Slashdot Mirror
New DVD Burners To Double Capacity
clester writes "CNN reports that new dual-layer DVD-burning drives will be released very soon by Philips and Sony that will double the capacity of DVD drives, making a complete copy of your dual-layer DVDs theoretically possible. It will use dual layer technology that will hold up to 8.5GB, and will cost around $230 for an internal and $330 for external, burning all 8.5GB in approximately 45 minutes."
This is a very low price for the technology to be released at. At those prices, we'll probably see a large number of early adopters. It makes me wonder what we'll see it for next year.
Considering I spent $250 on an external USB2 DVD+R/RW drive just last year, I can already regret my purchase.
But will the new dual layer DVD's be compatible with set-top boxes or legacy DVD ROM drives???
Now I can finally back up my porno collection to 10 easy-to-find dvds...*phew*
double sided dual layed dvd's... possible ?
When will dual layer media be available?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's cool that dual-layer DVD burners are coming out, but I have concerns about the reliability of dual-layered dvd(+|-)r media.
Would adding an extra data layer be much more complex than just having a single layer? I haven't been happy with some of the reliability of some of the single layer DVD-R media I've bought.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
So the 'dd' command is illegal now?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Blue lasers are really what's letting this technology take off! Here is some backgroudn info from this snippet off USA Today:
Most lasers use red or infrared. Blue lasers exploit the benefits of blue light, which has a smaller wavelength. Consequently, blue lasers can get into much tighter spaces than other lasers, and do jobs others can't, or at least do them a lot better and faster.
Blue lasers are only now starting to fledge from some of the world's leading commercial R&D labs, with several major American and Japanese electronics companies reporting plans to use them in the next year or so in some of their consumer products and specialized professional devices.
Blue lasers are able to do this because of their wavelength - the distance between the peaks of two successive waves - which is one of the most important qualities in defining a laser.
It's just you. My advice is to stay away from open sores. The really cool stuff is on Windows.
Isn't that slow? The Pioneer DVR-106 I'm currently using does a full 4.5GB in less than 20min at 4x, and the 107 at 8x does it in about 10min. 45min is almost 5 times longer for only double the capacity. That's somewhat disappointing.
OTOH I suspect it could burn regular single-layers DVDs at a better speed. Might be worth it for those who need a lot of them or can wait, but it won't be for me at first. Unless there's an error in that number...
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
But where's Blue Light?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Figure six-nine months till they double the speed, so roughly a 23 minute burn, and then i'll have to buy one. I, and many people i know, have been waiting to buy a burner until such time as i could make a single disc backup of a full length dvd.
The time is now, apparently.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Hopefully I'm joking, but don't be surprised if they don't file a suit to block sales of the devices in the US.
Now that you could copy an entire 'real' DVD at once.. with no compression, they might start to panic. Since they obviously buy into the ' pirates are eating us alive syndrome'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just try to calculate the time you will have to wait until one DVD has been burned... if it is 4x speed, then you can got to the next computer shop and buy a news hard disc drive in the same time ;)
I don't have usb 2.0 or firewire. will this come with a serial adapter?
I also reply below your current threshold.
This could really revolutionize the gaming industry. For example Final Fantasy XI fits on what 6 Cd's? It would all fit on just one HD DVD!!
Also when it comes to imaging machines you could have the OS, office suite, additional software, etc. and still fit it on one disk.
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
This is what I've been waiting for.
Actually, now I have to wait until all the compatibility issues are figured out, THEN I'll finally get a DVD burner.
I belong to the ______ generation.
see them pictures
Also, press release from Philips and press release from Sony with even better pictures.
DVDXCopy was presumably one of the biggest consumer application for these DVD recorders. People made backups of their existing DVD collection using that software, and why shouldn't they ?
But 321Studios was found guilty of violating the DMCA, and today we have the hardware to make copies legally available, getting cheaper & faster, while the software remains illegal.
I guess you should be able to create bootable DVD's for the XBOX with those burners. Anybody wants to try a Linux DVD image?
