Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3

fenimor writes "Sony announced today that it had begun preparations to adopt Blu-ray Disc ROM (BD-ROM) format as a medium for the next generation PlayStation. Single side double layer Blu-Ray discs have a huge memory size of 54 GB, being an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications. Next month Sony plans to announce a 200GB 8-layer version of BD-ROM according to MacWorld."

Comments

I wonder

[JaffaKREE]

how badly a small scratch will affect these ? How much data redundancy is there ?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not 100% sure but I think the BD discs are contain within a magazine.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots. That was a common concern when DVDs came out but there is a lot more data correction on DVD. Same so with BluRay See the FAQ

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

If the drive is anything like the PS2's, you'll find out right away (after your new PS3 digs a nice crevase in the first disk you pop in).

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

And, just how many games will ever use that much space? Considering a large slice of PS2 games that come on DVD are just barely scraping a single gig (and filled to the brim with empty "dummy files") I'd be surprised if any game hits over 10 gigs.

I mean, let's have higher resolution FMV's! Crisp! Less artificing. But seriously, the game itself -- Do you suppose they'll ever make a 50 gigabyte PS3 game?

I'm not denying that they will. Just being curious.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nobody will need more than 640K of RAM"

- Bill Gates

Re:I wonder

[grub]

I mean, let's have higher resolution FMV's! Crisp! Less artificing. But seriously, the game itself -- Do you suppose they'll ever make a 50 gigabyte PS3 game?

It's not just about games. Once the Blu-Ray readers are more common and available for a few hundred bucks for your AV rack you'll see the push to re-buy the movies you've already bought on VHS and DVD.

"Star Wars Special BluRay Edition in 300 channel THX certified blah blah blah" (and Greedo will still shoot first in that release)

Re:I wonder

[Laur]

Right.. the manufacturers have never dreamed that a disc would be scratched. They build so much data correction into these things it's a non-issue.

Don't rent DVDs much do you?

Re:I wonder

[vasqzr]

Keep 10 copies of a game on the disc. Bad spot in one? read it from another copy of the game on the same disc.

Or, maybe they'll start using some sort of caddy, much like when CDROM's first became used in PC's.

Or, they'll use some 'space-age' technology where you can't scratch the disks.

Re:I wonder

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

I honestly have no idea, but the latest Final Fantasy games I've played (X and X-2) seem so well done and crafted, with tons of audio/video, I'd wager at least one company (SquareSoft, or is it SquareEnix now or some other name?) will make use of this extra added space.

Re:I wonder

[libra-dragon]

How about distributing 10 different games on one disc. Allowing access to games via an activation key hashed from the internal host id. Maybe tack on a few Sony movies accessed by the same method.

Re:I wonder

[Zorilla]

Or, maybe they'll start using some sort of caddy...

*click*.....*click*.......*click*...

Damn...

Re:I wonder

[British]

Look on the bright side. With the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, they could have a larger library of tunes to play while you're driving around in Liberty/Vice City. beats mere 15 minute tracks per station like GTA3 had.

Of course, they could just make some premium version of GTA that would use something like private shoutcast stations to stream radio stations and have virtually unlimited in-game music.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

companies already do that with cds

Re:I wonder

[rhsanborn]

Nah, that'd mean they have to pay someone for the content...

Re:I wonder

[Enucite]

Don't rent DVDs much do you?

My father owns a chain of stores that rent DVDs. The grandparent is absolutely correct when he says scratches are a non-issue. You'd be amazed what those things can survive. They're infinitely better than CDs as far as reliability after being scratched.

If you're having problems with rentals, get a better DVD player. The only people who come back with problems have either a first generation DVD player, or a mauled DVD.

Re:I wonder

[nempo]

I guess that you've never played a final fantasy game have you ? ;D

Re:I wonder

[ZorbaTHut]

A game that I worked on - Everquest: Champions of Norrath - used the entire dual-layer DVD. In fact, if we'd had more, we could have used it. In fact, we ended up having to remove some of the data for the international version because the voice files were too big to fit. I personally wrote a compression algorithm to compress our textures down to about half their previous size (and yes, they were compressed before also.)

I think one level had around 10gb of textures uncompressed, brought down to under half a gig after heavy processing.

That said, if we'd had access to a really fast processor and GPU, none of that would have been necessary. So I don't know what people can use 50gb for, given that the system is extremely fast.

But maybe it's not as fast as I think it is.

Re:I wonder

[stratjakt]

Who says the discs have to be filled anyways?

But thinking of big animated textures, not animated like 3 frames but animated as in the texture itself is a 2 gig video file, I dunno..

It's certainly possible. There are plenty of XBox and PS2 games that are > 4.5 gigs, just look around the PS2 warez scene and see the kiddies crying about what games require a little skill to copy.

Xenogears is on 2 dual layered DVDs, isn't it? Thats almost 20 gigs there.

I don't care if games are 50 gigs or not, I hope none are even that close. I hope I never have to swap discs in the middle of a game again.

Re:I wonder

[mausmalone]

some of the graphic and audio hurdles you see in modern games aren't just 'cause the systems aren't fast enough to handle them. Repeated models, redundant textures, low res textures, dialog without audio... all of these things can be aleviated by having a bigger storage medium. Of course, expect development times to increase because of it ...

Re:I wonder

[Mysticalfruit]

I take it your algorithm was very lossy...

BTW, Champions of Norrath was a great game. My wife and I played the hell out of it and enjoyed every minute of it.

Where I think the blu-ray technology will be great is that you'll make it possible to add all kinds of extra stuff. Just imagine if this technology was available for Champions, how many extra levels, optional side quests, character classes, weapons, etc. that you could have added to game, while not having to compress the crap out of the textures and the like.

Re:I wonder

[Khaotix]

I remember hearing they planned on using a caddy. how silly.

Re:I wonder

[DrEldarion]

If you're having problems with rentals, get a better DVD player.

Very true. My PS2 shit itself when I was trying to play scratched DVDs, but a normal standalone DVD player played them just fine.

Re:I wonder

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Well you don't technically play FF games, it is more like watching them.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

After the merger Square and Enix became Square Enix, U.S.A. Co. Ltd. in the United States. But have since changed their U.S. based division's name to Square Enix, Inc. They are still called Square Enix, Co. Ltd. in Japan, and Square Enix, Ltd. in Europe.

Re:I wonder

[ZorbaTHut]

Very lossy. They "started" as 32-bit color, and, well, they're textures. They tend to be pretty monochromatic. It's amazing how many bits you can get rid of when your source is highly monochromatic. :) Every world texture in the game is compressed, and, well, how many texture artifacts did you see? :P

(There are a few, but you have to kind of know what you're looking for - they look surprisingly like MPEG2 decoding artifacts, despite absolutely no similarity between the algorithms.)

And thanks for the compliment ^^

The problem with extra content is that somebody has to generate it and debug it. I mean, yeah, we would have loved to add tons of new character classes and weapons and levels and quests, but the fact is that spending twice as long making the game wouldn't have generated twice the sales. Even all the different colorings on the pieces of armor - I watched our artists wandering around the office for *days* with long reams of paper, doublechecking that every single armor color matched up properly (and boy did I not envy them, although I did the same thing with the minimaps, so there you have it.)

Content, unfortunately, is surprisingly expensive to produce. :/

Re:I wonder

[Bachus9000]

Xenogears was a PSOne game. You're thinking of Xenosaga, and IIRC it was one dual layered, one-sided disc. Now you have me doubting my memory, though, so I'll just say it was at least one disc, then. :)

Re:I wonder

[MindStalker]

Hell GTA San Andreas is reported to use a dual-layer DVD. Thats already more than 4.5 GB

Re:I wonder

[Tenebrious1]

So how long will the new FF summonings be, 10 minutes each? 30 minute cut scenes? I shudder at the thought.

Personally I'd rather they spend the time creating more "world" to explore rather than rendering hours and hours FMVs...

Re:I wonder

[shawn(at)fsu]

Remeber Quake I, how you could get the demo from EB and it had the full version that you could get an activation key for....

I remeber a lot of people at my HS having Quake I but no one "bought' the key. I'm surprised companies would do this again.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this moderated funny? The discs are in a plastic casing...

Re:I wonder

[pommiekiwifruit]

And yet I often see pixellation and other artefacts when watching DVDs (on a standalone player).

Re:I wonder

[Brackney]

I always thought physical RAM was a greater hurdle for people developing on consoles. There's not a lot there so you end up shuffling data in and out of RAM from optical media. Not the best arrangement...

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I picked up Star Wars KOTOR the other day in the bargain bin. I think it's eating several GB on my hard drive. It was distributed on 4 CDs.

Don't worry--they'll find *some* reason to put more crap on our drives. Not sure I need to watch *that* many AVIs to enjoy the game, but oh well.

Re:I wonder

[NanoGator]

"And, just how many games will ever use that much space?"

Why is this in the slightest bit relevent? Sony's providing the platform, the developers figure out what to do with it. Less restrictions are a good thing, not some +5 interesting bitching point.

Re:I wonder

[Threni]

> Or, they'll use some 'space-age' technology where you can't scratch the disks.

Seems odd to me that CDs and DVDs are so easily scratched. Why not make them harder to scratch? Is the tradeoff scratchiness vs shatterproofness? Seeing as I'm usually holding one over a desk or carpet, I'd happily have less flexible disks if it meant they were harder to scratch.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

What you need to realize is that PS3 might support HDTV resolutions. In that case all the the out of game pre-rendered movies will be a lot larger. And for that matter maybe even normal textures.

Re:I wonder

[master_p]

PS3 games will have so highly advanced graphics, that the textures alone will fill more than, let's say, 5 DVDs of today. With resolutions of 4096x4096 and more, and with multiple textures for each surface, the big space is really needed.

And let's not forget the audio.

Re:I wonder

[Brackney]

I'll second MysticalFruit's kudos. Champions of Norrath was one of my favorite games of the past year. Great work from everyone involved!

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was a funny magazine.

Re:I wonder

[AuMatar]

YEah. Ever noticed how there's less and less game in each of the modern Final Fantasies? Ah, to be back with FF4 and FF6 again.

Re:I wonder

[AuMatar]

Xeno gears was a 2 cd PS1 game. Xenosaga was a 1 DVD "game". Your memory was correct.

Re:I wonder

[TrancePhreak]

ZORBALAT0R, it be the Ghaleon.

Re:I wonder

[hai.uchida]

Aren't Blu-Ray disks in protective cartridges? Everything I've seen so far indicates this...

Re:I wonder

[Baikala]

Thats the compression algorithms and the quality of the player, not the imperfections in the medium

Re:I wonder

[Nazmun]

On top of that... it seems there will be a minuscule (in comparison to modern computers and the upgrade from the ps2) amount of ram on the ps3.

It should at least have 256mb but last time i heard it was closer to 256 mega-bit.

Re:I wonder

[Hobart]

Do you suppose they'll ever make a 50 gigabyte PS3 game?

You're new to Final Fantasy games "summon" FMV clips, aren't you?

Re:I wonder

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This maybe true for many games, but one of the creators of GTA recently said when talking about San Andreas here

The danger is currently the storage medium (DVD), and one we thing we're all praying for in the next round of hardware is that they don't just go, 'It's DVD again'. We've done some clever stuff with compressing it, but we were virtually full on the disc with Vice City - this time we're overfilling the disc to the max."

Games which require more media content will need bigger discs, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to the days of 4 disc games. I was always losing one of the middle discs.

