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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.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Could anyone argue that DVD was such a huge success because there was no real competing format at the quality level? We didn't have to choose between two incompatible video disk formats. We just had to choose between a Panasonic or a Phillips..
Now, they are doing the betamax vs vhs thing again. I wish they would learn their lesson. In establishing standards, a bit of cartel may be for the better.
Stop the brainwash
A very long time ago (october 12th 2000) to be exact, I read a story on geek.com detailing new florescent disk technologies, kinda reminds me of this technology.
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)
These figures aren't all that surprising, considering that VCRs have more uses than just watching pre-recorded movies. Lots of people probably have VCRs mostly for time-shifting purposes. I, myself, only rent movies infrequently and don't buy a great number of them. Whereas, DVDs really only have one purpose, to play pre-recorded movies. They also offer higher quality and more convenience than VCRs, so it's not surprising that the sales figures for DVDs would be increasing, and although only a minority of households have DVDs, the ones that do would belong to the more hard-core movie collectors who are more likely to spend money on movies than average.
I'd bet that a minority of households have 1.5GHz+ computers with the latest GeForce video cards, but that they represent a disportionately large share of video-game purchasers.
take a format, take an asymmetric mirror, and reverse the original format to create an incompatible new format. Repeat 42 times.
From the article: "Their new optical disc will have a storage capacity four times larger than that of the DVD. It will be capable of recording up to 25 hours of television broadcasts."
They will have to confront the RIAA, MPAA and friends if they want to sell this gear. If the current legislation being drafted for HDTV and the DMCA are succesful, there will be nothing to record.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
link here
Shocking, everyone can afford a VHS deck, while DVD players are considered more of a luxury. Sure there are $60 DVD decks, but mostly online and hard to find. While they have recently hit the affordable levels, VHS has been there for 10 years.
Therefore, DVD, with its smaller penetration, has more penetration among upper income folks.
Upper income folks buy more DVDs? Wow... Who would have thought.
Video collecting is an expensive extravagance. While I enjoy my DVD collection (it gets used more than my VHS collection), I have more disposable income than most Americans.
However, I can't imagine being shocked at DVD's penetration...
Alex
The reason dvds have so much market share compared to vhs is because the movie catalog rollout to dvd. People with DVDs who love Godfather will re-buy the title on DVD, even though they already have Godfather on VHS. People are replacing thier movie collection in the new format.
I'll be doing it for of the newly released special edition Pulp Fiction DVD.
I'm not a *new* buyer. I'm a *repeat* buyer of the same movie. Naturally, this is not sustainable. Ad DVD adoption increases, and as the back catalog is filled out and people have replaced their collection, DVD will be no different from what VHS is. I doubt VHS is going away soon.
Of course, when VHS *does* go away, and the DVD catalog is complete, and the everyone has replaced their collections -- the movie introduce an "all new" format and start the cycle over again.
For accurate head-to-head measurements, check unit sales of LOTR on VHS vs DVD.
Software Wars
It'll be a while before there's a market for this type of disc, assuming we aren't talking about a 40 gig DVD-R, here.
HDTV hasn't widely penetrated yet, so that potential use for the extra space isn't there. And the fact that studios aren't likely to want to put more stuff on single discs (because people won't pay that much more for it) means that at current resolutions, the market isn't there.
Unless we're talking about RECORDABLE discs for computer use, this won't go anywhere for a while. And the Toshiba one will be most likely, since any drive will have to be compatible with as many options as possible to be competetive.
Still, nice to know that when the market wants it, the tech will be ready.
Like many others, I own both a DVD player and a VHS recorder/player. While I occasionally buy films in the VHS format (even less frequently now that I have my DVD player), I bought my VHS player primarily for watching rental films and for recording stuff on TV. DVD, on the other hand, has been heavily marketed as a player of purchased films, and although I now rent films in the DVD format, I bought my DVD player primarily to watch purchased DVD films.
The DVD may have better image quality, and room for more hi-fi audio channels (stereo sound quality on the VHS is excellent, though), but the main reason I prefer DVD is media durabilty. Every time I watch one of my VHS films, it wears down. Image and sound quality deteriorate over time and with use. I'm reluctant to let people borrow my favourite VHS films. With DVD i have no such hesitations.
I think this accounts for a lot of the difference in sales. The VHS is marketed as a recorder, the DVD is marketed (at least in Sweden) as the hub of your home cinema. While all newer films are available on rental DVD, purchasable DVD's are much more visibly available than their VHS counterparts.
Excellent marketing by the filmmakers. They recognised that the change of technology generations gave them a chance to push for a change in consumer patterns.
It would be nice if they see the advent of Internet media distribution as an opportunity as well, and not a threat.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
".....planning to propose a new optical disk format to the DVD Forum that will offer four times more storage capacity than current DVDs"
Gee, like DVD was supposed to have been all along? Not gonna buy into it. Wouldn't be prudent at this junc-ture.
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.
