1.5 TB DVD by 2010

prostoalex writes "The consortium of three universities and four Japanese companies is investing $25M into a project, that is supposed to deliver a 1.5 TB (that's a terabyte and a half) Digital Versatile Disk by 2010. The Inquirer story quotes multiple layers being used for storage." More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology.

Comments

Backwards compatible?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Backwards compatible is no big deal -- your typical DVD player can read CD, VCD, etc. formats. The real question is whether consumers will be ready for yet another format change by 2010. Somehow I doubt it. If you go by the previous cycle, it took about 15 years before consumers were ready to buy DVD players.

Also, we don't want to give Hollywood and the DVDCCA another shot at locking us out. The CSS cat is permanently out of the bag for the lifetime of the DVD format, but a new format would provide them an opportunity to come up with some sort of freedom-restricting technology.

So much data -- a little OT

[sisukapalli1]

The amount of data on a single disk made me think what the uses could be, and the primary thing I could come up with is hi-res multimedia. There was an article in one of the popular magazines about the next 10 years advancements, and one of them was about digital projections that fool the eye -- one would not be able to distinguish between real images and digital images.

But, this also makes me wonder... Our ability to process information has stayed the same (e.g., it still takes me awful lot of time to read a small book -- let alone the LOTR), but the amount of data is just exploding.

May be there would be some new technology that leads us into faster/better processing of the tonnes of information?

S

DVD technology?

[tandr]

More importantly, they claim that this will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology

But wait a sec... with which DVD it will be compatible? DVD-R ? DVD-RAM? DVD-RW? DVD+RW? There are more then enough DVD-xxx technologies already, and if rate of creating new ones will be the same, I think in 7 years they will have at least 3-5 new more to choose from!

What happened to Constellation 3D?

[agallagh42]

There was a company called Constellation 3D that was supposed to have something called a Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD) with capacity in the Terabyte range.

You'll notice that their website no longer exists. It did stink of vapourware from the beginning, but I had a glimmer of hope that it would become something. Here is the most recent press release I could find on the subject, but it's from early 2001.

They said they'd have their terabyte discs out "within a year or two". Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait until 2010 now...

2010?

[Rew190]

Not until 2010? 7 years is a long time. Shouldn't that amount of space be pretty much commonplace by that point anyhow? Sure, it sounds like a lot now, but somehow I don't think that number will be at all impressive in 7 years.

I imagine that if one of these gets scratched you're gonna lose a whole lotta data unless it has some sweet error correction going for it.

Re:Bad for RIAA

[kesuki]

You might want to concider using the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC).
Especially since your oggs already support FLAC
"libOggFLAC and libOggFLAC++, which wrap the encoders and decoders of libFLAC and libFLAC++, respectively, to allow access to FLAC streams in an Ogg container"
At just slightly over 2:1 compression it's enough to turn that uncompressed best-quality 2304 kbps (48khz stereo 24-bit) .wav into a ~1220 kbps .ogg. Keep in mind that DVD-quality 1536 kbps (48khz stereo 16-bit) would reduce to ~814 Kbps, in a FLACed OGG. BTW where did you come up with 1024? CD quality is 1411 Kbps (~605kbps FLACed).
just for fun, that's ~5916 hours of FLACed CD audio per 1.5 TB DVD. Just under 247 days worth of audio. Mathematically lossless Audio+video compression possibly in HD format could finally be realistically possible. At 63.1 Mbps (Hufyuv+FLACed 720x480 30 fps) you can fit ~50-55 hours of DVD resolution, lossless quality audio+video on the 1.5 TB dvd (depending on audio quality). 1920x1080 HDTV is 380Mbps so expect 8-9 hours of lossless full-resolution HDTV.