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."

Comments

screams of bullshit

[timmarhy]

another tech company crying to investment. take careful notice of the wording "designed" meaning they haven't made one yet.

-1 Redundant

[kjots]

While Toshiba has publicly announced its achievement of developing a triple-layer HD DVD-ROM (read only) disc...

Wow, a read-only ROM. Who'da thunk it?

</deadpan-mode>

a little misleading

[thedarknite]

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

Mark your calendars

[meta-monkey]

Combined with this story, I declare today, Thursday, January 11th 2007 to be the greatest news day in /. history.

Going a bit too far here?

[Constantine XVI]

What on earth happened to thinking like "640k ought to be enough for anybody"? Sometimes I think that rapid advances like this hurt programmers. If we have 100 GB discs, what encouragement do we have to make movies in 2160p that fit in 15 GB?

Making the box bigger makes it harder to think outside the box. Being unable to think outside the box kills creativity.

Re:Going a bit too far here?

[Jerf]

Movie bloat isn't as stupid as you think. As I'm sure many HDTV pirates are aware, it's quite possible to fit a 720p movie onto a DVD by using decent compression. So why do we need these new, highly inconvenient disc formats? Is going from 720 to 1080 really worth going from $50 players to $500?

Fine, I'll spell out why movie "bloat" is a stupid thing to worry about. Well, actually, since I don't want to type it I'll give it to you in algorithm form:

1. Think of a reason program bloat is bad.
2. Realize it doesn't apply to movies.
3. Repeat until you run out of reasons.

Pirates are in for a shock if they think the next generation of movies are going to compress that much better; one of the reasons for the new formats is that they are going to start out by using the same codecs the pirates have been using. 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. (Actually, I expect the pirates who are distributing the movies already realize this; I hope they're steeling themselves for the bitching to come when the next generation doesn't work that way...)

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.

Re:Going a bit too far here?

[StikyPad]

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.

10 Layers?

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:10 Layers?

[timeOday]

They can dump both HD-DVD *and* Blu-Ray, for all I care, and movies in general. Just give me a reliable, high-capacity, cheap removable storage for my own data. Coupling the storage media with the content just turns it into a food fight between huge companies, and makes it ten times harder to move from one format to a superior one.

Ritek Quality

[BillGatesLoveChild]

Someone asked about Ritek's media quality. There is a huge variance in quality of recordable media. Usually you don't find out until you lose an archive :-o. Ritek aren't the worst, but they're not the best either. Check this link:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

51 Gbs is better, but still far short of my 320Gb HDDs for backup (and I've got 1Tb of disks). A losing battle. Maybe Blockbuster will just give up and fill the ailes with Seagates to rent by the evening?

Read that as 3 Layers Today, Ten LAWYERS Tomorrow

[Nova Express]

Which, considering the current state of U.S. patent law, might be every bit as accurate...

The spec can't be changed now

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Title is a little misleading...

[AusG4]

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.

Re:Ritek?

[excelblue]

Many of the lists are just quite picky. If you take a look, most of the good ones are extremely hard to obtain. Of all the ones you could easily find, Ritek is probably one of the best of them (with the exception of Taiyo Yuden).

Their CDs come in about the quality of their DVD+RW's - that is, although they're not made to the quality of the best CDs, they rarely fail. Out of a spindle of 100 Ritek's, I get an average of about 2-3 coasters. Compare that with the average of 10-20 coasters per 100 of CMC's, or even more with the Moser Baer ones.

So, they're not that bad of a company. When comparing media that you could generally find anywhere, they're quite close to the top.

Re:Ritek?

[greylion3]

When choosing which media to buy, you have to take your DVD-burner into account.
I did that, and ended up buying Memorex 8x DVD-R with mediacode CMC MAG AE1, for my Hivision DRW3S121 (which is really a LiteOn 1213S with a slightly different firmware).

I bought 200 of them, I have burned 110 or so by now, and I've had ZERO coasters. Of course, they were all burned with dvd+rw-tools in Linux(Debian), which might be why I have such good "mileage" with DVD-burning.

This website; http://www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia was a great help for determining which ones to buy.

PS: I remember Ritek as total crap from when I bought CD-R discs, so I avoid them like the plague. Ritek had their chance, and they blew it. Completely. Never again.

Pricing model

[professorfalcon]

Maybe they should go with the pizza pricing model: a base price for one layer, and $1.99 for each additional layer. Discount if you get a salad with it.

Re:What happens when you scratch it?

[clickclickdrone]

>What happens when it's scratched, I wonder
You lose 8 movies, 3200 MP3s and 6800 photos. On the plus side, you still have another 314 movies, 789,543 MP3s and 142,323 photos.