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."

Comments

groovy...

[zxnos]

...i can now fit my 1/100th of my porn collection on one disk. sweet.

Re:groovy...

[MrP-(at work)]

i only have about 85 gigs, itll only take 1 disc for my whole collection

=(

Re:groovy...

[Spy der Mann]

...i can now fit my 1/100th of my * collection on one disk. sweet.

And rip your heart appart whenever the disc gets scratched :-/
(That's why I always backup my anime divx's twice)

Re:groovy...

[rampant mac]

Along the same lines, I was complaining to a co-worker a few days ago about how my Firewire drive was on it's last legs... It's a 100g drive and nearing capacity so I needed to buy a new one anyway.

He was blown away that I had that many files as it was, and I was about to make a humorous comment about the boatloads of porn I have on it, when a female co-worker walked in...

"Oh, it's all Photoshop documents that I've done! Some of `em are almost 400 megs each!"

Except everyone in the office knows I can't draw to save my life. Now she won't even talk to me. :(

Re:groovy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't kid yourself... she wouldn't talk to you in the first place..

Re:groovy...

[mattspammail]

It might be called a Re-Ray or Purpl-Ray disc. Or maybe a Gr-Ray disc.

Re:groovy...

[Anonymous Coward]

U running an FTP server? If not, can you set one up?

Re:groovy...

[Queer Boy]

I was complaining to a co-worker a few days ago about how my Firewire drive was on it's last legs... It's a 100g drive and nearing capacity...He was blown away that I had that many files as it was, and I was about to make a humorous comment about the boatloads of porn I have on it

Step one: load pr0n into iMovie.
Step two: burn to DVD using iDVD
Step three: there's no step three

Re:groovy...

[Not The Real Me]

Yes, but data integrity is the real key.

I've been burning DVD+-R's (4.7gb) and when I run the "verify data" option to confirm a good burn, the defective rate on my DVDs is about 1 in 5. I've had situations where the DVD burns and verifies perfectly in the burner but I cannot get it to read in another DVD reader.

Then there is the question of DVD rot. A DVD is a sandwich of two plastic layers. There is the possibility that the cement that binds these layers can become unglued.

For routine DVDs, I find myself burning 2 copies to be safe. For important DVDs I burn 3 copies (and use media from different manufacturers).

My primary DVD burner is a dual layer burner but I do not trust DVD media enough to burn dual layer discs. These 3 and 4 layer discs leave me wary of their long term reliability.

Re:groovy...

[milimetric]

ok, the woman and porn issue came up so here I am... to the rescue. Women don't like porn as a simple demand / supply issue. We supply too much sex so they don't demand anything from porn. They supply almost no sex and the sex they do supply is bad quality so we demand a lot from our porn. But they're clever too... if we stop giving them sex, they just get it from somewhere else and feel in the right too. So how do you solve this dilema? Simple! Fuck'em!

Re:groovy...

[hostyle]

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it. -- Linus Torvalds

So do what I do: run an FTP server locally. Instant backups according to Linus. And when was he ever wrong?

Re:groovy...

[hostyle]

After the last mess that ensued from posting my FTP site on slashdot, I think I'll just have to make do. You're not trying to say that I shouldn't trust Linus are you? Look at the great Norwegian group that just qualified for the Eurovision. I'd trust them with my backup any day, no questions asked.

Re:groovy...

[Deliveranc3]

You don't get it. They know you're human and diffrent from them, now your a phony, horny ,freakbag.... smooth.

Re:groovy...

[uhlume]

Now here's a man who takes his porn seriously.

Re:groovy...

[MidnightBrewer]

If a woman stops talking to you because you have porn, then you're far better off for it. If she's judging men by whether or not they own porn, she's the one who risks living a long life alone, not you. There *are* women out there who accept the fact that men like porn, and some of them will even watch it with you (part of the "good, giving, game," or GGG partner philosophy.)

Be with a woman who actually likes you for who you are and has a sense of humor. Every woman's beauty fades with time, so even if you have your choice of pretty girls, aim for the ones with good personalities.

My girlfriend gives me carte blanche on buying computer stuff because she believes in my desire to do great computer animation. She's also a great cook. Now that's the kind of stuff makes life worth living. And I think she's hot, so that's okay, too. :)

Re:groovy...

[chrish]

Actually, step three involves chafing...

Re:groovy...

[WuphonsReach]

QuickPar. Which would give you a larger recovery window before data is irretrievably lost. (A recovery window starts when you notice data loss and ends when there is no longer enough recovery blocks to repair what is broken.)

'nuff said

Well, okay... a bit more

For archival, staggered, multi-generational backup is the key. For instance, let's say you generate 1GB worth of archival material per month.

April - Write Jan-Apr to a disc
May - Write Feb-May to a disc
June - Write Mar-June to a disc

Multiple Standards

[bunburyist]

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.

Re:Multiple Standards

[mikael]

Various elderly friends have just moved to DVD from video for their favourite TV shows. Trying to explain DVD region coding and why DVD's purchased from amazon.co.uk will work, while those from amazon.com won't is bad enough, let alone try and make their player multi-region.

Re:Multiple Standards

[TobyWong]

" This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them"

The fact that nobody is buying them is not just because there are 2 different formats. There are good inexpensive players out there that can handle both formats no problem. There just isn't that much of a demand for them currently and multichannel audio is inheirently more difficult and time consuming to record/mix/etc.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Tenebrious1]

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.

Actually, it doesn't matter, as we've seen with the DVD +/- wars, because manufacturers stepped up and released burners capable of burning either medium. The only losers are the early adopters who are stuck with the losing format.

Re:Multiple Standards

[cmiller173]

But in reality, much like the DVD-R vs. DVD+R, wont the player manufactures just build drives that can read both. Granted that DVD-ROM came out before the recordable formats so older players have dificulty with one or the other(or both) recordable formats but more recient modles can read both. Won't the drive/player makers accomodate both? Or is the difference so drastic that the same mechanism simply can't read both with the firmware of the player controling the servos differently to allow for the different disk structure?

Re:Multiple Standards

[DuBois]

As I understand it the problem is as follows:

HD-DVD is backwards compatible with current DVD players while Blu-Ray is not.

That's basically it. The Movie people don't want to have to stock two different discs, one for Blu-Ray and one for current DVD owners. For more, see this article.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

SACD and DVD-A are not failing to catch on because of a platform war. They are failing to catch on because nobody cares.

The vast majority are productions which were "enhanced" for these formats were not actual improvements by the artist, nor are they usually identical recordings at a higher bitrate for the sake of audiophile appeal... but rather a naked attempt by the label to sell you a slightly more flashy second copy of an album you already bought.

Who in the hell is going to buy an alternate player just to support a format which offers pretty much no real advantage to the consumer?

Re:Multiple Standards

[MindStalker]

Actually the HD-DVD and old DVD can use the game laser (obvious an old DVD laser can't be used, but an HD-DVD laser can read a DVD disk) while blu-ray requires a different laser. Meaning any multiple format drive will require 2 lasers.

Re:Multiple Standards

[brontus3927]

That would be nice, but unfortunately its not likely to happen. The DVD-R vs DVD+R battle was never settled, now all DVD burners handle both. However, from looking at shelf space in electronics stores, it looks like DVD-R outsells DVD+R by at least 3-1. That's what will happen with Blue Ray vs HD-DVD. The first generation players will be cross-incompatible, then the next generation will handle both, and eventually one will be decided a winner over the other, but the other won't go away. IIRC, the sample rate for CD's was only decided by a surfing contest.

As far as SACD's and DVD-A's I think it's a matter of infrastructure and need/interest. There are very few SACD players, and neither SACD or DVD-A is inherently portable in the way that CD's are. I don't think there are ever going to be protable surround sound setups. And Joe Sixpack probably couldn't tell the diference anyway. I bet if you remixed stereo content into a mono stream and played that back, Joe Sixpack wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Heck, I wish headphones were monaural. I find it highly annoying to listen to a singer in my left ear, and the guitar in my right.

Re:Multiple Standards

[bfields]

The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing.

It's not just Joe Sixpack. I'm a nerdy slashdot-reading gadget-susceptible linux kernel developer, and I don't want to have to compare the string of logos on the back of the disc with my drive's spec sheet every time I buy a friggin' album either....

