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Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB
Xesdeeni writes "According to The Register and MacWorld, TDK has unveiled a Blu-Ray DVD with four layers that will hold a whopping 100 GB of data. This is shortly after the previously reported HD-DVD announced three-layer HD-DVD that would hold a "mere" 45 GB. Unfortunately, this is also on the heels of the news that the HD DVD unification talks have stalled."
...i can now fit my 1/100th of my porn collection on one disk. sweet.
always mosh clockwise
This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.)
But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people can just buy and make the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.
After a certain threshold, the capacity of the next generation DVD standard ceases to matter as much as cost, ease of use, and compatibility. So Sony/Toshiba... please step up and convince me of these issues instead of throwing capacity numbers around!
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
We already have problems with DVDs and CDs going bad. From what I've read, the Blu-Ray discs may be even more fragile due to their extremely thin protective layer. If I am to pick between the two coming standards (Blu-Ray vs HD), I'll choose the more reliable one.
Yay! Now we just have to wait 3 years for this to come to the market and 3 more years for it to be affordable. Then I will be all over it, until something better comes along.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
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.
Perhaps they should both talk to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon?
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
all 3 lord of the rings movies on one dvd without any pauses between the movies or needing to switch discs. Numb ass, here I come!
TFA says that Blu-Ray discs are still more prone to scratching than DVDs.
How about one of these four-layer discs with built-in redundancy to improve that?
i.e. a 50GB disc with four layers, two of which are redundant?
For archival purposes, I'd buy it.
100 GB of data on a DVD? I think we're putting too much trust in those little discs, no matter how handy they are.. Would sure be very painful if you'd scratch it and lose 100 GB's of data.
There's got to be a price for these increases in storage capacity. With more data in a smaller package, aren't you just asking for larger errors due to physical damage and defect?
I'm just thinking of how scratched my average disk can get, and imagine if that scratch now corrupts 200 megs of data instead of a few bits in a song.
When are we gonna have to enclose these things in some sort of 8-track like case?
:::: the insomniac's digest
you misspelt 'Dumb'.
sorry, just too easy to pass...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
Yes, but is this something that will be standard on all blu-ray devices. Will the PS3 be able to read blu-ray discs which can reach 100GiG? Further, will game developers take advatage of that much space for larger, more expansive worlds?
Will the content providers step up and use the capacity?
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
It's great thet they got 100GB disk.
Now fill it up and let a four year old put it in and out of a player a few time.
If it is still readable, then you know you are on to something.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lets say that you could fit the entire Lord of the Rings in HD on 1 disk. Hmm, lets see what a movie company exec might say "Consumers wont pay 60 bucks for 1 disk. They want a bunch of disks so they think they're buying a bunch of stuff."
Consumer would say "Hey why are you charging me 60 bucks for one disk, it should only be 20 bucks as it doesn't cost you anymore to stamp out one disk as it does 4 disks."
Unless for the next 7-10 years a quad layer Blu-Ray dvd media costs > $10k. And if that were the case then BlueRay would be the winner. You have to get the companies onboard thinking that no one can copy their disks cheaper than you can sell them for. Look at the price dual layer dvd the best I could find is $3 and I can get regular ones for 50 cents; so the execs are looking at moving on because the price of dvd replication is falling to the brake point of make it your self is cheaper.
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!
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The capacity of these drives that I can't buy yet goes up and up! Oh boy!! I'm so excited that there's a format in a lab somewhere completely unavailable to me that could back up so many of my files on a single disk, if only I had one!
The cake is a pie
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.
/. ++
For movie-consumers, now those DVD extras will include the cast party, the set-security tapes . . .
And TV-fans now can buy a single disk with the entire 2004 season of . . . well . . . TV.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
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.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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).
who cares? none of this means anything to me, wanna know why?
I CAN'T BUY A PLAYER OR DISCS IN EITHER FORMAT RIGHT NOW!
so who cares how much it can hold?!?!
ATTN: I hearby announce my new holographic crystal format can now store 1,000,000,000 tetrabites on a crystal the size of a grain of salt. This device not yet available for sale, please come back in 100 years.
I'm going to patent it all too and sue the bejeezus out of anyone who even attempts to copy it!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Finally..I can have every episode of Baby Loony Toons in HD quality! Thanx Japan!
Heh... seriously, that reminds me of catching a glimpse of the horrid "Tom and Jerry Kids" cartoon on the TV the other day.
