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6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance
gardolas writes "'Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote
HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second.'
HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."
pr0n, of course. :D
Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!
*De gozaru!*
I fear this new advance in storage will just enable greater and greater copyright infringement and rob hard working content producers of their deserved income.
I hope they have technology built in to thwart these evildoing pirates.
Wow, from TFA:
HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual-layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs, meanwhile, hold about 4.7GB. HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.
Hmm, there's a format war going on with the Blu-ray and HD DVD, and they're already plotting the successor. Of course, they don't give a date in the article or anything firm at all, so perhaps it is a bit of a pipe dream. I must admit, I liked this quip from the article:
If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up.
Considering when I got my first computer, and the salesperson chuckled and said 'there was no way in hell I'd ever fill up a 40 megabyte hard drive', it's nice to see that people finally understand the capacity of users to fill up every nook and cranny of a storage medium!
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Too bad that a hard disk would be nowhere near to keeping up with a 1GB/s transfer rate. Heck, IIRC (and please correct me if I don't!) RAM would have trouble keeping up with that ... -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi! You're our only hope...
Remember when technology used to be about enabling people, rather than disabling them?
From the spell-checkers-are-overrated department...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's,
That means nothing to me, can someone covert that into a more practical measurement like Libraries Of Congress (LoC) ?.
To effectively use Apple iHDTV 3D Holo-Garage Band home studio with patented QuickTimeHolo technology, we recommend using a G14 computer with a one button psychic-cursor and at least fifty quadrillion golybits of RAM.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
I remember, back when I bought my first computer, I had the choice between a 25 and 50 megs Harddrive. The sales rep said :
"Choose the 25 megs one, NO ONE will EVER need this much storage!"
Guess what : Needs increase with time and technology. I'm sure if this tech get released after Blueray that we will have a way to fill up 1 TB without thinking too much about it.
Now what we REALLY need is a PERMANENT way of storing data.
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Does anyone else find this horrendously depressing that they're already plotting the next format? Sure makes me frown on buying anything new in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format. :\
Good-Tutorials
The LoC is normally quoted at 10tb.
If they made the LOTR chronicles 1TB long, I think I'd have to get another job just to be bored enough to watch them.
Technically, the article stated that the transfer rates would be up to one gigabit per second, not 1 GB per second, as the summary states. That's certainly fast, but not beyond the capabilities of current hard disk/memory technology.
But will they put some kind of protection around the disk similar to 3.5 Floppies or MiniDiscs? That's my one big beef about CDs. They're so fragile. I'm careful, but one false move can really mess them up. If you can fit so much on a disc, make them smaller, 2 inch diameter? but make them protected.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"A tiny speck of dust has crossed the beam and 4gb of data have been lost." The bigger they get, they harder they fall.
I heard about this new technology a few years ago. I didn't realize it is about to be commercialized...
Anyway, the parent poster's example on Star Wars has it right. Basically the projected holograph at a different angle (or viewed at different angle) shows a different holographic pattern (i.e., from the front, you can see the princess's face. But from behind, her arse).
The different angle of the incident beam generates a different look of interference map, which in turn translated to bits. It doesn't seem too far off that you can hold "Library of Congress" in a tiny data cube between your finger tips...
PS. Do I want it? Sure. I have 1TB data of my own at work. It'd be nice to back them all up at once.
For the rest of us, 1TB is a lot of pr0n, or hundreds of Linux distributions.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
While they're increasing the density in a new format, how about making the spindle hole and clampable hub a lot smaller? Throw this density at a 1" disc, and a CD/DVD hole/hub will eat most of the usable area. Let's have a 1mm hole/hub, and use the whole medium. And while we're at it, let's finally get doublesided drives (without flipping discs): they've been promising doublesided media since DS/DD 5.25" floppies, and we're still waiting.
--
make install -not war
How about a multilayer, "multiphysics" disc? Lay down several optical layers readable by focusable laser. Beneath them, a magnetic layer readable by HD heads. We might be able to get over 50% more capacity, without needing greater areal density. With doublesided discs, and pinhole spindle hubs, we might be looking at 2" discs with 1TB capacity.
--
make install -not war
IIRC uncompressed video requires at least 80GB/hour. So a two hour movie would require over 160 GB if you want to completely avoid compression artifacts. There are also lossless video compression algorithms like HuffyYUV (anyone have a link?) which allows for around 2:1 compression without any loss in quality. So that 160 GB movie would only be 80 GB. Also don't forget that storing the audio in uncompressed PCM or a losslessly compressed format like FLAC would also add to the storage requirements.
I am not sure if higher resolution film transfers would increase the storage requiremtents even further. I assume it would. So this tech may only be somewhat overkill.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.
Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..
Ironic isn't it?
I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.