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
Another one bites the dust
According to the CNN article (which is the nutritional equivilent of sugary cereal), Sony's format is "DVD-R DL". Does this mean:
A) it's the -R (as we've all come to know -R) equivilent of dual layer technology? What happened to Pioneer's -R DL effort? Does this moot it, add to it, or surpass it? Will Pioneer ALSO release a -R DL format?
B) Or is this just a marketing name used by Sony for what is in fact the same DL technology used by the +R group, and the discs/drives will be basically interchangeable among the Sony/Philips standard?
C) Will the -R DL discs be readable in set tops or computer drives that cannot read +R/RW media but can read existing dual-layer media?
$5 per disc smells kind of expensive. I'm impressed enough with the job done by DVDShrink that I don't know if a direct copy of a DVD-9 means much at this point. It WOULD motivate me to replace my Panasonic E80 set-top DVD recorder if SP mode would now mean 4.16 hours of recording, or XP at 2.16 hours, or, if I'm willing to tolerate it, *16* hours at EP mode.
> When will dual layer media be available?
About a month or so after you give up on waiting for it and get a single-layer burner drive.
Please to note: double-layer burners will almost certainly burn to single-layer media, so it'll really just be a matter of waiting for the media to catch up to the drives, just like the current situation with 8x drives/media. It's not something you should really worry about, IMO.
If I wanted a dual layer DVD, I'd just put two of them in the drive at the same time.
Me, I'm waiting for *triple*-layer DVDs. Now that'd be something. Yessiree. Yessiree *bob*.
- undoware.ca
Does anyone know what DVD burning support is like for linux?
umm, 6 cd's fit on a standard DVD.
And we are talking about DVD DL. DVD HD is something else.
doesn't matter if you print on it or not, it lasts much longer then regular DVD media.
I'm sorry, please re-phrase your questions in the form of questions.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I for one can't wait for all this DVD burner stuff to settle down. I'd love to have one, but I'm not so inclined to get one as long as there's a new format coming out every few days...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
When I attempt to get a DVD writer it's just a mess with all the RW + - x # +_.
The capacity upgrade is expected overtime, but the format it feels like it's pending for changes year after year. And whatever happened to SCSI devices. 95% of the drives are IDE and it eats up your processor.
Well, the typical Mac homosexual will gladly pay 4x the normal retail price as long as it looks cool. Maybe Sony can put a transparent door on the thing or give it a cool name like iDVD, then the flamers will gobble it up.
More the point, does anyone know of an effective DVD burner that runs under Linux, so I can get my fscking .iso on there?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"Since when is -R the most compatible with set top players? Last time I checked, which was about a month ago, all of the major brand DVD players handled the +R format, while some of them didn't handle the -R format. I got a multi-format burner anyway, but I think your comment is wrong."
+R wasn't very compatible with 3rd generation DVD players...that generation being when the players reached a certain level of maturity.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Mmmm
0 40 322/480/nyet25203221828
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/
click moi
"This is an undated photo provided by Sony of their DRX-700UL external DVD-burning drive designed to record on two layers.(AP Photo/HO/Sony)"
When
cp? What if the bits move from some medium into volatile memory? Something one might do in order to process and render them?
:( I'm nothing more than a common theif. Where do I turn myself in?
I'm a criminal
What if I take the bits on some kind of "bus"? What if... what if... ah the hell with it. I'm going to Moe's.
Pirated Xbox games are just around the corner!
No more just -R writers availabe (HP still only produces +R) ...bit behind the news, eh?
"Hewlett Packard (HP), in addition to its DVD+RW burner models, is poised to launch DVD Dual (compatible with +RW and -RW formats) drives as retail demand for DVD+RW models wanes, according to Taiwanese makers of DVD drives."
"Well, the typical Mac homosexual will gladly pay 4x the normal retail price as long as it looks cool. Maybe Sony can put a transparent door on the thing or give it a cool name like iDVD, then the flamers will gobble it up."
Sorry, but I use Macs AND PCs (and mainly PCs). And I most certainly am not, as you put it, a "flamer." I would guess you have deep-seated issues with your own sexuality, to be stereotypical about it.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I say that because I had always been told that dual layer DVD's were "sandwiched" together after each layer had been burned separately. This obviously means a single disc burned all at once with dual layers. So what's the deal?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Last I checked 2 * 4.7 GB was 9.4 GB, not 8.5 GB.