-- null
Is there some mass conspiracy to confuse customers? If it's not a "DVD" why the hell do they call it a DVD!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
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
Ok, now go make those 50 Gb beasts writeable for a really small cost and include the drives with new PC's so we can finally move on from those bloody floppy disks!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Of course people with DVD players buy more videos than people with VCR's. First, people who have DVD players have more disposable income. I spent $350 on my first DVD player, and didn't bat an eye. I think the total bill that day was over $500 when I included a few movies. Compare this with the person scraping together $59 for a VCR.
But that should be modded 'redundant'.
Here is the insightful part:
What consumer cares how cheap the discs are to create? The savings will NOT be passed on to us. The savings will get divvied up amongst the distributor, presser of discs, and the owner of the source material.
Don't count on data either. At the very least, Valenti and the gang will be pushing for some sort of blank media tax.
The only way these get onto consumers' shelves is if the profit taking potential for the entities I mentioned is so great that they essentially subsidize the players.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No doubt because people can easily use their VCRs to pirate movies. I guess Jack Valenti was right after all.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Whoopee! Yet another format for the MPAA and RIAA to force digital "rights" managment onto! Managing their so-called "rights" by managing all of ours into nothingness! Let's all help them out by running out and buying it like the lemmings we are!
"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."
That is odd. Why aren't more customers running out and buying the newer technology with all its new features? Features like the inability to fast-forward through commercials or FBI warnings. Features like the inability to make archival copies as guaranteed by copyright law. Features like region coding. VCR's don't even have a cartel like the DVD Forum to eliminate all competition through their strong-arm tactics! Who the heck wants to record television broadcasts, anyway? As we all know, that's both amoral and illegal!
I used to have a DVD player, but then I got rid of my PlayStation 2. If they want me to buy into a new technology, they can come back when they stop trying to do through technology what they can't do legally. Of course, trying to put out a better product in a capitalistic market is a completely alien concept to them...
Proof that you can't trust history books.
Large-volume optical storage provides an excellent archival medium for large datasets. It can be kept in a near-online state with higher retrieval time for less work than traditional methods, e.g. tape.
I know a company that was looking for exactly this (actually, hoping for 80-100G capacity) a few months ago; a small (~30 person) company but they crunch monthly databases running around 70G, which they would like to keep around without paying for and maintaining massive disk arrays, especially since old data is only needed on occasion.
What we really need is a format with less dictatorship-like licensing. I don't mean the whole DeCSS thing, which was dictatorship enough, but the general DVD licensing scheme. If you want to even sell a product that has a DVD drive it is $10,000. It is another $10,000 as you all know to make the software to read DVDs, another $10,000 if you want to manufacture the DVD. So the Powers that be have made $30,000 off of every single DVD player ever made. Isn't that a bit steep? I know $30,000 is a drop in the hat to big companies, but that rules out small inventors from even making and selling a DVD rom based product. Isn't ONE $10,000 fee for the manufacture of the drive itself enough? If I buy an object shouldn't I have the right to resell it anyway I see fit without paying an extra $10,000? It's not like I can still use it after I sell it. There are alot of DVD players out there, millions. You'd think that 10,000 millions would be enough without the DVD consortium feeling the need to triple it.
Add to that, that it is probably also cheaper and faster to make a DVD than it is a video.
I tried looking via Google to find any info that would back up this point of view, but I haven't found any pertinent information on the subject. If anyone has any hard figures, please post them here.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It will take a poster-sized wall chart just to summarize the basic formats and their compatibility.
Consumers will just refer to them all as DVD!@#*&!!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA/RIAA facists change the law they wrote to label anyone they believe has misuesd their copyrights as an enemy combatant.
They have already hinted at P2P users being terrorists, have they not? Also, don't forget that while they want to be able to hax0r you, they are intentionally placing themselves behind an exemption to the hacking==terrorism talk that has been going on in the legislature. In other words, they can do anything to you that they want, but if you use countermeasures, you are a terrorist.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
What a coincidence! I bought an Apex 1200 DVD player at SEARS on Saturday for $60. That's SEARS, folks. Can't get more mainstream than that.
I have my complaints about this...it's the unhackable version that's VCD crippled, so it's not entirely roses and candy. It can play DVDs without having to boot a computer, which is basically why I got the thing. Just pop the disk in and off you go. It played my "Princess Mononoke" DVD which is perhaps the most elaborate DVD I have. It makes ATI Cinemaster choke, so I use it as a test of what I can or cannot do with a given DVD player/software.
BTW folks...advance word on the Daria "Is It College Yet?" DVD is that it, like the "Is It Fall Yet?" DVD, is DEFACTO REGION FREE. The box is marked Region 1, but the disk will play in any region so long as your TV will understand NTSC signals. From what I understand from my European friends this is not a problem.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Of course, the next step would be backing up full HDs, currently 80 to 100 GBs. But given the rate of growth of HDs, I can't imagine anything keeping up.
Unless we're talking about RECORDABLE discs for computer use, this won't go anywhere for a while. And the Toshiba one will be most likely, since any drive will have to be compatible with as many options as possible to be competetive.
Frankly, with 8mm backup tapes going for $50.00 a pop and 100GB/200GB LTO tapes costing $100.00 a pop, with all of the headaches associated with tape backups, something like this would be a godsend for the tech industry.
