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HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Coming Soon to PCs
An anonymous reader writes "A Yahoo! news piece has some sales details for the upcoming Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. They also have some details on disc drives that read the new formats." From the article: "Sony has priced its first desktop computer that will have a Blu-ray Disc burner. The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively and 50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively. The Vaio RC will be launched in 'early summer' and will cost around $2300. At the CeBIT show in Germany last week, Sony announced plans for a Vaio notebook with a Blu-ray Disc drive."
50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively.
Is is just me that thinks selling media for 2x the cost of a hard drive (if you calculate $/gig) stupid?
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WTF?
4.7 GB for $0.30 or 25 GB for $20
Sounds alot like the price that DVD(+-)R media was introduced at. Part of me is cringing from sticer shock but realistically I know that in a few years they'll be in the sub $1.00 range when other manufacturers figure out how to make them.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively
Why the hell didn't they call the rewriteable discs BD-RW?! Has anyone heard of the work "consistency"? Now I have to explain to everyone that BD-RE is like CD-RW or DVD-RW, but for Blue Ray. Great work on the customer confusion front!
Different technology so different material and production process so different prices (production cost is not the only parameter to determine sell price: offer/demand/strategy also influence the price).
The question then becomes: why buy writeonce while writemulitple is cheaper ? Well, sometimes people might want that the media won't be rewritten onto, I think.
AWX
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For those that don't know much about them (i didn't)
STORAGE:
HD- HD DVD supports 15 gb for one layer and 30 gb for dual layer. A triple layer disc in development by Toshiba will hold 45 gb.
BD - Blu-Ray discs as said in the summary hold 25 gb for one layer and 50 for two. Also in development for BD is 100 gb 4 layer and 200 gb 8 layer discs. Both BD and HD are backwards compatible with the current DVD specification (although for BD it is apparently not compulsory for manufacturers to include it).
COPY PROTECTION:
HD - HD's will employ copy restriction developed by AACS LA. Audio Watermark Technology is also being used. All Hd dvd players will include a sensor that listens for audible watermarks placed in the soundtracks of movies. (read more at the wikipedia site).
BD - Blu-ray has "experimental digital rights management that allows for dynamically changing encryption schemes". This prevents a single crack from breaking the whole protection scheme like what happened with DeCSS and DVDs. Also included is digital watermarking technology. (more at wikipedia
Interesting note about Blue Ray discs, original discs made with blue ray technology were very susceptible to scratches and had to be enclosed in plastic caddies for protection. TDK came up for a solution to this in January 2004 that gave Blue ray discs "unprecedented scratch resistance." HD DVD discs use the same coating found on cds and dvds. For my money, it seems like BD is the better technology. We'll see how the copy protection pans out.
All information taken from wikipedia.org
LINKS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD"
Honestly, about the only things the new generation of DVD (HD-DVD and Blue-Ray) is going to be a success for is Hi-Def movies. At the size they are, there isn't going to be any demand for them to use on the PC as writable disks, unlike CD-R/W and DVD-R/W. People currently use CDs and old DVDs to do primarily three things: Transfer/backup important data, Audio (whether Orange-book audio or MP3/WMA/AAC), and home-video. All three of these things fit nicely into the current DVD/CD sizes, and even when Camcorders start using HiDef, people generally don't send around multiple hours of Video. At most, it's 1-2 hours of little bobby's Soccer game/birthday party. Which still fits on a DVD via MPEG4 (even in HiDef).
The new DVDs aren't big enough to make an impact on the backup market (where you need 100s of GB per disk to even be considered), and they are (and will remain) far more costly than ordinary CD/DVD-RW media. They have some attractiveness for PC and console gaming, but even there, without a huge amount of in-game video, current DVD capacity will suffice for years for the vast majority of games.
DRM and other factors will hurt uptake even more. Honestly, I figure it's going to take at least 20 years before the new DVD format have anywhere near the penetration that DVDs and VCRs do now. And that takes into account having the new DVD formats on consoles. People just aren't going to use them much.
The big media companies rushed this tech to market - there is no real demand for their functionality right now, and won't be for at least 5 years, minimum. From the consumer standpoint, this is a solution in search of a problem. I figure there will be a generation skip here - the replacement for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray should show up around 2020, and consumers are smart enought to see it, so I'm predicting that the new DVD formats will peak at about 10% of the current DVD market, if that.
