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."

Comments

wow... what a bargain

[loraksus]

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?

Re:wow... what a bargain

[fatduck]

Especially when USB hard drives are roughly the same size as, and far more resistant to damage than, dvds?

Re:wow... what a bargain

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always a nitch market to begin with. The first person I knew who bought a CD recorder was a high end still photographer that was using it to archive files. His first drive cost $5,000. A few years later they were a couple of hundred. I paid $550 for my first DVD burner which I desperately needed at the time. A month later they were $450 and four months later the same one was around $250 but I burned a lot of disks in those months and I still use those back ups. I'm interested as a way of hard copying rendered shots in a digital format. I do it now on DVD but it takes a lot of DVDs and can be a bit clunky. I can store a lot of shots on 50 gig. Even better yet I can store the entire project file on disks of that size. I have to store them on several disks now and it's a bit clunky reinstalling them when needed. I do also use back up external hard drives but I've had failures with hard drives and I've rarely had trouble with disks. Also if you are going to store multiple backs up over time hard drives can take up serious space and can be problematic after they have set for a few years. I had disasterous experiences with Jazz drives in the past. In a hundred DVD folder I can store 5 terrabytes of information. That's a lot of hard drives especially when you consider a 100 gig hard drive holds a lot less than a 100 gig of information. A 50 gig DVD will pretty much hold 50 gig of data. Even with 500 gig drives it'll take eleven or twelve to hold as much as the one folder. Data recovery is extremely expensive if one of those drives goes down. If to be safe you do redundant back ups then you are talking 22+ drives to equal the one folder.

For most it won't make sense in the short term but give it a year when the 50 gig disks are even running $10 a piece and they'll start looking a lot more interesting.

Another issue is say I needed to send 50 gig of info through the mail. I'd much rather send a DVD sized disk than a hard drive that can be easily damaged.

A final note would be mastering films. For low budget producers they could burn a high res version of their film on a high capacity disk rather than using digi beta. Digital Beta decks are still extremely expensive due to the rariety. Blu-ray will be a much cheaper option. Say you want to project your new film at a local theater. All you would need is a single Blu-Ray disk. Instead of a stack of film cans you can put the whole thing on a disk that would fit in a breast pocket.

Re:wow... what a bargain

[dark_requiem]

You have to remember that when any new technology comes out, it is ridiculously expensive. Only when it starts to see reasonably widespread adoption will the costs be reduced to an affordable level. Prior to that, the market is too small to make a profit at what most of us consider "reasonable" prices. Early adopters pay a high price for having the latest and greatest, the rest of us wait to see which standard become dominant, then wait for prices to fall. If either HD-DVD or Blue Ray are recieved well by consumers, prices for that particular format will begin to drop to resonable levels as manufacturers increase their output, and will eventually (within a few years) be comparable with current DVD+/-R prices.

Re:wow... what a bargain

[LilGuy]

Have you never lost data on those dvds? We used to back up photo projects and the like on CDs a few years ago, and the cds only seemed to last about 2 or 3 years before they made the cd drive shit itself and wet the bed all at once. On the other hand, only once in my life have I had a hard drive eat shit on me. That was most likely due to being in my dorm where there was lots of beer, people, rowdyness going on...

Re:wow... what a bargain

[Hackeron]

You what?

I have a Coolermaster stacker with 12x500GB drives on raid6 - thats 5TB of storage with 2 redundant drives siting under a 36" LCD in a cabinet - (you know, so its inaudiable).

Sure the drives alone eat around 200W of electricity, but I have another raid1 array of 2 x 2.5" drives I have the OS and basic storage on, the raid5 spins up only when I want to watch stored content (since the whole family uses it, its something like 5 hours a day, but its not showing on the electricity bill).

Now the juicy part, the system is used for:
1) Phone, we have a normal analog line plugged into the PC and a voip contract, if we phone out, it goes over the internet saving a ton of money, incoming calls go through the PC so if no one is there, voicemail is emailed out or a fallback number is used like a work number that is forwarded to through voip (using asterisk@home, very easy setup).
2) Watching/recording sattelite TV, a simple DVB card plugged into a dish - didnt bother getting decoder cards or subscribing to Sky and what not as >1000 channels is really enough ;)
3) Surfing the web
4) Playing games on/offline (kick ass for FPS)
5) Listening to music with visualization
6) etc, etc, etc.

The remote is a cheap ATI one that works with Linux (using ubuntu dapper with XGL, looks stunning) and I have a media keyboard/mouse in the coctail table for FPS and what not.

I had to build it myself of course and set it all up, but it only took a day's worth and it was damn well worth it! - Any hardware problems I am emailed about instantly, there is a redundant PSU, redundant drives. Only had it for a month so cant speak of reliability, but I cant see it being any less reliabe than just a DVD player while providing so much more.

