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A Triple-Standard Disk
On the heels of the news of Toshiba's proposed double-standard disk comes word that Warner Brothers engineers have applied for a patent on a triple-standard disk. The new disk would offer HD-DVD and Blu-Ray on one side and standard DVD on the other. From the article: "Warner's plan is to create a disk with a Blu-ray top layer that works like a two-way mirror. This should reflect just enough blue light for a Blu-ray player to read it okay. But it should also let enough light through for HD-DVD players to ignore the Blu-ray recording and find a second HD-DVD layer beneath." See the patent application, filed last month.
Thank God that a disc has only two sides.. oh wait..
gtkaml.org
...include two discs in the Amaray case?
[...]
Naaah. That's too easy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don't look any better than DVDs on my 27" TV and I'm not spending $2,000 on a TV just so I can drool over PlayStation 3 games. Therefore I would recommend that you not buy this product. Furthermore I haven't met a single person who wants an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc player due to the crippling DRM and marginal increase in quality.
This was published last month, not filed. It was filed last December.
They can phase out old DVDs even faster now... you're paying extra for the HD content anyway, so why not buy the HD player? Seems like a new approached to planned obsolescence by Warner.
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Given that all of the players involved are interested in achieving "network lock in" with their proprietary technology and their proprietary players why would they incorporate all standards at once.
Secondly, it obviates the need to replace all of your DVDs or buy a new player or two.
Finally with all of the different standards, Sony might mess up their DRM and allow their drives to play the disk.
Far too consumer friendly to work!
The logical next step is the Fusion Disc, with five competing video formats on one side and an audio format on the other side. Also, lots of comfort strips.
If you buy a movie stored on one of these discs, do you have rights to six copies of that movie (the three on the disc + three archival copies?)
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
when can i eat the new sandwich?
I'm not spending $2,000 on a TV just so I can drool over PlayStation 3 games.
Err, HD capable sets are doing just fine without PS3 and if you're fine with your NTSC signal on your 27" tv, then more power to you. However, just because YOU don't think it's worth it, just because YOU don't see a need to watch HD content doesn't mean squat for the rest of the populace. Fact is, lots of people are plunking money down for new tv's that are capable of playing HD, you the manufs don't really care about.
BTW, the largest set in my house is a 27", but it gets used maybe 1/10th the amount that our 21" tv is. So I'm just as much a luddite as you. But it's obvious that every passing day, you and I are increasingly the minority.
While working on the road for on The GLOBE Program, I routinely explained to fellow passengers that this was an unprecedented case of hundreds of thousands of kids collecting real environmental data in a dozen areas for use by top scientists, and was a cooperative project between EPA, NSF, NASA, NOAA, Dept of State & Dept of Ed. I soon learned the their universal, blinking amazement was never for the kids/schools/data part, but for the cooperation of 6 gummint agencies.
This is like that. Someone dare propose that all three systems coexist in a win-win-win scenario? Surely these are the end times.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This one is really going to confuse my Mom!!!
______________________________________________
Free iPods? Its legit. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here!
definition: "Should" - a work that should never be allowed in describing a patent.
So they really haven't figured out how to do it? So what they file the patent hope they can figure it out and if not hope someone else does so they can sue them?
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Did anyone else imagine Wile E Coyote in a lab coat at the ACME factory?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
For one thing this probably isnt as perfect a solution as it seems because the disks will obviously be significantly more expensive than even the more expensive of either bluray or hddvd. For example, it will have to have that super expensive surface coating that bluray disks require since the wavelength of laser is so short (to prevent scratching).
But the more interesting thing is that if these were to go mainstream among the media providers, then success of each format in terms of players sold will be determined much more simply by price relative to the other rather than by a combination of many more factors such as movie catalog/availability, disk cost, what kinds of disks friends have, etc.
So, which of the two types of player is intrinsically cheaper and by how much? Does HDDVD have a huge advantage in the area of cost to manufacture players?
Once again Slashdot shows its abyssmal understanding of patents.
