my 100GB of hard drive space is fairly static (my CD collection in MP3 format, software and games that I can simply reinstall), and a minor amount of data that actually needs backing up on a weekly or monthly basis. However, if I was running a critical system that handled large amounts of customer data, I'd want to reduce the number of discs I needed to backup that data whenever possible. I don't need DVD+RW capability for my own personal use, but if I were managing a couple hundred gigs of customer data I would like to back that up with the largest storage media possible, short of putting it onto another magnetic drive.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
link here
You forget the original DivX format. Quality was better than VHS, but not quite DVD.
A couple of points to ponder:
1) Chances are this digital storage format would be used for digital video, and not for personal storage (at least on launch, how long was it from the launch of the DVD standard before consumer recordable devices were available?)
2) Digtal video/audio quality/resolution can always be improved, as (eventually) displays will be able to handle a higher res than what DVD offers, and as such, a full-length motion picture will require more space. For that matter, many DVD's we're already watching are multiple disc sets, whereas with any of these new formats, the whole thing could be shipped on one disc.
3) If you think 4.7gb of removable storage is enough, remember the 100mb zip drive? Remember when that was all the space most you ever thought you'd need to take with you? There are USB storage devices with almost this much space (or are there 128mb+ keychains available already?)
4) I'd almost guarantee you we won't be using DVD+RW drives in 10 years, especially if these new formats are available. Considering 10 years ago almost nobody was using CDR for storage, and CDR as a storage format is pretty much starting to phase out already, being replaced by DVD media and such.
Now to sit back and watch the electronics giants fight for supremacy and see which 'standard' is adopted...
z.
The companies supporting Blue-ray are: Hitachi Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Thomson Multimedia.
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At VCD quality, it's in the neighbourhood of 80 hours of video I think. VCD-compliant MPEGS run around 10megs/minute, don't they? 50GB = 50,000MB 50,000MB / (10 MB/min) = 5,000 min 5,000min / (60 min/hr) = 83.333... hours