Pioneer Promises 400GB Optical Discs

schliz writes "Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs."

Comments

Blu Ray

[CogDissident]

Good thing we all updated early to the blu-ray player, when something is about to come along to blow it out of the water, right at about the time when DVDs are reaching the point where people need more than 2-3 DVDs for games/movies (which is the point at which CDs were phased out, and floppy disks).

Re:Blu Ray

[ergo98]

Good thing we all updated early to the blu-ray player, when something is about to come along to blow it out of the water

There's always something better coming along. In this case it's pretty much just a research paper, not an actual product, so not all that exciting.

And Blu-ray had burnable 4-layer (100GB) discs two years ago.

Re:Blu Ray

[CastrTroy]

Well DVD Audio and SACD never really caught on, because CDs are good enough quality for 99% of the population. The advantages of BluRay over upconverted DVD is minimal at best. Even if BluRay catches on, I can't see anybody wanting to move to yet another format. Especially since we don't even have TVs that go beyond 1080p, which BluRay already supports.

Re:Blu Ray

[sexconker]

We had SDTV for nearly a century, and we had VHS for what, decades?

DVD's reign will be about 2 decades.

BluRay will be what, 1 decade?

HDTV will soon be replaced with SHDTV and other such nonsense.

Keep 'em spendin'!

Re:Blu Ray

[sexconker]

We do have TVs that support higher color depths though.

48 or even 36 bit color is something I would actually upgrade for.

Re:Blu Ray

[halsver]

From the article:
"The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use."

The tech they are using to read so many layers of information is impressive. However as the article states, this format is in no way intended for consumers.

Your BluRay hardware is probably safe for another five years or so.

Re:Blu Ray

[Hairy Heron]

The advantages of BluRay over upconverted DVD is minimal at best.

You must have a shitty tv or are blind to make such a stupid statement.

Re:Blu Ray

[zippthorne]

The advantages of BluRay over upconverted DVD is minimal at best.

Yeah, but not for the reason you're suggesting. The extra sharpness on the BluRay disk far surpasses your vaunted "upconverted" dvd.

The downside, though, is that they're not using the right compression scheme. Artifacts which I would not have noticed on DVD are readily apparent on BluRay disk. Either they need a better algorithm or a lot more bits.

Which is why many of us believed that HD-DVD was the better option: it was ostensibly cheaper than blu-ray, and both are really transition formats: just enough capacity to make the digital/HD TV revolution possible, but not quite enough to be the end-all storage media for the long haul.

Re:Blu Ray

[Lunix Nutcase]

Artifacts which I would not have noticed on DVD are readily apparent on BluRay disk.

Unless you are talking about film grain, I have no clue what "artifacts" you are talking about as Blu-Ray, outside of the early Mpeg-2 releases, and HD DVD both use more efficient compression codecs than DVD does. If you are talking about film grain, yes it is more apparent now due to the higher resolution which is able to resolve such detail now, but it is supposed to be there.

Re:Blu Ray

[sexconker]

A 500 GB HDD costs less than a single one of these discs, is reliable, rewritable a million times, lasts decades if properly stored, is already available, is faster, and requires no fancy hardware.

And there's always tape for true archiving.

Re:Blu Ray

[Ngarrang]

A 500 GB HDD costs less than a single one of these discs, is reliable, rewritable a million times, lasts decades if properly stored, is already available, is faster, and requires no fancy hardware.

And there's always tape for true archiving.

But you can't go out and buy ST:TNG seasons 1-7 on HDD.

Re:Blu Ray

[KalvinB]

The price point needs to be there as well. Companies need to pick a format and stick with it and get the price point low enough that people can afford the new media.

With the cartridge you could order as much storage as you needed for that particular game. Now companies are trying to find a one size fits all solution which will never exist. ###GB will never be enough for everyone.

My guess is that eventually solid state drives will replace the current one size fits all approach. You don't have to upgrade your computer every time a larger flash drive comes out.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean UHDTV, right?

Re:Blu Ray

[8282now]

A 500 GB HDD costs less than a single one of these discs, is reliable, rewritable a million times, lasts decades if properly stored, is already available, is faster, and requires no fancy hardware.

