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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
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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."
Yes, the drive can read AND write the standard DVD format. It's in the article.
you might as well ship them all to me for enviro-friendly disposal. message me and i'll give you my PO Box.
Yes, you can still play your DVDs. Heck, you can still use your DVD player to play your DVDs; it won't self-destruct if you buy a Blu-ray player.
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
It's backwards compatible in the same way DVDs are compatible with CDs. You will need a new drive to read these new disks, but the new drives will contain lasers for reading CDs and DVDs as well.
If you mean backwards compatible video format, then it depends on the players hardware and not on the drive. HD-DVD has MPEG2 in the spec. MPEG2 is what DVDs use. So they will still work assuming the MPAA doesn't try to pull a fast one.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ 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.
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In short, NO.
The DVD and CDRW units use a 'red' laser, where's blueray uses a (get this) blue laser.
Because of this, the whole focus/pit-size differences ensure that the units will not be able to read DVD/CDR. Though I'm sure someone will make a unit which supports both.
Except it probably wouldn't be able to read Advanced Optical Discs. Yay for format wars!
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
If you play them backwards will they give you the hidden satanic message: "Buy more, spend more, long live Microsoft" ??
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The sharp player/recorder will allow you to back up 5 dvd's to a blu-ray disk. FTA
Stop signs are only Suggestions
You realize that the first DVD-ROM drives were incompatible with reading CDRs because the dye used in CDRs is invisible to DVD wavelengths? DVDs read at a shorter wavelength than CDs do, just like Blu-Ray reads at a shorter wavelength than DVDs. They very quickly came out with dual laser systems.
Check it out.
This is why I'm not getting rid of my 5.25" floppies yet.
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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?! :-)
Actually as part of your licensing arrangement it does, but only after destroying all your existing dvds. This will allow the consumer to savour the full enjoyment of Blu-ray with brand new discs and the content providers with a glorious opportunity to fleece you again. Its a win-win situation.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The DVD and CDRW units use a 'red' laser, where's blueray uses a (get this) blue laser.
WRONG! The blueray unit uses a higherspeed red light in it's laser!
Death toy ou!
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MS and N have both announced their using new proprietery formats. I heard rumblings about HDDVD in XBox 2
Who knows what that means, exactly. It would be too expensive to set up facilities to create a physically different drive and press non-standard discs, who knows what writing technology they'll use.
No doubt it'll be high-capacity.
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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
I wasn't aware the current consumer technology allows us to manipulate the speed of light?
Either that, or you were joking and it went completely over my head.
Let's see:
CD - 3 formats (CD, CD-R, CD-RW)
DVD - 6 formats (DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM)
A simple extrapolation means we have to expect 9 formats for the blue ray disk.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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"
2x CD or 2x DVD?
Ah, I get it, you mean a double density 5.25" floppy!
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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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.
Well, DVD and CD don't have the same laser. CD is around 785 nm (very red), DVD is around 660 nm (almost orange red), and BR will be around 405 nm (blue :). Early DVD drives couldn't read some CD-R(W) disc because of these slight differences.
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."
Should have included a link to Sony's page regarding a 3 laser head, which is interesting.
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.
Well, at manufacturing level a CD-R/DVD head costs less than a dollar. (I have that from a very senior executive who manufactures them in tens of millions of units)
All Blu-Ray drives will have CD/DVD heads added for backwards compatibility at that price, since they would be rather unattractive otherwise.
More like 12 :)
Is that like the moore's law of formats ? the number of available formats doubles every X months ?
Um... he's saying that DVD-R stores 5.5MB /more/ than DVD+R. Which is news to me, but far from unreasonable.
I've had this sig for three days.
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. :/
Yeah, I didn't state that clearly enough. DVD-R stores about 5.5 MB *more* than a +R. I was certain it was a lie/hoax when someone first told me, but it is the truth.
For reference, a DVD-R stores 4,707,319,808 bytes and a DVD+R stores 4,700,372,992 bytes. This is in actual usable user space. Try googling for these numbers, you will see. (OK, I did the math, it's more like 6.6 MB difference as opposed to 5.5 MB. I almost remembered it correctly.)
You forgot to account for dual layer vs. single layer in several of the formats.
You must have a very funny idea about what constitutes red light. Last time I checked the 785nm that is used in a CD is not visible.
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.
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Jul 15, 2004 - Philips Develops All-in-one Optical Pick-up Unit
Philips announced that they have developed an optical pick-up unit (OPU) that will be able to read and write CD-R/-RW, DVD+R/+RW and the next-generation optical disc format Blu-ray Disc (BD). With its new OPU81, Philips has created the first important building block of the all-in-one recorder that can record and playback all popular consumer optical formats. By integrating the infrared, red and blue wavelength lasers and single detector into one single OPU concept, Philips has succeeded in developing a flexible triple-writer OPU design in a compact form factor. The OPU81 is designed for mass production and will meet mass consumer price levels. Mass production of the new OPU will start in 2006 when Philips anticipates that the mass-market demand for BD recorders will pick-up.
Anymore FUD you want to share with us?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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
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But I have just managed to learn how to use DVD Shrink!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
This decision will be the Blue Ray of Death of HP.
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Those are based on Blu-ray-like technology, but they aren't Blu-ray compatible and they won't ship any time soon.
MUST PATENT NOW!!