This patent was not FILED August 10, 2006. It was PUBLISHED August 10, 2006. The actual filing date, shown later in the publication, is December 22, 2005.
It may seem a trivial, but in the digital media market, eight months can make the difference between being a leader and a follower.
How is this a step in the right direction - a common, unified standard? While this technology allows end-user technology ambiguity, it's not solving the dual standard dilemma. We need one standard.
Also, how would a dual-standard drive handle this if one should ever come to exist? Would the drive automagically see the BlueRay disc, the HD-DVD, or simply refuse to play because both are present (really bad design)?
And of course, will this increase the cost to the end user?
$ man woman *
-bash:
Now studios can release one disc that is pretty much universally playable. This should go a long way to encourage the adoption of HD-DVD AND Blu-ray. If these discs become prevalent, and people realize that they could upgrade their DVD player to a Blu-ray player, and still play their last 10 movies, but in higher quality on their HDTV, they might actually consider the upgrade. As opposed to now, where people might not upgrade because they must buy NEW movies and start a NEW collection in order to enjoy what they see as "slightly" better picture quality over DVD (as well as massive DRM!).
If I was a movie studio executive, I would support these triple-layer discs at any cost.
Please... oh please... don't allow this obvious patent to be approved.
--WooooHoooo--
"Warner's plan is to..." "This should reflect enough light..." "...to read it okay." "But it should also..." I'm not even sure they believe it'll work either with as much speculative wording as that.
The only way either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD is going to gain enough momentum to become a standard is if they release it an a non obtrusive way. Most people simply wont spend the money on the new equipment needed and there is a strong reluctance to having to "upgrade" their movies to a new "standard" this give an option for those who might see a desire for HD support down the road without having to make a full commitment. I know that I would probably pay a few dollars more for the option of having the higer formats available even though I dont have either player yet.
"Warner's plan is to create a disk with a Blu-ray top layer that works like a two-way mirror. This should reflect just enough blue light for a Blu-ray player to read it okay. But it should also let enough light through for HD-DVD players to ignore the Blu-ray recording and find a second HD-DVD layer beneath."
Oh, this sounds like just a wunnerful guarantee of problem-free operation on all the drives, Blu-ray or HD-DVD, that were designed and produced with really tight tolerances before this mutant format was conceived. No problems with marginal signals at all, nosireee, we promise.
-k
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
wow that actually pretty cool how they did that
GI
you lucky barstool, i wanted it
Try the octaginator.
It seems like 2 markets were formed when the companies couldn't agree on one HD disk standard. Some of the same companies that couldn't agree are now going to step in with disks that work in both markets. Kind of lame.
I guess what I am saying is that if there was only BluRay, there would be no need for a disk that had BluRay, HDdvd and DVD. Convenient.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
for next-gen media.
If one studio attempts to license the proposed CD format, how will it get made in a low cost manner? More specifically, you will need at least one manufacturer to build the machine to burn the media on a large scale.
Who in their right mind will build the production equipment for a -single- studio owned technology? Say they don't make the manufacturer pay extortion, what cd production house will invest in the hardware for a -single- studio?
At this point some joker must have the patent for 4:3 on one side, 16:9 on the other.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is NOT a "triple-standard disk". It's a hybrid Blu-Ray/HD-DVD disk, which happens to also use the other side for data storage (as opposed to a label). It's the hybrid nature of the two high-definition formats on one side that is worthy of excitement. It would be relatively trivial to, for example, combine the HD-DVD/DVD hybrid with a Blu-Ray surface on the other side. By the standards of this headline, that's a "triple-standard disk" even though it is just an extansion of Toshiba's project.
The significance of this is that it may allow the high-def format war to reach a compromise, or at least allow disc producers to hedge their bets by releasing high-def content in both formats. People might not buy Toshiba's HD-DVD/DVD hybrid right now because if Blu-Ray wins out, they're left with essentially a standard definition disc. However, ANYBODY interested in high-def could buy a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hybrid and know it will work. Including the movie on standard DVD as well is nice for those of use that don't have a high-def player yet, but I'd actually prefer it to be on a second disk rather than the other side.
