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Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB
Xesdeeni writes "According to The Register and MacWorld, TDK has unveiled a Blu-Ray DVD with four layers that will hold a whopping 100 GB of data. This is shortly after the previously reported HD-DVD announced three-layer HD-DVD that would hold a "mere" 45 GB. Unfortunately, this is also on the heels of the news that the HD DVD unification talks have stalled."
...i can now fit my 1/100th of my porn collection on one disk. sweet.
always mosh clockwise
This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.)
But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people can just buy and make the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.
After a certain threshold, the capacity of the next generation DVD standard ceases to matter as much as cost, ease of use, and compatibility. So Sony/Toshiba... please step up and convince me of these issues instead of throwing capacity numbers around!
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Personally, HD-DVD's disgraceful AACS is enough to make me cheer for Blu-Ray, but I really think that BD-ROMs will win the battle.
Go Blu-Ray!
We already have problems with DVDs and CDs going bad. From what I've read, the Blu-Ray discs may be even more fragile due to their extremely thin protective layer. If I am to pick between the two coming standards (Blu-Ray vs HD), I'll choose the more reliable one.
Yay! Now we just have to wait 3 years for this to come to the market and 3 more years for it to be affordable. Then I will be all over it, until something better comes along.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
Finally..I can have every episode of Baby Loony Toons in HD quality! Thanx Japan!
People are getting hyped up over this platform debate like teenage girls wondering who will win between Rubin and Clay. "Oh no, I'll just die if Clay doesn't win, but mom says I can't call and vote more than once a week or she'll take my cell phone away!!!"
News flash: It's not that important!
One or the other will get a foothold and catch on, the other will go away. Whether the winner is the "better" of the two options or not, we will still be better off than where we are now.
That's good...but isn't going to make it a hell of a lot more popular with the general public...
It'll still be a while before this is in wide use, if it ever is.
So I can store even more Porn ?
Or maybe even more re-releases of tired old Star Wars movies ( ducks and exits stage left ).
I really hope they all decide on a standard soon (unless they have and I'm just out of the loop).
I want High Def Discs now! I just recently purchased a HDTV and am in love with the resolution. I long for having them release DVD's at 720p or 1080i instead of the meager 480 lines they're at now.
I used to think it didn't make a difference and was totally content with 480, but I've seen the light.
Decide already and start releasing! At least some TV shows were shot and presumably stored in their High Def format somewhere so those should be out pretty quick once the industry has chosen a format.
Perhaps they should both talk to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon?
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
all 3 lord of the rings movies on one dvd without any pauses between the movies or needing to switch discs. Numb ass, here I come!
Just make sure you don't burn both to the same disc. There's nothing more annoying than Jar Jar jumping up in the middle of the money shot.
"Mee-sah, dassa lotta goo!"
100 GB of data on a DVD? I think we're putting too much trust in those little discs, no matter how handy they are.. Would sure be very painful if you'd scratch it and lose 100 GB's of data.
There's got to be a price for these increases in storage capacity. With more data in a smaller package, aren't you just asking for larger errors due to physical damage and defect?
I'm just thinking of how scratched my average disk can get, and imagine if that scratch now corrupts 200 megs of data instead of a few bits in a song.
When are we gonna have to enclose these things in some sort of 8-track like case?
:::: the insomniac's digest
you misspelt 'Dumb'.
sorry, just too easy to pass...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, but is this something that will be standard on all blu-ray devices. Will the PS3 be able to read blu-ray discs which can reach 100GiG? Further, will game developers take advatage of that much space for larger, more expansive worlds?
Will the content providers step up and use the capacity?
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
a day to blank it and another day to backup your hard disk on it?
What is the speed input/ouput? That is the most relevant factor!
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
He's going to get a NUMB ass from sitting for all day watching the trilogy. Numbass.
we will just have noticable pauses between layer transitions because we are cheap bastards who can't be arsed to buy a decent dvd player that does a reasonable amount of buffering.
It's great thet they got 100GB disk.
Now fill it up and let a four year old put it in and out of a player a few time.
If it is still readable, then you know you are on to something.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lets say that you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings in HD on 1 disk. Hmm, lets see what a movie company exec might say "Consumers wont pay 60 bucks for 1 disk. They want a bunch of disks so they think they're buying a bunch of stuff."