Another reason for this move by Sony is that blu-ray on the PS3 may well increase blu-ray proliferation. I can say honestly that the inclusion of DVD on PS2 _seriously_ aided the uptake of the format. If PS3 supports blu-ray expect to see an unusually quick uptake of high density DVDs, paticularly those aimed at the 10-35 age group.

My only worry about this is that bigger and more impressive media will lead to an even lower signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves, with companies churing out even more linear, single play, interactive movies. I guess ZSNES may be around for a while yet.

Re:I wonder

[Spleener12]

That's precisely what they thought about DVD back when the PS2 was coming around. Keep in mind that this was a time when only a handful of games couldn't fit on one 650 MB CD. In the early days a lot of PS2 games were on CDs, yes, but it didn't take too long for people to figure out how to use the extra few gigabyes.

Re:I wonder

[Spleener12]

Actually, if you've been paying attention to the last couple of Final Fantasies, they've been listening to fans re: summon lengths. The average length peaked in FF8. FF9 occasionally had long ones but usually gave you shorter (but less poweful) versions of the animatiions. And there's a menu option to shorten the lengths of FFX's aeon summons/overdrives and FFX-2's dressphere changes so that you only have to see the long versions the first time you use them.

As for as FMV goes, I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 could render graphics that are good enough to make it so that Squeenix doesn't need to have pre-rendered FMV.

Re:I wonder

[geminidomino]

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is a 2-DVD game tho... I haven't had time to play it yet (and I bought it on release day =\) but this thing is supposed to be fargin HUGE. I'm just afraid of what Square's done to it.

Re:I wonder

[Soul-Burn666]

And according to the last preview, they used it almost to the last bit.

Re:I wonder

[InadequateCamel]

""Star Wars Special BluRay Edition in 300 channel THX certified blah blah blah"(and Greedo will still shoot first in that release)"

Yes, but good ol' George will use that extra storage space to his advantage to correct that little error, with Jar Jar hilariously causing a catastrophic systems failure on a shuttle that crashes onto Greedo's head just in time to save Han.

All of this will be recorded in 300 channel THX certified Milk-it-for-all-it's-worth-and-somehow-further-sul ly-what's-left-of-the-franchise's-good-name-o-Visi on.

Re:I wonder

[psetzer]

I think that it's inevitable. Every time you make a game, there's always a push to put in more content. One thing that I've seen that can work is to use a terrain generator for some game to make some large game world, and then save it for later use. This can be much quicker than doing it on the fly, and it's about the only way that you'd make a Paris-Dakar Rally game. When GTA4 comes out, you can be sure that it will use the size of the disc to some extent. Each iteration since GTA3 has doubled the game world, and this would allow another doubling, easy. I would have also liked it if Metal Gear Solid 2 were a bit longer, which a larger medium would allow.

Also, there's voice acting, which, when done correctly, makes a good game great. This takes up huge amounts of space if you want an entire game to be like that. In a related vein, music can be made more varied while still sounding just as good, or you can grab music that fits the game. More radio statons in a GTA game wouldn't hurt.

Finally, game code is getting longer and longer, and supporting files are also becoming bigger. I mean, the textures on the PS1 are enough to make baby Jesus cry, and the one advantage FF7 had over 8 and 9 was the fact that they just threw in the towel and used Gourand shading rather than trying to shove every texture you would need into (I think) 2 MB video memory.

Even though I mentioned this stuff, I don't really get as excited by it as I do by the ability to do stuff with more processing power. Game ecologies interest me in a way, as do game economies that really work. Imagine Ultima Online going into ecological ruin after the bunnies go extinct from too much hunting! OK, maybe not. However, it is gratifying to think that some day game programmers might not be stuck with some variety of C to write games just to get that last iota of performance out of the system. (I can dream.)

Re:I wonder

[Llama_STi]

will his shot be a blu-ray?? :P

Re:I wonder

[minasoko]

The problem with extra content is that somebody has to generate it and debug it. I mean, yeah, we would have loved to add tons of new character classes and weapons and levels and quests, but the fact is that spending twice as long making the game wouldn't have generated twice the sales. Even all the different colorings on the pieces of armor - I watched our artists wandering around the office for *days* with long reams of paper, doublechecking that every single armor color matched up properly (and boy did I not envy them, although I did the same thing with the minimaps, so there you have it.) Content, unfortunately, is surprisingly expensive to produce. :/

Offtopic, but I wanted to say that the effort shows. My friends and I greatly enjoyed Champions of Norrath and played the hell out of it to try and collect all the unique items. The huge amount of content was definitely evident (to the point that the ps2 noticeably struggles to access it all on occasion). BTW, are you working on the sequel?

Re:I wonder

[geminidomino]

As much as it made my skin crawl to see someone judge FF by X and X-2, I have to agree that SE will probably use a good part of this extra space. If I'm not mistaken (and I might well be) Star Ocean 3 (an Enix title) is the first US-released game to span more than one DVD.

Re:I wonder

[mausmalone]

For certain games, it is a RAM problem, but there are several that stream levels, geometry, textures, and audio straight off the disc. You can use any RPG as an example. They tend to load in between "areas" (however you want to define that from game to game). The game would probably tend to look nicer over-all if it actually loaded different geometry and textures for each scene, instead of repeating the same ones. Also, voice is usually not a constraint because it's only in memory for the duration of playback, then the memory is freed. Usually, inconsequential dialouge isn't voiced because it would take up too much space on the storage medium.

Re:I wonder

[Mysticalfruit]

I can see your point. It's the persistant problem we see with all hardware/software products. The hardware evolves faster than the software can keep up with it. What needs to happen is the tools for developing the software need to make a leap forward so stuff like level designs with triggers, etc would just work. The designers could just go hog wild and know that the tools are robust enough to not bungle things.

Re:I wonder

[jp10558]

and Greedo will still shoot first in that release)

I must be one of the only people who is not a star wars fan, but I'm seeing this all over the place on /. recently. Could someone please indicate to me the significence of greedo shooting first?

Re:I wonder

[Seek_1]

You mean just like iD did when they bundled all their games on the Quake (1) CD?

Re:I wonder

[ZorbaTHut]

Depending on how you're looking at it, that's either not a problem or not possible. :)

I know we had a ton of useful tools, all of which worked extremely well. However, somebody still has to code them. I don't believe it's possible to write a general toolkit for games (in another way of looking at it, I believe we already have one - it's called C++) and so I think what we've got now is as good as it will get.

This says nothing with regards to lousy programmers who don't understand how important tools are, of course - if your level designer has to talk to a programmer for every small change, something's seriously wrong. But even if the tools are completely perfect, the designer isn't - people make mistakes, and so everything (EVERYTHING) has to be tested.

Re:I wonder

[ZorbaTHut]

I personally am not (I'm working at Google :) ) but I don't know if Snowblind is or not. However, they have a forum frequented by the admins, so if you ask there somebody will know.

Whether they'll tell you or not is another matter entirely. :P

And yes, the PS2 does struggle quite a bit on that game - we're maxing out an amazing amount of the PS2's hardware :) I'm really not sure how much prettier it's possible to make a PS2 game - at least, I can't think of any resources we left untapped or any serious inefficiencies (well, one, that I thought of a year after the game was released, but.)

Re:I wonder

[harrkev]

Welcome to our planet. What color is the sky in your world?

In the original movie, Han shoots Greedo first. This fits in with his nature of being a "scoundrel." Of course, Greedo is already pointing a weapon at Han, so it is justified.

Mr. Lucas wanted Han to seem like more of a good guy, so he adds in Greedo shooting first, and Han taking the second shot. Not only does this not make sense given the plot, it also requires Greedo to miss a shot from only three feet away, and he has had time to aim. Simply pathetic. The special edition of Star Wars was an improvement in every way, except for this one blunder. Well, I also think that they cut the Stormtrooper banging his head on the door, but that is no big deal.

Sorry if this is OT, but he asked!

Re:I wonder

[SmittyTheBold]

Often times unrecoverable errors manifest in glitchy video.

Re:I wonder

[geminidomino]

Self-reply as a warning... Most of this space is used in a Xenosaga-esque fashion... Play five minutes, watch a 30 minute cutscene. *sigh*

SE, PLEASE leave DQ8 alone. *begs*

What will XBOX 2 use

[ThomasFlip]

Probably not this, anyone know ?

Re:What will XBOX 2 use

[JaffaKREE]

Knowing them, they'll use the competitor - I think it was Philips' version. Here we go again, DVD-R vs DVD+R.

Re:What will XBOX 2 use

[Volkov137]

Rumor has it, they will be using flash cartrages.

Now all we need...

[ackthpt]

Now all we need is some decent games. It would be very cool if Sony would direct some of their lucre towards obtaining rights to M.U.L.E. and Mail Order Monsters and put them on this system.

with all that storage they could make the planet Irata truly shine...

Re:Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes...MOM was a great game. They could add the "big stinkin' cesspool", where you can throw in monster parts and see what kind of random mutation comes out.

What was interesting about MOM was that no matter what I created, the computer monster was just a leetle more powerful...

Re:Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

M.U.L.E. kicks ass!

Re:Now all we need...

[Finkbug]

"Now all we need is some decent games. It would be very cool if Sony would direct some of their lucre towards obtaining rights to M.U.L.E. and Mail Order Monsters and put them on this system."

Ssh! Don't wake them up or we'll get M.U.L.E. IX: Spikey Purple Hair Localized Platinum Edition.

Re:Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would seriously buy a PlayStation if I could play MULE on it.

Then again, I can play MULE in emulation on my Powerbook anytime I feel like it, with the added bonus of being able to save the game at any time. So nevermind.

Re:Now all we need...

[ackthpt]

I would seriously buy a PlayStation if I could play MULE on it.

The upside to a new MULE release would be online playing against other planeteers. I found the game a riot when playing people, but it was usually hard to get a group together. Not a problem on a network, though.

Hmm

[deutschemonte]

I think I will use a previous comment of mine to address this story.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118044&c id=9973808

Re:Hmm

[cortez]

So..... you don't want any more mod points for your comment??

Fuzzy Logic.

[Carik]

Does anyone else keep reading "Blu-Ray" as "BluRry"?

Re:Fuzzy Logic.

[wheany]

no

Re:Fuzzy Logic.

[TylerL82]

Set your screen to a less-dense resolution - like, 800x600.
That should help.

Third post!

[Anonymous Coward]

W00t! Gah, I hate Italian majors who feel they deserve money just because they have always been priveledged. And yet they will probably wind up w/ 2x the money and 1/2 the work as me, but who cares, third post! w00t!

Re:Third post!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I think knowing how to say "Please don't break my kneecaps I'll pay next week" in Italian is certainly handy.

backwards compatible

[Tante]

Will this be compatible with all my PS2 games?

Re:backwards compatible

[Krandor3]

Blu-ray can read standard DVDs and CDs as well. Weather Sony adds the software/hardware for backward compatibility is a different question, but a blu-ray laser does not prevent them from doing so.

Re:backwards compatible

[0racle]

Sony would have to be complete idiots to drop backwards compatibility, it was such a big thing in the success of the PS2.

Re:backwards compatible

[drunkennewfiemidget]

Sony has already made it perfectly clear that the PS3 will also be backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 much like the PS2 is with PS1.

Re:backwards compatible

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why people care so much about backwards compatability. I know people who said that was the great thing about the PS2 and they probably never played a PS1 game on the damn thing. If you have the games already you must have the older system....just use that for shit sake.....I don't get it....I'd rather see them spend more time making the current system better than worrying about being able to play a few old games on the new maching.