--Bruce Fields

Re:Multiple Standards

[hamburger lady]

Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them

nobody's buying SACD's and DVD-A's because its a thin niche market. super-high resolution audio only really appeals to audiophiles, 99 percent of the population probably couldn't tell the difference between tracks mastered at 16 bits vs 24 anyways.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Monkelectric]

SACD and DVD-A.

I am an audophile, my question for you is, how do I make an ogg from a DVD-A or SACD to put on my car player? My CD collection lives under my bed in crates now, I dont want to be tied to media.

Re:Multiple Standards

[mbbac]

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.)

Early adopters aren't buying them because all of the discs are encumbered with DRM unlike CDs. Without early adopters, there is no one to influence the mainstream. Thus little market for SACD and DVD-A.

Re:Multiple Standards

[MindStalker]

s/game/same/

Re:Multiple Standards

[Dogtanian]

Joe Six-Pack might not notice he was listening to mono, but he'd probably feel less immersed by it and at some level feel something was missing.

Then he'd figure out what it was when you switched to stereo... trust me, I'm no surround-sound afficionado, but I can still tell the difference, no problem.

As for the left/right problem; pretty much nothing released from the mid-1970s onwards suffered from that. It was done that way because a lot of older record decks had integrated speakers close to each other. If it's really that big a problem for you, I'm sure there's a stereo->mono headphone adaptor available for a couple of dollars or so.

Re:Multiple Standards

[limon.verde]

Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them

Nobody is buying because, unless you have awesome equipment (read, worth way over $10.000) after the reader (ie. in amps and speakers), you will have a hard time telling DVD-A and CD appart. Heck, with what most people have, MP3 (LAME in APS) will sound just as good to their ears. SACD is a flawed idea, designed more to fight piracy than to sound well.

The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people.

All right, say I'm mister Sony, and I agree with you... should I give up my precious Blu-Ray DVD, which already has an installed userbase in Japan? Say I'm mister Toshiba... should I give up my multi-million R&D investment to pay Sony's liscencing fees?

The hardest part is that both are, by different standards, winning. They have both several manufacturers commited to producing media, and studios commited to relasing their movies in their format.

The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff

The content creation industry (studios) is working on that, it's the media and recording equipment industry that is not getting together. Except in the case of Sony/Columbia, they don't overlap that much. But it is not as simple for media producers to accept their investments are sunk costs, and they all believe they can win.

Re:Multiple Standards

[mangu]

99 percent of the population probably couldn't tell the difference between tracks mastered at 16 bits vs 24 anyways.

Make that 100%. The 16 bits format wasn't chosen at random. Human ears have a 120 dB dynamic range, and 16 bits allow for 102 dB dynamic range. Considering that someone having an anechoic chamber with less than 18 dBA background noise is extremely improbable, 24 bits is just a waste of money.

I know, there are many experts who claim to be able to tell the difference between both, but when you start talking about "double blind" tests they suddenly change subject.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Nazmun]

Eh???? We aren't talking about the players themselves right... As you'll still need different lasers to read them both.

Re:Multiple Standards

[cduffy]

If you're an audiophile and you don't want to be tied to media, encode to a lossless codec (such as FLAC) instead. OGG, like MP3, is lossy -- so if you lose your original media, your other copy is no longer pristine.

WRT the rest of your question, damnedifIknow.

Re:Multiple Standards

[kvn]

But you forget - the patent holder gets the lion's share of the revenue and control. In the high stakes world of consumer electronics, the "not invented here" mentality always wins. Which, of course, assures wasted resources as everyone pursues incompatible solutions to the same problem.

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

I'm a composer/producer. It's actually as easy or easier to make a surround mix than a stereo mix.
But it's difficult for the average consumer to have a playback system that makes it worthwhile. You have to spend a few thousand dollars, and have the right room, and then spend your time sitting in the sweet spot to listen to your music.
If, like me, you listen to music while driving, exercising (oh wait, this is /.) and entertaining, there really is no reason to pay for the equipment/setup, and therefore no reason to spend the extra bucks on the higher quality discs.

Re:Multiple Standards

[TobyWong]

You ever hear of a "golden ear"?

I think Ray Charles (among many others) would have disagreed with you.

Re:Multiple Standards

[DickBreath]

The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing.

Joe Fourpack seems to understand that they can't play XBox games in their PS3.

Based on past OpenOffice.org discussions, it is also clear that Joe Fourpack understands that it is best to just use Microsoft Office, because it is not interoperable with the others. i.e. multiple standards.

Think of the benefit from multiple formats to the content owners (not to be confused with content producers).

If you have one type of DVD player in your living room, but computers (big name ones) come with a different type, you canot play the DVD on your computer. If your car has yet a different type of player, you will need to conveniently purchase another copy of the content for your car.


Yes, I am being sarcastic after the article about needing biometric ID's in order to play your DVD.

Re:Multiple Standards

[TobyWong]

Explain to me why it's easier.

Re:Multiple Standards

[BVis]

neither SACD or DVD-A is inherently portable in the way that CD's are.

The one difference here is that SACDs have a "legacy" CD layer so your SACD will play in any CD player, at CD quality. The DualDisc format has attempted to address that (DVD-Audio/Video on one side, CD on the other).

Unfortunately I think high resolution/surround music formats will remain niche players for at least the immediate future; your average listener doesn't have the setup to take advantage of the extra channels/improved sound quality, and any attempt at education of the average consumer is doomed to fail unless it results in a cheaper product (thanks, Wal-Mart). And even if they do have a 5.1 setup, chances are they've put all the speakers in a corner, defeating the purpose. (One high point, they still press vinyl records. NIN's With Teeth even has a bonus track only available on the 12" vinyl. Almost enough to make me start to look at turntables. But where the hell do you put a turntable these days? No spot in my entertainment center has the top-down access necessary.)

Re:Multiple Standards

[slaker]

For a lot of people who DO have DVD-A and/or SACD recordings, the primary appeal is surround sound, not higher resolutions or sample rates.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Deternal]

Alot of people have dvd players, and by this time next year, the amount of SACD players will have multiplied several times (PS3 handles SACD).

Re:Multiple Standards

[pinkocommie]

If they release Blu-Ray now and have it available everywhere (integrated in a pc,tivo,dvd recorder device etc etc?) they will have enough momentum to win outright (with content being split roughly 50-50 as it seems to be at the moment)

Re:Multiple Standards

[nmb3000]

From what I've read about the formats, it seems very unlikely that there will be any "combo" drives for BluRay and HD. DVD -/+ disks (plus all the way baby) are similar enough and use the same laser that doing a dual drive isn't that hard.

Personally I think I like BluRay partially because it seems to have the ability to offer a lot more storage space than HD. The one question about that is the time it takes to create a disk, I don't want to wait a full day to burn 100GB. However, the bigger reason I like BluRay is the name. I mean come on, HD-DVD? Boooooooring. Not only that but it will introduce confusion where there's already to much. HD-TV, Hard Drive, HD floppies, Half Duplex, Harley-Davidson. I mean, I don't need any more things I have to explain 10 times a day to my grandparents.

Besides, blue is cool. Everything nowadays has those great blue LEDs. The way I look at it, you're either with the blue pop culture or you're with the mole men.

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

A stereo mix gives you just two channels into which you have to place all of your content. Generally bass content is placed fairly equally into both channels, and bass takes up a large percentage of the energy an average speaker can produce. So it's quite difficult to carve out a unique space on the virtual stage for each instrument, balancing frequency, amplitude, depth, etc., for all the instruments and allow each of them to be heard without overwhelming either of the speakers.
Surround, especially with a separate subwoofer, gives you a much larger virtual stage, which allows you to make creative choices with your instrument placement, and rather than having to squeeze them into what's left of a stereo speaker's capacity.

Re:Multiple Standards

[BVis]

SACD and DVD-A are not failing to catch on because of a platform war. They are failing to catch on because nobody cares.

I care. Lots of other people do, too. It'd be more accurate to say the majority of the music-consuming public doesn't care (or even know) about these formats.

but rather a naked attempt by the label to sell you a slightly more flashy second copy of an album you already bought

They said the same thing with cassette tapes and CDs. The world didn't come to an end, because the formats were improvements over what was available (in the areas of portability and sound quality, respectively.) That being said, there is some truth to what you're saying. (There were albums that I hadn't bought before that I got on SACD because of the improvement in quality.)

Who in the hell is going to buy an alternate player just to support a format which offers pretty much no real advantage to the consumer?

