HD Recorder Can Use Standard DVDs

Stonent1 writes "Early next month Panasonic is going to release a DVD recorder that can store HD content on standard DVDs. The new device is expected to be a boon for the backer of the Blu-ray format; Blu-ray uses discs several times more expensive than standard DVD media. While the DVD discs won't have the capacity of a Blu-ray disc, the content will be of similar visual quality. 'The company said it will start selling three models of new DVD recorders capable of recording full HD programs on conventional DVD discs on November 1. The high-end model with a 500-gigabyte hard disk drive is likely to sell for 130,000 yen, Matsushita said.'" Update: 10/02 16:18 GMT by Z : Rewritten to clarify.

Comments

Who cares how expensive the media is....

[ISoldMyLowIdOnEbay]

....if the machine itself is so expensive?

Why Blu-Ray?

[CastrTroy]

I'm guessing that this player just writes MPEG4 files to a DVD, which it can then play back. Why do we even need Blu-Ray. Couldn't a much cheaper device be made with no blu-ray capabilities that just records the HD Content straight to MPEG4 on DVD? That would actually big a major blow to both HDDVD and BluRay.

Re:Why Blu-Ray?

[lordofthechia]

You mean like HD Divx Players?

http://www.divx.com/products/hw/browse.php?c=7

Re:Why Blu-Ray?

[Jartan]

It could be made, but it couldn't store nearly as much at nearly as high a quality as they can with a Blu-ray.

Your statement is of course true but it's a case of 12 hours vs 2 hours. A pressed 8.5gb DVD is extremely cheap and plenty large enough to store a single HD movie at a level of quality that will please even a large portion of enthusiasts.

The hardware to playback such levels of compression would be slightly more expensive but in general they wanted to change formats anyways on purpose.

Re:Why Blu-Ray?

[frieko]

True, but the dirty little secret of the nex-gen format war is that you don't need high capacity AND better codecs than DVD, you only need one or the other. A plain old DVD can easily store a high definition, high quality movie-length clip, if it's encoded in x264. The only benefit of using blue-laser discs for movies is that they can continue to charge the higher price for the discs long after they become trivial to manufacture.

Why is the medium so important?

[dada21]

We're talking about a digital world, where the medium is far less important than the codec. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, whatever -- they're all about taking digital information, decoding it, and displaying it.

Since most of our movies are XViD (including our homemade videos), we've generally stopped using disc formats entirely. If I burn the XViD to CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray, it's still the data and codec that counts, not the medium.

Yes, people want to know if a given disc will work with their player, which is one reason why we need medium formats. Yet in a relatively free market, you'd see many multi-medium drives that work with almost anything (see most $49 DVD players today), so I'm guessing the number one reason for making new medium formats is control and DRM.

Is there any market reason for worrying about the medium, rather than the CODEC?

Re:Would someone please clarify

[Hal_Porter]

As far as I can tell from the extraordinarily sparse FA, that's all we know. The article made less sense than the summary

Isn't that the slashdot equivalent of dividing by zero?

OH SHI-

Re:Scru Blu

[Shrubbman]

Blu-Ray has an optional second layer of DRM overtop the required AACS layer, BD+.

Note the required bit I just mentioned, on HD-DVD the AACS layer is optional but on Blu-Ray it is a standard requirement for all commercially-pressed discs. I remember reading about this some months back about some smaller indie studios only releasing on HD-DVD simply because they could forego paying license fees to the AACS people (fees that cut into limited profit margins) and just release their discs DRM-free. That's not an option on Blu-Ray.

Re:Would someone please clarify

[pla]

So is this some type of hybrid/dual laser device? Or is it a blu ray that uses the blue laser to record on conventional DVDs? Or what exactly?

It almost certainly has dual lasers, as do most recorders, but that has nothing to do with what it does...

Until they release more specs I can only speculate, but the press release makes it obvious enough - This simply contains a perfectly ordinary DVD burner, to which it writes MPEG-4 data on a normal DVD using the FS layout expected by BR drives.

Just as you can burn a DVD filesystem to a CD, you can just as easily burn a BR or HD filesystem to a DVD. They simply don't hold as much, requiring either loss of quality or limited duration (or both).

Now, why anyone would want to buy a recorder that costs more than the difference in price of recordable discs over the practical lifetime of that player while burning only ultra-low quality content, ya got me. The coolness factor, I guess? Personally, I plan to wait for dual-format next-gen burners and for one or the other's writeable discs to drop a tolerable price.

Re:Storage Capacity?

[swillden]

So if 1,000 GB is 381 hours, 1 GB is 2.62467191601049868766 hours. Yeah, 2 and a half hours per GB.

You flipped that over -- it should be 2.6 GB per hour, not 2.6 hours per GB.

So a dual-layer DVD will hold about 3 1/3 hours. If they're getting more than that, they must be doing something different (disclaimer: I didn't RTFA and have no idea what they're claiming).