We already backup to DVD-R where it makes sense (database dumps, etc), and having daily archives on a stable medium that go back years (CD-R) has come in very, very handy more than once.
Imagine being able to backup and archive your entire fileserver that way.
That is what interests me in the 100GB optical media we keep being promised, or even the 27 GB media these folks are promising us. The ability to backup every night to a stable, randomly accessible medium from which restores are trivial, fast, and accessible for each day going back as far as we need to.
The day we can replace tape backup with inexpensive optical backup, a la today's DVD-R or CD-R media, is the day this sort of thing will have a very wide market in the computer industry, irrespective of what the entertainment industry wants or needs.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
IMHO they should not bring out another format until they can store 4 hours of video on a disc without resorting to lossy compression.
The way the lossless/lossy distinction is tossed around on Slashdot ("lossy sux0rz, lossless r00lz") bugs me. There's no such thing as "lossless" unless you reproduce the original film atom-for-atom, and even then, quantum effects will screw it up. It becomes a matter of how much loss a fellow is willing to accept. For most users, an 8 Mbit/s stream of MPEG-2 video + AC3 is more than enough, and that's what a DVD offers. If by "lossless" you mean "linear PCM video and audio", then even those aren't lossless, as video is typically quantized down to 8 bits per channel per pixel, and audio rarely goes deeper than 24 bits per channel per sample.
Define your usage of lossless.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How are they going to manage to fit this all onto the faceplate of one multifunction device?
The version of Slashcode currently installed on Slashdot will strip out any plus-or-minus sign (±) that I try to insert. Taco put it on when people were abusing Unicode bidirectionality overrides and making parts of the page look more like Hebrew than English. Thus, when you see a # sign in the following paragraph, imagine an underlined + sign.
It won't be hard to fit the necessary logos on Sony's "DVD#RW" drive, which stands for DVD plus or minus RW. Do you really think it'll be that hard to fit the "COMPACT disc ReWritable High Speed" logo, the "DVD ( o ) RW" logo, and the "RW DVD+ReWritable" logo on the face of the disc tray?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Then again, given that they'll be packing whole seasons of a show onto one disk, they may be charging about $50 - $150 for it.
How much cheaper is the 40 GB version supposed to be that the end consumer will see any difference?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's seems obvious to a non-marketing-mathematician like me that the record industry's pricing equations produce results that are no more accurate than the data put into them. Since the industry rarely conducts nationwide-scale, long-term studies of demand at different pricing levels, it's hard to be sure how accurate their data is, and therefore their conclusions are questionable.
It's not entirely inappropriate to note that while the majority of VHS movies are marketed to the rental market at high prices ($80), nearly all DVDs are marketed toward home consumers at a much lower price... And that, just maybe, some portion of the impressive sales revenue is due to a surge of consumer purchasing. Was this surge predicted by the industry's mathematical models? I don't have any evidence that it was or wasn't, beyond the fact that they never bothered to try it before. It's possible that this program created a new enthusiasm for purchased videos that was never reflected in previous price/demand estimates.
Would enormous price-cuts improve CD sales revenue? I don't know, and until the record industry tries it, they have no idea what sort response they'll get from the public. It could create a golden-age of CD purchasing. Or people could react the way the industry's crude equations say they will.
One place where digital storage in such large capacities per disc becomes useful is in the storage format for movies shown in theaters with digital projection systems.
Imagine instead of having to lug around six 35-pound spools of 35 mm film for a two-hour movie, the entire movie is distributed on 2-3 Blu-Ray DVD's. The packaging to hold 2-3 Blu-Ray discs will probably weigh in at most 2-3 pounds, compared to the 210 pounds for a single movie print; the shipping costs for distribution alone would save a huge amount of money.
As the cost of digital projectors come down (as I expect will happen by 2010), you'll see more and more movies shipped to theaters on blue-spectrum laser optical discs as the primary distribution format.
I can cite the following reasons why DVD sales have really taken off in the last 24 months:
/. think about MPAA's anti-piracy policies, their decision to adopt the low-cost sell-through model of video sales pioneered by the Walt Disney Company has ensured high level of sales and low levels of movie piracy of DVD discs. I mean, why bother with a pirate copy of a movie when in 6-8 months after theatrical release you can see it at home on a high-quality DVD release?
1. The price of players have dropped in price dramatically. You can get quite good players for under US$100 nowadays quite easily.
2. The price of DVD discs are actually very reasonable considering the content on the discs. Many DVD movies that come on two-disc sets in the US$25-US$30 range contain audio commentaries, foreign language sound tracks and/or subtitles, and supplementary material out of the wazoo.
3. DVD picture quality is excellent nowadays, especially if you can get a 480-line progressive-scan connection between the player and the TV set. Of course, DVD's have Dolby Digital and/or DTS surround sound tracks, which tremendously increases the enjoyment on appropriate home theater systems.
4. DVD's have become a huge boon for foreign-language programs. The distribution of officially-licensed Japanese anime programs have moved to DVD very quickly, especially with the fact the DVD pretty much settles the entire sub versus dub arguement since you can have both on the same disc! =)
I believe that despite what many people here on