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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."
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.
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.
TFA says that Blu-Ray discs are still more prone to scratching than DVDs.
How about one of these four-layer discs with built-in redundancy to improve that?
i.e. a 50GB disc with four layers, two of which are redundant?
For archival purposes, I'd buy it.
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.
Am I the only one in the world who likes the idea of a protective case? It's apart of the original Blu-Ray standard. I HATE my movies skipping especially when I rent them. I don't care if it adds to the production cost, pass it along to me and instead of having to treat my movie collection like my Grandma Treats her damn China I can pay a measly $.50 and have my cake, est it, and crap it out... all WITHOUT scratches!
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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...
I've had data CDs start going bad after a few months. I'd write them, verify them, and store them in a safe place. They are backups, so they were not used until my drive died. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.