And there's always tape for true archiving.

But you can't go out and buy ST:TNG seasons 1-7 on HDD.

But as soon as a generous person does, no one else needs to ;)

Re:Blu Ray

[mpathetiq]

But you can download someone else's copy. For archival purposes, of course.

Re:Blu Ray

[sm62704]

Good thing we all updated early to the blu-ray player

Sucks to be you all, then. That's what happens when you adopt bleeding edge technology. Didn't any of you all learn anything from Betamax?

I have a nice big forty two inch flat screen analog TV set which I plan to watch until it stops working. As it's analog I have no need for hi-def movies; you might fool non-nerds into thinking a hi-def movie will look better on an analog TV, but we know better. I'll be buying a new DVD polayer shortly, as the one I have now is starting to have trouble with a few DVDs. I'll be spending about 10% as much as someone buying blu-ray.

I'll buy one of these new half-terrabyte drives for computer data backup - when the price becomes reasonable, which it always does.

Re:Blu Ray

[tb()ne]

I wouldn't worry just yet. It looks like the discs may actually be 400 GB Bluray discs that will be compatible with existing players.

Re:Blu Ray

[jedidiah]

You can't go out and buy those shows on some high capacity bluray disc either.

OTOH, it's not that much trouble to buy the original DVD format and make your own disk.

With a modern codec, the entire series should easily fit onto an entire bus powered 2.5 USB drive.

2 large bluray discs would work too...

Re:Blu Ray

[COMON$]

what do you mean "we", I'm still waiting for this.

Of course I am also one of those guys still waiting for the media-less age where our infrastructure is strong enough that Terabytes can be pushed across the wire in a trivial way.

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

You must have a shitty tv or are blind to make such a stupid statement.

No. The only people who really care whether they are watching an up-converted DVD or a blu-ray are are videophile snobs looking to justify the expense, who pause the movie to point at some intricate pattern in the corner of the screen and gloat.

The average person can tell them apart side by side. The average person, once instructed what to look for, can see the up-conversion artifacts.

But when actually watching a movie, it just doesn't really matter, and most people can't tell the difference in a blind test, where they get to watch a few seconds of a random scene movie in just one format and then decide. I've done this with a number of people with a few movies I have in both formats, on a number of different TVs from plasma to DLP.

Bluray is the better picture (and sound), there is no question, but the difference is incremental, and ultimately pretty minor. Especially when compared with the transition from VHS to DVD. --THAT-- is a transition the average person can tell apart easily, and then you factor in all the extra convenience of the DVD format in terms of form factor and features. DVDs were worth re-buying much of ones collection in, blu-ray? There's maybe a dozen movies I would consider re-purchasing, and even when buying new, I'll take the usually significantly cheaper DVD version 9 times out of 10.

Re:Blu Ray

[Ngarrang]

On a less piratical note, distributing movies on HDD would be interesting. The HDD would be in a study case and easily inserted into the player. The HDD would not have the same data through-put issues the optical media has, but would suffer being less reliable due to the mechanical nature of the HDD. And not as study if you drop it or allow your toddler to gnaw on it while they are teething.

Re:Blu Ray

[jedidiah]

Your pretentions don't counteract the fact that most of the population
just doesn't care and would be lucky to even NOTICE.

        Of course, it goes without saying that those alleged side-by-side comparisons
they have playing at places like Circuit City are total bullshit. Even the 'blind'
spouse can tell that much.
       

Re:Blu Ray

[WinPimp2K]

I'm still waiting for really fast rewriteable storage in the 1000+TB range. I am really tired of having to keep a wall full of optical media for my recorded entertainment. I want something the size of a stereo component or smaller that I can load up with (legally purchased - not rented!) materials and not have to worry about running out of space any time soon. So that means room for (at a minimum) 2K hours of CD quality audio tracks, and 500 hours hi-def (or better) video. It should also be eaily expandable and it should be a simple storage device - let the playback devices worry about the various codecs etc. - all it needs to do is push bytes around.

Obviously, I also want an easy and reasonably priced(8 bucks per movie, 2 dollars per hour of TV programs, 1 dollar per song) means of filling such an appliance with new content as well as free software for transferring all my existing CDs and DVDs to the big honking storage device.