Double-sided DVDs are nothing new. I own several double-sided DVDs; usually widescreen on one side and 4:3 on the other. They're a hassle because you can't put either side on anything that might cause a scratch (like a table with a grain of sand). Both sides can be dual-layer and will play in any standard player.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of disk drives in this country. The Seagate Cheeta was the disk to own. Then the other guy came out with a two-standard disk. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the ST-506. That's two-standards and an extra channel. For speed. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to three standardss. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling two platters and an extra channel. Speed or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five platters.
Sure, we could go to three platters next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a wider channel and call it the Cheeta turbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-side game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Seagate is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If two sides is good, and three sides is better, obviously five sides would make us the best fucking disk that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the disk game by clinging to the two-platter industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five platters is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more sides in there. I don't care how. Make the platters so thin they're invisible. Put some on the outside. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth platter in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety disk" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make disk history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five platters can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five- platter disk becomes the storage tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Toshiba, working on fucking electrics. Rotary platters, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Sony's wake and make shitty game consoles. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Sony is the day I leave the disk game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, saving with anything less than five plattess is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your ide cable."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Seagate is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five platters, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another channel on that fucker, too. That's right. Five platters, two channels, and make the second one SCSI. You heard me--the second strip is SCSI. It's a whole new way to think about data storage. Don't question it. Don't say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we're on the edge--the razor's edge--and I feel like dancing.
The published application was filed December 22, 2005, but it claims priority to a provisional application filed Dec. 23, 2004. So, this application will be treated as if it was filed on December 23, 2004, just over 18 months ago. (U.S. patent applications typically publish 18-months after the filing of the earliest application to which they claim - 35 U.S.C. 122)
Underneath drm formats some standards are used.
But this matters very little since those standards are hidden to the consumer or third parties.
The result is a non-standard format.
Only with a near monopoly can a non-standard survive.
Normally, if company 'A' sells proprietary music files, and company 'M' sells the the same music in another non-standard format, and company 'X' sells similar media, company 'X' will win.
I had somewhat bad experience with regular double-sided DVD disks lately - several I bought were warped resulting in unplayable areas. Does anyone else have the same experience ?
...I've found that the biggest reason not to get a high-def player right now, is the damn selection. There's a bunch of movies I'd love to see in HD, but none of them are available and around here there's not a single HD channel to be had. Fortunately, the pirates have already solved my problem. 1080i30 movies (24p with 3:2 pulldown) are readily available for download, and is from what I've understood perfectly competitive with current Blu-Ray movies (15-20GB MPEG2). Not to mention I can store them on my file server, which I can't with the others unless I wait another five years for "Managed copy" in Windows 2010. I'd still get a player if I could get most hollywood blockbusters though... but as it is? Meh.
No, and it contains an important lesson. Never assume that the media companies are complete idiots. There are some smart people working for them, just like Microsoft has some smart people working for them.
want HD-DVD. More space means higher bitrates means better picture. Blockbuster dvds from major studios look fine on even a 27" crt. Obscure anime from small publishers look pretty awful. Anime distributers often don't have access to masters, let alone the time to do anything with them.
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Yeah, see, none of that is a real problem because there are so few Blu-Ray/HD-DVD devices on the market. Believe me, there were DVD players produced in the early days that have huge problems with "modern" dual-layer DVDs. Even my Zenith, produced two years after DVD's debut, could barely handle some discs released towards the end of 2000 (and later, of course).
Anyone who has bought (or will buy over the next year) a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD device should be an early adopter educated enough to know that a couple years down the line they may have to replace that hardware for reasons such as this fancy triple-format disc (if it ever sees production). Either that, or they should be making sure their device has upgradeable firmware that can accommodate such changes.
HV-DVD, Blu-Ray, DVD all on one disc. Cool.
But with the studios and RIAA/MPAA being the way they are, you will be licensed to view/listen to only one format.