Consumer would say "Hey why are you charging me 60 bucks for one disk, it should only be 20 bucks as it doesn't cost you anymore to stamp out one disk as it does 4 disks."
Unless for the next 7-10 years a quad layer Blu-Ray dvd media costs > $10k. And if that were the case then BlueRay would be the winner. You have to get the companies onboard thinking that no one can copy their disks cheaper than you can sell them for. Look at the price dual layer dvd the best I could find is $3 and I can get regular ones for 50 cents; so the execs are looking at moving on because the price of dvd replication is falling to the brake point of make it your self is cheaper.
So what kind of media requires 100GB of storage? Or do the MPAA finally feel comfortable enough with onboard DRM to prevent copying? When will the +-RW units be available? Man, that'd be awesome for backups!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Oh goody. 100GB per disc. It'll only take me eight of them to back up my files. I can hardly wait.
Of course, no matter which format wins, home-burnable discs won't have support for more than one layer for another 5-8 years, at which time they'll still cost more than pressed discs loaded with content.
Can we please stop dicking about with these useless incremental improvements in write-once offline-able storage media? Put ALL this crap to a halt until you can give me a holographic disc on which a high-end home user can do a complete back up. Currently that means 250GB would BARELY suffice (many of us would still need three or four of them), and a terabyte would actually make me happy... Even at $5 per disc, since I'd only need one per backup, I would consider that a suitable solution.
I don't care if Blu-ray or HD-DVD wins. They both suck, and compared to modern HDDs, the proponents of each may as well try to reintroduce the 3.5" floppy for all the difference it would make.
The capacity of these drives that I can't buy yet goes up and up! Oh boy!! I'm so excited that there's a format in a lab somewhere completely unavailable to me that could back up so many of my files on a single disk, if only I had one!
The cake is a pie
But he's a dumb ass because LOTR is the stupidest bunch of movies ever made.
I really don't need to ask - so this would be Star Wars Slashdot Slash ?
I know it MUST already exist - I'm just afraid - very afraid to type the search parameters into google.
Come on people. As blue ray etc. disc capacity increases, it is never going to keep up with ray daya transfer over scsi etc..
No matter how this technology advances it still ends up with a laser burning an etch into a disc - always slower than dinamic flipping of bits.
I believe the only answer is a cheap easy to manufacture mini hard drive (like a hot-plug mini hard drive). That way you get your high capacity together with the transfer speed to compliment it...
..but what do I know?
In the end, won't rewritable media end up being used as a hard drive? I mean, that has two and a half the capacity of my 40GB HDD.
They are faster and can be
made in large sizes.
It may sound stupid
but cheap, replaceable drives
could be the answer.
I can only imagine the groans and curses that will follow after discovering that your carefully backed up data (a moderatly sized mp3-collection) is on a disc that's struck with crc errors. I get really flustered finding dvd-r:s in my binders that doesn't work anymore, and that's only 1/20 of what one would lose on a blueray disc.
We're not retreating.. we're merely advancing in reverse. - Earthworm Jim
For movie-consumers, now those DVD extras will include the cast party, the set-security tapes . . .
And TV-fans now can buy a single disk with the entire 2004 season of . . . well . . . TV.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
IMO if an agreement isn't reached and the HD-DVD people don't make a definite move before the PS3 is released Blu-Ray will easily become the defacto standard once the PS3 starts getting into peoples homes. In much the same way as the PS2 drove DVD adoption, people with PS3s won't want to buy a different player, or people will buy one as a player and market forces will do the rest (epecially since Sony will be quick to release content).
This could change if the XBox 360 came with HD-DVD out the box, but this seems unlikely.
My DVD+RW drive claims that it can burn dual-layer media. I haven't tried it, dual-layer disks are still very expensive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...with huge flying donuts and goofy kids that can't reach the pedals of their space ships? This'll be cool@!
I drank what? -- Socrates
And if we AREN'T better off, we'll just have to suck it up.
I personally don't want to have to suck it up; I want a disc that's A) fast B) large (capacity-wise) C)familiar (shape-wise... I don't want to have to buy new folders for them) D) reliable and E) doesn't have built-in DRM.
It IS that important, at least to me.
...you will be able to have a back-up unit for your main hard drive that works with let's say a stack of these multilayer discs in a big platter case and...
Wow. Didn't those data processing center dinosaurs use these in magnetic? I seem to recall catalogs like Misco and Global offering them into the early nineties.