Don't go all nit-picky on me about DRM and other pesky details. I'm just being the idea guy here. I know there will be problems to be addressed. It is up to the "content producers" to see if they are willing to sell at the price I am willing to pay. To help them out, if they will meet my prices, I'll accept some limitations on my rights - for example I won't worry about resale rights. I can sell the entire appliance including content, but not individual items off the device.

Re:Blu Ray

[jedidiah]

Some people call this Quad HD.

This is probably close to the max potential for 35mm film sources.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

STURDY for fucks sake

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Blu-ray and HD-DVD support the same compression schemes (for video at least). The difference was that some early blu-ray discs were using mpeg2 (the same that DVDs use) while HD-DVD movies often used one of the better codecs like h.264 and VC-1 already in the beginning of the "war".

Re:Blu Ray

[squiggleslash]

And it's not really going to go anywhere. More layers = exponentially lower yields. Despite the increased packaging overhead, it's generally better to ship multiple discs.

If anyone doubts this is an issue, you might want to ask why anyone went with blue lasers for the HD formats in the first place. DVD can be increased to 50G just by making the discs 10-11 layers. Everyone's known how to do that for a while, there's even a (real, disks being pressed, players being made) HD format called HD-VMD that works exactly that way. The DVD Forum could have made HD DVD use that format, and would have thus killed Blu-ray's chances completely by making profitable sub-$100 players, in massive quantities. The only cost-adding modification you'd have to make to a DVD drive to make this work is to dampen the noise due to the 3-5X spin increase.

It didn't happen because the media itself is just too expensive in practice. It costs 10x as long to press a ten layer DVD as a single layer DVD, and if any of those layers are corrupt, then the entire effort was wasted.

Re:Blu Ray

[jedidiah]

This has some wicked "sneakernet" potential.

It's like the pirates answer to Netflix.

A EEE and 2 drives, one full and one empty.

What will the media moguls do when the mundanes re-discover the swapping party?

Re:Blu Ray

[linal]

surely you would use solid state hard drives although they are still really expensive. But isn't that a step back to using cartridges?

Re:Blu Ray

[jedidiah]

I see pixelation in the bluray demo movies that BestBuy like to show.

It's sad really...

Fixating on stuff like this really doesn't pay off in the end.

Once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny...

Re:Blu Ray

[drinkypoo]

Small (say, 1.8") hard drives have VERY high G-shock resistance while turned off. (Shock-G resistance varies.)

Re:Blu Ray

[Broken Toys]

And that's a bad thing?

There are only probably two episodes I'd watch a second time. I'd certainly rewatch the episode where they blow up the Enterprise five times - stuck in another chronological anomoly.

Yeah, off topic, mod me into oblivion.

Re:Blu Ray

[TheSpatulaOfLove]

Honestly, I don't even need 1080p - aXX0 releases on TPB are good enough for me!

Re:Blu Ray

[trickno]

I seriously hope you are kidding. At best, a Human eye can distinguish 24 bit (16.7 million colors), although most experts expect that range to be around 10 million colors. At 36 bit you are looking at roughly what.... 68 BILLION colors. At 48 Bit... A little over 281 trillion colors. Seems to me to be a little overkill.

Re:Blu Ray

[Comen]

Call me a snob if you like, that does not change the fact I can tell the difference very quicly on my 56" HDTV between HD content and DVD content, especialy when the HD content was recorded with a HD camera, not upconverted from film.
To me the diffence is as drastic as going from VHS to DVD.
Some people just do not care, and that is fine.
My Dad can sit in front of his 15 year old tv and the picture has a red ghosting hue to it, and drives me nuts but when I tell him he should get a HDTV, he just tells me he likes the one he has just fine, this is a guy that watches every sporting event on TV, and that content is mostly shot with HD cameras, so he would really benefit from the upgrade, but would he care? NO

Re:Blu Ray

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I see pixelation in the bluray demo movies that BestBuy like to show.