Re:backwards compatible

[tepples]

If you have the games already you must have the older system....just use that for shit sake.

If "the older system" breaks, then how will I replace it should Sony cease its production?

Re:backwards compatible

[xjerky]

Ebay?

Re:backwards compatible

[suicidedoll]

Actually, I play all my old PS1 games on my PS2. Faster load speeds and other enhancements that can be toggled in the PS2 load screen make a perfectly good reason to store my PS1 beside my Sega Saturn.

Re:backwards compatible

[AuMatar]

I play 3 PS1 games for ever PS2 game, all on my PS2. Backward compatibility is the greatest idea ever, it allows me to get rid of my old console before emulation is fast enough to support the games on my PC. I don't think I'd buy another console that doesn't have it- I'd rather not have the extra clutter, I'll play PC games and give my support to a console that does have it.

54GB

[Anonymous Coward]

size of 54 GB, being an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications.

Yes, that allows a lot of bloat for computer applications. Windows anyone? Sorry.

Re:54GB

[Paulrothrock]

Just like AOL. Remember when that came on a floppy.

And even if you didn't *want* AOL, at least you could reuse the floppy.

</crotchety bastard>

Re:54GB

[Zorilla]

Yes, that allows a lot of bloat for computer applications. Windows anyone? Sorry.

It's not just Windows. I can't even get SuSE 9.1 Personal below 2 GB. For one thing, it likes to find very weird places to hide temp files permanently (does that make sense?)

Disclaimer: SuSE is my favorite Linux distro

Re:54GB

[Walt Dismal]

Now I can stop worrying about archiving my pRoN collection.

Re:54GB

[Chrispy1000000 the 2]

Well, with that much room, if you could write on the disk, you could boot and run from disk, and save to that same disk, without easily running out. Just one step closer to being able to carry your entire OS in one CD case. And then the next step is just standardized terminals, where you plug this disk in, and go.
Or, in other words.
Just think of it as:

Yes, I would like to install GTA3 to Blu-Ray(1)

Access time would suck(at first), but hell, in a pinch...

And PS. Yes, there are exceptions... But for the normal person, this *would work*.

Re:54GB

[prell]

I was thinking: if you divide the amount of RAM available to the PS2 by the capacity of dual-layer DVDs, you get about 0.034. If you multiply 54 GB by 0.0034, you get ~183.60 MB. As impressive as 54 GB on a single disc sounds, it makes sense from a "scaling"/being-able-to-take-advantage-of perspective. Of course, if you consider the maximum size advertised in this article, which is 200 GB, you get 680.0 MB. What are the odds that the PS3 will have 512 MB of ram? 384?

Re:54GB

[Hadlock]

On the flip side, about 80% of the memory (probably more, I'm taking a guess here) is used for graphical application. With the advent of HDTV, you went up in graphical density by about 400% (another guess), giving you a number around 128 MB. Assume for a moment that they decide to make the PS3 be able to do non interlaced 1080, would give you 256MB.

I would guess the PS3 will have somewhere between 96 and 196MB of ram, with 384 being the absolute highest. Look at what the Xbox can do with 64mb of ram, and it is only half a generation ahead of the PS2.

Re:54GB

[upsidedown_duck]

What are the odds that the PS3 will have 512 MB of ram? 384?

It seems consoles lag consumer PCs in RAM, so I wouldn't be suprised at all to see 256MB in the PS3. For example, the PS2 has 32MB when PCs had 64 to 128MB, and I'm pretty sure the PS1 fell into the same ratio (a few MB RAM in the PS1?). Since modern PCs tend to have 256MB to 512MB or more, 256MB would probably sound about right at the time the PS3 is released. The next race won't be to put Linux on the PS3, but Windows! (I know the ISA will be a hurdle in this)

Security by Obscurity?

[LostCluster]

Since most of us don't use this type of disc in our computers, and are unlikely to upgrade solely to copy videogame disks... could they be hoping on good old fashioned security by obscurity to be an extra hurdle against piracy?

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[garcia]

The extra hurdle is the fact that they hold 50+GB per disc. With recent crackdowns on bandwith hogs on Comcast with unknown boundaries and DSL ISPs setting known limits I see this as being the major deterrent to pirates.

Now, of couse you can head over to your local Blockbuster and possibly burn the disc yourself from their copy (if it's possible) but I have a feeling that the media costs might not justify you doing that at least for several years.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[wheany]

Why not? It will probably do nothing to stop professional pirates, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[nbert]

I wouldn't call it Obscurity, because this format is very well documented and Bluray writers are planned. But it definitely slows down piracy since those discs are more expensive (lowers pirates profit). It's also quite likely that the PS3 will come out before any affordable writers are out... so there won't be any illegal copies around for a certain timeframe...
And even if piracy becomes a problem they will get an advantage in the next format war.

IMO those factors played a higher role in their decision than enabling developers to create 54 GB games.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since most of us don't use this type of disc in our computers, and are unlikely to upgrade solely to copy videogame disks... could they be hoping on good old fashioned security by obscurity to be an extra hurdle against piracy?

Maybe just for the Linux crowd who always seems to be behind the technology curve.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[he who meows]

Just because the format holds that much data doesn't mean it will all be used for every game. A lot of psx games only used 100-200 megs of the disc. Usually larger games only fill up the rest of the space with video or non-sequenced music. Also, some of the first generation PS2 games used a CD. Unless all of the videos for a game are suddenly 1900x1200 with 5.1 channel audio or something, I really doubt we'll have games using the full capacity of a Blu-ray disc for a long time

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

That is EXACTLY the same argument I have been hearing for years and it is ALWAYS invalid. People said that cds would be uncopiable because people would not have the hard disk space, cd recorders are amazingly expensive, so is media, and it takes about a week on an unreliable connection to download a cd. Well, guess what, things moved on. Then came dvds. Exact same arguments. Now it's the same with a blue-ray or whatever it's called. With a 10Mbit connection, something entirely possible during the next 3-4 years, the average consumer will be able to download 54 Gb in more or less 24 hours. Good enough for you?

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[MindStalker]

Yes, but some PS2 games actually fill the remaining space with crap, and then write some hash stuff to check the crap and make sure its there. So you copy the game you either have to just copy the entire thing, or by very creative.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrr! Professional pirates stick to the open water, and have no use for your video games! Bring on the grog and the wenches, landlubber!

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[prell]

But it definitely slows down piracy since those discs are more expensive (lowers pirates profit).

I think most people in the U.S. download things illegally because they want the convenience, the lower cost (not zero due to initial purchase of writing hardware and discs), and, of course, the ability to enjoy the data. Considering that, what do you think the chances are that demand for downstream bandwidth 5x what we have now, will be much higher two years from now?

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[nbert]

yes, at least in the US people usually download the games on their own, but it has the same effect: The difference in price between an illegal and an official copy is dimished thus resulting in less "convenience" for pirate copies. However, this is only true if it's much cheaper for Sony to make a Bluray disc than for the pirate (private person or organized crime business).

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[Matt2k]

Yes.

In fact that's why you hardly see pirated DVD movies these days. Chalk it up to those obscure DVD formats.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[johannesg]

I would think that developers would also attempt to actually cram 54GB of data onto those disks (using hi-res movies, etc.) just to slow down downloads. The convenience factor of downloads is kinda lost when it takes a week or two to download a game...

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[MikeBabcock]

They just want to use a good technology they developped in house.

Haven't you followed the news on Blu-Ray?

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[joper90]

I call bullshit.. you don't get then on p2p.. that for sure.. but on 100Mbit+ you most certainly do..

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[Anonymous Coward]

You dont get DVD's on P2P? Try looking at suprnova some time fucknut.

Re:Security by Obscurity?

[joper90]

i don't need too.. u fucking leech.

BD-RW

[elcheesmo]

I just want to know when I can get a BD-RW off of newegg.

Re:BD-RW

[Chocolate Teapot]

Probably before I get the mp3 I queued up 6 weeks ago

Re:BD-RW

[Zorilla]

Let's see, it took seven years for affordable DVD writing, and dual layer discs are still either unavailible or expensive to the asinine degree. Prepare to wait a while.

Re:BD-RW

[Hadlock]

The CD came out in 1982. It took until 1996 (1.4 decades) to see the first CD-Rs. 1.8 to see "affordable" CD writing.

Given the current "trend" of 2.5x less time from introduction to affordable writing capability each generation, it should take 2.8 years before we see affordable writable BD-ROMs. Considering that they're designing the spec with BD-Rs in mind (unlike CDs and DVDs), two years isn't too far out of the range of possibility.

In other news...

[Zorilla]

Next month Sony plans to announce a 200GB 8-layer version of BD-ROM according to MacWorld."

Today is November 5, 2006, and in today's news, angry video store owners with pitchforks are lined up in front of Sony's front doors.

Kids will love these discs.

Purchase of MGM

[frankmu]

this way Sony can push the PS3 effectively. the question is will they have enough Blue ray HD movies available by the time the PS3 is released.

Re:Purchase of MGM

[LostCluster]

Sony was a pretty big player in the content biz even before they had MGM... they bought out Columbia Tri-Star a few years ago and therefore own that movie archive as well as a handful TV series as recent as Dawson's Creek and the Donnie Osmond episodes of the Pyramid game show.

Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[goldspider]

You all know it's coming, but seriously folks, before the Dreamcast and original Playstation came out, what console's games didn't come out on a proprietary format?

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Dreamcast uses GD ROM => 1GB disks

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[magicsquid]

The Dreamcast DID have a proprietary format. It was called the GD-Rom.

The following explanation is courtesy of SkunkWorks

The Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM system utilizes Oak Technology's OTI-9220 CD-ROM controller which is a single chip integration of Sony's "CXD-3005R" DSP/Servo control and Oak Technology's "OTI-912" CD-ROM decoder.

So what does this mean? Sega had their "proprietary" GD-ROM system designed to use media with 2 times the capacity of CD-ROM discs, but with off-the-shelf CD-ROM components, and may have used a technique of running the spindle motor at half the speed required for CD-ROM's in reading 2x density GD-ROM discs-- tricking the pickup into believing it's reading off data from a CD-ROM disc at "x" (CAV) spindle rpm when it is actually reading a GD-ROM disc at "y" spindle rpm (x divided by 2=y). With same data read rates as with a CD-ROM disc running at twice it's rpm, the optical head, focus servo controls, signal processors, etc etc. aren't aware it's actually reading data off from a larger capacity medium. In other words, the GD-ROM disc is nothing more than a "passively accelerated" (tightly packed) CD-ROM disc, "decelerated" to emulate a CD-ROM by running the spindle motor at half the rpm!

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, you've got it backwards. The 3DO and Neo-Geo, as well as the Sega CD addons, for instance, came out before the PSX, and did /not/ use a proprietary format - they used regular CDs. The Dreamcast absolutely did use a proprietary GD-ROM disc, which held 1 GB by throwing away some error recovery data, I believe. PSX games were produced on specially-made CDs, too, though they were closer to the standard.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Anonymous Coward]

DC was a proprietary format. You're confused because the DC can play CD-Rs if they're set up right.
All console games have some kind of copy protection, they use non-standard disks in one way or another.

