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Movie Playback From 1TB Holographic Disc
qorkfiend writes "Optware Corp. has announced successful playback of digital movies on a new holographic recording disc with a reflective layer. Known as the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed. The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD."
I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density. How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense? I can appreciate the cool factor of cramming so much data on a single disc, but if I have to handle it like a Fabrege (sp?) egg, what's the point?
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
They should just skip Blu-ray and release this one. It may take a little longer to get into production, but why would peope buy Blu-ray drives if this one won't be far behind?
I remember back a long time ago on Reading Rainbow Levar(sp?) Burton visiting a research lab and them showing him a working model of holographic memory. I'm not sure which episode it was but I remember them saying we would have holographic memory "by the end of the decade" Damn vapor... (and no I'm not mixing this up with star trek)
This is not a sig
I don't think it'll take us 200 more years before we see this kind of storage.s olinearChips.htm s olinearChips.htm
http://littrell.doroch.nl/data/engineering/tech/I
We already have commercial holographic storage now. The disparity in the technological predictions of STtng is miles wide, they were so conservative when it comes to computer technology.
http://littrell.doroch.nl/data/engineering/tech/I
How long before we stop using discs all together ? Anyone care to guess ? 5 years ? 10 years ?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
...on the consumer end.
Given the proven nature of tape-based backup (and the anecdotal/proven(?) volatility of optical-disc backup), I figure the enterprise market won't touch these w/ a 10-foot pole - at least not until it's been on the market for many years.
However, the low-end/consumer-level backup market is mostly using CDs and DVDs these days (due to the cost associated w/ tapes/drives). I see that market segment moving to this more or less instantly, while growing at a VERY rapid pace (similarly to what happened with Zip disks/drives about a decade ago).
(And yes, I am assuming that this won't hit the market for a few years - however, given that the biggest standard drives are about 250GB now - and uncommon - it seems unlikely that drives will commonly be much larger than 2 TB 4 or 5 years out, such that HVD would be an inconvenient backup solution (compare the inconvenience of backing up a 40GB drive -> 10 DVDs, vs. a 4 TVB drive -> 4 HVDs).
The above presumes that they can get the tech out there for a market appropriate price - while the article doesn't shed much light on pricing, I can't imagine that new HVD media would cost too much (prob. a similar prive curve to DVD). However, the price-friendliness of the servo-technology they describe is pretty much an unproven quantiy, so who know how much the players/burners will go for...
Whether the media companies follow-suit and use the media to distribute movies (i.e. create compatible players), I have no idea. However, people will lilely be backing those movies up on these HVDs, even if only to re-burn to MPAA-approved-media-of-the-week later, as I don't see digital distribution of (uncompressed, un-DRM-encumbered) digital HD coming down the pike anytime soon.
And in 2002 we were supposed be getting damn close to have Flourscent Multilayered Discs. This was 1TB as well and they had fully functional prototypes. *sniff* *sniff* http://www.zzz.com.ru/index.php?area=articles&acti on=show_article&article_id=135&session_id= 0
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
The MPAA has sued Optware Corp. under the DMCA for manufacturing a device that will be used for storing movies and for copyright violations by making an unauthorized copy onto the disc.
The MPAA's Jack Valenti has commented that the Studios are going after the full $150,000/violation, and since it's equivilent to 85,104 Double-Layered DVD burners, they are going after $12,765,600,000.
A DVD has 4.7Gb right? But people trade quality for size, and rip it to 700Mb files. How about Telesync?
Huh?
I'd say it's more like this: What format is used for piracy is directly related to how common the media is on the market. CD's are probably still more commonly used than DVD's, but one can't say that DVD hasn't became much more common only the last few years without lying.
I've also seen some Telesync rips being more and more commonly as DVDR to minimize quality loss.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
On your last statement, sort of. Big file format is not THE solution, but it IS part of a solution to much piracy, IF it can outstrip hardware and network speeds.
You could argue that hardware and network speed demands will up as soon as the file size ups as well. That could happen, but realistically, market forces on network bandwidth gets squashed compared to hard numbers from the physical product. It's easier to deliver a 1 TV disc in the same way a CD or DVD is delivered today than to up the bandwidth universally such that piracy of a 1TB disk is feasible.
Even content development and playback tools could be massively up'd in performance to handle large formats but that does not correlate well with an increase in necessary bandwidth for piracy.
The argument of ripping and compression tools comes into play heavily, esp. considering increases in hardware performance, but there was already an excellent followup effectively takign that argument out. People who pirate compressed videos may be keeping them but weren't that interested in buying the real product. The content providers have more to worry about full, uncompressed rips akin to music CDs than something akin to what is happening with most video media like DVD (although their time it coming fast).
The fallacy in the big file format as a solution to piracy is that the strategy cannot stand alone. And the content providers and equipment makers are no where to be seen to provide the second factor to that strategy.
As you already know, 1 tb is a huge amount of material, esp. when using compressed formats (not that you would need to) like mpeg2 with really high bit rates. Any and all traditional media (TV, cinema/movies) right now can be placed on holo disks at full color, resolution, and uncompressed rates.
The problem is that playback sucks. HDTV? Pitiful. QuadXGA? Getting there, but still crappy. The tech may be there to get high resolution playback to the home, but hell, the MPAA and MS can't even even agree much less get a high resolution movie experience to the theaters.
Want to create the content? You need a freakin cluster a la Lord of the Rings. And that's cinema quality. You haven't even factored in strong 3d immersive environments like CAVES.
Right now, saving massive content is not really so much an issue. Processing for playback is not really an issue. It's the viewing devices like TVs that need to be up'd, as well as the content creation tools. Those, so far, have not kept up. While big file formats could squash piracy, it's not going to happen because no one can create these massive files with content that people are interested in, much less play them back in all their intended glory.