-Erik
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I can already see this new format going the way of many past failures (ie. Laser Disk, Beta, Minidisk).
The timing just isnt right. Consumers are not ready to start embracing a new technology when they just barely started embracing dvds. Lots of people have just begun moving their entire collection to dvd. Yes there were early adopters of dvd, but for the majority it has only been a few years. To introduce a new and improved format so soon will only make consumers realize what a sham it is. By making them have to buy the movies they have already bought a second time (maybe 3rd).
This new generation isnt revolutionary. Its not a big enough improvement to get an entire industry to switch. And 5 years from now 50GB is going to look very small.
We need a new standard that can not only support our needs now, but that can sustain them for many years to come.
Lets see... to get 400GB(rewritable) in discs would be $480.
For a decent 400GB hard drive today, around $225.
Already does this seem yesterdays technology.... and this is supposed to sustain us for many years?
Does anybody has ANY info about Linux support for these drives?
Information on the techniques used is available on Wikipedia. In short, the content is encrypted when it passes through every part of the system, including the display device itself. Sony said they wouldn't be using the option on this media for the time being though.
That's not to say that the encryption is unbreakable, but certainly ripping is to be orders of magnitude more difficult than with DVD. Not impossible, of course.
while the write speeds are still low compared to hard disks, and the access times would suck, it would be nice to be able to boot a disk on any computer, and be able to save all your work on that same disk. Beats having to work with only web based documents, or leaving small images on the local hard drive.
I can imagine a time when you could go to a net cafe (for example) and the pc you hired didn't have a hard disk at all, just a HD rewriter. You bring your own OS and leave no traces (incriminating or otherwise).
I guess this is possible now with DVD-RAM but the available space is a bit limited.
Another possibilty would be true use anywhere software. You wouldn't need to write for any particular market segment anymore, as you would provide the software and OS on the same bootable disk, great for corporate desktops or front of house applications.
I realise this idea will be shot down in flames for various reasons, but I still think it has merits. For example you could have MoviX or GeexBoX AND 40 or 50 movies all on the same disk.
Considering it takes around 10 years for optical media to make a 5-fold increase in capacity (CD 0.7GB 1983/91 -> DVD 4.7GB 1997 -> BD 25GB 2006) and Flash memory seems to be doubling every year (512Mb 2001 -> 16Gb 2006), the question is how long before Flash over-takes optical in capacity? Answer: about 5 years. Of course it will probably never beat optical discs for capacity/$, but at some point flash memory should be cheap enough that it doesn't rally matter a great deal. Flash memory is much more convenient to use. In other words, if the current trend continues, optical disks will be obsolete within 10 years. (Yes, that's right. 1TB flash cards anyone?)
:T:R:A:N:S:
With 25 or 50 GB capacity it would be nice to copy a collection of standard DVDs to the discs for use when travelling, etc. Imagine being able to keep one disc in a portable DVD player and be able to choose from three, six or as many as ten different DVDs all on one disc. I realize there are technical limitations such as creating a custom DVD menu and the cost of BD media, burners and portable players is going to be prohibitively expensive at first, but will a BD player play a movie from a burned BD-ROM? And I don't mean a HD movie, I am talking about the current DVD standard we have now.
Anyone know or is it even possible to know at this point?
As many so correctly point out - we've seen this before, they come out, are expensive, the media at ludicrous prices and most of us play the waiting game until it actually pays to buy one.
Not a bad thing really. Those who wants to ride the "fast-tech-lane" and be first with the latest - pay for innovation and pave way for the normal people who wouldn't get caught dead paying 60 bucks for a CD.
Personally I was "first-with-the-latest" all the way in my early twenties when the Commodore-64/Amiga was all the rave...and it stopped when I grew older and prioritized differently. I then found out that instead of buying a DVD-Recorder at 500 dollars (plus 30 bucks each DVD-R) I'd use my trusty CD-recorder and bought CD's for 20 cents each, easily reaching 4.7 gb with just a few bucks, sure....I'd have to change discs a bit, but it was more practical for the time as no single file took 4.7 gb so I could have a neat archive with files and names.
