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The First Blu-ray Burner, Pioneer's BDR-101A
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Pioneer's BDR-101A-- the first Blu-ray burner available. The drive can do anything with CDs, is kind of slow with DVDs, and doesn't support double-density Blu-ray media, but hey, it's a start, and can burn 25GB in 42 minutes. Check out its burn speed benchmark performance at the link above."
> The drive can do anything with CDs
should read:
The drive can't do anything with CDs
Copyrighted media detected. Burn aborted.
42 minutes... Oy!
...when you can set up your own distribution center: Engadget has a peek at Primera's mass Blu-ray duplication system
Primera has started shipping the world's first Blu-ray disc duplication system, the Bravo XR-Blu Disc Publisher, able to burn up to 50 discs in one session. The core of the unit is actually Pioneer's recently announced BDR-101A Blu-ray burner, but it's backed up by some sweet built-in robotics to keep the discs moving (we hope -- we've heard this things are a little buggy) and full-color direct-to-disc inkjet printing to ensure a professional-looking job. This being the first unit of its kind, however, it should come as no surprise that it only uses single-layer discs, able to store a measly 25 GB, but Primera says an upgrade will be available "shortly" to allow for dual-layer burning. And if you thought regular, single-disc Blu-ray burners were expensive, you better look away now, 'cause this beast will set you back a whopping $5295.
Sounds like we'll be seeing surprisingly cheap Blu-ray movies on Ebay any day now.
can or can't?
From the article: "Interestingly, the BDR-101A neither burns nor reads CD media of any type. So if you still need CD burning or reading capability, you'll need an additional drive."
Anyway, the Blu-Ray disks are $19-29 USD. I will need to wait until I can buy a spindle of 100 Blu-Ray disks for 9.99 before I go out and buy one of these things.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
Why did they leave that ability out? I know I don't want to have a separate drive to read CD's, but with this drive that is the only option. I can see phasing out CD's once this new generation of media is firmly in place but it is way too early to start phasing out CD's. Floppy disks somewhat recently just got phased out for Christ's sake. I don't see CD's going anywhere for at least 3 more years.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Interestingly, the BDR-101A neither burns nor reads CD media of any type. So if you still need CD burning or reading capability, you'll need an additional drive.
as usual no one has bothered to check the facts.
the drive does not burn cds at all.
This just about sums up the entire article: Wow, neat. Don't buy one yet.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
We have already established that Blu-Ray READERS are to be boycotted for the general public good. Why post an article about a BURNER when nobody is going to use the READERS? I mean, everybody reads and believes slashdot, right? Right?
Blu ray would have been relevant 4 years ago if it had been introduced then, but it wasn't. Instead it's been introduced in todays age when you can buy a 250 GB hard disk for less than $70 with ease. The disks for this will be like any other disk in that their effective lifecycle will just be a few years. Like any other burnable disk they will suffer from burn problems and very low reliability.
It doesn't price justify to buy this kind of media (nevermind the whole DRM bit). Your better off spending your money on hard drives, they hold significantly more data, are an order of magnitude cheaper and several orders of magnitude more durable. In all sincerity, why would you ever want to buy something like this?
Can this drive burn video blu-ray discs capable of being played back on a blu-ray video drive?
It remains to be seen if the Beta-Ra*COUGH* blu-ray has any merit.
Please forgive me. I seem to have caught a cold. It has persisted since, oh, about 1983 or so...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Dual layer DVD's have been out for a couple years now and the media /still/ costs about $2 a disc (best price on froogle). And to get that price you have to buy them by the 50 pack. By the time these disks come down to the price point you offered I'll be able to get a 1 TB drive for the price I offered, and the effeciency curve will continue to favor the drive. So why bother to invest in this technology.
This time we won't have to wait to burn copies of copywritten material. Those years before CD burners and decent DVD burners were just torture.
Let's just stick with DVD. 9,856,614K ought to be enough for anybody.
Cool! So when can I burn these disks with growisofs from the command prompt? I'll maybe get one of these drives then.
A current player can do anything with the burned Blu-Ray discs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This reminds me of the PS1, which used CDROM. At that time, the HP SureStore burner cost me $1,200. Good blank media cost $20 per disc. Add a little bit of soldering, and I never had to pay late fees for my game rentals ever again.