What is worth a flame is Sony's use of a non-standard format for movies, both BluRry and UMD for the PSP. BluRry may become the new standard instead of HD-DVD (I'm rooting for the 3rd, Chinese, standard myself :), but UMD is almost certainly doomed.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[goldspider]

I stand corrected on the specifics, but my point is still the same. There is nothing new about game consoles using closed, proprietary media formats.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Zorilla]

And it worked so well, you didn't even need a mod chip. Seriously, most games were less than 700 MB anyway, but if they did exceed it, the data could just be compressed, with only a small load time penalty in-game to show for it.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we all know, that if the first compression doesn't put you under 700MB, you could just repeat the process.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[gl4ss]

in fact.. can anyone state _any_ dreamcast game that was over the limit of what is burnable on a cd?

(besides, it was probably just cheaper to make the games for cd's.. )

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Zorilla]

Uhh....I meant compressed at the file level. For instance, the warez release of Skies of Arcadia was on plain CD-ROM, but with the data compressed down to fit below the 700 MB limit.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Zorilla]

You all know it's coming, but seriously folks, before the Dreamcast and original Playstation came out, what console's games didn't come out on a proprietary format?

NEC PC Engine (the later version with the cd drive, of course - the one with the awesome Castlevania game - Akumajuo Dracula X - Chi no Rondo)

Sega 32x was also standard CD-ROM, right? Sega Satuen? And what about Phillips CD-i? (if that even counts)

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Atario]

It was called the GD-Rom.

Yeah -- as in "gimme that G. D. rom over there."

Sorry.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[Dot.Com.CEO]

It actually worked pretty well. What did not work was the backdoor left for normal cds to boot given the proper instructions. Now, had there not been that oversight, the Dreamcast would have been safer from pirates. Then again, it wouldn't be such a good development platform nowadays...

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[iantri]

Skies of Arcadia (each disc was over), Jet Set Radio, Sonic Adventure 2, to start..

The release groups solved this problem by compressing FMVs (in the case of Skies of Arcadia), or downsampling the stereo to mono (cutting disk usage in half).

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[NeMon'ess]

Shenmue was 3 discs. Shenmue 2 came on 4. I'd be shocked if none of the discs were over 700MB.

Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format

[DeadScreenSky]

Maken X was - and no fully-working CD-ROM hacked version was ever released. Mobile Suit Gundam: Gihren's Greed was (both discs were bigger than CD-ROM size). Some of the Sega sports games. There are lots of other examples, as some have noted.

recordable bd-rom for pc?

[iezhy]

these would be perfect storage - i could fit almost all my divx'es into just one disk :-)

Re:recordable bd-rom for pc?

[captainClassLoader]

Perfect storage indeed - And it will only take a mere 4 or 5 of these discs to hold MS Office '07 when it comes out!... ;-)

Re:recordable bd-rom for pc?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not have very many...

Hmmm.....

[superpulpsicle]

Actually we need a decent media reader. I have never had a playstation 1 or 2 for more than 2 years. The lens or lens motor always die on me. Will Blue Ray be better?

Re:Hmmm.....

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I've never had a Sony optical media reader that lasted more than a couple years. Discman portable CD players, DVD players, and of course PS2s. I've stopped buying Sony products. But I will probably get a PS3, just nothing else where I have a choice of manufacturers.

Re:Hmmm.....

[vasqzr]

I bought a refurbished Playstation 2, 3 years ago. It still works. It sits on the carpet, too, and sucks in all kinds of dust. About 1 year before that, I bought a used PSX off eBay, and that still works to this day as well.

Also have a Sony CD player from about 15 years ago, which also still works fine. And, my 1994 Discman still works, it survived being carried around in a bookbag for most of high school as well.

Re:Hmmm.....

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

I've heard of this everywhere, my PS2 has been going strong for oh, almost 4 years now I think... never had any problems with it. And I leave it on for days at a time sometimes.. although I do make an effort to not leave it on for extended periods of time...

Re:Hmmm.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Murphy's law dictates that the moment you clicked submit your PS2 burst into flames.

Think I maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

have dyslexia you that.

Nope

[Wesley Felter]

Dude, Dell is supporting Blu-ray.

Blu-Ray Winning

[Kenshin]

Personally, I see this as the action that will establish BD-ROM as the leader of the next-gen disc formats.

I don't know many people who will rush-out to buy a new DVD player to play HD movies, but EVERYONE is going to buy a PS3.

With that installed base, it will be fairly easy to translate into the market for movies being sold in that format.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[webzombie]

I won't say that "everyone" is going to rush out and buy a PS3...

With little or no game innovation in the near future I can't see the PS3 or XBox2 causing near the hype wave that their predecessors...

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Anonymous Coward]

Both consoles will probably feature fighting/driving games with lots (64+) of players. Nothing you can't do with high-end PCs now, but a lot of people don't like PCs. A GTA based MMO would sell the PS3 on it's own. Bigger and better can sell games, not just different - and that is no bad thing.

p.s. "everyone"? You've reached super-/. levels of pedantry there.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Damek]

I won't be buying a PS3 (unless it has Doom III and Half-Life 2), but then I never bought a PS1 or PS2 or XBox or GameCube or anything else. I'm not in the market.

But I also think it's too early for any new movie media standard. Sure, I'm an outlier, as demonstrated by what I just said about the PS3, but I just started getting some movies on DVD, and I imagine a good segment of the public only really got into DVD buying within the last few years. Even assuming 4-5 years before a new format is really available with lots of movies, who would want to buy it? DVDs are good enough for most people, and probably still will be in 4-5 years. If new players support old DVDs, and new content just starts coming out in HD on the new disc media, then I can see a slow switchover being painless and mattering little.

But then there's the issue of media life. I've checked out a few DVDs from the library over the past year or so, and they all had such damage that parts of the films were unwatchable. DVD-damage is much worse than VHS-tape-damage. At least with a VHS you can still get an idea of what's going on, hear the dialog, or fast-forward. A damaged DVD skips and pauses painfully, decides to jump to the next chapter, and can't fast-forward through the video file because it can't read the video file. Even denser media will undoubtedly be worse, right?

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[iezhy]

Personally, I see this as the action that will establish BD-ROM as the leader of the next-gen disc formats

sony already tried to establish MD (mini-disk) technology few years ago, which was a brilliant sollution for the time. Although, MD's were eaten by cheaper CD-R/RW's

so its way to early to predict something - i guess the most affordable and widespread technology will win

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Anonymous Coward]

Please turn in your Geek Club card at the door on your way out. Thx!

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[JAgostoni]

I don't think you are an outlier. Myself included, I know many people that perfer PC gaming (i.e. your reference to FPS's).

As far as shelf-life of the DVDs I'll have to disagree. I have never had a DVD go bad on me for years. Now the DVD player itself is a different tale. I had a 1st gen DVD player that didn't last long at all but when I get a new DVD player (a Sony, coincidentally) it played all of the DVDs my last player had troubles with. When I did have problems, I cleaned the lens and it worked fine again.

Now saying that VHS has longer shelf life than DVD is just cray talk man.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Kenshin]

But the difference was that MD was just "another music format". Not in high demand, and viewed with apprehention by the american public.

PS3 is, on the other hand, the successor to the highly-popular PS2. I already hear kids talking about how they can't wait for it, and you can be assured there will be midnight lineups for it. There won't be midnight lineups for a simple HD-DVD device.

The primary focus of the PS3 of course won't be movies, but since a few million of them will easily be sold fairly quickly, it provides great incentive for studios to re-release HD versions of movies for it. ("Hey, we already have it, so why not buy these new movies discs too?")

People won't re-buy their entire collection, but when picking up new titles I'm certain they'd rather get the better-quality disc.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Damek]

Sorry, I shouldn't have said "media life", because that does imply I mean shelf life of the media. I meant damage resistance, ability to still be used despite data loss. My limited experience is that when a DVD has lots of scratches, watching them is painful if not impossible, but when a VHS tape has some twists or tracking problems or something, either something is still watchable/listenable, or you can at least just wind past the damaged part.

Maybe my Sony DVD player is just not very good at dealing with scratched discs.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[zardinuk]

...and memory stick, and Micro-MV, Clie OS...

I think the blue ray will fail because the rest of the industry will gang up on Sony like it would gang up on Microsoft given a flying chance at winning. Sony is renown for bundling proprietary technologies. Besides, most people can't afford a high resolution TV, it'll be a decade before widespread adoption of the HD displays.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[prell]

With that installed base, it will be fairly easy to translate into the market for movies being sold in that format.

I don't really think so. It might turn some tech people on, but unless blu-ray can be differentiated as a product, nobody will ditch DVD movies for this.

The length of movies is typically between 1.5 and 2.5 hours, with notable exceptions. These movies can be fit onto a DVD with quality that is damn nice on an HDTV. What does the average consumer see when someone shows them a blu-ray disc? A DVD. All they see is another disc that needs another player, and all this after they just made a nervous leap into digital media two years ago. Not to mention the fact that HDTV will be standard in a few years, so after people upgrade to that, what will be their incentive to switch to blu-ray movies? DVDs are already packed to the gills with extras that people think they'll watch but never do, or only watch once. So, the only real reason to upgrade to a blu-ray library (and believe me, people will be loth to do that) is some marked difference in presentation and possibly product nature (e.g. durability), which I don't see blu-ray doing. A blu-ray movie at 2^256 lines of resolution sure won't be pushing out any affordable new TVs.

Not many people started buying DVD audio discs because they had a DVD player, and not many people will be interested in blu-ray movies either.

Re:Blu-Ray Winning

[Etrigan_696]

First, let me start off by saying I own a small, independent video store in rural Kentucky, USA....
So with that knowledge, comes this:

Lots of the poorer people in America don't even have a DVD player YET!

Quite a few movies are either no longer released on VHS, or the public release date for the VHS is a month or more later than the release date for the DVD.
I can order movies on VHS from my distributor, but they are insanely expensive.
Take the wretched "Bad Boys 2" for example. From my distributor, the DVD would be here on street date, ready to rent, for a measly $24.99
If I wanted the same movie on VHS on the same day as the DVD, it was $89.99.
If I wanted to wait six weeks, until the VHS tapes were shipped to Target and Wal-Mart, then the VHS would be $21.99.

The VAST majority of America doesn't give a flying crap about things like "HDTV" or "digital blahblahblah"....The vast majority of America thinks "Widescreen" cuts off the top and bottom of the movie (I know, I know, I explain this to at least three moron rednecks a day).
Most movie outlets were saying this spring that DVD accounts for about 80% of their sales, with VHS making up the rest. And numbers in rural areas - especially "The South" being somewhere closer to 65% DVD, 35% VHS.
Blu-Ray is going to be a long time in coming. I know the vast majority of my customers only got a DVD player this past christmas. After doing some accounting, I saw that the best way for me to compete with the big chains up the highway was for me to actually buy DVD players from Wal-Mart (the cheap APEX model) and give them away as a store promotion rather than plunk down $90 on a VHS tape that will take a year to pay for itself. So, my store gave away five DVD players last year at christmas to VHS-only customers. This year, I'm probably going to do the same.

DVD has only just recently unseated VHS as the video format of choice. TPTB had better understand this, and not go switching formats again too soon, or....

Well, or nothing. People will be pissed about it, but they'll either buy a BDR machine, or they'll not watch new movies.

Speaking from a movie standpoint, hollywood has only just recently taken advantage of the cool technological advancements that DVD offers over VHS - such as New Line Cinema's 'Infinifilm' line, and all the cool extras added to the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies. For a geek like me, that kind of stuff has a really high "cool factor", but for most people all that extra stuff might as well not even exist. Sure, a few of them might watch the deleted scenes on a DVD if they really liked the movie, but that's it.