Later on, the DVD recorders dropped to an astonishing 50 bucks, and an even more astonishing 50 cents pr. DVD if I bought these "overseas" which I certainly did. Because NOW it paid to buy DVD's instead of CD's.
Interestingly enough - the need for storage haven't been in sync with the expansion of program/file sizes, so we're in for a treat.
I can't for the life of me fill up my old 80 GB harddrives, even with multi-booting systems with Linux AND windows. I'm actually more likely to use the 80 GB harddrives as "2-year-milestone-swapdisks" just replacing them with the need for change (new os/ new stuff etc.) and it's actually cheaper keeping my old stuff ready to use on those older drives, way safer too!
My old CD's peel after 5 years, some lasted 10...but I have 10 years old harddisk I still can connect and get my old photos, documents etc.
Food for thoughts...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I heard all PS3 games will be Blu Ray. Which brings up an interesting question about piracy? Since piracy will be really low for the PS3 does that mean that the cost of games will be cheaper? Because Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo have been claiming games are expensive because of piracy (well at least that's one of the main factors).
Can I bum a sig?
With the very large capacity hard drives out there, this, although it looks expensive, just might be the lesser expensive way to back up one's entire system, or entire hard drives.
Looks expensive? Heh... I place a pretty high value on my time and my sanity. And really, a full live backup system doesn't cost all that much, nevermind just using an external USB HDD!
About a year ago I started on a quest to back up my home fileserver to DVD, a few discs per week. I can deal with my or my SO's PC dying completely, but if my poor fileserver went down... Well, the mere thought scares me to the point that I started leaving it turned off and unplugged most of the time, not the most useful state (not to mention that a system has the best chance of dying on startup, but an unplugged system won't die in a thunderstorm).
After a couple months, I realized I would never finish that project, since it would take well over a hundred DVDs, and a small subset of that changed often enough by itself to take most of a DVD once a week (hey, I admit it, you could describe me as a digital packrat - Anything that touches my PC, I keep there. Well organized, mind you, but still, it takes up (cheap) space).
So, I now have a live fileserver and a backup fileserver. I rsync them once per week, takes about 5 minutes over GigE (though almost a full day for the initial backup), then take the backup machine offline. This gives me the best of both worlds... Something like a nearby lightning strike might hurt the live machine, but the backup machine would survive. A multi-drive failure on the backup machine would suck, but I'd still have the live machine to re-backup from.
I went for decent quality hardware, but could have pulled off the entire project for under $600 (I just now configured such a complete system (headless) at NewEgg - 1.1TB, Sempron64, 512MB - for $567.87). I blew closer to a grand on my own new machine, but have 1.2TB, a gig of fast RAM, same CPU (hey, like a fileserver needs a lot of horsepower?), SeaSonic PS, and a Lian-Li case (no, I don't care how it looks - I care that it had seven (or more - two 3-bay ThermalTake iCages plus an optical drive) external 5.25" bays in a mid-tower form, and only the PC3077 met that condition - and yes, it does have 7 bays - The entire front control panel thing slides out and you can throw it away if you want, no Dremel-use required). And it draws only 67W (about half what the old one ate), runs nearly silent and within a few degrees of ambient (4 120MM fans in it!).
As the only wish-list item remaining (other than 1TB+ optical writeable discs, of course, which would make all of this discussion irrelevant), I would like to find a way to grow a RAID-5 array. I use striped LVM2 on the live machine, which gives great performance and I can grow the FS just by adding another drive, but on the backup machine, I really want single-drive failure tolerance - Which I have, but if I want to add more capacity, I need to completely rebuild the array and perform a slow complete backup (which would also leave me uncomfortably lacking a backup for a couple of days).
The not-so-obvious thing here is if the player itself signs data making it different each time it's read. The irony of DVD was that it was a piece of cake (more or less) to rip a copy and burn it on another DVD, it was just transcoding or playing the DVD with an unauthorized player that could be tricky.
Do the 8-15% of households with HDTV's have the HDMI port? If not, they wont be watching hi-def. All the backstabbing in the consumer electronics business is really what will keep people away from BD/HD, either because people are paranoid or just simply confused out of their minds. By treating early adopters of HDTVs with no respect, Sony and Toshiba will likely find many problems selling their next-gen equipment.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14