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HP Backs Blu-ray Disc Technology
neutron_p writes "Finally HP announced plans to include Blu-ray Disc drives across many of its product lines, including select consumer desktop and notebook PCs, personal workstations and digital entertainment centers. They will start selling PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives in late 2005. An optical disc technology, Blu-ray Disc is poised to replace current DVD technology and become the next standard for personal computing data storage and viewing high-definition movies. More than 70 of the world's leading technology and entertainment companies have committed to the Blu-ray Disc format. Recently, Sharp unveiled Blu-ray disc recorder with Hard Drive/DVD which will be introduced on the Japanese market in December."
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Is this ish backwards compatible?
I have over 300 dvd movies... i REALLY don't wan to see them go to waste.
What is a "terrestrial/BS/CS110 digital tuner" and what makes it so special? The first term is Terrestrial, and I know that means over-the-air. Also sometimes satellite, but I don't think so in this case. What about "BS" or "CS110" though? Does it/can it double as a digital cable box, so I don't have to buy one from the cable company?
With all that storage George Lucas will still find a way to re-re-re-release the bastardized Star Wars movies one-per BluRay disc and people will still buy them. "More Ewoks! More pouty Anaki! More lifelike JarJar! All in THX certified Dolby Megadigital 24+3 Digital Sound!"
Trolling is a art,
i could've sworn blu-ray no longer needed the caddy
--They say only a fool looks at the finger pointing to the sky...
For the nth time people, there are no cartridges.
I've been on /. too long... I originally read the title as "HP Hacks Blu-Ray Disc Technology", and my first response was "I wonder how they did it."
you might as well ship them all to me for enviro-friendly disposal. message me and i'll give you my PO Box.
We have a bunch of writable DVD formats along with the standard read-only one, and there's CD, CD-R, and CD-RW. Now we're adding another DVD format. Does this add cost, or would a blu-ray-only drive be about the same as one that supported everything?
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ drive and ~$1 media will be the one that gets adopted.
That's how it's always been, really, from Beta v VHS to DVD-R vs DVD+R, the latter of which resolved itself by having everything read/write everything else (+/- is pretty much irrelevant).
That's how it will be with the next gen. Whoever gets their stuff out there will get bought.
The PC market desperately needs some sort of cheap media that stores in the 10s of gigs. Even if it's only useful as an affordable/practical backup/archive system for home users.
By the time I could afford a DVD-R, it's paltry 4.5 gigs was too small to be useful backing up 160gigs of drives.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
People have an investment in the players, companies have an investment in production of the drives, recordable units are begining to get cheap enough to displace VCRs, and people are happy with DVD. Seriously dvd video is good enough on any type of tv for my eyesight, that is similar to most americans. Blu-ray has a future in data storage as our requirenments continue to grow, but it will be 10 years before we hear about renting a blu disc, unless they make it ubiquitus, cheap, and prove its superiority.
In the +/- DVD format war, HP backed the slightly-superior-but-not-DVD-forum-approved + format. Now they back the Blu-Ray. HP may have some weird people working for them (certain ones I'd even call wacko), but I'd say they're smart just the same when it comes to choosing the better of two emerging technologies.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
why would the MPAA, of all people, pull a 'fast one'? I'll have you know they're fine upstanding folks, and besides, it's not like they've ever tried anything like that before, is it?
...anyone?
I know what you're thinking, but that whole Betamax thing really wasn't our^H^H^Htheir fault...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
This is why I'm not getting rid of my 5.25" floppies yet.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Sony long ago announced that PlayStation 3's main media delivery system will be Blu-ray.
Having such a technology available at a [presumably] low cost and [also presumably] in vast quantities could well see this format becoming very widespread much quicker than first thought.
And if Microsoft and Nintendo stick to conventional DVD, could this gave Sony the long term advantage?
1. 4.5 gigs just isn't enough storage space to be a viable backup medium. plenty of people have posted about this.
