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Another Competitor for Blu-ray and HD-DVD
neutron_p writes "New Medium Enterprises unveils the highly anticipated pre-industrial Versatile MultiLayer Discs, the next generation HD Disc & Drive containing 20GB of storage capacity. VMDs use the current Red Laser technology, so it's easier for DVD factories to switch over. The company is set for launching production and sales of 15 GB, 20 GB, 25 GB and 30 GB Discs & Drives by Fall 2005. The drives will be inherently backward compatible with the existing pre-recorded and recordable DVD and CD formats."
Is there one? Kind of strange that it wasnt posted either in the /. intro or on the tech news site...
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
I think that the lower overhead because this uses red lazers will be the biggest selling point of the technologly. Since the other alternatives are very radical this seems to be just right. Also since it is adaptable to blu ray at 1 terabyte eventually!!! This stuff looks like it has a much better change of success.
My UID is prime is yours?
Are they made from copper and tin dics created by the local blacksmith and can also be used as shields if you are attacked by roving brigands?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Cant they just Fking PICK ONE and stop trying to out-do each other in the 'snazzy name dept', so they can pool research and get a better product at the end of the day?
"The drives will be inherently backward compatible with the existing pre-recorded and recordable DVD and CD formats."
That may give them a slight lead, but since they are poppin up so late and Sony has already pledged for Blu-reay discs in PS3, and Xbox Next will have it too, if they ever want to see this new format get big they will need soem MAJOR luck, which personally, I dont want them to have, as too many formats isn't going to help us, and will probobly help piracy.
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
The prime consideration is that this technology uses current red-laser technology rather than a new blue-laser. This makes it inherently backwards compatible with today's CD-RW and DVDs. It is also cheaper and carries 20 gig on one side, with a 30 gb model available. If we use high-bandwidth XVID/Ogg streams on this, why would we need blu-ray?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
DVDs are good enough for current games/tv and other media.
By the time the next generation of media finally makes it into production we're going to be downloading everything.
Seriously - the way that things are going everything's going to be available via download, and unless you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere your bandwidth will be high enough toget it faster than the time it takes you to walk to the shops and back.
My Journal
The redundant department of redundant redundancy called on the telephone....
Because we all know competition is good and the best technology always wins... right?
Really, I currently have 600gb of data archived for photographs and images. That's not a whole hell of alot. 3x200gb Seagates take care of the raiding and assorted 80, 120, 160's (and I Just found another 60 laying around, YES!) handle day to day demands.
/ceramic disks.
So, as with bluray, All I've got to say is "How soon do your writers and media get down to 1/10th the cost of IDE media (currently reasonably at $0.47/gb).
A DVD (cheap) can be had for about 40 cents per disk- which doesn't get you much for archiving except the ability to slap it into a jukebox that makes whirling sounds.
I need a massive data storage solution that I can ship off to friends to keep backups for me that does not rely on moving metal
So, I welcome another format- so long as they MOVE THEIR ASSES and get the price down to what I can afford.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check Amazon and Outpost to see if they have any more 200gb Seagates for less that $0.47/gb after rebate.
It may use red lasers, but it won't play in current players.
As people are upgrading, the phrase "no layer-change pause" will become the marketing mantra of the blue-laser crowd.
And they will win.
Great, another format war on the horizon. Backwards compatibility is all well and good, but lateral compatibility is just as important. I mean, who wants to put 25gb on a format that may be competed out of the market in a year or two? And because the physical specifications are different (different lasers, etc) I doubt we'll be seeing many multiformat drives. But this is all in the testing phase, hopefully the market can agree on a disc by the time they go to market.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
dvd writer: $150
blank disk: $0.40
losing 30gb of pr0n due to a hairline scratch: PRICELESS
seriously tho, they should concentrate on making the media more reliable, what use is all this storage if it takes a tiny scratch to irrecovably lose it all
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm also very fond of the small 8 cm. discs. They fit in your pocket nicely. With PC equipment getting smaller/more powerful all the time, one of the things holding back small formfactor PC's is the size of optical drives/discs. In the past, the small capacity of 8 cm. discs may have been a good argument for keeping those, but with multiple GB.'s storage on even these small discs, that argument isn't so strong anymore. I would welcome it if some manufacturer had the balls to produce a 8 cm. disc only optical drive (about floppy-drive sized), and build an extra small PC around that. Think Nintendo GameCube style, but PC-compatible.