Well maybe we'll just update the look and add really cool neon trim and led-tipped fan blades and so on. Or make them retro with bubblers and rounded cases and call them juke boxes and sell them at Sharper Image.
I agree with those who want an end to the chasing of incrementalism and the format schisms and wars. I'll file this as Seriously Important News when they come up with a disc that backs up my entire hard drive because as of right now, in defiance of pop-tech press claims and pundit prognostications years back, magnetic hard drives are still faster and more spacious than any of these systems, formats, etc. I mean, the dual layer burner on my wife's machine isn't as stable and reliable as the single layer on mine and neither approach me being able to backup either system on less than fifty discs.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Not only do we get to see the movie in HD, we can see the filming of the movie also in HD, and from different camera angles.
Just think, we can have more blooper minutes than actual movie minutes.
And George Lucas can remake the entire Star Wars series in HD and fit it onto 1 disc, with tons of extras.
Only if you put them there yourself. Otherwise there will be 3 menu's, 6 copyright statements, 9 pieces of "Created with THX" logo's etc. etc. in between. I never get that: the one thing that really drives me to copy DVD's is to get rid of the copyright annoyance screens, for crying out loud. And it's getting worse; most of my newly bought disks won't play easily on my computer. I mean, come on!!!
Ballmer says blueray will die out in five years... MS servers are a safer place to keep your data he continues...
"The Movie people don't want to have to stock two different discs"
How many versions of Star Wars (Episode IV) are there?
I'm sure that there are several slashdotters that have original Star Wars VHS, Wide Screen VHS, New Effects VHS, Widescreen New Effects VHS, and another one of each on DVD, and probably a Beta version and a Laserdisc version as well. (or something like that)
I can't believe that Lucas, or Wal-Mart, or anyone but the buyer lost money on that.
I expect that it is difficult for hardware manufacturers to want to spend all the money to re-tool the factory to produce something that won't sell. I think that's where the slowdown is.
But, even without a standard they will sell to some people that are willing to pay to be early adopters.
And, it doesn't matter in the long run, because either (or both) will be obsolete in 10-15 years.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Am I the only one to notice a weird correlation between the race for putting more blades on razors (three or four) and the race for putting more layers on next gen DVD formats (three or four).
It shows where this nation's priorities are when there are more warnings and threats on my DVDs than there are on the label of a prescription medicine bottle.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I keep my pr0n collection on UseNet.
Perhaps you've seen it...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
who cares? none of this means anything to me, wanna know why?
I CAN'T BUY A PLAYER OR DISCS IN EITHER FORMAT RIGHT NOW!
so who cares how much it can hold?!?!
ATTN: I hearby announce my new holographic crystal format can now store 1,000,000,000 tetrabites on a crystal the size of a grain of salt. This device not yet available for sale, please come back in 100 years.
I'm going to patent it all too and sue the bejeezus out of anyone who even attempts to copy it!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Personally, HD-DVD's disgraceful AACS is enough to make me cheer for Blu-Ray
Sony is a major proponent of Blu-ray Disc, and Sony is also a member of the Copyright MAFIAA. Who's to say that Sony's Columbia Tristar Home Video won't demand some sort of digital restrictions management?
I was looking at the boxed sets for TLoTR in a store and after I saw the DVD extras "map" guide (basically a flowchart to all of the extras on the other DVDs) I could only think "Do I really give a damn how the cast's hairdresser prepared for a shoot?". Soon they'll be adding in "A behinds the scenes look at the catering."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm so sick of this format war crap and how all the media types assume that everyone is going to throw away all our current DVDs and RUSH to the store to buy them again in HD. GUESS WHAT, WE'RE NOT! Here's a clue, the only people that'll do this are people who already own HDTVs and are very anal about HD quality. Considering that most people don't have an HDTV and some people (myself included) don't want one! Yes that's right I don't want an HDTV, everything I watch is NEVER EVER going to be in HD (unless they do some sort of bastardized upconverting) so why get one? (BTW I'll save the trolls some time, hardy har har Barney's not in HD I can't see the purple suit in detail hahaha you're so clever) It's like this there MIGHT be a market for a HD DVD format in 10 years maybe! I mean look at how long people were using VHS? They had 50 inch TVs and were watching VHS tapes on it without a problem and now they expect them to suddenly care about DVDs on a HDTV? Seriously guys this is going to just turn into a giant clusterfuck of a failure. Give it up and work on improving the existing DVD format.