If they are showing the exact same program on multiple sets simultaneously then it is not blu-ray, or at least not blu-ray over digital like HDMI. The reason is stupid, it is because of the DRM in HDMI. You can not split an HDMI signal, so it is legally impossible to run the same output to multiple sets.

Re:Blu Ray

[Madball]

IMHO 80% of the advantage comes from the sound perspective. Image-wise, Hi-Def is a moderate improvement. Sound-wise, Dolby 5.1 (or DTS or 6.1 or 7.1) is a giant improvement over Dolby Pro-Logic. Not only can you get real immersive sound effects, but the clarity of dialogue is improved a hundredfold.

Re:Blu Ray

[AdamTrace]

First, I don't think BluRay can still be called "bleeding edge", nor do I think it can be compared to Betamax. It might not ever be as popular as VHS and DVD, but it is now THE standard for home high-def disc entertainment (am I wrong?)

Recently, I've spent $2000 on a nice big TV, and $400 on a PS3. I sit smug in my home, watching upconverted DVDs and BluRay movies, as well as lots of high definition cable with a low-end home theater surround sound system. I absolutely love it.

You, on the other hand, have spent close to nothing, and enjoy standard definition TV and DVDs, all the while happy with the fact that you've spent much less money than me.

Who's happier?

I can only speak for myself, but I'd guess neither of us would want to trade places with the other... :)

Adman

Re:Blu Ray

[EchaniDrgn]

Now all we need is a Station Wagon to transport them in.

Re:Blu Ray

[Crock23A]

News Flash... Smellevision replaces Television!

Re:Blu Ray

[daybot]

The downside, though, is that they're not using the right compression scheme. Artifacts which I would not have noticed on DVD are readily apparent on BluRay disk. Either they need a better algorithm or a lot more bits.

It depends on the quality of the transfer. This is why there are lists like these.

Re:Blu Ray

[CastrTroy]

From what I remember, The HD-DVD standard required the use of h.264 or VC-1, and had no provisions for the use of MPEG2. Basically, they set a high minimum standard. BluRay on the other hand, while supporting these high def formats, also suppored MPEG2, and a lot of studios chose to use it.

Re:Blu Ray

[Firethorn]

Too large. Personally, I figure a mating between a Tivo and iTunes to be the future - buy your movie online, have it download to your media center for play. Time needed? With a good internet connection, about what you'd need to run to the store, find the movie, purchase it, and get home. Even for HD, you'd have enough buffer built up by then to be able to watch the rest of it.

Either that or you do a jpg style 'don't need all the data to show a lower res picture'. Give it more time to download and you get a better picture.

If you DO manage to fill up the 2 1TB HDs, have some sort of predictive system that deletes the less popular movies, keeping them available to download again if you decide to watch it again.

Re:Blu Ray

[Belial6]

Since the DVD and BR movie is often showing on the SAME tv at the same time, split down the middle, I am going to have to agree with you. It always reminds me of the old TV commercials that would show you how much better picture you would have with their brand by showing you the better picture on you set.

Re:Blu Ray

[kabocox]

Bluray is the better picture (and sound), there is no question, but the difference is incremental, and ultimately pretty minor. Especially when compared with the transition from VHS to DVD. --THAT-- is a transition the average person can tell apart easily, and then you factor in all the extra convenience of the DVD format in terms of form factor and features. DVDs were worth re-buying much of ones collection in, blu-ray? There's maybe a dozen movies I would consider re-purchasing, and even when buying new, I'll take the usually significantly cheaper DVD version 9 times out of 10.

That's the reason why I'm skipping the entire BlueRay generation. My family can live with DVD quality just fine. (Heck we download youtube quality stuff and are happy with it.) BlueRay just doesn't bring enough to be plate to make it worth it for me. Now if a new 400+GB disc format came out, I and others would love it for buying one disc that has the entire series of DVD quality shows on it. O.k. some will want increased picture quality; I'd like to easily fit my entire DVD collection on 2-3 single discs.