From the article: "VMD is a high quality format with unparalleled built-in copyright protection .."
And then there's the DRM issue. With DVD, it doesn't actually prevent consumers from copying/converting discs, but what if this changes? I wouldn't be willing to sink ANY money in it if that were the case.
If DRM on next-gen optical discs really does become a barrier for consumers, I might start looking to grey import some equipment/discs using non-DRM including China-developed format.
Imagine a world where the HD-DVD people stuck to writing the standard for what would be stored on a disc, while the manufacturers like sony stuck to making discs that would have sufficient capacity to store the data.
Then we could move forward without this format war bullshit, and people could start developing video players that will actually work, and the hardware manufacturers could just buy whatever drive is available at the time and slap it in their machine.
See these things? They're gonna replace CD's soon.
Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again.
sigs, as if you care.
One of the things that matter for the next-gen media is, whether manufacturers can produce enough units or not. With this new technology, no big-name manufacturer announced the partnership yet.
This has all the makings of another another DivX story... (crappy PPV sceme aside, of course. ^_^)
I wonder whether the discussions on slashdot, on topics such as these, have any influence on the decisions taken by promoters of products. This is because the chatter on slashdot is often quoted by may bulletins on other websites. What do you think?
I've never liked the disc technology, I wish there was a better replacement (durable flash drives, or something like that) or maybe the CDs with an extra plastic cover, kind of like the old floppy disks.
Anyway, spinning disks end up having reading errors, and the reading rate becomes really slow.
I definately dig the idea of competition helping to create and give us better technology, because, face it, if no one had anything to fight or work against, things wouldn't grow and develop as quickly as they do.
It's things like this that give us great computer technology especially, great choices as well, instead of a single brand for everything with one company controlling it all. I love choice after all...
The only problems this runs into, would be, the confusion that arises for the general populace. IE, is dvd+r or dvd-r better? what's the difference? Is AMD really better than Intel? Should I get an HP, Compaq, or Sony computer?
These are questions I hear daily, and while some are answered by gathering a little information and figuring out what the person really needs to use it for, others are not so easily answered.
Recordable media for example. Sure, I can tell someone, "Good luck finding a zipdisk anyone that's not online, why not get an inexpensive CD or DVD burner". However, whether or not DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs are better. And while we all have opinions and some facts, each one has their strengths.
Which leads me to this: How much confusion will your average non-geeky customer have once all this new-wave recordable technology hits the market? More storage capacity, faster burns, more compatibility, these could be easy answers, until you get to the point to where you have five (i picked a random number, however many it really will be/is) to choose from and compatibility starts slimming down to specific brand names.
Any thoughts or ideas on this would be appreciated.
The "article" (if you can call it that ... marketing blurb, really) seems like one of those "too good to be true so it probably isn't" things. Time will tell, but odds are if what they're doing is as easy to manufacture as they claim, the other major DVD researchers have probably already thought of it and discarded the idea, and if it is a really complicated affair then the fact that it uses a red laser vs a blue laser probably won't make much difference. I don't know, we'll see, but I'm not holding my breath on this one. Even if they have something, they're up against some pretty tough boys that have a vested interest in seeing their own technology prevail.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Videos of Mass Destruction.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I remember when I had an 80Gb HD and I needed to buy about 50 CDs to free my hard drive of all the junk i download everyday. So I decided to buy an DVD-Writer and a new 250Gb HD.
:-( Maybe I should just buy another 250Gb drive...
What happened is that i just moved everything from my old drive to the new one. Nowadays I have about 200Gb of stuff in the hard drive that I have no idea when i'm gonna use. I would need about 50 DVDs to free the space... great progress!