2. DVD video just doesn't scale. Sure, dvds look great on your 10 year old 30" behemoth tv set in the den, but try watching them on a new million inch HDTV... you can see with your own eyes that the MPEG2 compression just isn't so great. even with fancy progressive scanning and other image enhancement algorithms, the quality just isn't there especially when compared to higher resolution HDTV. whats needed is less compression and higher resolution video. and that requires more storage space. HD-DVD is one solution and Blue Ray is another. which spec is better is an academic debate for another post.
you want to know where the early adoption will be? home theatre. not computers.
Ahh and when they arrive you'll then have to wait for the ones that can record 500Gb on "DVD's"... so how is your 486 going these days?! :-)
Laugh, I am a slow adopter of new technology, the only burner I got is a 2x !!!
Posted Anonymous to save my "Geek" rep...
I think it's a bad thing because they'll have the chance to move to a non-broken anti-fair-use system. No more DeCSS.
It's sad. 10 years ago advances in consumer electronics were something I reacted to with joy. Since then it's to the point where I'm worried about things like HDTV because any potential benefits to me as a consumer will be vastly outweighed by increased capacity for corporations to abuse their government-granted power at my expense.
AFAIK the only software yet to come on DVD so far are certain Linux distros. Reguardless that dvd drives can be bought for less than 20 dollars nowdays. Games typically can span 3-5 cd's and they still say they do not want to distribute on DVD. Course if they didnt have to pack a thick CD set they could put more copies of the same product on the shelf in a slimmed up packaging.
And with Blue-Ray coming out it wont make much of a difference if the distribution channels still stick with CDROM.
Same here! In fact, it wasn't until I just read your comment and looked back at the title, carefully, that I realized the word wasn't "Hacked". Here I thought there was some fancy reverse-engineering going on, and I just didn't see it in the blurb.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
at 120mW, and a scarcely visible wavelength, accidents are going to happen as geeks salvage drives...
HP has to back SOMETHING. The trick with Technology is that you have to stand behind a product, push it, and hope that consumers accept it. If you stand by the wayside, you are bound to be grabbing ticket #4,165,280 (ficticious) at Bankruptcy court.
Technology, especially for home theaters(as one poster put it), Will always be moving forward. But it is not the baby steps that make the majority change, it's the leaps and bounds.
A VCR to a DVD = Better picture, sound, content, and navigation. It was innovation. Blu-Ray is the equivalant of buying a 3Ghz Computer for your grandmother to browse the web and read email with.
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
I think I need to popularise a law dictating the truth about backups and medium used for them. Henceforth, It shall be called Bill's Law:
By the time backup media that is large enough to back up your current hard drive is cheap, you will have upgraded to a new hard drive with a capacity such that it will no longer be practical to back up with that media.
Ok the phrasing needs some work, but thats certainly been mycase. When I had a hard drive that was only four gigs, cd-r's looked perfect. It would only take six of them. By the time I got one I had a 30 gig hard drive. But then it looks like dvd-r's will work as a back up. By the time I get one my hard drive is 250 gigs. So by the time I get a Recordable Blue Ray that stores 500 gigs I'm sure I'll have a 30 terrabye drive.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
.. so how is your 486 going these days?! :-)
Running linux/samba with a pair of 160GB Seagate hard drives to backup my unstable Windows and serves as a media file server. First thing I do when I buy a CD/DVD is to rip it to the disk and been up a year solid now.
This way I can use it anywhere in the house on any OS, even over wireless.
It's a technological arms race. The studios get a new format (CD, DVD, Blu-ray) and it works to prevent piracy for a while until the consumer gear to copy it becomes cheaper. It sounds like HP is already announcing Blu-ray writers though, unlike when CDs and DVDs were first introduced and it took years to make them commonplace.
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
I've got to disagree. The driving force here will be if the movies are released in HDTV quality. The difference between that and typical DVD quality will be enough to get many people to switch.