Are they holding back 0.9 GB to preserve a threshold against piracy?
(Note: units for DVD capacity are metric.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Apparently the issue is that to be read as a DVD-ROM the top abd bottom layers have to have exactly the same amount of content other wise the player will misread it. This is not a huge problem when the size of the content is known before the burn starts, but presents problems for dynamically created media like video recording from a camera or streaming source (like a TV signal).
If the size is not known before writing then the burner must write the second layer out with dummy data before finalization, potentially doubling the burn time. In the case of a video camera it would be unacceptable to make the user wait an hour after filming before he could change or view the DVD.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I fully agree, there's not much of a reason to spend your bucks now, just because the industry has decided to come to market with yet another poorly conceived technology to let it ripe at consumers' homes. wait and watch the market, - until then, an extra blank dvd will do.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
They will be marketed only for Windows PCs, but the external one should work on Macintosh computers with the proper third-party software. correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't ide devices pretty platform independent? why wouldn't an ide device for win32 work in ppc? and, (what i actually care about) are they going to work in some sort of proprietary bs that will prevent me from using it in linux?
So now we can look forward to boxes and ad flyers with specs like "8XDVD+/-R DL 8XDVD+/-R 4XDVD+/-RW 16XDVD-ROM 48XCD+/-R 8XCD+/-RW 48XCD-ROM"?
I mean, I know what that all means, but it still makes my eyeballs want to scurry behind my ears and hide.
I have a NEC-1300A that I got from newegg for just under $100 running great under Mandrake 9.2 and k3b-dvd.
does anyone know of an effective DVD burner that runs under Linux
.iso under Linux so long as you use this software.
All the burners I've tried work fine for
New formats are not really an issue. Seeing how things are going, you will throw away whatever burning device you buy today in 3-4 years anyways. So why bother? Blank media will always be around in this time span. And your media burned in the meantime is compatible with 100% of the DVD players that are released since a few years now, so it will be readable.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I for one can't wait for all this DVD burner stuff to settle down. I'd love to have one, but I'm not so inclined to get one as long as there's a new format coming out every few days...
Get a Dual Format. I have a +/- R/RW and it works with any media. I don't anticipate that there will be only one format anytime soon, but that's ok. I purchased my burner accordingly. This way only price is the determining factor as to which DVD blank I get.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Blue lasers have nothing to do with dual-layer DVD burning. DVDs are based on red lasers, period.
How about k3b?
It burns DVDs and CD-R/RW and has evolved quite a bit since the last time I used it, no weird configurations or root privileges required
in mandrake type as root: urpmi k3b
I guess in another 10 years, we'll have black light lasers which can write to 10 Terabyte DVD's.
In 20 years this won't seem like enough memory. We'll hardly be able to fit a single small sized Micro$oft Super Duper Word (or whatever they'll think of to call it by then...) file on one.
Three cheers for technology. Hip Hip Hooray!!!
DATA comments; PROC SORT DATA = comments BY score; PROC DELETE comments >> 1; RUN; DATA entertainment SET commen
schweeeeeeeet
How much will media cost?
An arm and a leg.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I'm waiting for SCAP. Ten times better.
I came across name-brand 4x burners yesterday for $63.00. But as soon as I considered buying a 2nd burner I already have a 4x Sony), that thought was supplemented by the thought of "The next version of burners must be right around the corner". Voila! The next day, and here it is. Has anyone heard what the dual-layered media will cost (ballpark? Don't even know if it's avail. yet).
Also, the fact that I can get another 4x burner for about the same cost as a decent CD burner has me thinking about adding a burner to my media PC. Has anyone done this w/their PVR system yet? I've seen a fair amount of CD-burner addons/features, but nothing for DVD yet...
DVD+-R/RW finally work in linux (Mandrake 10) and I like the 4.4 capacity... I don't really think it's worth it to just double that capacity. I'd feel a lot more nervous with 8.5 gigs on on disc than 4.4 gigs; if that dvd goes bad that's 8.5 gigs of data down the drain. 4.4 isn't anything to sneeze at either, but at least it's more managable.
