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Blu-Ray/Standard DVD Hybrids Planned
An anonymous reader writes "Recently stories about hybrid HD-DVD and regular DVDs were in the news. This was supposed to be an advantage for HD-DVD in its battle with Blu-Ray. But that advantage will not exist, as according to this story on PhysOrg, the same technology will be available for Blu-Ray. And it is even better than the HD-DVD solution, since instead of two sided media, it uses a triple layer structure on one side (one layer of 33.5GB for Blu-Ray, then two layers for 9GB of dual layer DVD data)"
They've been very clear from the start that there'll be two versions, one plain and one with extra everything. So far, that is exactly it. The collected series is nothing but those combined, there is no "extra-extra".
I'd much rather you go after the movies that have
a) normal version
b) extended version
c) director's cut
d) remastered edition
e) special edition
f) ultimate edition
etc etc.
They typically told noone that their movie was so crappy they needed a dozen releases to get it right. Or that they had another 3 minutes of bonus material to add. Those should all burn and die.
Now, we shall see if they add something new in addition to making the LotR films HDTV-resolution. If they do, then you may complain. So far, I've seen no reason to complain about them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I believe one of the main factors besides the manufacturing cockblock Sony put on their format was that the discs could only store 1 hour's worth of video and there was no technically feasible way to fit in more video without losing quality or changing the form factor. At least not at first, but they snoozed and lost because it took them too long to find a solution.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Well, something close was made and produced commercially with the Kenwood label for a couple of years on CD-ROM drives. Zen Research developed what they called "True-X" technology which was their attemp to help debunk all the ridiculous leap-frog marketing of touted drive speeds which we all know was, at the time, less fact than fiction. Very few drives actually reached their advertised speeds and even fewer could actually sustain those claimed speeds over the entire surface of the disc. "True-X" technology developed by Zen research basically took the one laser and split it into multiple beams that would read different tracks of the disc, effectively keeping transfer rates consistent across the entire disc. Having owned several of them, I can testify to the superior speeds they offered over other typical drives of the day, reliability of the units themselves aside. While they still never seemed to actually sustain their advertised speeds either, they were much closer to actual advertised speeds than everything else on the market, and by a long way! Old reviews: http://tech-report.com/reviews/2000q3/kenwood72x/i ndex3.x
http://geek.com/hwswrev/hardware/cdrom/kw52xcd.htm
Granted all reading and writing was done on one side of the disc, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see that same approach utilized in products in the future since as the ammount of data per disc keeps going up and up, the time taken to read/write that data will as well barring different technical approaches such as your suggested dual head drives. I can speculate at possible reasons why we haven't seen muti-head/sided drives en masse to date, but as I am not in the field, it is just that, speculation. I would imagine that you would effectively almost double the manufacturing costs?
I would see split optical methods as a much more realistic and cost effective solution rather than increasing the number of read/write heads. For all I know though, current drives could already be using variations of this method already, but judging from benchmarks of drives I have owned since, that is highly unlikely as the myth of "claimed" drive speeds seems to just be continuing its legacy of hype and half-truths.
I am but an egg...