Just what the shelf life of these would be. Assuming it works and they figure out how to press the disk it sounds VERY touchy.
:(
How much of a scratch would it take to mangle the BluRay data that is being read off this semi-transparent layer. I thought those were pretty sensitive to start with.
How about the stability? Will any of the optical properties change over time of any of the several compononts involved? Will your new Disney disc last til your kid is out of elementary school?
All sounds like trouble waiting to happen to me.
Especially as the patent included a lot of SHOULDs to start with
oh well, pretty much a mental exercise as i am not going for either one for quite some time.
i want a hd-dvd layer meshed with a vinyl album. if you can do that without scratching the disc, I would be impressed.
Such an obvious way to make a consumer pay extra unnecessarily will help kill the next gen formats. And I think that's a good thing.
I call your triple-standard player and raise you a quintuple-standard BluRay/HDDVD/DVD/CD/floppy disk hybrid.
Bonus: If you punch a hole in the lower right corner, you instantly get double the storage!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
So this actually looks like one of the first articles on slashdot that actually covers a real patent. Not some stupid lame one-click, conjugation, whatever other simple and obvious nonsense. This format for these disks actually seems fairly patent worthy.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
As anoying as two formats probably will be, its quite obvious both HD-DVD and blu-ray camps want to completly annihilate each other and exist in a monoploly.
If this disk was invented and publishers not aligned with either camp decided to go multi-format on the one disk, what would the ramifications be if either consortium decided to make things difficult??
Both sides have a lare amount of studios who could make things very difficult for anyone who didn't want to fall in line.
This could have the making of another huge anti-trust case.
FMD would have been a better development than Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
DVD, CD technology are both crap, I'd say at least 25% of the time I have problems with playing a DVD (especially if children have been near it).
Surely we can come up with a better medium than these coasters. I have the feeling that 'Big Money' are more interested in built in obsolesence and format lock-in than in longevity and useability.
I'm still waiting for a digital storage/retrieval medium thats better than a hard-drive, surely that can't be too difficult?
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
One for BluRay, one for HD-DVD?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
In other news, Toshiba and Schick have filed applications for approval of a proposed merger of their two companies. When asked about the merger Toshiba representatives replied that with Warner Bro's having added a third level Toshiba wanted to push the envelope even farther. Schick has already demonstrated a willingness to keep adding new levels in order to look new and innovative and Toshiba wants that kind of vision behind their own products, particularly as they look ahead to Quad-layer DVD's (to be called Quatro DVD's) and even on to merging future DVD lines with Schick's razor lines: a 5-blade, 5-layer device that will let you watch movies as you peel off the top layer of facial skin.
I love my sig.
But I wasn't talking about the effective filing date -- just the filing date of the linked document. You are correct, however, that for examination and patent term purposes, the date of the provisional filing is used.
The cynic in me had the same exact thought.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
I'm sorry but I don't want to handle media anymore. Today, I just rip my music CDs and use files from a huge library.
So forget the whole "which standard am I going to buy" nightmare and the costly playback unit that goes along with that decision.
Get your Mac mini and "iTV" right here. It gives you a really good operating system and amazing H.264/AAC streaming to your living room. It's an iPod for your TV.
They're on to something here (duplicate royalties aside) but trying to make the Blu-Ray side translucent is a bad idea when the other side already IS translucent! Putting a Blu-Ray on the flip side of a 3 layer disk (2 layers of HD-DVD, 1 of DVD) would be a good move though, and they could just let the Blu-Ray side be Blu-Ray - This would probably not work with a dual layer Blu-Ray anyway, which they will hopefully eventually come out with to get above 25GB on a disk. Personally, I really do hate double-sided disks though. I like to keep my movies in a CD holder instead of their cases so I can take them with me. When all the disks look alike (ie no silk-screen image on the top side) it's a real pain trying to tell them apart. I've pretty much decided on HD-DVD... I can't imagine that Toshiba is charging anywhere near what Sony would charge (being Sony) and I like the idea that I won't be paying for the studios to invest in new hardware to manufacture the disks since they can use standard DVD burners to pump out HD-DVD disks.