And as for the whole disk v. tape debate in the durability department:
tapes rule. Sorry....but it's true. The plastic housing on a VHS tape protects it from harm. Sure, the tape stretches over time, but that's not an issue here.
If the tape stretches and snaps on the 300th use, that means I've rented the tape 300 times before it dies.
A dvd will last indefinitely - if it is cared for. However, dipshits will rent a DVD and hand it to their kid to put it in the player. the kid has...I dunno...ice cream or snot on their hands, and grabs the disk by the data side. When the movie doesn't play, the dipshit adult take it out, sees the goop on it, and rubs it vigorously on their shirt - RiGhT On ToP of their freaking buttons - to clean it. Then they pop in the disk and it still doesn't play (because they dug huge furrows in the plastic while trying to "clean" it). Then they bring it back in and say to me "Hey bubba, this thing don't play none!" I open it and see a snot-encrusted, scratched disk and sigh heavily.

DVDs should have been in a plastic caddy.

I pray that BD-ROM will be. I know it won't, but I still pray for it.

Bluray has a 50GB capacity

[squeezee]

What Ken Kutaragi appears to have said was that the PS3 will have 54GB of storage Capacity in addition to playing DVDs and CDs. Since Bluray can hold 25/50GB one assumes he is alluding to the inclusion of an onboard HDD or flash memory device.

http://ps2.ign.com/articles/549/549950p1.html

Re:Bluray has a 50GB capacity

[neonstz]

...or maybe he just means 54 billion bytes.

Re:Bluray has a 50GB capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

It's double layer. 2 layers of 25 gigs = 50 gigs of storage. No HDD here.

finally a followup to The Dukes of Hazzard

[Tante]

With PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PSP(TM) (PlayStation(R) Portable), SCEI will continue to expand the market and create a new world of computer entertainment. Have they made anything new for the PlayStation in the past 3 years? Or do they think making it smaller is a breakthrough.

Re:finally a followup to The Dukes of Hazzard

[dmp123]

and multicolored!

David

Re:finally a followup to The Dukes of Hazzard

[bludstone]

There have been a small handful of games released for ps1 in recent years. Mostly niche titles released only in Japan.

Does that count?

Re:finally a followup to The Dukes of Hazzard

[Anonymous Coward]

FIFA 2004

Re:memory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it's not volatile memory doesn't mean it's not memory ass clown.

if this is the case then I doubt ps3 in 05

[cyrax777]

Like people keep suggesting. More like late 06 early 07.

Re:if this is the case then I doubt ps3 in 05

[Nazmun]

While i also believe there is a good chance the ps2 won't be out till 2006 or 2007 it's not because of BD-ROM. BD-ROM is going through some development but the version that will go to the PS3 is most likely finished or close to finished. They just need to mass produce like all their other components.

anti-piracy

[alatesystems]

If they really want to stop piracy, they should do what Sega did with the dreamcast, using a non-standard format, the gd-rom.

It will be impossible for people to burn those other formats.

Chris

Re:anti-piracy

[Maul]

I'm assuming that this should be modded up as "Funny."

Re:anti-piracy

[tsioc]

should I be laughing at that? No one burned a gd-rom, but they found way around it, and as I recall the piracy problem with the Dreamcast was particularly bad. Of course, 54 gigs is a lot more that 1.2 or whatever the gd-rom was. Then again, one of the release groups was able to release Skies of Arcadia on two discs... If the game developer doesn't use the full 54 gigs, or uses it mostly for movies, there goes the anti-piracy aspect. Crap. I just realized you WERE joking, and I just rambled for nothing.

Re:anti-piracy

[Zorilla]

Nice troll. Mod up :)

Oh, my 96 CD wallet of Dreamcast *coughbackups* is about full. Someone help me buy another one.

Re:anti-piracy

[Zorilla]

I believe Skies of Arcadia did originally come on two discs. The trick was that it was compressed in a manner that was transparent to the game. The only penalty was slightly longer load time.

Re:anti-piracy

[roadkill256]

Don't know if you were being funny or serious with that. After awhile of the Dreamcast being out with the gd-rom, people found out how it was written and were easily able to make bootable DC games without issues or the need for any type of modification or special boot disk. Most of the games weren't using up all the space on the gdrom disk anyways and could just be trimmed a bit so they would fit on a regular cd.

Re:anti-piracy

[crabpeople]

wtf are you taking about the dreamcast was the best console i ever had in terms of ease of pirating the games. i had like every dreamcast game. they burned on regular 80 minute cds, not even the 99 minute ones.

and back then, no one had a DVD burner so ps2 games were a bit harder to pirate.

Re:anti-piracy

[antimatt]

I gave up moderating this comment down (or Funny) so I could say the following: it's high time /. got a new moderation option -- "-1, Ignorant".

Re:anti-piracy

[__aailob1448]

Hahaha. Great post. You had me going there for a second (and I owned a dreamcast with lots of "backups" )

Re:anti-piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy was bad on the dreamcast because you didnt need to modify the hardware to play. At first there were boot discs needed but later games were self booted. Playing a burned game was as easy as playing the original. Cheaper too.

Re:anti-piracy

[Rew190]

Now that's ironic.

Re:anti-piracy

[NeMon'ess]

Do you remember how many MB the Shenmue games were? If the 3 disc first game and 4 disc sequal weren't huge I'd be confused as to why they were multidisc. Now if the audio was stereo and the burned copy reduced it to mono that would explain it.

MGM comes into the picture..

[voice of unreason]

Interesting. I think I'm starting to see Sony's strategy. They're rolling out a console that can probably play blu-ray DVD movies. They recently bought MGM, giving Sony the rights to rerelease all of MGM's movies on DVD. With PS3 to put players into the market, and with MGM movies to release, it sounds like sony has put a lot of thought into making their blu-ray standard a success.

Re:MGM comes into the picture..

[[000000]]

I have to agree on this one! It would appear that this is the mastermind plan. But, If this is true then there woudl also me a market for other HW Mani*rs to create clone Burners.

Re:MGM comes into the picture..

[Hinhule]

You have only scratched the surface of the masterplan. Remember the box for the PS3 you kept somewhere because it looked cool. Well seems to me like you just added a hiding place for Solid Snake in every home!

*shuffle shuffle shuffle* "Snake, you are a genius!"

Re:MGM comes into the picture..

[fm6]

...it sounds like sony has put a lot of thought into making their blu-ray standard a success.

Maybe. But they don't have a good track record getting their formats accepted, as any early adopters of betamax, 8mm video, memory stick, or MD disks will tell you.

Xbox 2 and PS3......

[ARRRLovin]

BluRay and PPC970 chips........The next generation of security through obscurity.

Re:Xbox 2 and PS3......

[Royoken]

that's security by obesity

Re:Xbox 2 and PS3......

[ARRRLovin]

How many fat chicks did you know in high school that got pregnant? Same deal. ;)

Re:Xbox 2 and PS3......

[Chrispy1000000 the 2]

The thing is, could you tell? ;)

I want to see...

[Short Circuit]

A modernized Streets of SimCity. :)

That's not what worries me.

[mcc]

What worries me isn't the use of a proprietary Bluray-based storage format for the games of the Playstation 3 game console (which I personally plan to buy). What worries me is:

1. Sony will be soon leveraging the Playstation 3 game console to push a proprietary Bluray-based video format they will be attempting to introduce at about the same time.
2. Sony will be at about the same time attempting to leverage their upcoming PSP handheld game system to push another proprietary video format, this one based on Minidiscs, called UMD.

Something within this I'm not so comfortable with. We're about to get a bona fide Betamax vs VHS style format war between HD-DVD and BluRay. I don't think it's going to be pretty. I'm glad I don't have plans to buy an HDTV.

Re:That's not what worries me.

[zardinuk]

This seems to be the strategy they employ. I was about to buy one of those micro-DV video camcorders sony was making but then I found out that you have to use proprietary sony software in order to decode the video on your PC. And that sony memory stick is a joke. Frickin sony.

Isn't Microsoft helping with Blu Ray

[emo boy]

I thought that Blu Ray discs were gonna use Microsoft technology somehow? Why would Microsoft not include it in Xbox 2?

As space available goes up

[suso]

... quality goes down.

Heck, Screenshots of all the Below the Root screens for the C64 took up 4 times more space in png format than 2 5.25" floppy discs could hold. What have we come to?

Re:As space available goes up

[Anonymous Coward]

I never played that one! It looks like the Caverns of Khafka engine; I was a big fan of that game. Though I don't really know why.

Re:As space available goes up

[mr_spatula]

Insightful? That's not even a valid comparison.

The individual sprites were very, very small... A c64 game wouldn't keep each individual background as a single file, it was building these from indexed sprites, most likely 2-4 bits of color (not sure of the specifics)

Point being, you have a bunch of 256 byte sprites that are repeadedly being drawin on the screen... The instructions to "draw this sprite again" are quite a bit smaller...

oh, hell... you were being funny weren't you? (*smacks self on head*) Thanks, mods!

Re:As space available goes up

[suso]

No, I was being serious. And I know about sprites. But I was just commenting on the fact that programmers and game writers used to write much more enjoyable games when they had more limitations to work with.

Re:As space available goes up

[mr_spatula]

I agree with you to an extent, as I'm not a fan of the "Hey, let's have a 5:1 video to gameplay ratio" genre.

Then I go back and think about the glut of Atari 2600 games that were out there. Those were some pretty awful games there! Don't get me wrong, Activision was gold back then, but for every good game you'd end up with some crap like "Tax Avoiders" (or of course ET) that was just horrible.

The NES had this as well, what with all of the horrible movie licensed games...

And early computer games sure had there share of crap as well. Even in the C64 era.

I think that there have been some truly incredible games in the past few years, although you still have a pretty high "crap to gold" ratio. They certainly aren't in the majority, at any rate. There were truly incredible games in our past as well... I just think it's easier to forget the BAD games of the past, though, mainly due to nostalgia.

Re:As space available goes up

[suso]

Yes, there are some good games recently, but then for every good game you have about 20 companies making basically a copy of the idea. And there aren't very many original ideas out there.

When you go back and look at c64 games there were a great number of highly original ideas. A lot of them where not about blasting things, which I think is a big challenge.

Now, it's all about having the best graphics. Sure, it was back then too to some extent, but I think people enjoyed games for the gameplay more.

Re:As space available goes up

[valkraider]

The reason for this is cost. Back in the C64 and Atari days, an entire game could be made - and made WELL - by just one or two guys. In fact, many games - good games - were made by hobbyists.

Flash forward to now, where companies need millions of dollars to make a game just compete in the advertisements. So they put all of their money in things that are more likely to get that sale. Things like flashy graphics, expensive ad campaigns, and big license franchises. When they have paid for all of that and the latest development environments to make them with - gameplay gets $3.67 left in the budget.

There are a TON of games with GREAT gameplay that don't sell well because they don't have hookers and pimps or lowered honda civics. In todays market - if you make a great game, just throw it away - unless you can put in blood, gore, and sex. Otherwise it is relegated as a "kiddie" game.

If I am going to invest $20million on a game, I want it to sell - not to be fun...

Re:As space available goes up

[Anonymous Coward]

I got c64 emulation going on my xbox last night.
Oh the Joy of 1989!

Dropzone
Imposible Mission
Snookie
Jump Man

Re:As space available goes up

[identity0]

If you think about it though, you can probobly make that "screenshot" as small as the original using Javascript. Just take the original sprites for each object, and have a JS program render the scene using a map of where the sprites are placed. Since PNG has a better compression rate than bitmaps, it might even be *smaller* than the original : )

Of corse, it's going to take time.... but it looks like you have plenty to begin with : )

Big Deal

[LilMikey]

Most PS2 and XBox games don't even use both layers of today's DVDs. The only one I recall encountering is Rallisport 2 and it was only like 6.5 gig or so. What this does seem likely to do is drive up the production cost of the games and system, however this probably won't translate to higher game prices as competition will even that field.