Now, right before the PS3 release, Blu-ray burners are available in the same price range. Even the media is similarly priced. If history repeats itself, which it always does, you should be able "backup" your PS3 games for under $400 in about a year.
- $1000 price tag
- Can't do anything with regular CDs
- $19-$25 for one disc? Can you say Zip disk?
- Can't burn dual layer discs, although dual layer blu-ray discs are available, completely ASININE!
- "The drive includes Roxio Digital Media 7 for creating discs, but does not ship with software to watch Blu-ray movies." WTF?
Sounds like a winner to me!Meet new people, and kill them.
Is it just me, or were there a LOT more DVD players and DVD media in enduser hands, before the announcement of DVD burners?
It's almost like they (yes, the perjorative and mysterious 'they') want to have it both ways.. sell the stamped media, the blank media, and the hardware all at once - yet you *know*, from recent demonstrations, that they are geared up to protect any potential infringement of copyrights.
Or is this just how things work, these days?
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Don't think of it as a lack of a CD-Player/CD-Burner ...
Think of it as protection from Sony's Root-Kit
They might as well have used SCSI-3/SAS and gained some performance instead of sticking with IDE.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's why I have my Mac backed up on 3,248 floppies. If anything goes wrong with one, I'll only lose 1.44MB
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
CD Disk = Compact Disc Disk
This Public Service Announcement has been brought to you by the Redundancy Department of Reduncancy.
Note, "HD" is possible on DVD5 or above.
Here are the steps to follow:
1. Upscale your DVD collection, writing using standard DVD's, in the DVD format, except enhanced for resolution, and perhaps formats (Perhaps Theora, DivX, MP4, in addition to MPEG2).
Call this DVD-HD.
2. Find a player that plays these DVD-HD discs. Buy this player.
3. When/If you find a commercial disc encoded with "DVD-HD", buy it as well.
4. Remember, don't buy the other HD-DRM discs (Unless it has be worked-around)
5. You can buy a DVD20 or DVD45 writer for data backups.
6. If a "DVD-HD" player is sold that plays "DVD20-HD" or DVD45-HD", buy this player.
7. Or just use VLC on a PC.
8. When/If you find a commercial DVD20 or DVD45 disc encoded with "DVD-HD", buy it as well.
0. If you bought into HD-DRM-DVD, then you expect the next step to be expiring media, then rentals only . Have fun.
It would only take me a day or two to back up the whole Internet!
(Um, biblical-length days - but hey, who's counting?)
Even the Blu-Ray readers presumably fund the DRM queen via licensing fees. To me, that makes them nearly as culpable for the infestation as the commercial releases are.
But even if I put all my DRM vigilantism aside, the capacity increase over reg'lar DVDs just doesn't cut it in my pocketbook. In fact, why even write to removable media when a RAID can store oddles more gigs per $?
I guess I just don't see the point in these things, with TV & stereo -out available for most PCs on the cheap, and with HTDV -out not being too pricey either.
Pi Ran Out
For those that don't know, PAR2 files are parity files that can efficiently reconstruct missing or damaged blocks in your archive. If you have more PAR2 recovery blocks than damaged blocks, then you can completely reconstruct all of the damaged files in your archive. The best newbie explanation I've seen is the "PAR & PAR2 files" section from Slyck's Guide To The Newsgroups.
If I'm backing up to a data DVD-R (capacity 4,706,074,624 bytes), I'll leave around 4GB of space for the actual data and fill the rest (to the brim) with the PAR2 files that I created for that data. I name the PAR2 files starting with the letter 'z' so that they get burned on the outer edge of the DVD. When creating the PAR2 files, I choose a block size that is a multiple of 2048 bytes because that is the block size of a DVD sector.
Some easy-to-use tools to create PAR2 files:
Some DVD data recovery software (to get every readable block off a damaged disc):
Thanks, WuphonsReach.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Anyone else notice this? "The BDR-101A is a 2x Blu-ray recorder, meaning it can theoretically burn a BD-RE disc at 72 megabits per second (9MB per second), which is 6.66 times the data rate of the DVD standard." That was a joke son.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
If you're concerned about loosing valuable data make duplicates of a disk. That's what I tend to do.