Here's where you lose me. You can get a player that plays SACD, DVD-Audio, any recordable/rewritable disk you can name, DVD movies, and CDs for under $150. I've got one of those. I can easily tell the difference between CDs and high resolution formats. My wife (who isn't nearly the "audiophile" (champagne taste and a beer budget) that I am, can also tell the difference. Anyone who tells you there's no improvement in sound quality has crappy equipment, lousy hearing, or an overdeveloped apathy gland; possibly all three.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Monkelectric]

If you're an audiophile and you don't want to be tied to media, encode to a lossless codec (such as FLAC) instead. OGG, like MP3, is lossy -- so if you lose your original media, your other copy is no longer pristine.

Yea ... the problem with being an audiophile is so much of it is voodoo :) I did lots of listening tests and determined that at quality setting 7 *I* was unable to tell the difference between an OGG and a CD on my setup. Good enough for me :) I will just re-encode my CDs if I need to change formats (i've done it before, its not fun, but with a good CD reader and a fast computer it isn't too bad).

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

16 bits theoretically allows for 96dB (6dB per bit). In reality, a 16bit consumer system only approaches 90dB. So theoretically a human could hear the difference.
But once you get to 90dB of signal to noise ratio, the quality of the converter, cables and speakers matter much more than the dynamnic range. 24 bits makes a huge difference in the recording and mixing stage, and is the reason that analog now sounds better than digital (that and education of your average audio engineer.)
But once you have your stereo mix, 16-bit is just as good as 24-bit, with a possible exception for classical music. Most pop music released these days has a dynamic range of about 24dB (3 bits).

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

Typo. 24dB equals 4 bits, not 3.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Klaus Obermeyer]

I think the problem is one of benefit and not standards in the case of SACD and DVD-A. Namely, what benefit does one exact from a quality higher than that of 44.1 Khz Redbook CD-Audio?

For ninety percent of the audio consumers out there, none. Listening to a SACD on Joe-Sixpack's stereo system is a bit like watching an HD-DVD on a black and white TV from 1950.

You're right of course, it would be nice if they'd all adopt one standard, but it's not 100% necassary. There's a bit too much money in this issue for either side to give in until it becomes profitable to do so though and that might just never happen if dual format players become cheap enough.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Woody77]

But I've yet to hear a surround encoded DVD-A that didn't sound like the engineers just had no idea how to deal with the multiple channels. They didn't create a convincing listening evironment, instead it was just instruments randomly thrown into the back channels.

(and this isn't a playback system problem, it's a very well setup theatre system at a friends house).

Re:Multiple Standards

[brontus3927]

DVD players are, and PS3 players will be, for the most part, limited to the living room/bedroom. I barely ever listen to music in the house, and neither to most of my friends. Mostly in the car, in the gym, at work are the places most people listen to music. I bought the Bruce Springstein album 2 weeks ago, it's a DualDisk, and it hasn't made it's way into my house yet.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Woody77]

Sounds like I need to check those out.

All the DVD-A discs I've heard used the side/rear speakers so poorly that it sounded like playtime and using the channels for the sake of being able to, not because it added anything.

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

I agree with you. Surround is usually done because it can be done, not for any imperative reason. We hear with two ears, so there are biological reasons to create stereo music. There are no biological reasons for multiple channels. Theoretically you would be able to create any audible sensation from two properly placed speakers. I have heard a few recordings that use surround to put you inside the band or orchestra rather than in the audience, but most surround recordings are done because the format exists, not because the music requires it.

Re:Multiple Standards

[EggyToast]

I'm not the parent but I do deal in audio, and I can kind of understand what the parent meant.

If you're dealing with a mix of instruments from a studio recording session, it can often be difficult to get all of them to sit well with one another in a stereo mix. Gentle EQ'ing, compression, and so on, all go into making that mix sound good in stereo.

With more channels, you have more leeway on where to place sounds and it could be seen as easier to arrive at a final mix that sounds good, given the range of sources.

However, I'd argue that it's more a matter of personal preference and is based more on the source material and the mastering engineer's skill or abilities than an objective difference. To most people, more tracks equals more work.

Not to mention that it's ONLY going to work on a home theater setup or other 5 speaker setup. You'd need to rip to AC3 in order to get the files on your desktop, which aren't exactly as usable as MP3 or its equivalents, and nevermind cars, headphones, etc.

Re:Multiple Standards

[cduffy]

I will just re-encode my CDs if I need to change formats

Thing is, that doesn't do much good if they're lost or scratched -- and it means you need to spend a bunch of time at your system swapping CDs.

Re:Multiple Standards

[mangu]

16 bits theoretically allows for 96dB (6dB per bit)

I agree with the rest of your post, but the exact formula for calculating dynamic range of a digital signal is 6 dB / bit + 6 dB. This is because a digital value does not represent an exact analog value, but a range of values. That is, when calculating what is the highest amplitude an A/D converter can represent, you must consider that the signal can go +/-0.5 bit above the maximum digital values before it is saturated.

To simplify calculations one often assumes that the quantization error behaves like a noise. If the interval between two bits is "d", the quantization noise has an amplitude of sqrt(d**2 / 12). With 16 bits, d is 1/65536, so the quantization noise is 10*log10((1/65536)**2 / 12) = -107dB.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Woody77]

I've watched many movies that used surround to good effect without screwing it up, I just haven't heard any DVD-As that could do it.

Multiple channel (more than 2.0/2.1) does actually make sense, unless you're using headphones. Because unless you're using headphones, you'll hear some of the left channel in the right ear, etc. So being able to place the audience in a circle of speakers allows for being able to properly place sounds behind a person, which are VERY difficult to do through digital manipulation, even when you can drive the ears separately with headphones. I've heard demos of it, but it wasn't nearly as accurately portrayed as a properly setup surround-sound system can do.

Reproducing the same using stereo speakers is next to impossible. With an anechoic chamber (or a VERY dead listening room), it gets closer, but it's still nothing like what headphones can do, which is better, but still not as realistic as just putting the sound behind you or to the side of you in the first place.

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

That's why I said "properly-placed" speakers. In the real world, most sounds are heard by both ears, but you are still able to pinpoint their location.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Short Circuit]

When sound seems to come from the middle of my skull, it's either unusually poor headphones or a mono sound source. And I haven't used a pair of headphones that bad since the 90s.

This I figured out before I was a teenager. I'm sure even your average grandparent recognizes the difference between mono and stereo.

Re:Multiple Standards

[TobyWong]

This is kind of what I was alluding to when I said multichannel is inheirently more difficult and time consuming.

Maybe I should have added on "to do well" on the end of that but it was somewhat implied.

Most of the current DVD-A and SACD offerings are pretty poorly done right now, so my question to soupdevil is if it's so much easier than stereo then how come hardly sound engineers seem to be able to pull it off?

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

Please don't ever mix an album that I will listen to.

Already did. Sorry...
There is no "purpose" of surround where music is concerned. The infrastructure is there due to movies, and musicians will do whatever they want with it. It's rock-n-roll, man. Chill a little.

Re:Multiple Standards

[zippthorne]

yeah.. why is that? You'd think that every sound would appear to be from both its location and the compliment of its location about the axis of your head.. but most of us seem to be able to tell the difference betwen the bang that happenend in front of us and the one behind. Any thoughts?

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

It's all about timing. Your ear/brain times when the signal hits each of your ears, and compares the direct source (which generally arrives first) with the reverberations off of other objects. For example, if the direct signal hits your left ear first and most of the reverberations hit your right ear, then you probably have the source on your left, out in the open, and some surface or combination of surfaces on your right. When there is no direct source (for example, someone yelling to you from around the corner and down the hallway) then it's harder to pinpoint their location.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Inebrius]

I'm actually not looking forward to either format. They'll probably sell well for a while, but I expect they will get crushed when holographic disks come out, not only due to the storage space (>200GB to 1600GB), but also due to a significantly increased transfer speed and faster access times. Some manufacturers already have working prototypes and are planning (hoping?) to ship to OEMs in 2006. http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx? NewsId=11966 http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/index.htm l>

Re:Multiple Standards

[MyDixieWrecked]

Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A.

You said DVDA... hehe.

Yeah, seriously. That shit is painful. You try having 4 dicks in you and see how you feel. ...not that I know this first hand, but one can assume.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Mr. Underbridge]

There is no "purpose" of surround where music is concerned. The infrastructure is there due to movies, and musicians will do whatever they want with it.

And if the mix sucks, no one will buy it. There's nothing worse that buying an album to discover it's atrociously mixed; these days it's easy to listen first to avoid making that error.