"An indestructible DVD - that excites me!"
Me, too.
We can armor Humvee's with them (overlapping to cover the holes).
Maybe armor buildings with them too.
And use them structurally.
Use them to build space-craft.
Or submarines that can take ultra-high pressures.
Even black hole exploration.
Use them for long-lasting (albeit slippery) pavement/floor coverings.
Make notched ones to use for non-wearing saw blades.
Use them to make non-wearing bearings.
The disposal will be difficult, since they won't biodegrade.
And you'd want to be careful what you stored on them, since there are some things that no underappreciated archeologist of the future should have to suffer.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Finally..I can have every episode of Baby Loony Toons in HD quality! Thanx Japan!
Heh... seriously, that reminds me of catching a glimpse of the horrid "Tom and Jerry Kids" cartoon on the TV the other day.
Ignoring the quality of the animation (who cares, the show is vile anyway), what struck me was how soft and horrible the picture quality is. And the problem, it seems is... it was mastered on NTSC video.
Now, no-one gives a monkeys about Tom and Jerry Kids or Baby Looney Tunes, but... they will care about ST:TNG.
I had that on DVD recently; it looked really bad. Thing is, I live in the UK, and even when I was young I thought that US TV shows looked weird; the picture was soft and the colour was... not great.
Some of this may have come down to so-so conversion at the time, but as shown by the ST DVD (which I assume would have been re-converted from scratch and would not have gone through an intermediate PAL stage), the problem seems to be with the source material. Even when I first saw ST:TNG 15 years ago, I thought the picture was lousy.
Of course, since the US was the main market, I'd guess they figured it didn't need to be better than NTSC broadcast standard. Nowadays it looks horrible, unfortunately.
(A major irony is that 60s and 70s US shows shot on film usually seem to look better)
The picture quality on US shows seems to have improved massively over the past 5 years (I assume there's been a switch to higher-quality RGB recording formats); which means that Americans are going to start noticing how bad archive footage looks.
And believe me, there's no point putting stuff like that on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they can remaster it to look a heck of a lot better.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Perhaps you've never seen Van Helsing, or League of Extraordinarily Distorted Characters (even more than the well distorted LOTR chars), or City Slickers II, or You've Got Mail, or . . .
They know they need to collude if they want to maximize profits. Not having a standard is going to hurt everybody.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
And how long would this take to come out? How expensive would a single disk be?
If the price of dual layer DVD's are a gage of how expensive these will be then the price will be through the roof. Dual layer DVDs which aren't sold in bulk are anywhere from $4 to $6 dollars each (rough estimate) and only sold in packs of 3 or 5 if you're lucky, or that's what I've been finding at the local ebil Fry's. Too expensive for me for making image backups of my system.
Specks
Batteries not included
May I direct your attention to http://cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt? action=cpt&urlID=14256847&partnerID=2200 and http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/ 2117243.
of how much this will increase the bandwidth of Station Wagon Net! How many 100GB discs do you think I could pack in...?
its not going to stop people from using Blu-Ray for personal and business uses. Its 100% obvious that Blu-Ray is the better replacement for dvd-/+r/w technologies. You also know they will just come out with multi-format drives like they did for -/+
Hilarious. You're funny. Thanks for the laugh!
...the one I go with will be whichever reaches an affordable price first! under $200 for the drive, and less than $1 a disc. The first format to reach those 2 requiremtents is the one i'm gonna use. The sooner the better, BTW.
I've re-mux'd the entire LOTR extended trilogy onto 1 single layer DVD-R and it looks fine on my Portable DVD player with a 7" screen....
Since sony gave it the kiss of death by supporting it.
Now instead of complaining that when you buy 30-minute shows on DVD which only put two episodes/disk, we'll have a format with 25x the capacity which is still only holding 2 episodes.
That's always bugged me about that kind of stuff on TV. They want to sell you a bazillion dollars worth of stuff. You want it all on one disk.
Then again, I have a huge problem equating two 30 minute episodes of a show which has been running for several seasons to the equivelant (or more) then a movie which cost over $100 million to make.
Yet, time and time again we see just that -- two episodes of Freinds (or whatever) costs as much as one Lord of the Rings movie -- personally I think they need to look at macroeconomics -- Mr Smith is not getting the utils of enjoyment out of the second purchase.