Re:Blu Ray

[TheSync]

I have no clue what "artifacts" you are talking about

I can attest that Hollywood studios are very serious about making their newest Blu-rays "artifact free". We're talking MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 at 25 Mbps, which (speaking as a HDTV guy) is way overkill for most eyes. Consider that terrestrial HDTV is =19 Mbps MPEG-2 and what you see on cable or DBS is probably compressed down from that. I'm pretty happy delivering 14 Mbps H.264 HDTV to stations for high-quality prime-time network use.

In post-production houses, there is now this position called the "compressionist" who uses semi-automated systems to compress each scene 10 or 20 different ways with different parameters to ensure the best compression. There are built in PSNR measurement, MOS estimation, as well as the human eye looking over all this. And it costs a lot of money....

Re:Blu Ray

[Doghouse Riley]

"I'll take the usually significantly cheaper DVD version 9 times out of 10." Me too. Especially considering that I have four fixed and three portable devices that can play vanilla DVD's. (not counting ripping them to xvid for viewing on my Palm TX). Assuming I wanted to upgrade, I'd have to upgrade everything or else watch my discs only in one location.

Re:Blu Ray

[TheSync]

HDTV will soon be replaced with SHDTV and other such nonsense.

Don't forget 3DTV

Re:Blu Ray

[popeye44]

Hah, I have a counter to that. My Dad who also loves sports. Typically watches them on a 27inch tv in his Den. He recently went to my bro-in-laws house where I had installed a HDTV.

He was sitting there watching a Lakers game. My bro-in-law walked in and said hey, I think we get that in HD. So he switched it over and my Dad has said at least 10x since then... My next TV will be one of those that just looks awesome.

I told him I'd be glad to come install it when he does.

Sounds like your dad might benefit from some time sitting in front of HD. Sports to me is one of the most significantly changed by HD. I don't watch sports but they do look great in HD.

As for topical conversation. I have a 50" between dvd and blu-ray It's noticeable for me and I'm only capable of 1080i. Much of that is because the resolution of the movie is higher than DVD up-conversion can be made to do. Granted though my dvd's look better too on the blu-ray and HD-dvd boxes.

I've explained HD vs dvd this way. In H. Potter chamber of secrets in the scene where he fights the basilisk. If you can't see how many zits HP has on his face under the makeup then HD would let you.

I compared up-converted against HD and the difference in the scene I am talking about is very noticeable. So does it affect how I watch movies? Yes to the point that I always seek a better version now over standard. But I still watch standard with no serious complaints.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can't go out and buy ST:TNG seasons 1-7 on HDD.

And you know what, you can't buy single-blu-ray discs that have all of a season of a tv show on them either, despite the fact that they would easily fit with room to spare. They insist of still selling "sets" with four episodes a disc. What's the point of an expanded format medium if you don't actually use it?

Re:Blu Ray

[gravis777]

I am pretty sure you could fit an entire season on a DVD-R. TNG was shot on film, but all editing and special effects were done on tape, so unless you redo the special effects, you will never have TNG in HD. So, take the SD episodes, compress it down in DivX or XVid to about 250-300 meg an episode, and you can fit an entire season on a dual layer disc.

Of course, someone has already done this

However, it would be nice to have the HD-version of an entire season of TOS on a single disc.

And a disc is certainly more convienant to swap out than a HDD, and takes up less space on the shelf. Now if we can just talk Paramount into not charging us $140 a season.

Re:Blu Ray

[Doghouse Riley]

As I type this, I'm listening to music stored on a portable HDD (laptop drive in a self powered enclosure). 250 GB and it's 4.5" x 3" X 0.5" I could store all seven years of STTNG in full DVD resolution on two of these - one in each pants pocket, no station wagon required.

Re:Blu Ray

[Doghouse Riley]

"I've explained HD vs dvd this way. In H. Potter chamber of secrets in the scene where he fights the basilisk. If you can't see how many zits HP has on his face under the makeup then HD would let you."

Golly, why didn't anyone tell me this before?? On my way to Best Buy right n

Re:Blu Ray

[Ngarrang]

... have some sort of predictive system that deletes the less popular movies, keeping them available to download again if you decide to watch it again.

"Howard the Duck", "Ishtar" and the ST:TOS episode "Spock's Brain" would never last under such an algorithm.

Re:Blu Ray

[MMC Monster]

Cost differential is an issue even for some of those with HDTVs.