what a disk with that much dencity and the size of a laserdisk could hold...
is a 12" vinyl record..on one side, backed by a laserdisc with an SACD embedded into its centre. When I buy one, it will come with a complimentary sample of the new "minidisc within a betamax" unit. Sweet.
this reminds me of the whole disposable razor crap.
then:
Mach 3 has 3 blades.. then shieck was like: well we have 5 plus one on the back because one blade wasnt that bad.
now:
we have DVDs on one side and cda on the back... to we have DVDs and HD dvds to we have HD-DVD-Rays
are HD-DVD-Rays as bad as X-rays?
... okay now im rambling.
Even if such a thing could be done, it would probably be the WORST of both HD technologies. Perhaps a single layer of each? A single layer of Blueray is not enough for later. A single layer of HD-DVD is not enough for later. Then you get a damn "flippy disc", so there is no cool label, no side you can safely sit the disc on while moving them around, and no light protection if you forget and leave it on the desk and the sun shines on it for a while.
On top of that you have to pile the licensing fees for all three on top of the cost of the disc. And I have a feeling such a disc would be unreliable, at best.... playing in some devices and not others.
What is needed is a affordable, DUAL FORMAT HD PLAYER, not disc. Then the consumer can then "not care" what media they end up. In an ideal world, all blueray AND HD-DVD discs would both have DVD layers (on the same media side as the HD), so the consumer can also play the movie on the billions of existing devices out there, many that they already own.
Oh well... dream on...
Will this be a triple-standard disc, or standardless?
It reminds me of those DualDiscs that the record companies tout as having a CD side and a DVD side. Guess what? The "CD side" is not a Compact Disc at all, it fails to meet the Red Book standards and therefore won't play in all CD players. Actually, because of the extra thickness of the disc, they can jam up or damage slot-loading players.
The same problems could doom this triple format.
"Spaceballs" was released as a two-sided DVD. Same deal, 4:3 on one side, 16:9 on the other. That was MGM which is now part of the Sony octopus.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm assuming they use some sort of filter to reflect the blue light but not the other spectrum... why couldnt they do this with X number of different wavelengths, each with it's own "layer" or reflective filter... couldnt you theoretically have a really large storage capacity on the same size disc? instead of blue ray its "rainbow-ray"
The major studios might have been able to control piracy by phasing out DVDs and using BluRay or HD-DVD with HDCP (and BD+ or whatever they are calling it today) since no one has convincingly broken HDCP yet (not that I think this won't happen). The hardware control and the key revocation actually gave them a fighting chance technologically.
/. have said that the quality on DVDs is good enough and they wont upgrade - I won't because I'm a poor grad student who cannot afford to spend a 1000+ bucks on a HDTV because in the end its still a TV. Even if HDCP isn't broken they've left a gaping hole because CSS certainly is and so people can buy these combo discs and still pirate the DVD versions of movies using their DVD-RW drives like they are doing now.
This move is shooting themselves in the foot - lots of people on
Ofcourse they are caught between a rock and a hard place - consumers don't want to upgrade from existing equipment that many of them think is good enough and the stuios want consumers to upgrade so that they can sell the same content again in a new format and control piracy more effectively - thus the combo disc. Ultimately the worst case scenario is people like the combo discs so they cant stop piracy and people still choose not to upgrade, and they have to sell these things at prices similar to regular dvds now or people won't buy it. I suspect this will likely happen if they implement this.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
As of June, 41% of all TV sales in the US were HDTVs.
In other words, more than half of the people who bought a new TV this year bought a standard-def set. Way to make the GP's point for him...
1920x1080 luma and 960x540 chroma, downsampled to 1280x720 luma and 960x540 chroma, is still a huge improvement over 704x480 luma and 352x240 chroma. In theory, a 1280x720 pixel LCD or plasma could use ClearType style rendering on the RGB subpixels and get the equivalent of 1920x720 luma. And yes, there are a lot of native 1080p displays in the wild, which double as computer monitors. Besides, even a cheap 1080i CRT displays 1080p at full resolution, with a flicker that's usually too small to notice unless you're looking at test cards.