TVs are so obselete :)

DVD vs. BlueRay

[cskrat]

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.

Re:DVD vs. BlueRay

[donaldm]

Actually we should not just compare DVD vs Blu-Ray (or HD DVD) on price just yet. What we have here is a capacity comparison. Lets start with the following:

Floppy disk (1.2MB) - yes you can get larger but they are now pretty much obsolete. However they were good for their day. Lets not go into 5.25 inch, 8 inch or even (gasp) 12 inch floppies .

CD (650 - 800MB) - still useful for Music, install software and some backups. Look like hanging around for a long time. I doubt we will see a Music DVD put out by the Music Industry anytime soon.

DVD (4.7GB) - at the moment this media is very cheap (sometimes cheaper than a CD). Dual density is a lot more expensive though. Still 4.7GB is a very useful size (PC and small size backups including movies) although certain companies would like to see this killed off, I personally this won't happen for some time, since there are a lot of DVD/Hard-Disk player/recorders on the market which have really started to kill off VHS recorders. You could probably start a new Slashdot article just on this alone.

HD-DVD (15GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

Blu-Ray (25GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

For HDTV the industry is proposing 15GB to 30GB and this is were the above two fit in. You won't be able to put a HDTV show on standard DVD without some loss (normally considerable) and this is what the Entertainment Industry wants. In addition what is also wanted by the Industry is DRM and the best one will have a definite edge, although the PS3 will be will be the Trojan Horse that puts BluRay in the living room.

Holographic DVD (1.6TB) - http://www.betanews.com/article/Holographic_DVD_to _Hold_16_Terabytes/1133197797 The specs are incredible however I cannot see HDTV being put on this. Where this will shine is in Small to Enterprise backup solutions and this is exactly what it is aiming at. Basically this puts the backup tape industry on notice since it now becomes very possible to have close to "near-line" recovery. Those people who are responsible for serious backups should welcome this.

Please don't come back at me suggesting disks to actually do backups. All I can say to that is try to backup 100TB and put that off-site cheaply, while taking into account possible disaster and recovery scenarios.

Comparing DVD to any of the above is rather silly and as far as costs go, the new media will come down eventually. Even today if you compare RW DVD to Write once DVD you are looking at approx 10 to 1 in cost so if the new disks are say $15 to $20 each for writable only it does not take much effort to imagine what the price of the RW ones would initially be.

Oh, the name!

[Godji]

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!

About HD and BD

[signore pablo]

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"

Not anywhere near the success of "old" DVD...

[trims]

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

Re:Not anywhere near the success of "old" DVD...

[Jesus_666]

> 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.

Just wait until the new .NET Generation Secure Gaming Framework comes out! All executables will be stored as Secure Managed Code, which means that the executable comes with 12 MiB of executable code, 25 MiB of security certificates and 120 MiB of Trusted Computing interface code. All videos will be stored via a proprietary XML extension (the .NET Generation Secure Media Framework Professional Edition)...

    <bytestream type="video/mpeg" drm-clsid="{1435:543236:EF32EF:AB543634E:3565363B3 4:432242342:ABAD5}"
                checksum="14758f1AFD44C09B7992073CCf00B43D">
      <byte drm-clsid="{435:AA564:CC922329:32323244AB34:A54654 B3343E32:EEFEEF3434:AB3A}">
        0x15
      </byte>
      <byte drm-clsid="{ABC123:F00BAA:CAFEBABE:DEADBEEF:100010 01001110:123456ABC:ABBA}">
        0x15
      </byte>
    ...

...which will ensure that no one in their right mind would ever want to copy that three-second cutscene. Not if it's 500 MiB big.

Hard drives more resistant to damage?

[Curien]

I've never broken a DVD by dropping it.

Could be worse

[CptnHarlock]

They could have called the WriteOnce disks something like "Singlewrite Media" and ended up with "BD-SM".. ;P ..

Cheers...

Your kidding right?

[grungefade]

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?

Re:Your kidding right?

[westlake]

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...

An estimate posted on Slashdot the other day put HDTV in 8-15% of households. No matter how inflated, these numbers look pretty damn impressive.

RCA Color TV entered the U.S. market in 1954. It took ten years for color to become mass-market and RCA was out there alone.

In one jump, consumers are moving to large-screen, wide-screen projection, high-definition digital video and digital television sound, as standard.

DVD videos look grand on your 27" screen. But not so hot at twice that size.

Possible uses ?

[smoker2]

I think one possible use of the rewritable disks would be in bootable disks, like knoppix et al.

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.

And don't forget the *Flash*!!!

[transami]

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?)

Re:And don't forget the *Flash*!!!

[doodlelogic]

every exponential trend
comes to a sticky end

So will burned DVDs play in a BD player?

[Hamster Lover]

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?

History repeats itself, whatcha expect?

[MindPrison]

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 HDTV?

[Penguinoflight]

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.