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand it will mean that a large base of customers will have Blue-ray DVD players, thus giving Sony a leg up in the current format war. Personally, I just want someone to win as soon as possible. My HDTV capabilities are just sitting there...

Re:Big Deal

[thegrue76]

The next Grand Theft Auto game maxes out a dual-layer DVD, I believe. And they've already gone on record as saying they hope the next-gens use something even bigger. They plan on using it.

Re:Big Deal

[LilMikey]

Ahh... the rub. Ingenious and insideous. I'd put my money behind that theory.

Finally!

[Dark Paladin]

Square-Enix can finally achieve the dream of turning Final Fantasy XIV into nothing more than a 50 hour movie with save spots in between!

Re:Finally!

[miTTio]

Namco beat them to it. Ever played Xenosaga?

Re:Finally!

[mausmalone]

Maybe they'll get really ambitious and add a "Choose your own adventure" style game. at least all the plugs for cell-phones will be absolutely crisp & clear.

Re:Finally!

[pommiekiwifruit]

I thought "The Spirits Within" was a typical Square game, although it did have more interactivity (on the PS2 controller) than their other games.

Re:Finally!

[Zcipher]

Actually, what I'd really like is for them to take that extra space and use it to include the original japanese voice acting. I cannot stress enough how much this would improve the game. Simply put, American voice actors are, with very few exceptions, terrible. As in, like a thousand needles in my spine. Restoring the original, non-awful voice acting would be the best use of additional space.

Re:Finally!

[Kiryat Malachi]

Personally, I like *understanding* the voice acting more than I like the Japanese voice acting. If I can't understand what they're saying, there's really no point in them saying it; give me BETTER VOICE ACTORS IN ENGLISH, not possibly better voice actors who I can't make a decent judgement on because I have no idea whether they're talking about their dead beloved or breakfast.

Re:Finally!

[mikefe]

Then just have the Japanese actors speak in english. Oh wait...

Re:Finally!

[upsidedown_duck]

I love driller! ...wait, no I don't.

Re:Finally!

[geminidomino]

dotHack did this. You could choose whether you wanted the VO to be in English or Japanese (w/ subtitles, of course.) I thought it was a nice touch

Re:Finally!

[psetzer]

Xenosaga is in some way related to Xenogears, another Square game with impossibly long cutscenes, but was still a very good game.

Re:Finally!

[Thing 1]

[...] I have no idea whether they're talking about their dead beloved or breakfast.

"Comment allez vous?"

"No thanks, I already had breakfast."

Re:Finally!

[Thing 1]

i know funny mods don't help your karma, so i don't really care, but i just wanted to say to the mods that this was in better off dead when the french foreign exchange student was working on lane's car (the 'auto cocoon in my front yard' car). she's asking, in french, 'how are you' and he totally misinterprets it making it funny.

'it's a real shame when folks be throwing away a perfectly good white boy like that.'

'gee ricky, i'm real sorry your mom blew up, i guess she won't be able to eat any spicy foods for a while.'

'do you know what the street value of this mountain would be?'

(brandishing a whippit) 'greendale is a bodaciously small town, lane--i can't even get real drugs here!'

'i've been going to this high school for six and a half years, lane--i'm no dummy.'

'seeyalater' (lane says to the ducks falling out of his car)

'i'll tell you what everybody wants!'

'hi lane, i know it's real awkward me being a cartoon character and all, but i was just wondering if you'd mind if i took out beth?' (barney rubble to lane)

'my grandmother dropped acid and hijacked a schoolbus full of penguins, so it's kind of a family crisis, come back later okay?'

'I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!'

i rest my case.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong. they ARE related. Obviously you haven't played the game.

backing up will still take 50 disks

[davidwr]

In the days of 20MB hard disks, it took about 50 360KB floppies to back up a nearly-full disk, more or less.

In the days of 40GB hard disks, it took 50 800MB CD-Rs.

With 250GB systems, it takes about 50 4.7GB DVD-Rs.

By the time 50-200GB burners are available for under $200 in 7-8 years, I'll probably be using 2.5-10TB systems at home, and the ratio will still be 50.

I don't know about you, but 50 disk-swaps is several too many. Even with incremental or differential backups, it's a pain in the ***.

Your disks-per-complete-backup ratio may not be 50 but it's probably fairly stable over time.

Re:backing up will still take 50 disks

[Biff Stu]

10 TB of data that can't be compressed? That's one hell of a Pr0n collection!

Re:backing up will still take 50 disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually mine just dropped from 225 to 0.5

Two internal IDE drives (40+120), one external USB2 (160GB).

And it's so much better. Optical media suck.

Re:backing up will still take 50 disks

[xutopia]

I don't know about you but if your time is worth anything buying another hard drive with firewire/usb case is actually cheaper than buying a DVD burner and taking the time to burn your backups. Consider for one second the price of each media and the time for each to burn, not to mention the sorting of your important vs non important data.

Re:backing up will still take 50 disks

[joib]

Personally, I have an old computer with a couple of extra disks, running dirvish. It's cheap, and has enough capacity to backup my homedir and some other stuff as well, and dirvish offers snapshot like capability (uses hardlinks to save space).

Re:backing up will still take 50 disks

[mikefe]

Why does everyone think they'll save a lot of space if they don't backup the applications?

In most cases the data is several times larger than the applications.

Sony to announce 8 layer 200 GB Blu-ray

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117867,0 0.asp

DVD-ROM has an "M" in it....

[raygundan]

I know it's driving you crazy, but calling it memory is fine. What did you think the "M" in DVD-ROM or CD-ROM stood for? And in case you're still not sure, ROM stands for "Read-Only Memory."

Re:DVD-ROM has an "M" in it....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I was taught when CD-ROMs were first coming out that it was a misnomer to refer to it as "memory" (my father preferred to refer to them as WORM drives [write once, read many]). By the same token, can I refer to my hard disk as memory, too? Not trolling, just trying to make sure I'm clear on when to use it and when not to.

Re:DVD-ROM has an "M" in it....

[tepples]

By the same token, can I refer to my hard disk as memory, too?

Yes. Magnetic disk drives are a form of rewritable nonvolatile memory. Turn on your swap file to make it even more obvious.

Re:DVD-ROM has an "M" in it....

[raygundan]

It's all memory, just of varying speeds and capacities. Some of the memory systems for older computers were much more like today's disk drives than they are like our SDRAM chips. Things like drum memory, which is essentially a cylindrical hard drive, were used as main system RAM in the 1950s and 1960s.

DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs are forms of memory, as are hard drives, but it still bugs me for some reason when people say things like "my computer has 200GB of memory," even though I know they're technically right.

um...

[Run4yourlives]

that's why they have these things call tape...

You actually back up your entire harddrive on 50 CDs/DVDS? Sorry, but that's just anal.

BD-RAM?

[DamienMcKenna]

Anyone know if there will be a Blue-Ray version of the DVD-RAM standard? I want something reliable to store my data.

Damien

Re:BD-RAM?

[JockAMundo]

Blu-Ray backup already exists my friend!

http://www.sony.net/Products/MO-Drive/ProDATA/

Re:BD-RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was this comment in jest? Just in case it was not:

Blu is an RW format. There will, undoubtably, be pre-recorded disks created for it - but at heart it is a rewritable standard.

Now, asking for 'RAM' is... odd. You can packet-write to a blu disk, if that is what you mean. This means true random access, like a floppy.

Reliability figures - no, we have none of those yet. There aren't enough players / writers yet.

If, instead, you are looking for a format war - the competing formats are:
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray

So far there's only two. And although they are in competition right now, they both use the same basic concepts (blue laser, DVD style media) and use the same recording formats (that is, the same media encoding options. WMP9, MPEG4)

So you can expect dual-format players and recorders at about the same rate as happenned with DVD+ and DVD-

Hope that the rumours of a third media format from China are just that!

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[Templaris]

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. The benefit of using a blue laser is that it has a shorter wavelength (405 nanometer) than a red laser (650 nanometer), which means that it's possible to focus the laser beam with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly on the disc and makes it possible to fit more data on the same size disc. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray Disc recorders can be made backwards compatible with current red-laser technologies and allow playback of CDs and DVDs.

ROYGBIV - Somewhere between green and indigo.

http://www.blu-ray.com/info/

Piracy will decline

[Space_Soldier]

Damn, unless it is impossible to hook a hard drive to it, it will be very hard to play pirated games since there are no blue-ray drives for computers.

Re:Piracy will decline

[Anonymous Coward]

...yet

Re:memory?

[orst_sw_engr]

Because it is memory...

External memory technically. Common conception that it is not. I just part of the memory hierarchy. Granted low on the pyramid, but faster than tape.

I hope the bandwidth is faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Need faster bandwidth than DVD to support streaming in large amounts of data for big streaming cities

Don't forget about the drives!

[ProfessionalCookie]

While I'm mildly concerned about the discs what I'm really worried about is the drive.

I've gone through 2 PS2 drives- the units function perfectly otherwise they just rarely load discs anymore. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that this has happened to. I want to know if we're gonna get cheap drives that break every 8 months.

I have the capacity to take care of the discs pretty well but all I can do with the drive is use it as intended.

That said, yay for new tech adoption.

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[cortana]

Yes, yes we are.

Judging from the experiences of the gamers I know, the reason the PS2 is the most popular console is because EVERYBODY HAS TO BUY BLOODY THREE OF THEM!

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[aceh0]

check out this FREE PS2 repair guide. I dont know of any other cohesive free resource but there are some useful hints in getting a broken PS2 working again cheaply.

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[Brackney]

I'm still using my original first gen PS2 unit - and I've used it HEAVILY since I got it. It's not uncommon for me to leave the unit on for days at a time. I did have to replace the reader on my PS1 eventually - got tired of turning it upside down. Still, that was a cheap do-it-myself repair compared to buying a new unit.

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[falcon5768]

only a few problems though.

a) not everyone has those problems, MY PS2 DVD drive lasted almost 4 years before it needed the optics replaced.

b) Sony still honors the DVD drive LONG after they say they do. Not only that but they will replace it no questions asked even if you opened the case. Any simple google search would turn up hundereds of reports of people getting replacement DVD drive optics for just the shipping from Sony, Im certainly not a sony fan, but for this I applaud them for doing, even if they d keep very secret about doing it. Heck they have even sent me replacement Network/Hard drive/DVD rom disks for free NO SHIPPING ASKED. There is a forum you fill out on their site and they send it as soon as they can.

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[Spleener12]

I've had to buy two PS1s. The first was a 1998 model. This model worked quite well (well, it had the overheating problem ONCE) until it died in April 2001. This is probably due to the fact that it was on the carpet at the time when Sony specifically warns that you're not supposed to put it there, something I read in the manual to the PSOne I purchased a couple of days later.

I recall hearing that Final Fantasy 8 killed a lot of older PS1s (probably first-gen ones), probably due the the fact that it pushed the system a lot harder than any other games had done before it. Xenosaga Episode 1's dual-layered disc required some people to replace their PS2s as well, I beleive.

And then, of course, there are Playstations and Playstation 2s that are purchased at launch and played extensively and still work today.

I'd say that it's part luck, part how well you take care of them, and part how many revisions later you buy them that determines how long a Sony system lasts.