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

Easy to listen first? Oh yeah, because Kazaa is flooded with lossless surround mixes off of SACD and DVD...

Re:Multiple Standards

[soupdevil]

Most engineers are under the thumb of a producer and/or artist who are watching the clock, and unaware of the subtleties involved in making a surround mix. There is a certain wow factor when a guitar jumps out of a speaker behind you, and that wow factor usually trumps the subtle things that can be done if an engineer is allowed to do it. Listen to some classical and/or sound track recordings to hear the state of the art.

Re:Multiple Standards

[aslate]

The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people.

The industry as a whole would benefit, we all know that. However, who should back out? The one that steps down loses everything and the other reigns supreme. In the DVD +/- war, neither + nor - won, and both formats are about. None of the producers stepped down, everyone "won" as opposed to one side losing.

Re:Multiple Standards

[DarkEdgeX]

The library of music is also very small right now. For example, soundtracks are largely unrepresented on either SACD or DVD-A (ex: John William's Star Wars scores aren't available at all on either format, not even the latest movies score). AFAIK the only John William's score on DVD-A or SACD is the soundtrack for A.I. (Artificial Intelligence).

Like you, I don't care about DRM on DVD-A/SACD either. And actually, there isn't any DRM on DVD-A or SACD, so that's false on it's face-- the data is encrypted usually so you can't rip it to your PC, but that's an issue that I think will solve itself as the formats become more popular (just as DeCSS came about after DVD had gained in popularity). Encryption is not DRM, encryption just keeps you from making copies. DRM keeps you from even playing the content in some situations.

Re:Multiple Standards

[AaronLawrence]

What will that be used for at a consumer level though? High-def (blu-ray or HD-DVD) will likely reach the maximum useful quality we can perceive. I have a projector and upscaled DVD looks pretty amazing already - HD will be somewhat sharper, but it's not going to be "twice" as good. So going beyond it seems unlikely to have any point.

One use for more storage I can see is upping the framerate to 50/60 Hz, I find movies a bit jerky sometimes. But that will only use a certain percentage more, not even twice, because the extra frames would compress well).

Re:Multiple Standards

[AaronLawrence]

Maybe you can hear the difference (although as the other poster said, it's most likely due to source/mixing differences). But 99% of people cannot. Therefore, the format will not catch on, except to 1% of the buying public.

Still, it seems reasonable to me that it exists as a niche for high-quality recordings. It's just never going to be "popular.

Re:Multiple Standards

[Mr. Underbridge]

There is no "purpose" of surround where music is concerned. The infrastructure is there due to movies, and musicians will do whatever they want with it.

Or there's always "borrowing someone's CD." And bad mixing/mastering isn't limited to surround, there's always everyone's favorite method of screwing up music, over-levelling.

Re:Multiple Standards

[DickBreath]

Who the fuck is Joe Fourpack?

Two short of a sixpack.

The average Joe, is Joe Fourpack.

While a minority of the sheeple might qualify to be Joe Sixpack, the majority definitely do not.

Re:Multiple Standards

[jtjin]

If they can get the transfer rates to match those of current-generation hard drives, these discs will have more use than just for movies.

Imagine, no need to install OS's anymore, just pop in the disc and you're ready to go. Wanna play a game? Pull out the OS disc, pop in your game disc and have at it. Self-contained everything.

Re:Multiple Standards

[AaronLawrence]

I was meaning that the movie would be originally recorded at a higher rate. Obviously it doesn't make any sense to up the frame rate if the source stays the same.

and everyone is still using floppies : )

[essreenim]

Hardware: Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB It's really sad that we have such high capacity easily scratchable media. Why o why are we not using mini discs ....

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Mr Smidge]

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.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[ProfaneBaby]

I'm just waiting for a rewritable DVD device that has loadable cartriges and autloading drives.

I'm tired of DLT. 40GB, even compressed, won't backup a modern NAS, so you end up with 2-3 times the hardware investment in permanent media instead of using the DLT/DVD reusable media of old times.

If Blu-ray hits 100GB/disk, and they manage rewritable formats, someone will put them into a scratch-proof cartrige for backup devices.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Icyfire0573]

If I recall correctly, Blu-Ray has come out with some kind of coating for their disks that makes them highly resistive to being scratched or otherwise maimed unless you really really want to mess them up. There was even an article on it previously on Slashdot, but I can't be bothered to look it up

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[MrP-(at work)]

i'd prefer 4 layers, 25gb per layer but only 25 usable, that way you can have 4 layers with the same 25gb but offset each layer by ~33%.. if it cant read a bit on 1 layer, read the bit 33% over on layer 2, if layer 2 is bad, layer 3, etc

id buy that!

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

I'm sorry, but thinking that DVD even in a cartridge would be a good alternative to proven tape backup is silly.

Bit-rot happens on optical media. Doesn't on tapes.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Adapt or Die]

Why not use Ultrium 3? 400/800G isn't too shabby, and it's available now.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[ProfaneBaby]

Average need for backup lifetime in my specific situation is less than 2 months.

Bit rot isn't a concern - quick snapshots of files that are deleted and noticed within a week is.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Nytewynd]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but if the surface gets scratched, wouldn't it prevent all layers from being read correctly? I guess if there was an offset on the layers, you could create some kind of raid structure on the disc. Chances are that if each layer is offset by 180 degrees, the scratch wouldn't harm both copies, but at that point I wonder if you would be sacrificing performance to the point where the disc is too slow to use anyway. If it had to scan the disc, decide if the data was readable, if not find the other copy, and the use that, it might not work too well. Also, writing your data would take twice as long. They already say it will take over an hour to write an entire disc but if you only need to write smaller files on it, each file will take twice as long.

100gb is nice and all, but if you can't rely on these for more than backup due to their fragility why not just go RAID 1 and get some extra read performance at the same time?

These are nice for movies, but DVDs scratch badly as it is. I don't want something even less durable.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Jherek Carnelian]

These are nice for movies, but DVDs scratch badly as it is. I don't want something even less durable.

They may get scratched physically, but they do not lose data as easily as all that. Most players will play right through most scratches without a hiccup. And when there is a scratch bad enough to cause a hiccup, you can often polish it out with toothpaste or a more conventional disc polisher. Plus, unlike CDs, DVDs have a layer of plastic on both sides of the aluminum substrate so scratches on the "label side" have to be exceedingly deep before they cause any data loss at all.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[muckdog]

Archive grade CD-Rs exist at about $1.25 each. do a seach on MAM-A cd-r. Hopefully when the Blue ray disks come out they will have an archive grade version as well.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Anonymous Writer]

There was even an article on it previously on Slashdot, but I can't be bothered to look it up

Here is that Slashdot story. It was developed by TDK. Here's a quote...

In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[mooglez]

The consumer versions would probably be coated by this: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6583 As stated in the News section of blu-ray.com Oct 30, 2004 - TDK Develops New Hard-Coating Technology for Blu-ray Discs Also, i'd like to comment that it's wrong to call a Blu-ray media DVD.. it's not like you go calling your DVD's CD's either, do you?

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[kylemonger]

In one of the most convincing technology demonstrations this reporter has witnessed, I was handed a CD, a wire-wool pan scourer and some permanent marker pens, and invited to scratch or mark the discs. Hard as I tried, I could not make a single mark on the disc with the scourer. And the ink simply wiped off.

Wow. Forget DVD's--- when can I get eyeglasses made with this goop?

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[OglinTatas]

"TFA says that Blu-Ray discs are still more prone to scratching than DVDs."

There was an article the other day about CVD diamonds. If diamond production becomes dirt cheap, coating CD's and DVDs with it would prevent scratching, and you could pack as much information on them as can fit, with less error correction than on current scratchable disks. Monitor screens could probably benefit, too, as well as cooking utensils... I'm running off topic here, so:

Coat blu ray with diamond, problem solved.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[ignorant_coward]

What about some sort of RAID 5 in concentric rings from the inside to the outside of the disc? A scratch would have to span multiple regions to affect data integrity (not foolproof, just better).

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[Queer Boy]

i'd like to comment that it's wrong to call a Blu-ray media DVD.. it's not like you go calling your DVD's CD's either, do you?

No, although it's technically correct since CD stands for Compact Disc and DVDs are the same size. Since DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc, it wouldn't be incorrect to call Blu-Ray DVDs either.

Of course, Blu-Ray is catchier and has a hyphen!