With all the cost of tripple enginering these players to work across the board, it would just seem more logical to put an effort into deciding on a single standard, lowering cost for manufactures and consumers alike.
So if there are even slight imperfections or smudges on the disc from use, it will be completely unreadable and I'll have to buy another...
Wait, why do I get the feeling this is on purpose...
...why couldn't they just get together on HDTV or Blu-Ray in the first place?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you can get this cobbled-together monstrosity to work, you could do something equally clever that would make better use of the storage capacity than storing three identical copies of the same movie in three different formats.
As it is, the average DVD has glitches playing in some players. A randomly-selected DVD player probably has only a 98% chance of playing a randomly-selected DVD. It is certain that these disks will play more reliably in one format or the other--and not as reliably as a native-format disk does.
And they _have_ to cost more to manufacture than a single-format disc.
This makes about as much sense as a vinyl phonograph record recorded at 33-1/3 RPM on one side and 45 RPM on the other. That never happened, and this isn't going to happen, either.
The only thing this has going for it is an appeal to trinitarian theology. (But which format is the Father, which is the Son, and which is the Holy Spirit?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'll have to buy the white album again.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Do ya get the impression that when they are all done these disks and players are going to be more temperamental than anything we've seen before? You'll have to set your media center up in an Intel clean room to keep your player from skiping out to la-la land half way through the movie.
Wait a second... Who do I speak to about my quintuple-standard disk idea? Lets throw on VHS and BETA versions aswell. Does anyone else think that this multi-format market flooding is absurd? Hell, the compact disc is still holding some pretty decent ground against these new-fangled mp3 things. What's wrong with regular animorphic DVD? I think the HD/DVD and Blu Ray squads jumped the gun by a couple of years, just look at the sales numbers that are way below expectations. And don't gimme that "well the players are still too expensive" arguement.
This signature has The Force
Let's say these discs become ubiquitous... and so would dual or even triple drives... as in, the vast majority of the market would have a dual (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD) or even triple (Blu-Ray / HD-DVD / DVD) drive. Wouldn't it make sense for a producer to think "instead of putting the same content on it in 3 different forms, why don't I put the movie on the Blu-Ray layer, the extras on the HD-DVD layer, and whatever else I can think of like a computer game or something on the DVD layer?"
Then again, I hardly ever see double-sided DVDs (I just saw one, which had a pan&scan version on one side, and the widescreen version on the other side *cringe*) - even though that would help tons with picture quality if they'd keep the extras off the movie side (can use a higher bitrate encoding then).
My ass. You can buy a 27inch HDTV for $500 or less and a LCD HDTV of 26 inches for $600ish.
Hmmm... Pie...
... by the words "Warner Brothers engineeres"?
The thought of the media companies creating the hardware on which we'll have(*) to use to to buy their content worries me.
* Of course, "have" just means "until someone hacks a way around it".
Let me get this straight.. they're calling them "Double standard" disks? and no one thought that might be a bad name?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I can't ever decide which side to place down when I carelessly toss it on my dusty desk.
but DVDs are not encoded with Xvid or divx. Poorly encoded dvds don't give better quality than that. Reds and blacks are blocky, colors are faded, lines indistinct, picture is grainy, etc, etc. The Nadesico dvds, for instance, suck rocks. I notice on a mediocre 24" Sony. Anyone looking at them would notice, and anyone who's a fan of the series would care. My point is, you don't need an HDTV set to benefit from HD-DVD. If anime publishers had larger budgets (better encoding and/or fewer eps per disk), this wouldn't be the case. But if wishs where horses beggers would ride.
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$70 per disk per movie?