Re:Don't forget about the drives!

[Basehart]

I often wonder whether I should leave my PS2 on all the time like I do my computers (well, my Mac's anyway - I'm paranoid that my PC's turn into spambots as soon as I leave the room).

Unless there's a disk in the machine is there any real reason to ever turn the PS2 completely off?

Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3...

[gatekeep]

... in Japan!

Re:Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3...

[suso]

in bed.

BEWARE PYRAMID SCHEMES

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot get something for nothing.

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[Hitmen]

X = 88 Z = 90 Blue = 392

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent Futurama reference!

smooth wombat is of course referring to episode 1ACV07 (http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/scripts/1acv0 7.shtml) where Fry tags along with Bender and Leela to "Little Neptune". Bender hopes to purchase a fresh Neptunian slug for his next culinary masterpiece.

Spelling

[ari_j]

I thought we were done spelling words incorrectly to make them cute. :/

Re:Spelling

[astrokid]

Source 1.2 Why the name Blu-ray?

The name Blu-ray is derived from the underlying technology, which utilizes a blue-violet laser to read and write data. The name is a combination of "Blue" and optical ray "Ray". According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, the spelling of "Blu-ray" is not a mistake. The character "e" is intentionally left out because a daily-used term can't be registered as a trademark.

Re:Spelling

[ari_j]

That doesn't make it any less stupid or more creative. :P

anal indeed

[davidwr]

I backup disk-to-disk for full backups augmented with removable media for stuff that has to be backed up offline.

It would be nice to have everything on a set of CDs or similar though.

Re:anal indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the point of backing up stuff that you can just reinstall?

The OS, the applications, etc, are pointless to backup. You already have backups in the form of the original install disc.

Just backup your data. Duh.

Re:anal indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Time.

I'd much rather put in a boot floppy, which loads OpenDOS or Linux, reformats my HD, and reinstalls everything in about 2 hours (from DLT or copy from removable HD) than spend a couple of days reinstalling all my software, reconfiguring everything, etc., and this is assuming I can find all my notes for how things are set up, etc.

The glamour of having to baby-sit media swaps, reconfigure, etc. gets old after about the first swap. It's about as much fun as watching a 200 GB HD get defragged.

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[smooth wombat]

Nice to see someone else knows what the hell I'm talking about. It's bad enough I have to talk to myself to have an intelligent conversation.

Had I said something about Microsoft or SCO being evil or the benefits of open source then I would not have been labeled as Offtopic (damn mods).

Though I have to admit, the one poster above who gave the values for X and Z compared to Blue certainly put things into perspective.

It's all about the load times...

[mobiux]

As long as they can improve load times, that shouldn't be a problem.
The ps2 was absurd when it came to that and those games about a gig or so. I couldn't imagine waiting 5 minutes between levels.

It was a joke.

[alatesystems]

Sorry for the people who didn't realize it. Glad for the people who did to be able to provide humor.

A friend of mine has a lot of "backups" for his DC.

Chris

Re:ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

The word is ASS.

Say it with me now. ASS.

not ***, but ass. I dont know who you are trying to "protect" with that, but trust me, they dont need it.

You ass. :)

Hours and hours of...

[Moo Moo Cow of Death]

I can't wait for these to come to the PC...HOURS AND HOURS OF PRON!

I'll never leave my house again :)

M$ supports HD-DVD, no word yet on Blu-Ray

[hajihill]

Why would microsoft be microsoft??

You'd think they could see how wildly unpopular that stance would be.

Seriously, however, M$ seems to be putting their weight behind HD-DVD, leading many to conjecture that Xbox 2 will also utilize the format.

Re:M$ supports HD-DVD, no word yet on Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Um if I'm not mistaken, you are confused. HD-DVD does not offer higher storage capacity. It simply uses more advanced compression codecs than mpeg-2 to fit HD content on existing discs. This is a different approach than Blu-Ray, which as we saw in the article, offers much more storage space.

So HD-DVD rules for movies since you basically would use the exact same DVD player hardware, except it would support these new codecs and support HD video output. Blu-Ray requires completely new disc reading technology. But for storage size, Blu-Ray wins.

Re:M$ supports HD-DVD, no word yet on Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get laid much, do you?

Re:M$ supports HD-DVD, no word yet on Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably more than somebody who spells "Microsoft" "M$." The grandparent poster probably reeks of Linux fanboyism as much as he reeks of underarm staphylococci bacteria.

In one word...

[maloi]

Yes.

PS3 Hard Disk Speculation

[blueZhift]

By using such a high capacity read only storage medium, I wonder if this signals even less need for an internal hard drive for the PS3. If the console has enough system memory and/or available memory cards with fast enough read write access and fast throughput, then most games should be able to support updates/patches on the fly. If the memory cards really are up to it, then even a large RPG should be doable without need for a console HD. Most of the game world is going to be static so it can live on the read only disk. Updates for patches and special events are small diffs relative to the global data, so those reside on memory cards and loaded on the fly. Major expansions come on all new disks.

What does this all mean? It means that the PS3 is even less likely to come out with a HD and by extension, the same can be said for Xbox 2 since it will likely use a disks of similar capacity (to keep up in the spec war). I'd expect to see memory cards for both boxes come in 128MB and 256MB flavors.

Re:PS3 Hard Disk Speculation

[rubberbando]

They should just save themselves the trouble of making a special HD setup or memory cards for the PS3 and just use their awesome memory sticks instead (up to 1GB now I do believe).

That way they could add the ability to view pictures as well as video clips from the memory sticks onto your TV.

Re:PS3 Hard Disk Speculation

[MikeBabcock]

Personally I'd love to see Sony just use Memory Stick Pro or something for their memory format instead of another proprietary format.

Hmm... DVD-Parallel...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they figured out how to make the player read all 8 layers at once, what would that do for the data transfer rate?

My guess would be to shoot the laser in at a non-normal angle, and have an "eye" able to direct the reflections to an appropriate collector corresponding to the right layer. It would require setting up the bits so that 11111111 doesn't overlap the next series of bits...

Re:Hmm... DVD-Parallel...

[TheAwfulTruth]

There is a mechanism which more or less works like you are suggesting, and it's been worked on for a couple of decades now. Remember "holographic" memory? First it was in cube format, then a disk format, but it never really panned out.

Still you could have a multi layer read merely by having multiple lasers and pickups. Might even be able to fire them all through the same focusing optics (trickey) but better would be to have mutiple "heads" so that they could also independantly seek. Imagine a device with 8 heads that could read any layer. The completely abysmal seek times of DVD players might approach respectability!

His name is Bond. James Bond.

[tepples]

Sony was a pretty big player in the content biz even before they had MGM... they bought out Columbia Tri-Star a few years ago

Columbia Tristar is only one of the seven major American movie studios. If Sony just had Columbia Tristar, then what if Fox, Disney, Warner, Universal, and Paramount were to go HD-DVD only? Adding MGM brings the James Bond license to Blu-ray, not just for sales of 007 films but also for PS3-exclusive 007 video games.

Shouldn't that be 54 GB of storage, not memory?

[divisionbyzero]

Not to be pedantic...

Re:Shouldn't that be 54 GB of storage, not memory?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the "M" in BD-ROM stands for "memory"...

Re:Shouldn't that be 54 GB of storage, not memory?

[Rew190]

Nope. Memory is memory is memory, whether it's volatile or not.

forever.

[Private Public]

Finally we will have media capable of holding Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly the main reason I don't have a user id at Slashdot yet. While it would be nice to start each post at +1 instead of at 0, I take it as a personal challenge to see just how high one of my anonymous posts can be modded up. I don't like having to crack a joke at the expense of SCO, nor do I like praising Linux in all its glory.

You were labelled offtopic because no one recognized the Futurama reference, which is a shame. Had it have been a Simpsons reference, I think the mods would have at least voted that your post was funny! Personally, I think your original post deserved a +5 Funny rating because it made me laugh out loud when I read it, of course, triggering the appropriate scene to start playing in my brain where Fry is dealing with the friendly neighbourhood organ salesman right out behind the Neptunian grocery store :).

I honestly think that with enough momentum, Sony will be able to push this format through without too much trouble. They have some movies in their catalogue now, ever since they purchased all of the ones that MGM used to own. If they convert them all to Blu-Ray format (or perhaps they were already in a HD format to begin with), they'll be playable on the PS3.

Mind you, I tend to side with Microsoft when it comes to consoles, as the modchips available for the XBox offer some truly amazing features for the hobbiest and pirate alike. I can't stand the types of controllers Sony designs, and I've always been a fan of Microsoft's first XBox offering (some even called it clunky). So, for me, the PS3 is not a must have device. Sony may have the goods, but I'll venture that the big names in the movie industry side with Microsoft's new HD format (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/con tent_provider/film/HDVideo.aspx/).

Blu-Ray is great and all, but I still have one question that remains unanswered: If a shorter wavelength for the laser means being able to pack more data on a disc, then why design a device that uses the shortest laser wavelength available?

I mean, we're still dealing with wavelengths in the visible spectrum here. Blu-Ray uses a 405 nm wavelength laser diode, which is pretty much right below Krypton when its used as a lasing medium. The next logical step is to enter ultraviolet territory, so why not shoot for the best you can get right now? ArF as a lasing medium rings in at 193 nm (UV-C), so what are we waiting for?

Oh, I see.. some people might be concerned about the safety of ultraviolet drives. Well, they should realize that if their eyes burn up and fall out of their sockets, our friend down in "Little Neptune" would sure be able to help them out..

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[Steffan]

• ROYGBIV - Somewhere between green and indigo.

I can see it now...After this, they'll go to Violet...Only they'll call it 'Purple-Ray' and license the rights to the Prince music... "Purple Ray...Purple Ray"

Why blue-ray will win the format wars

[gcpeart]

I think this may be why blue ray wins the format war. If PS3 uses it, and the average PS2 owner stay s true to their old behaviour, it won't be long before they are modding and burning and complaining about fair use. Before you know it, blueray dvdrw will be fly off the shelf, driving the price down, and making fence sitters say "hmmm do I get nearly equivilent option 1, or cheaper option 2?" Cheap wins (re: beta vs vhs) and boom blueray is your standard of choice. All thanks to the power of software piracy!

I was going to say...

[thegnu]

what about when you run out of blue-ray discs, but then I remembered you can buy things on the internet. What a thought.

Only 54 GB, I spit on it.

[wkytechhead]

Just kidding. 54 GB on a single sided Dual Layer rocks. Might we see the return of FMV in games? Phew, let's hope not.

Nothing to worry about

[mapmaker]

Sony *always* goes for market domination on new electronics by trying to impose their proprietary format (Betamax, Memory Stick, Atrac) and they *always* fail. They *never* learn.

Sony's like the Brain from Pinky and the Brain:

"What are we going to do tonight Sony?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the home electronics business with a proprietary media format!"

Re:Nothing to worry about

[hai.uchida]

Don't forget Digital 8. And possibly even the Minidisc, which has had some success but certainly never took off like they had hoped.

Re:Nothing to worry about

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot minidisc :) Also, how popular are these formats in Japan? Out of all the mentioned formats, memory stick seems not to be doing too horribly, there are enough around that my 6-in-1 media card reader includes a slot for a memory stick (although this doesn't make sense if its truly proprietary).

Re:Nothing to worry about

[nutshell42]

But this time their chance is better than ever.