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[martyn s]

I sometimes refer to DVD's as CD's but only as a joke, and to make a point....technically, DVD is a subset of CD. CD (Compact Disc) seems to refer to the size (compact) and physical nature (disc) of the medium, not anything about the particular digital format. Hence, DVD is a type of CD :)

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[thanew]

Yes, a lot of space on one piece of media, and you accidentally let it get scratched or something and there it all goes. Yes the space is nice, but what to do when its all wiped out with a small scratch?

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[MojoStan]

Your newscientist.com link doesn't work for me (Slashdotted?), so here's some alternate links for information on the hard-coating technology for Blu-ray media (it's called "Durabis"):

Blu-ray FAQ 1.10
Adopts the "DURABIS" as Worldwide Name for Its Super Hard Coating Technology

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[ediron2]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but if the surface gets scratched, wouldn't it prevent all layers from being read correctly? ... an offset on the layers... some kind of raid structure ... if each layer is offset by 180 degrees, the scratch wouldn't harm both copies, but ... sacrificing performance ... to scan the disc, decide if the data was readable, if not find the other copy, and the use that... Also, writing your data would take twice as long.

Heh, nice job. You're halfway to reinventing FEC, or Forward Error Correction, a technique for on-the-fly checksumming and knowing what data is valid and what data is damaged. It's *ideally* suited for broadcast or other high-dataflow streams, like dvd data. And heck, no, it isn't a dumb question. It's just been asked and answered. Now if someone could just tell me why this (or an earlier generation of error-correction code) isn't built into cd's and dvd's to start with... I *hate* unprotected media and losing data to scratches.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[netwiz]

magnetic tape? blech.

I'd _never_ trust important data to tape.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[calculadoru]

I hope you're joking about minidiscs?
They hold a puny amount of data, on a normal MD you can only fit one album which means that, sound-wise, you will end up with the equivalent of a 128 KBps MP3 rip on one disc. Not very good. I bought one of those things in Japan some 7 years ago, when they were becoming popular, only used it for about a year or so then forgot about it. Sound quality does matter.
P.S. Yes, I know they now have 1 GB minidiscs. They still suck.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[New_Syntax]

From what Ive HEard And Read (http://www.pcw.co.uk/news/1161455) The Blu-Ray Disks are scratch resistant. I also read something about this in Maximum PC a few months ago.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[StikyPad]

it's not like you go calling your DVD's CD's either, do you?

I'm pretty sure everyone will be calling them Blu-Ray DVDs.. The only reason the terms DVD and VCD caught on was because they distinguished between CD as audio media, and the former two as video media.

And, copyrights aside, the abbreviation itself is no more (or less) applicable.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[psiphre]

"Digital Versatile Disk" is actually a backronym.

Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )

[diabolo-nerd]

if the companies had put DVD technology on the market when it first was devoloped in the 80's, we may have found a way by now to make them more scratch resistant.

Size is no longer the issue

[kneecarrot]

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!

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats funny 'cause I always save my last mod point to mod down something Insightful. You bastards think you're so smart.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[harrkev]

Being robust is also and advantage -- but NOBODY talks about it. I find that DVDs are quite prone to having problems if you get them scratched. With the density increasing, this problem is likely to get worse. A larger DVD - ho hum. An indestructible DVD - that excites me!

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[edwdig]

From a consumer standpoint, there isn't much difference between the formats other than capacity. With either one, you're going to need new hardware to use it.

The real difference is in the manufacturing end. HD-DVD is designed with the goal of minimizing the amount of changes needed at the existing manufacturing plants, making it cheaper and easier for existing manufacturers to upgrade. Considering that movies often come with extra discs without increasing the retail price, odds are that Blu Ray isn't expensive enough that a movie on a Blu Ray disc would sell for more than one on an HD-DVD disc.

Considering Blu Ray discs are now reaching more than double the size of HD-DVD's, I think it's enough of a difference to justify the additional one time cost of upgrading the manufacturing plants. By the time we get writable versions of these discs, we're all going to have terrabyte hard disks and complaining how it takes over 20 HD-DVD's to back up our system.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[NanoGator]

Remember when CDs originally came in Caddies?

Damn I miss those days.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[nokiator]

Even with the latest quad-layer format, optical storage formats don't seem to be able to keep up with hard drive technology. When CDs were first introduced, they had much higher storage capacity than the highest capacity consumer drives available at the time. When DVDs were introduced in 1996, the highest end 3.5" hard disks could match even the double layer capacity at 9.1GB. Now, we are talking about a quad-layer Blue Ray disk which will have a total capacity of 100GB. This sound pretty impressive but it is only one quarter of the maximum storage capacity of consumer grade hard disks. You can get a 100GB HD for quite cheap ($30AR?) these days. By next year, when BlueRay discs actually start shipping, 500-600GB 3.5" drives will be available, 100GB may become the mainstream point for 2.5" drives and we may even see 100GB 1.8" drives. It is likely that the 4x price-per-byte premium that we currently see for 2.5" and 1.8" drives over 3.5" drives will slowly disappear as the volumes for these smaller drives keep picking up.

In the consumer space, many people are moving to using external hard disks as a secondary storage mechnanism instead of burning the data they want to keep around on CDs and DVDs.

Instead of focusing on higher capacity, I would rather like to see Sony and Toshiba focus on how to make next gen DVD formats compatible and cheap. Otherwise, both formats may lose to new paradigms based on using modular hard disks as the content delivery and storage mechanism.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[RicktheBrick]

Who would buy a disc? Let say 10 giga bytes per hour of high definition video that is still 10 hours of video or about 5 movies. Lets say $20 per movie or about $100 per disc. That is 25 of today's movies or $500 per disc. As for back up an additional terrabyte hard drive will be not only cheaper but a whole lot faster than backing up to dvd. Another option is to backup your data to google mail as only user's data needs to be backed up and google now offers 2 giga bytes of free space. Try buying a dual layer dvd disc today and you will find they cost about a $1 per giga byte which at that price will buy a hard drive today. The hard drive is eraseable too as the dual layer dvd is not.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[NeMon'ess]

hold out for two years and hope holographic discs are finally out? Should offer 200-500GB per disc. HD's will probably still be a terabyte or less.

Re:Size is no longer the issue

[rockola]

Remember what blank CD-Rs cost in those days?

Go BluRay

[Mr Smidge]

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!

Re:Go BluRay

[Wesley Felter]

Blu-Ray will either use AACS or something even worse. This is Sony we're talking about.

Reliability

[Airline_Sickness_Bag]

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.

Re:Reliability

[fbody98]

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!

Re:Reliability

[FidelCatsro]

Sony on the UMD disks for the PSP (which are derived from Blue-ray tech)Have a cartridge like case for the disks , So perhaps when they go comercial they will have the sence to use a simmilar case for blue-ray .
It may put the cost up a little , but i would be willing to pay extra for the peace of mind.

Re:Reliability

[wvitXpert]

Do you use a lint-free cloth to clean out your CD tray before you put your CD in? If not then I bet your CDs have scratches too. The funny thing is the only one acting like an asshat (and a baby who needs to wear diapers) is you. Nice Karma BTW.

Re:Reliability

[Jeff DeMaagd]

My problems with the ONE pressed DVD that went bad was just bad manufacturing. There's nothing wrong with the format. I haven't had seen a pressed CD go bad except through abuse.

CDs have a thinner protective layer against damaging the metal layer, which really isn't one at all, basically a clearcoat. TDK has also introduced an anti-scratch compound.

My suspicions on this matter is that if you manage to get a scratch deep enough to hit the metal layer on a BRD, a similarly deep scratch on an HD-DVD would still render it useless.

Re:Reliability

[whackaxe]

i hate a CD or DVD skipping when i BUY them. Lend them to a friend who takes little care of your DVDs and your screwed. I'd gladly pay more for the time I'd save placing discs back into their box without acting like it's brain surgery. they'd have to make them shiny boxes though, the only mini-discs that never get bought at the matte ones :D

Re:Reliability

[NeMon'ess]

I don't, and the few scratches on my discs don't stop them from playing. Do you live on the beach or in the desert and keep your windows open? How did you get grit in the drive, leaving it open for holding coffee?

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

YAY

[lupinstel]

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.

Enough already

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Enough already

[ignipotentis]

Great additude.

What is important is that people speak up and make their opinion heard. Right or wrong, based on fact or fiction, opinion is important. Since we are all geeks here, a good percentage of us have an opinion on the next generation of consumer electronics.