It'd be cool if they could put in a function in the hardware that would calculate and fill out the media with [standardized] redundancy data. You'd want it do be done in hardware to be fast, compatible and not generate unneccesary bus traffic.
Basically, the burn software would feature a '[X] Fill out with redundancy data and finalize disc'-option box together with the '[X] Finalize disc' one.
I've sometimes done this by hand, but it takes forever to calculate the data, and you don't get it properly distributed over the disc, etc, etc. I think it'd be better done in hardware.
Guess there's no hope though, it'd up the cost a dollar, and we all know that's just impossible to bear. <sigh>
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You just know the PHBs will still use an entire disc to walk a 37KB spreadsheet thirty feet down the hall ;)
according to TFA:
The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD.
I was getting sick of that old redundant legacy blu-ray format, its about time we replaced it..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
From the slashdot article:
"about 1GB per second"
From the cnet article:
"transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second"
Slight difference there of about eight times...
Yes. I filled my station wagon with quarter-inch tapes and drove them there.
All along the way I could see other drivers looking at me and underestimating my bandwidth.
If the boys and girls at Redmond keep expanding the windows kernel at it's current rate we'll need all of that 1TB and more!
There's a cool article here for those interested in a little windoze history.
Stephen Colbert on race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad."
That hole serves a purpose. You'd have to spin the disk at a much faster speed to get the same sustained data rate if you made the hole smaller. And CDs/DVDs are already near their physical strength limits.
" 60 secomds of high resolution holographic porn!"
So from foreplay to cumshot, 60 seconds *IS* enough!
I'll tell my wife next time she complains!... Yes darling, an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot said its OK.
Does it bother anyone else that they are talking to successors of products that aren't even out yet? I mean, if blu-ray doesn't hold enough data, then we've got a problem. Because with the existence of DVD's they've proven that even though the technology is there, the publishers don't want to put more than 1 movie, or 1 album on a single disc. If they did, I'd be able to go out and buy the a DVD with the complete TU-Pac library. The only problem with this is what happens when he comes out with something new. Then I have to buy another disc.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Sometimes new tech like this gets passed on to the consumer before the XXAAs get to them. Sometimes they don't. That's why we never had "DAT" really catch on in the US -- too many rules and laws and crap -- DAT is a great format and it was just killed by XXAAs saying "but they will be able to make perfect copies!! We'll never survive!! WAAAAA!"
Well, the CD got out without much hassle in spite of the XXAAs and was quite successful in even boosting the sale of their media rather than seeing countless "friends and families making perfect copies...waaaaa!" until they were out of business.
I think history does a lot to illustrate that the consumer is not a threat to the XXAAs even with movie/mosic file swapping going on all over the place. The fact is, when people like it, it doesn't matter if they can get it for free on the net -- they want a nice box to put on their shelf and a nice piece of 'official' media that contains one of their favorite works. That part will never change and that's the money in their bank.... why they want to take their profits and give it to lawyers I'll never know...
Of course, those idiots at the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and other left-wing anti-freedom organizations will find ways to make one movie take up a whole disc...
For example, they'll decide that instead of burdening the DVD player with both decompression and unencryption, why not make up an encryption algorithm that is a thousand times as difficult to crack, while placing the movie on the disc uncompressed.
They'll advertise this as providing even higher quality than DVD, which it will when viewing takes place, and they'll sell it to so-called "content providers" as preventing piracy, which it will not do.
Their ulterior motive, as we all know, is to get Congress behind them to allegedly "prevent piracy" when what they actually want to do is prevent Linux software from being capable of playing videos and music. Microsoft wants this because it gains additional power, such as the ability to push its Media Center version of Windows XP without unwanted competition from Linux vendors. The price can be high, the software can be so buggy that it might work, maybe, once in a while, sometimes. But users will pay this price and live with the unreliability and inefficiency of Microsoft's product because they will not know of any alternative (read: Linux) which can do a better job, cheaper, faster, with less hardware, and with higher customer satisfaction.
That is but the short-term goal. The long-term goal of these terrible organizations is to chisel away at our freedoms so they can control our lives and turn the free countries of the world into something that makes the former USSR look like heaven.
It's important to note the comment "HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."
Blu-ray itself isn't due out to 2006-2007, and assuming it has the same sort of live that DVD had, it will be around for about 5 or so years before it is overtaken by some new technology, such as this. So we are looking at maybe 2012 before this technology is actually first seen, at which time early adopters will pick it up.
Add in another year or two for it to become more main-stream, with movies and games being published on it, and we are looking at 2013, 2014.
So, it will be nearly 10 years before we really see people using this technology - that's a lot of time in terms of computers. As a reader above rightfully pointed out, not even ten years ago they thought 18GB drives were insanely big.
Over the next ten years the size of games, applications, movies, music, pictures will all grow as their quality and features increase. As such, they will need greater space.
There will be a need for this kind of technology by the time it is released.
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.