Now, even with this 30gb discs, i would need 7 discs to backup my stuff.
repeats itself
I call BullShit, for the second time today, actually.
--Mike--
This sounds exactly the same as D-Data's apparently defunct Digital Multilayer Disc format, which also was a multilayer red laser. The CTO is even a Russan/Israeli, although not Eugene Levich.
My video compression blog
Some of us can notice the quality loss on DivX.
Yeah, sure, I know.
Divx/MPEG-4 at high bit rates is the same "quality"... actually better than MPEG-2 (DVD) in most cases.
Then again it's all about where you play your MPEG-4 movies. Play the same "DVDRip" on a 550 MHz computer, a 2 GHz computer and a stand-alone player. The stand-alone will likely come out on top because it was built to only decode MPEG-1/2/4 and do nothing else.
My player has what they call "upsampling" which sounds like pseudo-science but it actually does make the movies come out better (then they look on the ol' PC).
Then again it's all a matter of correct encoding and so forth. If the movie was encoded badly it will never come out right. Come look through my DVD backups, I dare you to find the flaws.
And when it comes to most video content you'd be suprised about how much stuff you don't see anyways because you aren't looking for it. If you watch the background constantly you are likely to be angered by bad extras or movie mistakes before video flaws.
Anyways to say that you can see the quality loss with Divx makes me laugh because you can even go a whole Mbit/s higher than MPEG-2 (DVD)... it's all about encoding (like mp3 and real audio!).
Get your Unix fortune now!
Just thought I'd point out that their proof of concept (according the press-release-in-article's-clothing) is a "pre-recorded VMD has four layers on one side for an initial capacity of 20 GB...." One quick reference to recordable says:
"In 2006, the company will start manufacturing cost-effective 50 GB VMD's on Red Laser, for HDTV and Digital Cinema. With minimal changes of its technology, the company can manufacture recordable VMD as well." (my emphasis)
The fact that the recordable version is referred to as a vague possibility, and (more disturbingly) brought up AFTER a reference to what will happen in 2006, all suggests that we won't see burnable versions of this technology for quite a while. Anyone know where the Blue Laser folks are on getting a home writable version out? That, I think, will really impact user adoption.
Unless they can include 1 or 2 layers that current generation DVD players can play now, as a red-laser tech (note how I said red-laser) it's doomed to failure already.
OK, so the manufacturers don't have to invest in new equipment now, but the consumers will have to, and everyone will when the inevitable change-over to blue-laser happens.
But what really rules it out will be the long long change-over period in which both "normal" red-laser and VMD red-laser discs will have to be produced and sold, that will be at massive cost to both the manufacturers, and retail chain, creating additional confusion to the consumer, and only to happen again quite soon.
We are going to have/need blue-laser discs.
I can well see all blu-ray players being able to read VMD discs though.
I always that the ultimate defeat of Blue Laser would lie at the hands of the Cheat Commandos.. "Justice rocket backpack rocket, rocket fire!"
I just had a thought ... what if you tried reading a medium with two different colored lasers? Could you get effectively better resolution than with just one laser? By how much? From what I recall from my music classes, the difference between two close frequencies is a lower frequency, not a higher one, so maybe there's nothing here. But I thought I'd ask.
Great, another promising technology crippled by DRM. This is supposed to be a selling point?
Video2000@Wikipedia
"Video 2000 was technically superior to both Betamax and VHS, but the format was introduced at a time when VHS had already established itself as the de facto home video standard, and failed to overturn its position."
We had Video2000 at home, and it was awesome. Very old 8hr tapes (4hr/side) are still running better than brand-new SVHS tapes. Sad.
Beta, psha.
I can almost hear Dubya say it:
"What?! They got VMDs?? Let's wage a preventive war to stop them!"
Whatever happened to holographic storage? Weren't we suppposed to have little sugar cube flash drives with a bajillion bytes of storage? I want a keychain thingy to hold all of my MP3s all of my pr0n, my collection of pirated kung fu movies and 10,000 Dr Who episodes and still have enough room left over for the fucking Library of Congress! Where is the future, damn it?! And while we're on the subject, I want my flying bubblecar too! IBM lied to us back in the 60s! They lied!