Re:Enough already

[coopaq]

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.

One drug will cure cancer and one will make cancer patients feel better.

Two drug companies are vying for market position.

Whether the winner is the "better" of the two drugs or not, we will still be better off than where we are now.

Re:Enough already

[RavenChild]

Didn't this happen with BETA and VHS?
BETA was much better but VHS just stuck.

Re:Enough already

[coopaq]

Right because which high-capacity DVD format becomes the standard is every bit as important as the cure for cancer!

--sarcasm on--

My mistake. 640k is enough for any doctor's needs.

Lets just go with whats good enough.

Who cares how much data about a patient or drug can be stored.

As long as it's GOOD ENOUGH!

--sarcasm off--

DVD storage is used for more than movies and pr0n you know?

Re:Enough already

[.killedkenny]

One or the other will get a foothold and catch on, the other will go away.

For somebody to gain a foothold, there will have to be millions of players and billions of discs purchased. Which means the people who picked wrong will again get the shaft. Anybody wanna buy some 8-tracks, laserdiscs, or Beta tapes?

Progress...

[Avyakata]

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.

Re:Progress...

[javaxman]

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

Yea, too bad one of these HD discs won't be in some really desirable machine, like a super-cool fancy new console game machine or something. Oh, wait...

Need Standard Soon

[kannibal_klown]

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.

Re:Need Standard Soon

[fbody98]

IIRC the 35mm film that most movies are shot on have resolution to spare for HD, the issue is always scanning them in at that resolution but it can be done.

Re:Need Standard Soon

[Detritus]

Many TV shows are shot on film. The problem is that some of them scan the film to SD digital video before adding special effects and doing the post-production.

Unification

[DuBois]

Perhaps they should both talk to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon?

excellent! we're closer to

[Savatte]

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!

Scratches

[Niekie]

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.

Re:Scratches

[pHZero]

I think we were saying the same thing when CDs came out... "650 MB of data? OMG what if I scratch it?" Now they're disposable and you can fit 650 MB on your keychain.

Re:Scratches

[MasTRE]

> 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.

No more painful than if I lose my 1/2 GB of valuable data right now. It's not the quantity that matters. And if anything, making multiple copies of 100GB in the time it takes to write 2 discs will be great.

Durability?

[J Barnes]

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?

Re:Durability?

[FidelCatsro]

The very same argument was used when we started moving from floppys to CDs.
I am fairly sure the comercial Blue-ray discs will in all likely-hood be alot more resiliant than the current discs .
Who knows they may very well use a cartridge , which would be great.

Re:Durability?

[TummyX]

Yes. That's why DVDs are less reliable than floppy disk drives.

It's not like higher storage densities allow for more space for error correction or anything.

Re:Durability?

[Nytewynd]

Who knows they may very well use a cartridge , which would be great.

Do you work for a storage company or something? They are the only ones that would want to cause people to rent facilities to store their old data...

I don't know about you guys, but even CD cases tick me off. All of my CDs are in paper sleeves in a couple of trays. If we got to the point where I need something the size of a hard drive to hold the same amount of data as a hard drive, I might consider just using a hard drive. Also, adding mechanical components to anything optical is making it 10^100000 times more likely that your data will get ruined by the time you need it again.

Re:Durability?

[Detritus]

With the right error-correcting codes, you can make the disks extremely resistant to hard errors. The problem is that this reduces the usable capacity of the disk due to increased overhead. The trick is to balance durability and usable capacity. This also affects the production yield in manufacturing pre-recorded disks.

Re:Durability?

[Chyeld]

On the other hand, consider how much easier it will be to maintain duplicate back-ups if you only need to copy one disk instead of 100?

Re:Durability?

[FidelCatsro]

A cartridge as in a protective case ala a flopy disc just a thin layer of plastic that is non removable so that the Disc within is not damaged even when reading .
I dont know about you , but having a disc scratched and loosing data is very very annoying ;)

By the time these are commen HDD drives will be very much larger , the same occured with the introduction of the CD.
At the time CD drives were introduced , 1 cd could contain all my data .

Re:excellent! we're closer to

[geekoid]

you misspelt 'Dumb'.

sorry, just too easy to pass...

PS3

[ignipotentis]

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?

Re:PS3

[yabos]

Just imagine the load times.

Re:PS3

[stratjakt]

The only thing that can eat up that much space for a video game is streaming media (movies). 3D models, even really complex ones with thousands of polygons, don't need squat-all storage for vertex data, and texture data is generally limited by what the systems GPU can manage, and memory. From there, if you render cutscenes, you're just talking about script files and some audio (mp3'd or something like that) to back it up.

It's why the Gamecube doesn't suffer too badly due to it's 1.4gig discs, it's a lot of space for a video game the games that span 2 discs generally have a whole bunch of space-hogging streaming media. The largest PS2 and XBox games get much smaller when you remove cutscenes and such.

100GB discs are mostly useful, at this point, for archival, but I doubt there'll be anything 500 bucks any time soon that can burn them.

Re:PS3

[Charcharodon]

Until they put the hardware for larger, more expanisve worlds. The discs are not the choke point preventing the consels from doing just that. Even the new toys coming out from all the big players will be sorely short on the RAM needed, and I can't see the read/write speed being more than 2-4x faster that current media which meaning your are going to see some abysmal load times for anything expansive.

100gb is alot for a game. Even the biggest ones out now are less than 5gb. What it would be nice for 100gb would be being able to buy a game library that has ever single title to come out for the last 10 years, or a music library with every song from a particular 10 year period or genre, or 10-20 movies on one disc. What they really need to add is a couple small raided hard drives in the consels along with a nice big stack of RAM to make the big games humm. Then you could have your 100gb disks for "loading" the game to the consel and your expansive worlds would come to life.

Re:PS3

[MindStalker]

Probably not, as its long been possible to make a 4 layer DVD (2 layers on each side) But as the manufacturing cost is so high most opt for 2 layers on one side on two seperate disk. Its a cost/conveniance factor.

So it will take

[presarioD]

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!

I hear you

[geekoid]

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.

Re:I hear you

[Bimo_Dude]

Now fill it up and let a four year old put it in and out of a player a few time.

... or a drunk /.er.

Re:I hear you

[Hoi Polloi]

Why can't they make the plastic for the disc out something hard as, say, polycarbonate (used in sunglasses). If you need a softer material near the recording medium then they could do a layer of polycarbonate on the surface so at least it won't scratch as easily.

Re:I hear you

[Golias]

Why can't they make the plastic for the disc out something hard as, say, polycarbonate (used in sunglasses). If you need a softer material near the recording medium then they could do a layer of polycarbonate on the surface so at least it won't scratch as easily.

Wouldn't it be simpler to put a cheap cartrige case around the disk, ensuring that nothing ever comes into contact with it?

Sure, it might seem like it would take up more shelf space, but since such a scheme would let you do away with the "jewel cases" we store CD's in now, it would be a wash, wouldn't it?

Just think of it as a case which you don't need to remove the media from.

Re:I hear you

[morcheeba]

do you mean that the four year old should put it in and out of the drunk /. er a few times?

That's kindof disturbing, but it makes me wonder how much alcohol would be required. And would a slashdotter have a higher or lower tolerance for this kind of thing than the average person...

Re:I hear you

[nuknuk]

This is not a new idea. Go back to even the oldest floppies, and they had a magnetic disk encased in a plastic protective cover. When CD-ROMs first came to PCs they came with little trays to put the disks in (for the life of me I can't remember what we'd call them...3 hours of post-star wars sleep will do that) Heck, I think the first DVD-RAMS had this too. The reason they don't do it as a standard is probably cost. The best part about DVDs and CDs is their low cost. It's just a plastic disk with mylar glued to the top. Start throwing in these plastic casings and the cost per disk would probably quadruple.

Re:I hear you

[Golias]

I didn't say it was new, I said it was simple.

There's a reason why the final generation of floppies had that little metal door, and it was a good idea. Something like it would be a good idea for these new DVD formats.

Oh, and those "little trays" you are talking about, they were called "caddies," but that's hardly the same thing, because 1. They were kind of expensive, not like the cheaper way of doing it I'm suggestiong, and 2. You had to remove the CD from one plastic case and put it into another, which was a fantastically stupid way to go. Current cases only cost a few cents each... Just make a similar case which doesn't open but does allow a player to spin and read the disk, and you're done.

That's the death sentence for Bluray

[stecoop]

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.