I have a samsung 50" 1080p TV. Upscaling DVDs look awesome. I have a computer attached to it and it looks awesome as well.

I'll probably buy the HD package from my cable provider once the price comes down.

That being said, I'm not investing in a blu ray player and discs until the price come down for both the player and the discs. At the local store, DVDs sell for $15 for new releases (usually it's a one week promo the week that the disc comes out). Also, there are $5 bins full of older releases.

I'll wait until blu ray is similarly priced.

The fact that I can't even back up the blu ray discs is another issue. My kids have already destroyed a few DVDs I own.

Re:Blu Ray

[nabsltd]

Call me a snob if you like, that does not change the fact I can tell the difference very quicly on my 56" HDTV between HD content and DVD content, especialy when the HD content was recorded with a HD camera, not upconverted from film.

This statement basically says you don't know what you are talking about, as conversion from film to HD formats (1920x1080 or 1280x720) involves a loss of resolution, sometimes massive depending on exactly how the image is stored on the film.

Film easily has a resolution of 4000x4000, so even using a film format where black bars are stored on the film, you end up with about 4000x2200 at the 16:9 HDTV aspect ratio. Film is then telecined to whatever HD resolution is required, which results in a loss in resolution, but you still have at least full HD quality at that point. Now, special effects aren't always rendered at full film resolution, so some movies (or TV shows) will not have the full film resolution in all scenes, but generally the lowest rendering these days is 2K, which is more than enough for 1920x1080.

What's probably confusing you is that HDTV cameras have more depth of field than most lens/film combinations on 35mm film cameras. This gives the scene a much more "in focus" look for more of the image, and gives the illusion that it is sharper. Film can do this, but it is more difficult due to the complex interaction between the type of lens, the film speed, and the lighting for the scene.

Re:Blu Ray

[llZENll]

"No. The only people who really care whether they are watching an up-converted DVD or a blu-ray are are videophile snobs looking to justify the expense, who pause the movie to point at some intricate pattern in the corner of the screen and gloat."

No. I guarantee you everyone is able to see the difference if they were sitting at the THX recommended distance from their screen. For a 42" screen that is 4.7 feet, well within the 5.5 feet required for visual acuity of 1920 x 1080. Of course sitting that close to a 42" screen is usually impractical, and its easier to see and understand on a larger screen, such as my 120" with a 1080p projector.

Since I don't buy media, I rent it, why wouldn't I want the best recording possible, renting a bluray disc is the same price as renting a DVD.

If you want a cinema experience in your home as the director intended, bluray is the only way to go. It does make a difference that anyone can see and resolve all 1080 lines and more if you are doing a valid test. Of course no one is going to see the difference 10 feet away from a 36" tv.

http://myhometheater.homestead.com/viewingdistancecalculator.html

Re:Blu Ray

[JesseMcDonald]

It is possible to split an HDMI video signal, provided it's not tainted with HDCP. HDCP encodes the signal for a specific receiver, so even though you can split the signal only one screen can decode it. It is true that all (licensed) Blu-Ray players require HDCP on their digital outputs, but one could create an unencrypted, full-HD signal some other way. For example, by applying a cheap DVI-to-HDMI adapter to the output from a PC. The resulting signal could then be distributed to multiple HD screens. Suitable PC-compatible HD video for a simple demo shouldn't be hard to come by.

Re:Blu Ray

[Hatta]

To me the diffence is as drastic as going from VHS to DVD.

So, not really that drastic then. A good VCR with a good tape is pretty much flawless to my eyes. DVDs are a benefit because they're sturdier and random access and easier to rip, but that's about it. In fact, I see a lot more compression artifacting on brand new DVDs than I saw analog artifacting on brand new VHS tapes.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm missing something, but this already exists. It's Amazon's UnBox. I rent or buy movies and they are downloaded to my Tivo. Run out of room? Delete them off my Tivo as I can re-download them from Amazon's servers any time I want.

Re:Blu Ray

[sricetx]

That's the reason why I'm skipping the entire BlueRay generation. My family can live with DVD quality just fine.