Ignoring the quality of the animation (who cares, the show is vile anyway), what struck me was how soft and horrible the picture quality is. And the problem, it seems is... it was mastered on NTSC video.
Now, no-one gives a monkeys about Tom and Jerry Kids or Baby Looney Tunes, but... they will care about ST:TNG.
I had that on DVD recently; it looked really bad. Thing is, I live in the UK, and even when I was young I thought that US TV shows looked weird; the picture was soft and the colour was... not great.
Some of this may have come down to so-so conversion at the time, but as shown by the ST DVD (which I assume would have been re-converted from scratch and would not have gone through an intermediate PAL stage), the problem seems to be with the source material. Even when I first saw ST:TNG 15 years ago, I thought the picture was lousy.
Of course, since the US was the main market, I'd guess they figured it didn't need to be better than NTSC broadcast standard. Nowadays it looks horrible, unfortunately.
(A major irony is that 60s and 70s US shows shot on film usually seem to look better)
The picture quality on US shows seems to have improved massively over the past 5 years (I assume there's been a switch to higher-quality RGB recording formats); which means that Americans are going to start noticing how bad archive footage looks.
And believe me, there's no point putting stuff like that on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they can remaster it to look a heck of a lot better.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
They know they need to collude if they want to maximize profits. Not having a standard is going to hurt everybody.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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?
And how long would this take to come out? How expensive would a single disk be?
If the price of dual layer DVD's are a gage of how expensive these will be then the price will be through the roof. Dual layer DVDs which aren't sold in bulk are anywhere from $4 to $6 dollars each (rough estimate) and only sold in packs of 3 or 5 if you're lucky, or that's what I've been finding at the local ebil Fry's. Too expensive for me for making image backups of my system.
Specks
Batteries not included
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.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Now instead of complaining that when you buy 30-minute shows on DVD which only put two episodes/disk, we'll have a format with 25x the capacity which is still only holding 2 episodes.
That's always bugged me about that kind of stuff on TV. They want to sell you a bazillion dollars worth of stuff. You want it all on one disk.
Then again, I have a huge problem equating two 30 minute episodes of a show which has been running for several seasons to the equivelant (or more) then a movie which cost over $100 million to make.
Yet, time and time again we see just that -- two episodes of Freinds (or whatever) costs as much as one Lord of the Rings movie -- personally I think they need to look at macroeconomics -- Mr Smith is not getting the utils of enjoyment out of the second purchase.
There is no reason to believe this won't keep happening as disks get bigger.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
With the recent PS3 announcement of Blu-Ray, and no HD-DVD from the Xbox or Nintendo Revolution, I seriously think Blu-Ray has won this. Besides having better capacity, they're going to guarantee themselves 25-50 million players in households by Spring 2006? Plus an additional 20+ million each year thereafter, that's a large footprint. Even if HD-DVD is more cost efficient and beats them to market (say a decent amount of players available by xmas 2005), I can't see the same amount of people jumping on the HD-DVD bandwagon in its first 6 months to outweigh the PS3 release.
I hope HD-DVD hits a stumbling block, no one wants format wars.
I'm asking myself exactly the same question.. what's the likely price per unit.. because the bigger question is Is this the new price leader for large-scale storage? Currently, disk is about $0.40/GB ($80 for a 200GB disk) and tape is $0.25/GB ($50 for a 200GB LTO2 tape). While these will definitely fall by the time these disks come out, they probably can't come close to 6 or 4 cents per gig.
Plus, though tapes are pretty cost effective on a per gig basis, the actual machines for accessing them are tres expensivo. Look at the ADIC Scalar series. A Scalar 24 costs about 10k. Now consider that a 400 CD changer goes for ~$200 at Amazon... That's currently in a different market segment, but for how long? Even when the CD changer makers decide to price gauge the data consumer, they won't be able to go too far without being outcompeted from below.
That means the ETA to a, let's say $50k petabyte system, is a couple of years.
E.g. let's say the Blue-Rays get up to 200GB each at a price point of $10 each (conservative). That's 5000 discs for 1PB and so $50k, which is much better than the alternative medias by a factor of between 2 (tape) and 5-20 (offline and online disk). But more importantly, it will take only 10 cheap disk changers to access all 5000 disks needed.
The one big gotcha here is that the discs are write-once, read-many. But for certain applications, e.g. video, this is ideal. And it just so happens that folks like Microsoft's Chief Researcher, Jim Gray, think that video is what we'll fill this next generation of capacity with.
"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.
More music, fewer hits
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?!?
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).
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.
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.