No. No thanks. I'll wait for a more open standard, or one that offers real gains in visual quality before I go and pawn a kidney.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is getting ridiculous. We should just get movies on little mini-drives (like thumb drives) we can pop into our TVs to play the movie, screw the moving parts and all too. I would have said a non-media like the online stores basically have, but the bandwidth and DL speed isn't up to par yet. But of course the cost of the mini-drives would be huge in comparison to a new age DVD. Maybe places like Best Buy could download the movies then we just have to bring our mini-drive there and pay a fee to transferee the data, save on the DL time too. My idea is about as far fetched as trying to put all the formats on one disc I'd say.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Actually, from what I understand, this is just one of those idea patents that we all love to hate. Most people around seem to assume that somehow vague idea patents are equivalent with software patents, but this is one of the proofs that it's not quite so.
Basically what their patent says is "you know, if you could put a layer in between that reflects wavelenght X but is transparent to wavelenght Y, you could have one laser type (hence drive) read one layer and the other laser type read the other one." Which is squarely in the "bloody obvious" category for anyone with even grade school knowledge of physics, or who ever had a black CD, or whatever. What it doesn't say is _what_ material should one put there, and which actually does that.
Basically it doesn't actually tell you "ok, mix material X with material Y, press at Z degrees, and there you go." It doesn't give you a recipe to actually make one of those dual-standard DVDs. Which, frankly, was the whole purpose of patents. It's just the idiotic kind of modern-day patent that patents a vague _idea_ and then waits to sue anyone who figures out how to implement it.
It used to be that, say, the patent for the sewing machine involved the _exact_ mechanism and needle used to make a working one. (And got invalidated when someone showed samples of such needles produced centuries ago.) Nowadays it would just involve the generic idea of a machine that sews, without actually knowing how to make one. And you'd just sue anyone who actually figured out how to make one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against patents. I know what role they (were supposed to) serve. But such idea patents are idiotic and defeating the whole purpose. The idea was to foster innovation and encourage people to study new ways to do something (or do something new.) Blanket generic idea patents just forbid everyone from even trying to compete. E.g., if you let people patent the generic idea of a machine that sews, you just discouraged everyone from inventing a different kind, that does it in a completely different (and maybe better) way. If you let people patent generic stuff like "using any substance that reflects just one wavelength", you just discouraged everyone from researching a (maybe better or cheaper) such material. It's not a research stimulus, it's a grant to be a monopoly. But I digress.
At any rate, don't expect to see DVDs phased out just yet, because someone still has to invent that material.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This new standard means more bullcrap, not more movuies. Movies last about 2 hours. When they got all that extra space on DVDs they didn't give us MORE movies, or longer movies. They just filled the extra space with crap. "The movie about the movie about the movie", etc. Pointless time wasting by actors with a camera pointed at them (Interviews). God spare us from the TOC of the new disks, if they ever come out.
I said 1080p, not 1080p signal. The video on an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc is stored at 1080p at 24 frames per second, and the player converts it to 1080i for the TV's use.
How is 1080p at 24 frames per second any more display data than 1080i at 60 fields per second?
As if double standards were not bad enough...
yo.
What about the realiability of this? I'm assuming the respective formats already are pushing things, leaving little room for decreased reflectivity. Reminds me of the problems older CD-ROM drives had years ago when CD-Rs were a fairly new thing, as CD-Rs don't reflect as much light as normal CD-ROMs do. I could accept having reduced reliability on recordable media, but now they want to use such schemes on pre-pressed media? I wonder if recordable HD-DVDs will be more reliable in the future than this hybrid junk.
No one seems to see the potential here for super duper high density data disks. If the disks can hold info in all 3 formats at once then they can hold different data in all 3 formats at once. Therefore we may be able to have discs that have 100GB of data on them.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
It is indeed amazing how much Rube Goldberg systems have progressed. In fact I'd say that all OSes today as well as this new concept from Warner are all high tech Rube Goldbergs. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, Google it or hit Wookieepedia. Look it up!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Will they start putting different content on each layer?
Extra scenes, only for licensed Blu-Ray users?
I can see this happening with data disks, to double the storage density if they're cheap enough to produce, and if they aren't superceded soon by another, higher-density format.
-- Jamie