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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.
you misspelt 'Dumb'.
sorry, just too easy to pass...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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
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
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!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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?
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.
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?!?
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.