There is no reason to believe this won't keep happening as disks get bigger.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't forget the IV and catheter. And a colostomy bag if you at a big meal the day before.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
By the time holographic discs are around and reach 250G or 1TB, hard drives will be 10TB.
... still waiting. It's never been the case, and probably never will be, because it's much harder to make reliable removable media, period.
Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
With the recent PS3 announcement of Blu-Ray, and no HD-DVD from the Xbox or Nintendo Revolution, I seriously think Blu-Ray has won this. Besides having better capacity, they're going to guarantee themselves 25-50 million players in households by Spring 2006? Plus an additional 20+ million each year thereafter, that's a large footprint. Even if HD-DVD is more cost efficient and beats them to market (say a decent amount of players available by xmas 2005), I can't see the same amount of people jumping on the HD-DVD bandwagon in its first 6 months to outweigh the PS3 release.
I hope HD-DVD hits a stumbling block, no one wants format wars.
I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.
Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.
That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.
E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.
The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.
Thing that gets me about DVD-A is that they bring out this hyper-hidef system and then screw with the signal by mandating watermarking on it.
Now, they say that this cannot be heard, but then if it is in a signal domain that you cannot hear, why does the hardware sell itself going into that domain?
Either non-DVD-A is all that can feasibly be audible or they are lying about watermarks not degrading the signal.
This is shortly after the previously reported HD-DVD announced three-layer HD-DVD that would hold a "mere" 45 GB.
Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with four layers! When will they learn?!?
Perhaps the poor reliability of these discs is an attempt to underhandedly bring back the DiVX concept.
I'd think they could work around this somehow with a floppy-diskette-like cover for the disc so it never sees the light of day. Only exposed when in the player. It's a bit of a hassle, but better than the (apparent) alternative.
Have you got a Playstation 3, Ass Cheese? No, I didn't thin so. From TFA that you cited Due in spring 2006.
Like I said, it doesn't fucking matter because nobody has one!
Does anyone have specs on the baseline players of Blu-Ray format (besides PS3)? DVD players today suck in terms of interactivity--where is my You Don't Know Jack DVD? If these next HD-DVD formats don't allow for at least some programming...
Now I can fit all my 16 seasons of Simpsons episodes on 1 DVD! Nice!
As a data addict, I feel I must weigh in here. There are a few concerns:
Migration
I have switched exclusively to recordable DVD for backups about 20 months ago. The extra capacity was dearly needed, as my CD-R collection was growing large by bounds and leaps, making it unmanageable. At first, like everyone else, I thought whoa - 4.37GB - surely nobody will need more that than. Famous last words.
What was interesting to observe is that a) the transition to DVD from CD-R happened faster for me than from previous backup mediums to CD-R (Zip disks, MO discs, etc.). Whereas I had used CD-R in conjunction with my previous mediums for quite a while, jumping from CD-R to DVD-R was much quicker. About the only things that held me back are the fact that most OS installation media are still CD-R images, and the fact that the mp3-capable HU in my car only reads CD-R. That's why I still stock CD-R, otherwise I would have none.
Capacity
I felt the capacity of DVD-R as being limiting much quicker than I did so with CD-R. In other words, 4.37GB "got small" much faster for me than 700MB did. Broadband is here to stay and is only getting faster. The average computer, its display adapter, is getting faster and can display higher bitrate video content. Filesize is only going up.
Evolution
I feel that DVD-R is a clear improvement on technology compared to CD-R. There are a number of practical issues to consider. It looks like they did their homework and fixed the main issues with CD-R.
Number one is sandwiching the recording layer between protective plastic discs, as opposed to putting it on top, as CD-R did, where it is easily damageable.
The other is the overall improvement of recording reliability. Granted I only use high-quality media, but it seems to me that either thru improved error-correction algorithms and/or improved quality control/design of both recorder and media, DVD-R far surpasses CD-R in reliability. I haven't burnt one single bad disc that was directly related to media or recorder in over 1000 burns on multiple recorders. CD-Rs would often fail to verify.
Price
There is no contest as far as the price, per GB, of DVD-R vs. hard drive for backup purposes. Believe it or not, backup media has traditionally been lagging behind the real needs of customers.