Blu-Ray is much better than HD-DVD (come on 30Gig on a dual-layer that's just 3 times the size of a dual-layer DVD, 54Gig and quad-layer in the works, now we're talking. For a technology to be adopted it has to be at least 10 times better than the existing solution)

Sony said it would be cheaper than DVDs (yeah right, but I'm hoping they got at least the order of magnitude right this time)

With the new coating they don't need those removable trays anymore (and in comparison to HD-DVD they could afford to have 20% of the disc used for error correction and it would still be bigger)

Sony *supports* *standards* with mpeg4 avc and vc-1. This *is* important because the decoder chips will be cheap and it'll be easy to make dvd/blu-ray combi-drives. Also they have a lot of the big names on board. Hitachi JVC LG Panasonic Philips Pioneer Samsung Sharp Sony Zenith. They're not trying to do it alone this time

PS3 alone will sell 10 million units in its first year unless they screw up really bad. In fact 20 million are possible. Remember that especially in Japan many people bought a ps2 to use it as a dvd-player

You're right Sony has a history of screwups but unless they do something extremely stupid I don't see how they could lose to HD-DVD

Oh and they offer 25Gig paper discs. =P

Why have external mem cards?

[NYTrojan]

I made due with 2 8 meg PS2 cards for 4 years. Why not have an 128 megs of internal flash and not deal with mem cards at all. The obvious answer is the marketing. There is good money to be had in those flash cards they sell, but it sure would be nice to see that feature internalized.

Re:Why have external mem cards?

[rubberbando]

The purpose of extrenal memory cards is to make it possible to take your saved games with you.

For example, if you go to a friend's house and want to take Timesplitters 2 with you, you want to bring your memory card with you because it has all of the unlocked goodies on it. Otherwise, you will have to start from scratch (which really sux).

The same goes for any sports games where you have your own customized teams and such.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Everyone?

[jayveekay]

EVERYONE is going to buy a PS3

True, for all sets of EVERYONE who is male, 20+, and still living in their parent's basement.

HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

[augustz]

Can someone in the industry catch us up on the status / thinking on HD vs BlueRay?

We all realize that this battle will be deceided by marketing and content control. Would be interesting to understand a bit more about the relative strengths of the two techs under the hood.

With PS3 going Blu-Ray, perhaps XBox will go HD-DVD.

Are either of them simpler to use for storage etc for computers?

Technical bullet points pro and con between them.

Royalty hassles, which group will charge the most?

Which looks like it has the momentum so far.

Re:HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Are either of them simpler to use for storage etc for computers

Not really. Players and burners are in production that use standard ATAPI command sets. To your computer, it just looks like a giant capacity CDR. You will probably need newer versions of your burning apps, since many of the current ones take one look at the capactiy and scream "That's a lie!" and crash.

Technical bullet points pro and con between them.

Not much to call them on, yet. The standards are still settling down and only the people who wrote them have produced drives so far.
It'll probably be much of a muchness.

The only BIG difference is between the copy protection schemes. CPRM or Gigis. They're both pretty similar, in their intent, but the movie studios like one, and the other is more robust.

Royalty hassles, which group will charge the most?

Both groups will charge as much as they can get away with. And since all Blu drives will probably also need to play and record DVD and CD... Royalties wil be high.

Which looks like it has the momentum so far.

Blu, but only marginally. With HP supporting HD and Sony supporting Blu, it's a close call.
The PS2 and PSP using Blu (or an 8cm variant in the case of PSP) Blu probably has the edge - but not a very big one. Movie studios like HD, microsoft can't make up their minds and probably don't matter much anyway.

Re:HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. Thanks.

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spam filtering text

no hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

one assumes wrong.

50 * 2^30 = 53,687,091,200 bytes

they're just rounding up to 54 "GB".

Re:MS supports HD-DVD, no word yet on Blu-Ray

[hajihill]

In the article I linked above it seemed to indicate something to the contrary in this passage:

The Japanese unit of Microsoft Corp. said on Monday the company's next-generation operating system, Longhorn, would be compatible with HD-DVD, Reuters reported today. This announcement is considered a boost for the next-generation blue-laser DVD technology, which is promoted by Japanese corporations NEC and Toshiba.

Some further research indicates that they are talking about the AOD (Advanced Optical Disc format), which in it's current spec is read-only, and referred to as HD-DVD.

PS. The above Microsoft comments were largely tongue-in-cheek, lighten up. I mean we obviously don't like 'em, we live with 'em, and, for the most part, we laugh at all the ridiculous commentary we make about them while still harboring strange resentments and utilizing their software somewhere... Tell me that's not a tangled web.

but DVDs suck ...

[Heisenbug]

My title is wrong, but it's true that in my experience DVDs could benefit a lot from better error correction. I can't think of the last video tape I rented that had significant playback problems, but I can think of the last 5 DVDs that did. I would love to see a movie encoded on something like Blooray that has a full-on four way backup of the data, so it has to be scratched in exactly the wrong four places at once before it'll skip. I'm sure there are cleverer ways to make error checking more efficient, but you get the idea -- like the grandparent, I hope like hell they'll throw more data at this problem, because right now DVDs strike me as anything but permanent under normal use.

Re:but DVDs suck ...

[strider44]

I've not known a single DVD to have playback problems. I think there's something wrong with your player or the video store, not the DVD standard.

Re:but DVDs suck ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but the poster has had incredibly good luck with rental videos. Aside from the usual problem of my VCR eating the video, I've rented plenty with terribly muffled audio tracks or tracking problems.

Surprise

[Lord_Dweomer]

Wow, Sony chose to go with their own proprietary format for this. I thought this was a news site, not a "duh state the obvious" site.

Re:Surprise

[MikeBabcock]

Its no more proprietary than any other standard -- they even vied for position as the replacement for DVD. Go call up Sony and tell them you want to make some Blu-Ray devices and see what they say.

They'll ask for licensing fees and be happy.

maybe..

[suicidedoll]

They're going to pack multiple games onto one disc, to cut down on material costs/waste.. that'd be nutty.

And The PC Still Needs 20 CDs

[rsmith-mac]

It's interesting to note that for as advanced as the PC is, here we are in 2004, and virtually every PC game is still using CDs. PCs have had DVD drives well before consoles have, but with the exception of a couple of AAA titles(UT2004, The Sims 2, etc), nearly everything is still being released on CDs, even if it's working its way up to 4 or 5 CDs(Far Cry, Enter The Matrix), at least as far as North America goes. I seriously swear we'll still be using CDs when major PS3 games move to BD's, and the consumers will still be left as clueless as ever as to why this hasn't changed.

Nice try.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are DNF jokes old and entirely not-funny, but this article has entirely absolutely nothing to do with anything DNF-related.

Or a better OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I've rebuilt filesystems many times, and only a small fraction of those was due to hardware failure.

Console format use != media dominance

[dysk]

I'm still not convinced that they'd have any leverage in other media based markets because they use Blu-Ray in their consoles. Since it's unlikely that people will use PS3s to play their Blu-Ray movies, I don't see how using the media for games would make it any more dominant in other areas. It would be just as easy to buy an HD-DVD player when you have a Blu-Ray PS3 as it would be if you had an HD-DVD based PS3

Maybe Sony should direct efforts elsewhere?

[jbn-o]

Maybe Sony should just stop working on optical drives -- from my perspective, they have a very poor track record because they're way late to deliver interesting amounts of storage space and whatever they ship only works with proprietary formats.

Put this in the context of a hard drive: Pricewatch says we can get a 400GB HD for a little over $1/GB right now (lower capacity hard drives offer faster rotation speed at less than $1/GB prices). Putting aside the price, these HDs currently deliver 4X the space of what Sony may deliver in 2007, and the hard drive will offer no proprietary hassles. I'm guessing that any HD will be faster to find what I want to read and faster to get the data to me than the upcoming Sony device.

Perhaps their upcoming drive would be interesting if the specs for it and the compatible blank media were distributed to any competitors, thus letting the market turn this into the new low-end optical drive+media. But since Sony is probably not going to do that, I doubt the market will change to this new format.

I recall a Sony CD-R replacement that offered slightly more space than a conventional CD-R, but only if you used their proprietary encoding scheme. The drive cost more than a conventional CD-R burner and the blank media would cost more than conventional CD-Rs as well. The press release came out and I knew nobody who was excited about it. It was obviously a bad exchange: initial hardware outlay would cost too much money, there was virtually no interoperability with one's friends, and any subsequent maintenance would cost too much (CD-R burners are about $20 and DVD burners are about $30 right now, by my skimming of Pricewatch).

Re:Blue Ray? What about Z Ray?

[upsidedown_duck]

ROYGBIV - Somewhere between green and indigo.

One of my physics teachers said Indigo was put into the spectrum for the sole purpose of allowing ROYGBIV (easy to pronounce), instead of ROYGBV (hard to pronounce).

Only One library rented dvd did not work

[Anonymous Coward]

Only once have I rented a DVD from the library and had it not work. It was Minority Report, a fairly new DVD release.

Are you sure you are not exaggerating when you say all of them had damage to make your point? You sure you are not over stating things to make your point, I have rented like 15 DVDs from my library and only Minority Report did not work.

Re:Only One library rented dvd did not work

[Damek]

What library is making you rent?

What a troll

[aussie_a]

As someone else said FFX has an option to have shorter summonings. The quality of the FF summonings will most likely increase rather then a "10 minute" summoning. Honestly, this was either an attempt at Funny or just a troll.

Star Wars: Super Special High Quality Edition?

[elementus]

Wow, just imagine what George Lucas could do with one of these 54 gb disks? I predict many bastardizations of Star Wars Episodes 1 - 3. As if Episode 1 wasn't bad enough already. Like that'll stop about four re-releases in the year 2025.

Re:Star Wars: Super Special High Quality Edition?

[jmole]

That would be pretty neat if he could fit all 6 episodes on one DVD though.

Hmmm....

[Spy der Mann]

*thinks*

500 PS2 games! 3-disc pack! Only $29.95. Includes PS2 emulator for your PS3.

Now THAT sounds interesting :P

How about REALISTIC voice-syncs for a start?

[Spy der Mann]

I've seen STRONGBAD videos much better voice-sync'ed than 3D Anime sequences. You don't expect something to feel realistic when the characters speak like this:

OH, no! You (mouth closes) must stop (opens) her! (image keeps talking).
(Image starts talking) You're (stops) right.

Frankly, I wonder if the cheap hardware will win the race over nice rendering algorithms.

Proper unit

[allanj]

What I'd like to know is: What is the capacity in a PROPER unit, like LOC?

Slow....

[Analog Anomaly]

This would be a nice informative article.... IF i hadn't known two years ago that sony had plans to do this. Unless it get's pushed back or forward the release date will be in fall of 05. at which point I should be reciving one of the first 300 on the U.S. Waiting List. As usual, it'll likely hit Japan and Europe first. As for data redundancy, currently zero, though I expect developers will be changing that in the future, of course you could always go buy a blue ray DVD burner (MSRP roughly 400-500 or so when they hit the market) and I'm sure nero and the xcopy line of burning software will follow suit.

Not for home users

[davidwr]

Home users who just do word-processing and email typically have a very small amount of data.

Now those with digicams or whose kids get RIAA subpeonas do have lots of data.

Bad tapes are common

[PhoenixOne]

The main reason I bought a DVD player was because video tapes wear out. About 1 in 5 of the movies I would rent would have some problem. The problem was worse the older the movie. I would always think twice before renting a video from the 80s.

My first DVD player had problems with some disks but (don't hate me because I bought a Microsoft product ;)) they all run fine on my XBox. Buy a good DVD player and your playback problems will probably go away. :)