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]

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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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...

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...

backwards compatible

[Tante]

Will this be compatible with all my PS2 games?

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?

[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.

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

[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!

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?

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.

if this is the case then I doubt ps3 in 05

[cyrax777]

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

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.

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.

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!

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:54GB

[Walt Dismal]

Now I can stop worrying about archiving my pRoN collection.

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.