Standards
CD-R had no competing standards. Good. In the beginning of DVD-R, it was a problem if you had a -R and someone else had a +R. Bad. They fixed it by having virtually all drive manufacturers, for both recorders and readers, seamlessly support both standards. Fair enough, and it gets a "fair -to- good" grade. It is transparent enough that today you don't need to even look at what media you're buying (if your name is "John Smith," of course - us freaks look at much more than just the brand of media we buy). But DVD-R was clearly a step into the general direction of chaos as compared to CD-R. It looks like the next gen will be considerably worse, unless one of the standards completely kills the other one before either comes to market.
Conclusion
Please note that I am not closely following the BR vs. HD-DVD race because I think it would be a waste of time at this point. This is a disclaimer for any specifics I mention - they are only approximations.
I feel that 100GB should not be viewed as realistic. 4 layers are not practical unless they are introduced from the get-go. I offer current DVD-R dual-layer as an example. It has 2 major cons: 1) it is currently roughly 10-30 times as expensive as single layer DVD-R for roughly double capacity, 2) it does not burn anywhere near the speed at which DVD-R SL burns (fastest is 4x vs. 16x, realistic is 2.4x vs. 12x). The only people who spring for it are the ones that use them for video backups. Being that I only back up data, it would be of no use to me even if one of the two above points were to go away.
Therefore, lets say a single layer disc will have 25GB. Nothing wrong with that, but by the time it is introduced it will be "just enough" to satisfy the needs of the market.
I feel that backups will still be lagging for a while into the future. Don't believe the hype, and don't feed the trolls.
keep this up, I want higher storage density.
1 CD (650 MB) could hold 451 floppies (1.44 MB)
1 DVD (9 GB) could hold 14 CDs
1 Blu-Ray DVD (100 GB) will hold "only" 11 DVDs. If the other standard wins, it will hold only 5 or 6 DVDs.
So, it seems that the "memory expansion rate" of external media is slowing down little by little (I'm not counting medias that really never caught on: iomega, ZIPs, JAZs and all that funky stuff from the 90es, neither superspecialized medias like DAT tape recorders). When we will hit the barrier? (is there one? Are holographic hard drives on their way?)
Interestingly enough, the adoption rate of new mediums as "the standard" (meaning the time during which it is installed by default in most PCs sold) has been inversely proportionnal : floppies sticked around forever, CDs for about 12 years, and we've had DVD for 7 years, and it looks like everybody is about to switch to either BluRay or HDDVD very soon, "killing" the DVD as the aforementioned standard.
How long will it take to burn 100 GBs of data in a single disk though, assuming recordable blurays ever show up?
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Microsoft can now breathe easier. Now they won't have to trim more features off the OS to fit it on one DVD. I can't wait to see the 3-D font they're planning to use in the DOS window (not to mention 3D Clippy!)
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
don't you worry! beside usuall trailers and "the making of" stories you'll get _tutorials_ on setup and makeup and lighting to justify the disc capacity/and price :-).
Personally, I don't care if it gets approved as a standard. I know of many places where people are dying to find a more efficient backup medium. A 100 gig disk would make me exceedingly happy, regaurdless of who's standard it is. So long as they publish the specs on it, I say bring it on...
The funny thing that you probably haven't realised is that the majority of dramas and sitcoms are STILL filmed. Friends was filmed, Raymond was filmed, and you bet your ass that the latest Star Trek was filmed. Not taped. FILMED. The picture quality issue often can be attributed to the -broadcast- prepared copy of the episode.
Also consider: anytime cross format conversion is involved, picture quality will ALWAYS suffer. PAL has more lines and a lower framerate, NTSC has a higher framerate and a slightly more soft/smooth picture. NTSC also holds up better (due to the higher framerate) to poor signal conditions.
Watching NTSC formatted stuff on a PAL TV (even if that $20 DVD player of yours can cross convert it) isn't going to result in the most ideal picture quality. Watching a PAL DVD on my NTSC TV was pretty miserable. Watchable, but it didn't look any better (in fact, much worse) than the NTSC mastered DVDs I have here.
Watching a PAL Mastered, converted (professionally, I might add) to NTSC source on my TV... produced an EVEN WORSE signal. Due to the higher framerate of NTSC (30 versus 25), some frames were doubled. If the interlacing didn't happen exactly, instead of doubled frames... you had SPLIT frames (Often called the Ghost effect) where you saw two whole frames overlapping each other. The result: an even fuzzier picture because that sharpness is gone.