Moreover, having even larger disks would make that process a LOT more efficient. I'd much rather make multiple copies of a few large disks then multiple copies of dozens of smaller disks.
No doubt, putting all your eggs in one big basket is dumb, and putting all your eggs in multiple little baskets is a better thing to. Yet, if you can make copies of that big basket all your huevos are going to be pretty damn safe.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Now I'm looking forward to burning warez for my PS3, oh joy.
o hai
ZFS gives you data reliability (through checksum'ing) and RAID-Z allows ZFS to detect and repair bad data that is mirrored. Free with OpenSolaris.
That person's point wasn't about having to get rid of DVDs, it's just that now it's pointless to spend so much time and money building a collection when a better format is coming out only a few years later. You can keep your DVDs, but why would you want to have the lower quality version?
//extremely// reliable (failure proof), compact, cheap, long term storage format/device.
It finally hit me about 6 months ago, and now I'm in the process of transfering thousands of CDs and DVDs onto several large hard drives. I'm kind of excited to get rid of all these disks too, though I'm worried about the reliability of HDs (these are WD). So, I think what we need now is an
When/if BR becomes dominat, I'll just copy the movies I buy onto the hard drives, and reburn them on a BR-RW when I want to watch a movie on a player, if I have to. Maybe by then, they'll have players or TVs with USB ports that are able to read popular media formats of an external device. There are already DVD players that read MPEG, DivX, Xvid, MP3, OGG, JPG, Gif, PNG, etc. off a disc (I have one). Just a matter of time.
These type of drives usually see use in optical jukeboxes first.
Here is one such example;
http://www.storageflex.com/nsm.htm
We don't mind paying $2000 per drive for our optical silos because we can store many TB of data on them. This is great for imaging systems.
The limitations of this drive might be because it is designed for such use. Though I'd imagine to see SCSI and not IDE as the interface.
Well, there you have it everyone. The question is "how long does it take to burn 25GB with the first Blu-Ray burner?"
From the first releases of HD-DVD movies, even encoded with the more efficient MPEG4.
The Last Samurai: 28GB,
Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles: 26GB,
The Phantom of the Opera: 25GB,
Jarhead: 25GB.
The Bourne Identity: 23GB
Serenity: 20GB,
The Fugitive: 18GB,
Doom 17GB.
None of these movies could fit in a single layer HD-DVD, and some came very close to filling up the double sided one. Current capacity (double layer), Blue Ray: 50GB, HD-DVD: 30GB. but that's just the beginning. The highest achieved for the 2 formats: Blue Ray: 100GB, HD-DVD: 45GB. The theoretical max: Blue Ray 200GB, HD-DVD: 60GB. I'm really surprised that M$ and Inter support HD-DVD, obviously the Blue Ray has a lot more to offer capacity wise.
Hey baby....
Wanna stroke my beard?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This is because the CD-ROM (Mode 1, "Data") standard added an additional ECC layer which takes up aditional bytes.
You can still use these extra bytes for extra capacity if you use Mode 2 (VCDs use this), at the cost of ECC.
In either case, the CD (assuming 1x read) still rotates at exactly the same speed, whether it is a CD-DA, CD-ROM Mode 1 or CD-ROM Mode 2 disc.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
At Fist I thought Blue-ray drives were not going to be compatible with standard DVD's. So I became a fan of the HD-DVD format. Now this Blue-ray drive does support DVD's . Why don't they make a Blue-ray player that's supports DVD's? I think that would probably kill HD-DVD?
Try SeaGate... I left WD in the dust when they lowered their warrantees from 3 yr to 1 yr. That shows that they have no confidence in their own products. Seagate, meanwhile, upped their warrantees to 5 years!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I expect either I or some of my clients will have a Blu-Ray burner for data archiving before the end of this year. This would be great for archiving DV masters of home videos. Come Christmastime, I might be tempted to buy either a Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD player. I'll probably buy the kind I'm already using for data.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not every machine carries IDE/SATA. To enough people, a cheap short term solution will never be the case. U320 can do the job, and it may have to the way things work with IDE->SCSI conversions only able to match speed for these initial drives.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.