Existing players certainly won't be compatible with these discs, even though they may red-laser readable. If the industry is going to move to a better technology, they might as well choose something that is a little more advanced like Blu Ray... In either case DVD backwards capability is going to be a must
And you can already buy the units from Sony.
They cost a lot. That's pretty much the only problem with them right now.
Expect the price to drop when the deman d picks up when the price drops whern the demand picks up... you know the drill.
Realistically, we (anonymous, but not Sony) are currently aiming at a back-end of 2006 release for the triple-writers. (That is, they will read and write CD/CDRW/DVD+R/DVD-R/Blu at 48x, 40x, 16x, 16x and 2x - bearing in mind that 1x DVD is about 8x CD and it's about the same again for Blu)
DRM is a reality, however. You clever clever people will find a way around it as quickly as you did CSS, no doubt. And our sales will respond accordingly.
Actually, reading multilayer disks isn't too bad.
Writing them is a royal pain in the behind, since it's much harder to fix a mistake. When reading, if you fall out of focus on the desired layer, the worst that happens is you have to try again.
Blu is inherently NOT backwards compatible with DVD. But then, DVD isn't compatible with CD either.
In the same way that you'd be insane to produce a DVD reader that can't read CDs (it DOES happen, for a few home players - but very few. And no data drives) you will see Blu players playing CD and DVD. This WILL jack up the cost a bit, though.
An interesting question is: When will we be able to drop support for CD?
The problem being that DVD-Audio and Super-Audio-CD (both DVD disc technologies) have kinda been a flop so far. Plus you have to wait until everyone is no longer using their old media.
It probably won't happen much before 2010 that any backwards compatibility is lost. And even then, I think it will be due to solid state portable media players.
There is also, you'll note, nothing stopping you making 8 layer Blu disks. But no-one will. For the exact same (cost) reasons no one made massively multilayer DVDs. And by the time anyone wants them, there'll be a large installed base of players that can't read them.
First of all, I'm quite glad someone has decided to go this route for HD / HD-like discs that have tons of storage. The backwards compatibility is what will win people over. Plus, the name just sounds better. I mean, who would buy something called "Blue-Ray" anyways? ;-P
It would be interesting if somebody counted up all the Slashdot stories over the years covering newly invented or newly for sale storage technologies, and how many of them ever caught on. I bet it would be less than one percent.
The winner will be inferior technology.
You take the blue laser - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red laser - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
I don't get the concern with "backwards compatibility" (these discs certainly won't be playable on older players, at least from a logical standpoint, if not physical); the blue laser players will be able to play CDs and DVDs back; if not initially, soon after (it's required for mass market appeal).
It will record almost all of the movies it will receive. But in a different manner. If we only can show all we can remember...
What ever happened to the development of the optical storage cube (remember Star Trek?). I thought someone was developing a laser to write layers inside of a poly cube. I've seen the tacky "etchings" for sale in the souveiner shops but no media reader for them.
Tongue: A variety of meat, rarely served because it crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of dead cow.
"Sharp Corporation announces the introduction into the Japanese market of a new Blu-ray Disc Recorder with Hard Drive/DVD. The new BD-HD100 can record and play back high-definition pictures to/from the built-in hard drive and Blu-ray Discs with exactly the same high resolution seen in digital Hi-Vision (HDTV) broadcast images. "
read more, see pictures and specification at http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/041111.html
-tomsen
Oh God, apparently new disc formats are emerging with each passing week. What now? VMD? The only bright spot for this technology is its low cost. Alas, it lacks the backing of major electronics and content companies, thereby consigning it to the rubbish heap before it's even hit the store shelf. The fact is that the market will not support more than two formats (see SACD vs. DVD-Audio), and in that particular case widespread adoption has been almost nonexistent. On the other hand, single-format markets (see plain old CD, DVD and their (re)writable variants) have grown by leaps and bounds.