I think 4.4 gigs is a good size, and I'm going to be using my pioneer 4x as long as it keeps on burning.
It'd be interesting to see if the current technology (cdrecord) would be able to work with these new dvd drives. I'm not familiar with the way it communicates with the burner, but it can't be terribly different than communicating with the single layered drives.
A great device, I recommend it, too. Its successor, NEC ND-2500A is for sale at 99,- EUR in Germany right now, similar pricing throughout Euroland. Highly recommended.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Yeah, and we can just crack the case open while playing some Joey Beltram.
I can see it now... The Pioneer DBL-100, with InstaRave(tm) technology.
I've ordered 50 and 100 packs of Samsung Beall DVD-R from MeritLine like 3 times now. Plus my Pioneer 106 (-R +R -RW +RW) drive was like $120 there. Good prices, and reliable ordering every time so far. I have no connections with them except I order from them.
for them to release a DVD/CD Mp3 player!
Still the same old problem - not enough to back up a 400 Gb drive, and how reliable are these new DVDs for long term storage??
Tbe new DVD may offer more capacity for redundancy though - you can write multiple copies of a large folder to the same disk with a lot of space left over so any degradation is unlikely to blow away all your data at once.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
But in base 2, doubling is an order of magnitude. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Always use myway.com for AP and Reuters articles, they don't have any banners, popups, or registration.
Why would Apple switch away from Pioneer, who has already demonstrated that their current drives can do dual-layer burning, with only an updated firmware. (translated link to actual article is here)
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
What manner of DRM will be built into the drive firmware?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Media prices better drop, otherwise, what's the point? You're not really saving anything in the long run.
Right now, my main concern is fitting a movie on one DVD. Kind of an inconvenience to split it across 2 discs, but I'd rather pay $2 and have a movie split during the middle than pay $5-6 only to have it on ONE DVD. (Although, I guess I can't really complain since I haven't purchased a DVD in ages.)
DVD-RW's are $5-6 each, hell, even less if you buy them in bulk. Even if you wanted to back up 9 gigs of data, it's cheaper (and faster) to just buy an 8X and use 2 blank DVD5's to get your data on in half the time (and half the cost) of this new technology.
They're forgetting that people will have to WANT to buy it. They aren't giving us any incentive to buy it.. wow, so it can write dual layers.. it's still 5x as much as a regular DVD.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I recently forked out cash for a regular DVD burner. Do I feel sick to the back teeth for buying (now) deprecated technology ? No I don't. If you make technology purchase decisions with an eye to what's around the corner you would never buy anything, ever. If today's thing does what you want it to do, go ahead and buy it; if it doesn't yet, then wait. You'll have near-infinite opportunity to rectify your purchase decision in the future and contribute to the country's GDP / trade deficit.
Well, certainly movie DVDs are that way - I'd imagine they'll get around to the double-sided burnable variety soon enough, but having to turn over a disc to use the other side went out of favour back in the old days of 5.25" floppies.
I've had a fantastic idea; maybe it's already possible to use both sides of writable CDs and DVDs in the same way that you could do it with 5.25" floppies- you cut a great big notch at the edge.
I definitely think that you should try this excellent tip on your collection of "backed up" movies and MP3s this instant (*).
(*) The MPAA paid me to say that.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
These drives are twice as expensive as commodity 4x drives. Will normal people really splurge right now for double the price, double the capacity, and increasing their per-disk cost as well probably?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
According to this review of the ipod mini, firewire is slowered than usb.
The Mini comes with both FireWire and USB 1.1/2.0 connections. Over FireWire, our songs transferred at 2.6MB per second; over USB 2.0, they synced at a brisker 3.18MB per second.
you format partisans
...look at me! I use both standards!
That's 'format partisan Sir', to you.
both standards have their advantages
What a chump...the marketing guys luv idiots like you.
Oh oh oh...look at me!
Now we're getting excited about seeing pictures of A DVD Drive? Come on people! It looks just like my non burning DVD drive, and come to think of it, quite a lot like my CD drive too... Geeze... this is just silly.
according to sony
the dvd player is dual layer dvd+R
http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/4532
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How long before the MPAA makes it illegal?
