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Three HD Layers Today, Ten Layers Tomorrow
Marcus Yam writes "While Toshiba has publicly announced its achievement of developing a triple-layer HD DVD-ROM (read only) disc with a capacity of 51 gigabytes, Ritek is disclosing behind closed doors at CES its own achievements in multi-layer HD optical media. Ritek claims to not only have been able to produce a three-layer and four-layer HD optical discs, but to have successfully designed HD media with a full 10 layers. The company says that its multi-layer process can be applied to both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats."
10 layer DVDs from Ritek?
When I've seen lists of various qualities of CDs, Ritek was usually near the bottom.
I wonder how they rank on DVDs. I've used Ritek DVD+RW and never had more problems with them than other DVD+RW media.
another tech company crying to investment. take careful notice of the wording "designed" meaning they haven't made one yet.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
FTA
"Ritek claims to not only have been able to produce a three-layer and four-layer HD optical discs, but to have successfully designed HD media with a full 10 layers."
"While those numbers do sound impressive, Ritek officials point out that the real barrier to this advancement is the lack of reader and writer laser diode technology to support the additional eight layers above the current standard."
I feel that the phrase I've highlighted kind of diminish their announcement. The summary implied to me that they were already able to prototype these new discs
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
And all I want are two... One blu-ray, one HD-DVD, both on the same disk. Then this whole stupid war can finish already.
Oh, and finally, there's a world of difference between "squeezing" a high-def movie onto a DVD, with visible quality degradation, and fitting one onto one of the new high-capacity disks, which at a decent quality still doesn't leave much room left over on the disk. Squeezing a DVD onto a CD is a cute parlor trick, and certainly works far, far better than it has any right to, but if you can't see the quality degradation you either lack the equipment or lack the discrimination. (I don't consider the latter to be a problem; in fact I tend to encourage people not to try to attain that sort of discrimination since it pretty much only leads to pain. Nevertheless, the differences are there.) And like I said, it's not going to be as big a win this time around; nothing will stop you from trying to squeeze a full HD moving onto a DVD5 or DVD9, because the codecs will pretty much let you use any bitrate you want, but it's not going to be without cost this time, and I expect most such movies will end up with their resolutions cut down in practice.
The HD-DVD spec was finalized a while ago. HD-DVD players can only read two layers, therefore no movie can ever have more than two layers. All this talk about more layers is just PR wanking.
There really is no three layer HD-DVD media. It's not part of the standard. They don't expect it to be a part of the standard until the end of 2008 at the earliest. Even still, Toshiba would likely need to decide between making current players obsolete, or reserving three layer HD-DVD for 'desktop' purposes, like backup and data storage.
This technology isn't likely going to ship with any Hollywood movies on it anytime soon.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
No more shrinking a movie by 75% with minimal quality loss (although I can still tell the difference); you're going to have to make harder choices about quality vs. resolution.
Unresampled HD movies are already all over the Usenet, at ~12GB each, which is about 7-8 hours of downloading on a 5Mbit connection. As connection speeds rapidly increase, this will become more of a non-issue.
At any rate, your observation is a bit off. Say we compress a 16x16 (256 pixel) image to an 8x8 (16 pixel) image, that's 1/4 the size. If you are satisfied with that 8x8 image, then there's no reason you can't compress a 128x128 image down to 8x8 as well, and in fact, it will look better because there was more information there to start with, which makes the interpolation more accurate. It's the quality of the source material which determines the quality of the result. The higher the quality you start with the better any compressed material will look.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That brings me to another point - write speeds. I can imagine how pleasant it would be for the early adopters, with 1x or 2x write speeds :) Start the burn, go on your annual vacation, and it's done when you're back. Muwahahaha.