The reason I'm skipping BlueRay is that I won't buy ANYTHING with DRM (unless it's easily crackable like DVD). Hollywood can take BlueRay and stuff it. I will reject any technology which limits my free use rights.

Re:Blu Ray

[Lunix Nutcase]

That's because the demo discs are far more compressed than the actual releases. You see the exact some pixelation problems on demo DVDs. I agree with the sentiment though that their demo discs should look a lot better when they are trying to sell the product, though.

Re:Blu Ray

[jellomizer]

Just like VHS and DVD you will have at least a good decade of use out of it.

Re:Blu Ray

[Sethumme]

From the article: "The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use."

The tech they are using to read so many layers of information is impressive. However as the article states, this format is in no way intended for consumers.

Your BluRay hardware is probably safe for another five years or so.

The non-consumer, archival focus was the same thing they were saying about the CD (or was it DVD?) when the technology hadn't been perfected yet and when 3.5" floppies were considered more than sufficient for consumer storage. Eventually, consumer media will demand larger-capacity formats then even a 100Gb Blueray can provide. Besides, anything that a library can afford to spend money on will have to be cheap enough that it could also feasibly be marketed to some portion of consumers - archiving isn't an industry that's rolling in venture capital...

More importantly, it's highly likely that a significant market share of home entertainment will be provided via downloads and HD-quality streaming media services within the next several years, which could devastate the physical data storage medium industry, including Blueray.

Anyway, I'm still holding out for consumer holographic storage devices.

Re:Blu Ray

[Theoboley]

400 GB Optical disks... That's a whole lot of porn to fit on one of these.

Re:Blu Ray

[EchaniDrgn]

Sorry, guess I should've mentioned the Station Wagon full of tapes not HDD... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW Pioneer is claiming that this will be blu-ray compatible.

http://pioneer.jp/press/release193.html

"Since the optical specifications of the objective lens, such as NA (Numerical Aperture)*2, are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs."

Re:Blu Ray

[sexconker]

You mean SQUVWXGA+?

Re:Blu Ray

[hattig]

That's the one major advantage with BluRay, even if you use it with an old TV. The blocky artefacts are a lot smaller due to the higher resolution - never mind the H.264 and 30mbps+ video rate.

I merely have a 42" plasma TV and a PS3, and the one BluRay I've watched (Planet Earth, which is 1080i) is extremely clear and beautiful compared to a DVD. But the difference in quality is far less than the leap from VHS to DVD IMO, but I never had a videophile VHS deck.

As far as I'm concerned, HD resolutions have merely allowed TVs to get larger without having huge pixels in your face, and even then for most content you'd need a >50" TV before you really got annoyed with it.

Re:Blu Ray

[hrtserpent6]

Nothing to see here...

I remember reading about blue laser storage technology in 1998. The Blu-Ray format was not agreed upon until 2003, Blu-Ray players were demoed at CES in 2004, the first retail unit shipped in 2006, and it took until mid to late 2007 for the early-adoption phase and format wars to end. One could argue that we are still in the early-adoption phase, since prices are still slightly out of reach for many consumers.

Even under ideal circumstances, this new technology will not be realized as a production-ready proof of concept for 1-2 years, take another 2-3 years to go to market, and then another 2-3 years for full market penetration, right about the time you start seeing off-brand 17" combo Blu-Ray/LCD TVs for $199 at Costco.

Besides, Blu-Ray is backwards compatible with DVDs and CDs, why would this be any different?

Re:Blu Ray

[prisoner-of-enigma]

If anyone doubts this is an issue, you might want to ask why anyone went with blue lasers for the HD formats in the first place. DVD can be increased to 50G just by making the discs 10-11 layers. Everyone's known how to do that for a while, there's even a (real, disks being pressed, players being made) HD format called HD-VMD that works exactly that way. The DVD Forum could have made HD DVD use that format, and would have thus killed Blu-ray's chances completely by making profitable sub-$100 players, in massive quantities. The only cost-adding modification you'd have to make to a DVD drive to make this work is to dampen the noise due to the 3-5X spin increase.