The only thing (that I'm aware of) that prevented people from duplicating retail discs is that an unmodded Xbox would only boot from the second layer of a DVD (or its dashboard on the HD). With dual-layer recordable discs becoming available, this might now be possible.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
it's the effort required of the CPU that matters
I have a external harddrive that can connect via USB 2.0 or firewire, and a DVD external with the same options... on usb2.0 heavy read/write traffic puts a 4-10% (once 16%) processor load on my 2.53 p4, firewire puts maybe 1% load....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
just glue two DVD+/-Rs together. You could even glue a DVD-R to a DVD+R to get a maximum compatibility disc.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Working with broken windows invariably leads to open sores.
THE NERD IS THE COMPUTER.
In fact, with so much storage, perhaps it will become possible to partition these discs and put several Linux distributions and *BSDs, running essentially the same application software, to allow people to compare and contrast them without actually installing anything.
Oh yeah, and the rumors of this technology have kept me waiting for months to buy a DVD burner.
But they will claim the larger capacity leads to twice as much piracy, as the RIAA did with CD-Rs.
The write-once discs can store up to 8.5 gigabytes of data, or about 4 hours of DVD-quality movies, twice the capacity of regular blank DVDs.
Twice the current spec would be over 9 gigs. 8.5 is not twice the capacity of regular blank DVDs. 9.4 gigs would be 2x the capacity. I feel ripped off.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
"Sony will sell an internal drive for $230 and an external one for $330. They will be marketed only for Windows PCs"
F*ck you Sony...
Luv, Tux...
How thick are these new $75.00 Blanks?? Can they be used in a pinch as a spare?
...just when i was about to buy a DVD burner.
It's funny - 11 CD-Rs are still 4 times as cost effective as a single dual layer DVD. Long live CD-R?
... how long after the technology is introdcued that Plextor will finally get around to making one. I love their drives, but I'm not a fan of their slow uptake of technology. :-/
Although I haven't researched myself, I believe I read here on /. that it was going to be possible to enable dual layer read/write on select existing DVD burners via a firmware update. Is this possible or not? FYI - I have a NEC-2500D burner.
I can't afford a sig!
They already use Sony drives in the later iMacs...
That's soooo last year, it's quite obvious that the $75 price is from the USA :-P
DVD Shrink is Da Bomb! Transcoding, remastering, and ease of use. DVD X Copy has nothing on this freeware product!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Look, with hard drives approaching half a terabyte in size there's still nothing reasonable to back all that up to... Besides another 500+ GB drive. I'm terrified to buy a drive like this - except perhaps to use it for temporary video editing space.
Meanwhile I've got tons of past in-house DVD productions I'd love to shrink down into a few discs (or perhaps a single holo-kube), so doubling DVD+-R's size really doesn't 'do it' for me.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
At the quoted speeds, it would take over 10 hours of non-stop burning to back up a 120G of data.
You could do selective backups with this device, but not actual servers. I seriously doubt the drive would last very long even if it was only expected to do a weekend image with weekday deltas.
It sounds great for backing up large data files that don't change very often, but I don't deal with many of those. People keep wanting to change the database, website, and developer tree files all the time for some reason.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
8X Writing speed.
End Of Line.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
For some strange reason his comment did make me LOL - big time! :O :)
Lighten up!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Now it'll take half as many disks to back up my pr0n collection.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
(can someone read one of my posts for once? :/ )
:) )
Anyhow, does anyone have any idea how these actually WORK and how an original DVD itself works?
When the layer changes on say my retail copy of fight club and the movie pauses is the laser at the edge or the inner part of the disc?
Will these burnt dual layers do the same thing?
Can we control where the layer change will be (I can imagine some movies a layer change at the wrong point would be devestating, plus money shots of course....
Also I continue to hear bloody conflicting reports that these discs are slightly smaller than retail pressed dual layers?!!? - what's the deal
9.4gb vs 8.5gb (and yes, I do know about 1024 vs 1000)
Anyone here a bit of a DVD junkie and care to answer? (please!)
DVD+R9 (The dual layer plus spec, I have no idea about minus, we're doing the same as we did with single layer minus and burying our collective corporate heads in the sand) requires MUCH tighter tolerances.
