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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)"
Do any of these systems plan to have the ability to read/write both sides at the same time? Double-sided media with no cartridge is kind of limited for labeling, but it is a cheap and easy way to double storage without a lot of engineering.
I'd also think a two-sided medium could be faster than single-sided medium if you combined the surfaces together in a RAID-0 kind of striping setup.
Would it really be that much more expensive to put a R/W head on top of the drive in addition to on the bottom?
I wonder what kinda redundancy these discs have? ,I have stored lots of data on cd's and I have lost some data because the cd's went bad for whatever reason. That was just on a one layer disc, now imagine having 3 layers of data, even more to worry about!
Over the years
What I forsee is, lots of corrupted data due to dust,smudges,scratches and enviromental changes. I'm sure cotton or rubber gloves will be nescesary to hand the discs.
Jesus Christ, they've been talking about this shit for years and yet there's not a single recorder/player available. Do what Apple does - don't talk about shit until it's ready.
Hard disk capacities have been outstripping backup media by orders of magnitude for years. 40g drives were already common when DVD-R hit, and now that it's developed, 120-160g drives are common and 40s are on their way out- and good luck finding 9g DVD-R media. Have fun backing up 300g of data to 4.5g DVD-Rs.
2g and 4g drives were commonplace by the time CD burners became consumer-viable- you still needed multiple disks to backup a full drive.
I don't think the CD->DVD->HD-DVD comparison is valid. Remember, CDs replaced audio casettes and DVDs replaced VHS tapes. A spinning disk was a huge upgrade over reels of tape. Not having to mess with all of that tracking and tape breakage/streching plus having to clean the heads. God, what a nightmare and thank God we're past all that.
I think the media executives have learned the wrong lesson from CDs and DVDs. They now seem to be looking for the next break away format which will convince us to once again replace our entire entertainment collections. To them this is like free money. They think they can get us there by offering something with improved resolution or fidelity.
Most of us however, our reasonably happy with what we have now (just like most of us were reasonably happy with VHS except for the mechanical difficulties noted above). Now us geeks and the hardcore video/audio folks may think HD is a good upgrade but I noticed that very few chose laserdisk when they had the option. Price and convenience is why we moved to CDs and DVDs not better quality, that was just the bonus.
Now I can't think of a more convenient media than spinning disks but what if we could find a way to get rid of the media all together? Why that sounds a lot like an iPod doesn't it? iTunes? iVids?
My prediction: The next big thing for delivering entertainment to the user will be TCP/IP. Shocking I know but there it is.
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
I would beg to differ. Floppy disk errors were caused by mechanical damage that resulted from using the floppy since this is a direct-contact technology. You use it a lot and due to the wear and tear of mechanical contact the magnetic surface gets damaged physically. But with CDs you just put a CD on the shelf for a year and you get data corruption and major data loss eventhough you never even used the CD once that whole time. Now that is just unacceptable to me, with floppies at least you knew you could expect damage due to use, but CDs just tend to go sour without you touching them. That is why I refuse to buy any kind of optical RW drive, they are useless to me, I'd rather get a new hard drive, they are faster, far more reliable and convenient. Do the math: how much does a quality DVD-RW drive + 30 quality DVD media combo compare to a quality 120 or 200 Gb hard drive?
If you want something portable get a solid state hard drive, USB flash drives are getting cheaper by the day.
The bottom line is - optical drives are a dead-end technology that serves only one purpose well - the interests of RIAA and MPAA. They package it any way they want and you end up buying 3 disks, each containing the 20 % you wanted and 80 % of what you never wanted but still got charged for. No thanks, not for me.
because of this special coating, the cartridge was deemed unnecessary and will most likely not be found in any future drives.
What about a future 8cm BD standard for use in handheld devices? Carrying and switching discs on those would seem to introduce more wear than one gets in a typical DVD library. This is part of why the Sony PSP's UMD media have cartridges.
This is something that I have not understood from the get-go: The way it was explained to me, while blu-ray is based on the combination of today's video compression technology with an advancement in optical technology (blue lasers), hd-dvd is based on the combination of today's optical technology (perhaps incrementally improved, I'm not sure) with an advancement in video compression (mpeg-4). My question, then, is why is there this unnecessary competition? Why not combine these two standards bring to the table, using mpeg-4 on blue-laser optical media. Of course, hd-dvd still has the benefit of being an easy manufacturing transition, but that didn't keep us from converting our tapes to cd's.