The best thing to do in any case when providing a format for different countries to watch is to completely retransfer the source from scratch. Obviously, cost is prohibitive, so they run a tape through a converter onto another tape. Think "high speed dubbing" on your audio cassette deck. It never sounded as good, did it?
I wouldn't call this unfortunate, I would call it a victory for Blu-Ray which is a technically superior format. HD-DVD is supported by the MPAA because it allows them to add another step to the hardware progression. Instead of simply going straight to a Blu-Ray, they will use HD-DVD for a few years, make you buy your entire DVD collection over again, then switch to Blu-Ray causing you to buy them all once more, getting you to buy some movies up to four times. Seems silly to me, I say let's not feed their tactic.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
You're picking and choosing for your comparison, I think.
1 CD (650 MB) could hold 451 floppies (1.44 MB)
You skipped an intervening step here. 100MB Iomega Zip drives were practically standard before CD burners became really common. They held about 60 floppies worth of stuff. And a CD only held 6 100MB Zips worth of stuff. I see that you skipped the Zips on purpose... but I don't really think it was appropriate to skip them.
1 DVD (9 GB) could hold 14 CDs
I'd really do this with the single-layer DVD-R standard, which was a little less than 5GB. It therefore only held 7 CDs of stuff. Or do you want to talk about double-sided dual-layer DVDs, which hold 18GB, and make Blu-Ray look even worse? (Can you even buy recordable double-sided dual-layer DVD-R discs?)
I don't know if I'd count the 100GB version of Blu-Ray Disc, as it is currently not a product. You can at least buy 25GB single-layer BD recordable discs and drives. Not sure about dual-layer 50GB BD recordable discs right now, I'm not going to bother doing a google search to check either.
But that 25GB Blu-Ray only holds 5 5GB DVDs worth of stuff.
So it is slowing down a bit... but only from "factor of 7" to "factor of 5" which isn't that much of a slowdown, assuming you ignore the jump away from floppies.
As to "how long to burn 100GB of data"... The Register article says TDK claims they burn at 6X (216Mbps) or about an hour.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
2 reasons why it won't happen:
Seriously. As long as the tech is doubling in capacity every few weeks, the last thing we want is a standard. Just a couple of years ago, you used to put 700MB on a CD. For the moment you can put 8GB on a dual-layer DVD. There is really no point in another standard until you get another order of magnitude increase in capacity when the technology is moving this fast.
The ability to store up to 100GB is remarkable but who will really use these discs? I understand that the movie industry will propably get the most out them (can you say "exceedingly bloated DRM?") but what about Mr. Average Q. Joe? What are the real benefits for the typical consumer?
Most consumers have a difficult job filling up a regular CD with their vacation photos and, with a 100GB to play around with, the only way a lot of them will get the "full" usuage out of these DVD's is backing up their entire HDD. But, as anyone who has ever served as tech support for their friends can asert, system backups are wasted on the general Windows 98 crowd.
The bandwidth of station waggons just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
By the time we can get our hands on these things they'll have 500GB discs.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
What unification talks? There's none needed. Sony's PS3 will have Blu-Ray and a Blue-Ray disc can hold 55% more per disc. Apple will also be using Blu-ray, which means Pixar will be releasing everything on Blu-ray. That's MAJOR industry support and I'm still trying to figure out what the HD-DVD guys are complaining about.
The battle is over. Blu-ray gets my vote.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
according to blu-ray.com http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#1.10 the disc's now have a new coating to make them harder. But again if you really want to protect them, cartridges would be the way to go.
3. Higher Manufacturing costs
4. Consumers like the CD/DVD form... encasing it in a cady/shell makes it seem clunky and old fashioned.
It ain't going to happen.
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BAH! 640k is all anyone will ever need.
HD-DVD is backwards compatible with current DVD players
Are you on drugs? This is patently false.
Unless you mean that a special DVD compatible layer can be added onto a HD-DVD disc (reducing it's max capacity) to make part of it's content available on a DVD player, but you can do the same with Blu-Ray too, so no real advantage there.
The only place where HD-DVD is "more compatible" is with existing commercial DVD manufacturing factories, where the process and materials are supposedly similar enough so that migration costs are smaller.