Reading shouldn't be an issue - a DVD+R (if you close the session) is supposed to be identical to a DVDROM. Of course 'supposed' is always the problem.
Anyway. Yes, you need a more responsive die and a lot less wobbly disc. We are having a really hard time finding discs that give reliable results burning right to the outside edge.
It's really nifty, but I can't in all conscience advise buying them until someone starts producing decent quantities of media.
Something similar applies for 12x and 16x writing, by the way - the media needs to be that much better. But several suppliers are making 8x media with 16x tolerances already (and will probably start branding it as such soon)
Posting anon from philips.com
...my goddamn holographic cube storage.
Four words for you: Exact DVD movie backups.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Why would Philips and Sony introduce a burner which burns all 8.5GB in approximately 45 minutes? Thats awefull SLOW!
I myself burn 4.7 Gig in 8 minutes , so a 8.5 Gig DVD-R would be finished burning in say 15 minutes max... Do i miss something here??
Robert
Once the dual-layers are bought, the ultra-high density DVD-burners/players with 20+ Gigs of capacity, will be available...
Friends help you move... Real friends help you move bodies...
And your media burned in the meantime is compatible with 100% of the DVD players that are released since a few years now, so it will be readable.
:-)
While the format might be readable, the media may have rotted away. So many discs are barely readable when they're new. I won't depend on anything more than 2 or 3 years old now. Although film and vinyl seem to be holding up pretty well
What?
Computer storage was tradionally measured in gibibytes (or mebibytes, or kibibytes) although labelled "incorrectly" as GB (gigabyte), MB (megabyte), or KB (kilobyte). That is, until hard-drive marketeers got into the act (see below).
Strictly speaking GB (gigabyte) represents 1.0e+9 bytes because giga means one billion. Similarly, mega means one million and kilo one thousand, so 1MB (megabyte) == 1.0e+6 bytes, and 1KB (kilobyte) == 1.0e+3 bytes.
In 1998, the IEC defined new prefixes to clear up the traditional confusion. See this article. Basically:
So a "tradional computer gigabyte" is is now properly represented 1GiB, and is exactly 1073741824 bytes.
Here come the marketeers
Realizing that most folks don't know a gibibyte from the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow (African or European?), marketeers noticed that labelling the size of their hard drives in strict measures of GB's (10^9 bytes) instead of the tradionally used GiB's (even though GiB is often "mislabelled" GB in the computer world) -- would allow them to artificially grow the size of their disks by more than 7% with no hardware modifications.
That is, unsuspecting computer geeks used to seeing the friendly GB as 1024^3 (2^30) bytes, and yet knowing from their science classis that this isn't quite correct, would continue to presume GB being used to represent (2^10)^3 bytes. After all, it's a sly bit of superiority when you know what the computer version of GB really means. Plus a geek worth her MBR can compute any power of two at the tip of a hat, right?
Yet a geek buys a drive labelled 120GB, and finds usable storage of less than 112GiB is present. This of course doesn't include overhead lost to file system management structures...
Coming up with free bytes by simply changing the packaging is a good thing for marketeers. Plus, they're not even lying about capacity! They're putting the correct (if non-traditional) number on the box.
DVD storage manufacturers adopted the same approach. So a 4.7GB DVD is 4.7*1e+9 bytes. Stated in tradtional computer-land GiBytes, this becomes: 4.377GiB.
While I agree with you, this is not the point. The point is that the grand-parent was frightened by a new format making his actual burner obsolete. That is not going to happen, as his already burned DVD are readable in all (most) DVD players. The fact that the media will die is irrelevant, the new media will die even faster anyways.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
That won't happen until we get gamma lasers (for short wavelength) and Dual sided/dual layered discs and burners for all. Blue laser is just around the corner, waiting to wipe out the existing "antique" formats now in use. Probably the best thing to do is to wait until your old burner breaks (which should be about 3 or 4 years from now, considering how crappy they're made) Just make sure to have a back up reader to copy from old to new format.
What?
Someone tell me I'm wrong...but i read they would be 8x and 16x....45minutes would be a huge step back...
5 96 .html
http://www.press.ce.philips.com/press/documents