Re:That's the death sentence for Bluray

[oGMo]

"Consumers wont pay 60 bucks for 1 disk. They want a bunch of disks so they think they're buying a bunch of stuff."

This hardly stops them even today. Look at most Anime discs and the like. You could easily fit the entire series on a single disc, but they split it up into 3-4 eps per disc (if you're lucky). Same with movies. Throw on a bunch of useless extras, use "high-definition" video to eat up lots of space, and release tons of editions.

Mostly, this is useful for pressing data. Large games, applications, etc. Really, DVDs are pathetically small and always have been: we should have been at 50-100G years ago.

Business execs can always come up with new ways to rip you off. (Besides, you think $20 isn't a ripoff? DVDs cost less than a penny to press and the box is cheap. Huge ridiculous profit margins.)

Re:That's the death sentence for Bluray

[tuffy]

This hardly stops them even today. Look at most Anime discs and the like. You could easily fit the entire series on a single disc, but they split it up into 3-4 eps per disc (if you're lucky).

You don't want to see 650 minutes of animation (an average 26 episode series) with dual audio tracks on a single DVD. Even the HK bootleggers don't try and cram them that full.

The reason legitimate anime companies put 3-4 episodes per disc is economical. They've tried putting more episodes per release at a higher price point (Fruits Basket) but it didn't sell well whereas the 2 episodes/disc release of Gantz at a low price point is doing great last I heard. But in any case, they'll continue to release only a few epsiodes per disc once the HD formats arrive simply because they'd go out of business otherwise. At least they should look nice.

Re:That's the death sentence for Bluray

[EggyToast]

While I'm not saying that Anime and even some TV show discs tend to use more discs than they need for sales purposes, a lot of the reason that you get fewer eps per disc has to do with audio choices. Each audio track requires the same amount of space on the disc, and it's not very compressed. Some anime cheaps out and uses it as a way to get the most amount of money out of fans. But there are plenty others who use that space for actual content.

Storage Arms race... w00t!

[rsborg]

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!

Re:Storage Arms race... w00t!

[EggyToast]

HD content requires ungodly amounts of space. 1 minute of HDTV content uses about 1GB of space, uncompressed. So you could fit some movies...

Re:Storage Arms race... w00t!

[composer777]

It already has RW built into the standard and they take it one step further than the hack that is known as DVD+-RW. The great thing about it is that you don't need to use sessions to write to a BluRay Disk. They have true random access read/write capability, so that you can record just a single file to the disc without having to go through the hassle of opening and closing a session (i.e. what you do everytime you use burning software). Instead, just stick in the disk and write the file. This will make it the superior format for things such as backing up files. That's why all of the computer hardware manufacturers are backing bluray, it will be quite a bit better for PC users.

Yippy!

[ucblockhead]

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!

Re:Yippy!

[NeMon'ess]

Yeah, I guess we shouldn't get excited about unavailable new consoles, football teams in the offseason, or pregnancies only a month along. The drive is coming with the PS3, so we're going to get excited about it's possibilities.

Re:Yippy!

[eobanb]

Asshat. Don't you want these kind of products to be done right before they're released to the public? You actually expect a product to be developed and tested, marketed, shipped, and sold, all in a single day?

Re:Yippy!

[ucblockhead]

I wasn't aware that "Pointless Press Release" was a crucial part of developing a piece of hardware.

Storage.

[wlan0]

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.

Re:Storage.

[StratoChief66]

Umm, no. By the time this gets out to us,the consumers it will be a significantly smaller fraction of a hard drive. Think about it, your comparing the disk to a 40GB hard drive when you could also be comparing it to the new 400 GB hard drives or the 1TB ones they may have when burnable blu-rays finally come to a store near you.

Hard drive size isn't going to stall out while the industry piddles around trying to find a unified standard we (they) can all be happy about. They have to learn how to compromise and that to compromise means that both parties have to agree on something neither of them are happy with.

nightmare

[Jabberu]

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.

Overkill?

[moviepig.com]

Blu-Ray DVD with four layers . . . will hold a whopping 100 GB of data.

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.

Re:Overkill?

[British]

It would be nice to have an entire season of The Apprentice on just one disk(instead of charging me for 5 dvds at the video store), AND include the deleted secenes you can see from the website.

Not sure why they didn't go for a "Director's Cut" of The Apprentice, when plenty was available on the cutting room floor.

Just citing an example. A good selling point would be to get a full hour of a television program instead of 40-something minutes/episode.

But with The Apprentice, no 'extended scenes' existed, ths swearing was cut(but not cut on Heidi's audition tape), and the theme song was different.

Re:Overkill?

[ppz003]

Or maybe I'll be able to purchase then entire series of DBZ in a small, compact 10 disk set!

Re:Overkill?

[MrP-(at work)]

so you think just because they can fit all the episodes on 1 disc instead of 5 they wont still charge you an insane amount? yeah right

Re:Overkill?

[getnate]

All seven seasons of a show in mpeg4 @decent quality (350mb per episode) will take:

~24 episodes per/season
7 seasons
== 168 episodes

350mb per episode
168 episodes
== ~58GigaBytes

You could turn up the quality by 170% and still get all the seasons of a show on one of these discs!

Multi-Layer

[Detritus]

My DVD+RW drive claims that it can burn dual-layer media. I haven't tried it, dual-layer disks are still very expensive.

Not enough already

[8086ed]

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.

So soon...

[suitepotato]

...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.

Think of all the stuff you can fit.

[demonic-halo]

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.

Re:Think of all the stuff you can fit.

[CelticWhisper]

You don't want anything to do with that, though. In that version, Jar-Jar shoots first.

Re:Think of all the stuff you can fit.

[Hoi Polloi]

They'll actually start encouraging the cast to screw up in front of the camera so they can have more blooper shots to pad the movie DVD with. Soon they'll have "Show up drunk on the set" day.

Maybe they'll start showing the business bloopers too. Morris in accounting: "And this is crazy! See, I forgot to include capital depreciation in that quarter so we took a tax hit on the film editing systems. Everyone just cracked up!"

Re:Think of all the stuff you can fit.

[GigsVT]

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.

Wow, it would be cool to see how they make those movies about the filming of the movies too. They could have commentary on the editing decisions that went into the "making of.." part.

Re:excellent! we're closer to

[owlstead]

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!!!

more is better

[QMO]

"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.

Re:more is better

[Fulcrum of Evil]

How many versions of Star Wars (Episode IV) are there?

There are 2: VHS and DVD. Each is easily distinguished from the other and all DVDs will play in my player. The special edition crap is a mild irritant, but there's no question of buying something you can't use.

More layers

[nokiator]

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).

Re:More layers

[wantknowledge]

If you read the article you'd notice that its mentioned in the first paragraph.

Here is the referenced Onion story. Its one of the funniest fake articles I have read.

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

- wk

Re:excellent! we're closer to

[Hoi Polloi]

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.

so what?

[jspectre]

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!

Re:so what?

[SmokeHalo]

tetrabites

Sounds fishy to me. Just food for thought.

Columbia Tristar Home Video

[tepples]

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?

Crappenfest!

[Hoi Polloi]

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."

Indestructible

[QMO]

"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.

Re:Indestructible

[Da_Biz]

Good lord, who modded this post up?

NTSC Fuzziness on Blu Ray will still suck

[Dogtanian]

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.

Not stalled, they are meeting again

[The-Bus]

Sony, Toshiba presidents to meet on new DVD format

5/18/05

TOKYO (Reuters) - The presidents of Japanese electronics giants Sony , Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. will meet to try to break a stalemate in talks over a unified format for next-generation DVD technology, a source close to the matter said on Tuesday. Sony and Toshiba, leading rival camps, have waged a three-year battle to have their new technology standards adopted by the industry. The winner will have pole position in the multi-billion-dollar markets for DVD players, PC drives and optical discs.

The high-level talks offer new hope for negotiations that appeared to have reached an impasse. A senior Toshiba official was quoted by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun on Monday as saying one format based on Sony technology would be "extremely difficult." Both sides still believe one standard is the best scenario, knowing that a prolonged format battle like the one between VHS and Betamax two decades ago would likely discourage consumers from shifting to advanced discs and stifle the industry's growth.

(continued)

They know they need to collude if they want to maximize profits. Not having a standard is going to hurt everybody.