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
The drives also will include LightScribe technology, a labeling solution developed by HP that allows silk-screen quality text and graphics to be burned directly onto LightScribe-enabled Blu-ray Discs using the same laser that burns to the data side of the disc.
So, any bets as to how they're going to do this?
My guess is they just going to put thermal printer paper on the backside of the disks and use hardware/software like Yamaha's DiscT@2. Either that, or some kind of substrate embedded in the disc on the data side that turns color(s) instead of a sticker.
My xboxes perfer -R media...maybe I'm using the wrong +R media (I even set the booktype to DVD-ROM)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I couldn't believe it when I saw a product (National Geographic Back Roads Explorer) in the store that comes on 17 CD-ROMS instead of just a couple DVDs.
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
No one challenged this? 5.5 MB? MB?!!!????
j sp
First of all, you mean GB, not MB.
Secondly,
http://www.goallover.co.uk/white.
states that DVD-R holds 4.7 GB of data, which is the same as DVD+R.
You, my friend, are seriously mistaken.
I'm getting sick of vapor announcements... especially from HP. Is anyone else still waiting for LightScribe?! If HP's backing of Blu-Ray is gonna be anything like that we won't see it 'till the next decade. :/
Or at least all the ones who bashed him when he said the dvd will be obsolete in 10 years. Then again, he probably has better things to do than read slashdot.
If you could properly setup a Windows server, it would be both stable and accessable from any OS/wireless.
Fag.
The increase in storage from a DVD to either of these blue laser format optical disks is simply insufficient to make it worth while. From a CD to a DVD was a 10 fold increase in storage. From a DVD to a blue laser based disk is only around three times the capacity.
This is just not worth the effort and cost, especially when there are holographic alternatives in development that have the potential to offer over 100 times the storage capacity of a DVD.
Nintendo used weird proprietary optical discs in the Gamecube that aren't used for anything at all except the Gamecube. This turned out to work extremely well; although the Gamecube has the weakest copy protection of any console this generation (bootloader discs are sold legally in stores), it is the only console this generation without a significant piracy problem. Nintendo will probably do the same thing with their next console.
However: The Gamecube optical discs and disc drives, developed by Matsushita/Panasonic, were somewhat similar in nature to DVDs, and Panasonic actually sold a device in Japan which used a single laser to play both DVDs and Gamecube games.
It has been widely speculated that Nintendo will once again ask Matsushita to create the optical drives for the next Nintendo console, since they seem to have done a good job with the Gamecube drives and anyway it has been indicated the N5 will be backward-compatible with the Gamecube. Since Matsushita is firmly in the Blu-ray camp, this would make it likely the N5's optical discs will be technologically closer to Blu-ray than HDDVD, and even make it possible (though maybe not likely, as the Panasonic Q was eventually discontinued) that a Bluray/N5 combination device will be at some point available from Matsushita.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
CDs did well because they were basically a replacement for audio cassettes and LPs. DVDs did well because they were a replacement for VHS Tapes. What is the purpose of the Blu-Ray disc. Sure they store more than dvd's, but that doesn't mean that they will start putting movies on them. DVD resolution is already high enough that most TV's don't even do dvd's justice, and increasing the resolution can't be detected by the human eye anyway. The only thing that these may be useful for is putting a lot of movies on 1 disc. Which isn't going to happen. Because if they were interested in doing that, I'd be able to buy all of one group's songs on 1 DVD, instead of having to go out and buy 10 CDs
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
But I have just managed to learn how to use DVD Shrink!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Brilliant!! Absolutely Brilliant!!
Not as funny as your other post.
I've long since said to hell with the "dvd consortium".
Blu-Ray is the better tech, just like DVD+R.
This decision will be the Blue Ray of Death of HP.
Round the Bowl and Down the Hole, Roll Carly Roll.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
Arent these disks supposed to have as much as 8 layers, giving 200 GB per disc?
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/5616.cfm
Sad. There was time when HP would have invented this technology rather than simply market it. I guess there is more money to be made marketing things than actually creating them.