Why? Because the quality is better and the format is more attractive and convenient.
So the reason you buy official content rather than downloading unauthorized versions isn't a matter of ethics, but of convenience.
The goal of the industry should be to fight the pirates the only way they can (through lawsuits) while simultaneously making it easier and more worthwhile for people not to become pirates in the first damned place.
And, the industry corporations should bend over backwards to outcompete those offering alternative versions of the content they paid to manufacture?
This screams "sanction of the victim" to me. Shouldn't the content producers set the terms of distribution and acquisition? Not under your system - the pirates, the law violators, get to do that.
Added-value is a kludge solution that is not sustainable over the long term. The only thing sustaining it now - despite your desperate pleas to the contrary that "it's worth it to buy" - is widespread ignorance of the general ease of piracy.
But one thing I have to ask is, will this format actually look higher quality on a normal TV? Cause if it doesn't no-one will upgrade till HDTV or whatever becomes far more commonplace.
Hell, the average person cannot tell the difference on a TV of a DVDShrink transcoded disc to 47% quality and an original DVD disc. It's a limitation of the standard TV's. On a computer screen it looks like crap, but on TV looks the same.
My point then is that, this may be 1000 times better quality, but if you need the next resolution leap past 1080p to see it, quality will not sell the players and discs.
And convienience won't either. DVD's were a major step up from VHS. Noticable quality, sound, no reqwinding or wearing out/strectching of the tape, smaller, easier seeking/skipping etc.
But what do these have over DVD? They are the same size, and presumably will have the same navigation abilities. The quality improvement won't be noticable on the next generation system of audio and video, much less what is in homes now, and for at least 5 yrs to come I would guess. So what makes these attractive?
All 3 LOTR extended edition movies and appendicies on one disc? Ok there that is a draw, but really - how many movies are just - hollywood homocide - not epic, not a trilogy, no real interesting advances to make it... So no big extras. So what is the draw?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this.
True... but I think this technology changes the concept of "linear density" entirely: with holographic page recording, each area on the disc encodes a 2-dimensional holographic image.
If it were just the same type of 1-dimensional spiral of pits, packed closer, you're right... it would take many many more revolutions to read the whole disc. But I believe this technology doesn't use a spiral pattern at all, so the data read speed could scale right along with the overall density.
We don't know, but it's possible that each holographic page has a large amount of data, but there are a relatively small number of pages on the disc: maybe only 100 "tracks" with a variable number of pages per track. But if each page holds hundreds of megabytes of data, that would still give you a high overall capacity.
(Of course, the technical details are sparse from the company... it's obviously press-release stuff, since they're talking about playing "digital movies" -- the type of digital content obviously has nothing to do with the underlying technology. Or maybe their point was that the playback mechanism is capable of a stable enough data-rate to support movie playback?)
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
Great another spinning disk. I wish we could move away from things with motors - fans, spinning disks etc If it is cool holographics why not leave it stationary and move the laser
Given a 1 terabyte disk, how hi-def could the video be? Let do the math. I'm going to assume base-1000 marketing measurements where "1 terabyte" is actually exactly 1 trillion bytes.
;)
Assuming a 2 hour movie at 24 frames per second...
2*60*60*24 = 172,800 frames
1 terabyte / 172,800 frames = 5,787,037 bytes per frame
If we stick to uncompressed but low dynamic range pixels then we need 3 bytes per pixel...
5,787,037 / 3 = 1,929,012 pixels per frame
That's actually slightly less than the 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) highest-end HDTV image.
Of course, WMV9PRO compression supposedly delivers something like 2 hours of 1080p on a standard DVD. If we accept compression, the math becomes much easier. Given that 1 terabyte is roughly 200 DVDs you can do:
1) 400 hours of 1920x1080 video
2) 2 hours of 26,880x15,120 video
3) any balance between 1) and 2)
Personally, I'd like to see some of that extra space go to delivering 72 frame per second, 16 bit per channel video. That 6x multiplier would still give us approximately 66 hours of 1080p video even if the compression only scaled linearly.
Let me know when it hits the shelves.
I agree with suraklin here... people say you "can't tell the difference between cd audio and dvd-a (the real audio version) unless you have expensive sound equipment, and that 2 speakers is all you need... And usually its from the audiophiles...well
I CANT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 192kbps mp3 and a cd... can't.. i'm not "audiophile" I just like to listen to my music. Mp3's sound fine to me. I like positional audio for games sooo...
I got the cheap 7.1 creative labs speakers ($99 or so!!!) from newegg. I wasn't expecting much. But my sound card has true dvd-a support... I put in a dvd-a disc and was BLOWN AWAY by how amazing it sounded.
It's like the difference between a good but not perfect cassete tape and a cd. Sure i'm sure if you had the perfect cassete and stereo it might be hard to tell the difference but get real. Its very noticeable... DVD-A IS GOOD.. (i've never heard a sacd i dont have the stuff to play one)...
And I'm not just saying that because it "seems" to be good.
My mom was gone when my new computer arrived and I set up the new speakers etc... She walked into my room when i was playing the dvd-a sampler I had... she never comments no music except that "its too loud"...
Her first comment was "how much did these speakers cost?" I reply, $99... she goes.. "wow..well...I was going to be upset but...that sounds *amazing*"....
I've told my friends to sit down at the optimal listening point (my chair of course)...and then started up the dvd-a player...no one i've played it for has been less than amazed about how it sounds.
So don't listen to the "audiophiles".... fuck 'em... You don't need $1000 speakers to enjoy DVD-A and their uber spendy 2 channel fuck-me-in-the-wallet speakers aren't needed to enjoy the audio... DVD-A and prolly sa-cd (i dont know never heard it) can be enjoyed fine on $99 speakers..the difference IS REAL.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)