Re:Not stalled, they are meeting again

[dreadlocks]

I can summarize the meetings:

Sony/Matsu.: you guys back down and adopt our standard

Toshiba: YOU guys back down and adopt OUR standard

-repeat with more yelling/capitalizations-

Re:I don't need a disc...

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

hahahahahahahaahah!!!

That was great! Thanks for the laugh, I'll be laughing all day now! :-)

Great

[Specks]

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.

Re:Great

[MrP-(at work)]

so what you're saying is, if they come out with a 100gb writable blue-ray disc for $6, and you can backup your whole system on just 1 disc for $6.. you'd consider that too expensive???

i bought a 160gb hard drive for $90 to use as a backup and i thought that was reasonable and im a cheap bastard

Re:Great

[the_2nd_coming]

$6 BR-RW maybe... but not a BR-R

Re:I don't need a disc...

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I've been creating an off-site archival backup copy of your collection - in case UseNet should ever fail, send me 9,854,289,413 blank blue-ray DVDs and I'll send you a copy.

Re:Whoop-de-doo.

[angle_slam]

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.

What the hell are you talking about? HD-DVD isn't intended to replace the hard drive. It's intended to replace the DVD.

Re:I don't need a disc...

[Poltras]

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.

Gotta love those Torvalds quotes.

let the studio's use whatever they want....

[Hohlraum]

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 -/+

BAH! 4.7GB is all I'll ever need.

[cttforsale]

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....

Now instead of .....

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Whoop-de-doo.

[Gulthek]

I guess you don't run backups. You might want to look into that.

(And backing up onto another hard drive is hardly a solution.)

Re:excellent! we're closer to

[R2.0]

Don't forget the IV and catheter. And a colostomy bag if you at a big meal the day before.

Whatever.

[IdahoEv]

By the time holographic discs are around and reach 250G or 1TB, hard drives will be 10TB.

Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc. ... still waiting. It's never been the case, and probably never will be, because it's much harder to make reliable removable media, period.

Re:Whatever.

[Blakey Rat]

I think 2 GB Iomega Jaz drives hit that sweet spot for about 3 months. Their new Rev drives, while a very good backup solution, are unfortunately only 90 GB.

Right now the best solution is just USB2/Firewire external drives. Alas.

Re:Whatever.

[pla]

Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.

When CD-Rs first came out, they compared favorably to hard drives of the time. I still had a 340MB drive when they initially hit the market, and still only had a 1.2GB drive when I first got a CD burner.

10 years later, and while HDDs have increased in size by literally a factor of 1200, writeable optical media have increased by only a factor of seven (thirty if you allow DSDL DVDs, of which I don'tbelieve I've ever personally seen one burned rather than pressed). And now with BR/HD, we might improve the situation somewhat, but they both still leave a dismally large gap.

In particular, consider the most likely course of near-future improvements - We won't see another major optical disc advancement for another five years, but in that same time, we'll all have 5-8TB drives in our desktop machines. Back to the days of 80-disc backups. So as I said, they may as well propose reintroducing the floppy.

Re:Whatever.

[Milican]

"Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc. ... still waiting. It's never been the case, and probably never will be, because it's much harder to make reliable removable media, period."

How about when 640 MB CD-ROMs were bigger than the 540 MB hard drives that were in computers at the time? Maybe you meant removable + recordable media?

What about tape drives? Tapes used to be way bigger than hard drives...

JOhn

Blu-Ray Wins....

[Razzak]

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.

Re:Blu-Ray Wins....

[DCheesi]

I hope HD-DVD hits a stumbling block, no one wants format wars.

Unfortunately, BluRay is the one that's more likely to see problems. HD-DVD's main claim-to-fame is that it's very similar to DVD specs, to the point that existing equipment can be retrofitted to make the new discs cheaply & easily. I wouldn't expect any major surprises to come out at this late (yes, late) date.

I do think that the PS3 will give BluRay a huge advantage, however. If I were Toshiba, et al, right now, I'd be paying Microsoft or Nintendo major kickbacks to squeeze an HD-DVD drive into their design...

Re:Blu-Ray Wins....

[Big_Breaker]

Production cost is a VERY small fraction of the retail price of a DVD. I think the market penetration of the player is far more important to the desirability of a format.

Both have a chicken and egg problem. Blu-ray's might be bigger but PS3 solves it.

Re:Blu-Ray Wins....

[DeadScreenSky]

There is no way the PS3 is going to sell 25-50 million consoles when it launches in Japan (Spring 2006). Even selling 20+ million every year after that would be really shocking...

That's $.06/GB, which is a steal

[freality]

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.

Only three layers?

[wheany]

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?!?

Player Capability?

[Panaphonix]

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...

From the trenches

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:From the trenches

[StikyPad]

In all fairness, CDs were leaps and bounds ahead of contemporary storage media.. Hell, CDs held more information than my HDD when they started becoming popular, and the only other common removable media was a 1.44MB floppy (or not-as-widely adopted 2.88MB). As far as ubiquitous portable storage, CDs held massively more information than their previous generation counterparts. (I'm not counting Zip drives, or other proprietary magneto-optical storage, since they really weren't as widespread as floppies and CDs). DVDs only hold several times as much data as a CD. If there had been an equal leap forward after CDs, you'd see discs (or whatever) with 340GB capacities.

Not as huge a transition as the floppy-to-CD one

[ElGanzoLoco]

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?

Longhorn will just about fit on one of these disks

[Prototerm]

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!)

Re:On the size of backup media

[Kichigai Mentat]

True, small hard disks are highly efficient, and come in sizes as large as 80GB already. But, here's one of the problems that many cite as problems with VHS: HDD's have moving parts, and thus they wear out. And when things wear out, we can lose data. As a person who runs his own server, I've had a hard disk wear out, and a CD-ROM drive die on me. In both cases, I've been set back in one way or another. The hard disk was bigger set back because I can't just force the drive door open and take the discs out. Plus, a hard disk is more easily damaged if dropped. I wouldn't risk dropping my XBox or my HDD equipped PS2, let alone my laptop in a bet to prove their stability. I would drop my DVD-Rs and CD-Rs to prove their stability. However, portable hard disks are a good idea. For those of us who work with media files, having files small enough to fit on cheap flash memory is a luxury, and burning a disc is wasteful. When I've dealt with Illustrator files that are about 148 MB, and whole projects that are larger than 1.8 GB, a portable hard disk that I could just plug in would be a nice thing. But, I wouldn't trust a purchased video on a miniature hard disk, but rather an optical disc, where I can replace the physical mechanisms easily without having to worry about damaging the media itself. Plus, discs are backwards compatible. All DVD drive read CDs, and there's no reason Blu-Ray or HD-DVD won't be able to run older discs. However, hard disks on the other hand... it's like saying that DV can run Hi8. Plus, anyone remember when the newer model hard disks came out, replacing the old standard (I forget what it was called, I remember my 386 had it). When I tried to pull data off of it, only to find out that the connectors for EIDE and the older hard disks are incompatible. And don't think that this is an extreme case. My brother plays individual game disc, and reviews parts of videos often enough to wear down a cassette or hard disk. Unless you can guarantee that this hard disk is going to survive no less than five years of constant abuse, I'm not going to rely on it for my media.

Not just for DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Unfortunate?

[Nephroth]

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.

Re:Not as huge a transition as the floppy-to-CD on

[TFloore]

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.

Simple solution (not going to happen though)

[joggle]

Enclose the disk in a protective shell like Sony's MiniDiscs. Then they are virtually impervious to scratches (I've yet to replace any of my MiniDiscs after years of use).

2 reasons why it won't happen:

1. Not backwards compatable. I would disagree since the enclosure could be made in such a way that an empty, reusable one could be used to put older DVDs and CDs in.
2. Disk never needs replacement. This would seem like a plus unless you are the manufacturer...

Talks have stalled -- good!

[LYM]

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.

Tanenbaum's station waggon

[Barlo_Mung_42]

The bandwidth of station waggons just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

It doesn't really matter

[cbreaker]

By the time we can get our hands on these things they'll have 500GB discs.

Blu-Ray Wins

[Frobozz0]

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.

Blu-Ray disc's may not be so bad now

[dayton967]

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.

4 reasons really

[spoco2]

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.

Re:Longhorn will just about fit on one of these di

[AmberBlackCat]

At least Windows will recognize the 4-layer disc drive.

Transfer Speed

[eluusive]

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

Not next year

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:NTSC vs PAL is actually the issue. Not NTSC "Fu

[Dogtanian]

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?

compatibility

[SwItCH_LiVEs]

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?