We'll probably switch to something like flash or the single-write memory that there was a story about a few days ago. The rate of increase on those seems to be just beginning and they pick up(just barely) where DVD technology leaves off....the biggest prototype flash drives made today are 8gb(at least), so more than a standard DVD. Affordability with semiconductor-based storage has unfortunately been much poorer - the tendency seems to be towards one large drive over many smaller ones.
At least Windows will recognize the 4-layer disc drive.
you don't need 1 bit redundancy for 1 bit.. that's pretty bad, and if it is that bad, there's no reason to trust that 2nd bit. 1 bit redundancy for 3 bits is a reasonable balance storage : protection. Just XOR the 3 bits and store that parity. 33% of storage spent on parity is still high, but se le vive. The layers, in fact, don't matter at all in figuring out how many bits you want to parity. Just treat the disk as just one giant bit-array and then decide how many bits you want to waste in error-correction. Hamming codes let you pick any number of bits to waste.
Phillips, Sony, Panasonic and the other HD/Blue Ray optical disc players should bury this endless BS fighting about who makes what money from the patents needed to build a blue ray DVD player + the royalties from blue ray dvd media.
Release the damn thing with percent of retail price royalties.
Waiting another 4 years with endless negotiating meeting will lose each of the major players billions of dollars + lose customer goodwill.
It also allows the DRM lobby to force technology on the buyers that they buyers do not want.
What's the transfer speed on these? My ATA133 Hard Drive only gets about 40 MegaBytes a second last time I benchmarked it. Based on my understanding, that is pretty decent hard drive performance. How long does it take to burn one of these disks? If my HD is only 40mB/sec, I can't possibly burn faster than that At that rate it'd take 41 minutes to burn one of these. Last I checked DVD burners don't even get close to 40mB/sec
is it available? I dont think so.
:hit: several GB
iirc, in 1992 holographic storage also
Ill stick with my DVDs and HD for the next 10yrs thank you.
blue-ray device currently costs over $3000 in jap, disc cost is big too
That's true now but next year, blu-ray devices will be $300 (or whatever Sony prices the console at) and due to the massive numbers of discs being cranked out to put game content on the cost per disc will drop dramatically.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I know ST:TNG was filmed; that's why I said "mastered" on video. I assume that many of the effects shots were done direct to video (albeit at 30fps, not 60 half-frames per second, as it would have looked obviously superimposed if the effects had greater temporal resolution than the underlying film).
I know full well that quality will suffer in cross-format conversion. For example, I don't blame the horrible juddering in pans/credit sequences in US TV shows on NTSC; that's obviously a 30fps->25fps artifact.
I don't know what your PAL-->NTSC setup was, so I don't really want to comment, as I would have several different answers depending on how it was connected (signals, material, yadda yadda). But I'll say this; if you convert from PAL to (true) NTSC signal, you're going to get all the disadvantages of NTSC *plus* (bad) on-the-fly conversion artifacts.
My justification for the suckiness of old NTSC is this; I have a digital TV receiver (DVB-T, not PAL), and the more recent US stuff show on TV is *much* better. Where there is slight softness, it's probably down to the interpolation due to the different number of lines. PAL shouldn't enter the equation here (although the resolution/frame rate of DVB-T is the same, the encoding isn't).
There still seems to be some variation in quality (maybe some is US HDTV sourced, giving more leeway to conversion), but *nothing* I see nowadays is as bad as 1980s/early-mid 1990s US TV shows.
And yeah, you're right about the frame rate in PAL; it's low once you've noticed it. (I watch DVDs on my computer, and my TV is a small portable thing- flicker's generally a bigger problem on large TVs). If I was buying a large CRT, I'd definitely get one that 'doubles' the frames to 100Hz. But with other technologies (e.g. LCD), flicker doesn't exist; and 24/25fps is enough if you don't have to worry about flicker.
FWIW, I've seen some older PAL material, and it *does* look less than brilliant on (e.g.) DVD. But not to the same extent as old NTSC.
Anyway, I bet it'll be possible to process old video and improve the colour quite soon. I wouldn't push the process too far though; TV shows were made with the limitations of broadcast in mind, and who wants to see the joins in the set on an ultra-high resolution version of ST:TNG?
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Dumb question probably, but does UV wipe these?
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
So, is ALL Blu-ray media compatible with Blu-ray readers? (like say, PS3?)
Or are we heading toward Dvd+r Dvd-r all over again?