There are a number of faults with your argument. First off, the DVD Forum's decision to go with a maximum of two (later three) layers for HD-DVD had absolutely nothing to do with what was technically possible at the time. It had everything to do with accommodating existing DVD production lines, all of which could (supposedly) produce HD-DVD discs with only minor changeover costs. This was supposed to give HD-DVD a production price advantage over Blu-ray, as Blu-ray production required a complete overhaul of production facilities.

And why did Blu-ray require a complete overhaul of production facilities? Was it because of the use of a blue (violet, actually) laser? Nope. It was because of how Blu-ray was layered, with the data-bearing disc surface being much closer to the physical surface than DVD's. There were several reasons why Blu-ray chose this approach, but one of them was (drum roll please) to accommodate a larger number of layers in the disc while preserving the "standard DVD" thickness.

So, while it was perfectly possible for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray to use a red laser, it made no sense for either camp to do so. HD-DVD's capacity would've been too small with a red laser unless they went with more than two layers, and that would've mooted the production cost advantages that were the cornerstone of HD-DVD's "buy us, we're cheaper!" market strategy. Blu-ray could've gone with red lasers and many layers as well, but it would then have higher production costs than DVD without as much of a capacity advantage.

Re:Blu Ray

[sm62704]

Blu-raty is no longer bleeding edge to be sure, but I just spent $1000 on my TV only five years ago.

This new tech is now the bleeding edge.

I'd guess neither of us would want to trade places with the other... :)

As to tech I guess you're right. But I'd gladly trade ages, asuming you're not a geezer.

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

No. I guarantee you everyone is able to see the difference

I didn't say they wouldn't see the difference. I said they wouldn't care, and that it didn't matter.
if they were sitting at the THX recommended distance from their screen.

Big if. Unless you have an actual 'theatre room' and a truly huge TV the THX recommended distance is a joke. Almost nobody sits that close to the TV. To put it into perspective, a 6'2" individual sitting in a recliner in the reclined position with his FEET ON THE TV STAND will still be well beyond the recommended viewing distance of his 42" TV.

If you want a cinema experience in your home as the director intended, bluray is the only way to go.

Don't flatter yourself. Directors are still aiming at a theater experience in a classic movie theater, projected by commercial projectors.

It does make a difference that anyone can see and resolve all 1080 lines and more if you are doing a valid test.

I don't dispute that if you create a test designed to show that people can see the difference that they will be able to see the difference. However, I'm talking regular people in regular situations.

Of course no one is going to see the difference 10 feet away from a 36" tv.

But since that's more or less how most people have it set up. (or 12-15" from a 42-48" set) why should they really care about blu-ray?

If the only way I'm going to realize any value in blu-ray purchase is to push my couch up against the TV, then its not *really* worth it, because that's not how I'm going to use it. Its a status symbol, and if push your couch up closer and look for it, you can see the difference, but it doesn't really matter.

To use a car analgy, its like buying a 911 Turbo instead of the slightly less powerful 911. Oh sure, there's an unmistakable performance difference between them, but really, the average driver will NEVER really experience more than a hint of the 'extra' the Turbo can deliver in normal driving usage. You've pretty much GOT to take it to the track to really experience the difference.

And for most people, the odds of taking their car out to the track on a regular basis to experience that extra is about the same as the odds of setting up a theatre room in their home... people do do it... but not many, not in the big scheme of things.

Re:Blu Ray

[pushing-robot]

It depends on how the monitor is configured; some monitors have poor color curves, so some colors are a bit "farther apart" than others. Worse, some monitors (even ones marketed as 8-bit) show less than 8 bits per channel due to cheap controllers or "dynamic contrast" systems. These displays show distinct banding on many images and should be avoided.

But as long as the display is well designed and capable of outputting a solid 8 bits per channel, it's unlikely that anyone will notice banding outside of special test patterns, even those of us (myself included) who can detect 9-10 bits of color definition per channel. While I wouldn't mind the extra colors, and it's a relatively easy thing for display manufacturers to implement, it's not a feature I'd spend much extra for.

The big advantage to >8 bits per channel color, though, is during the editing process.

When working with raster-based programs like Photoshop, it's pretty normal to create a gradient, then compress or tweak the colors, then mess around some more, then adjust the color levels again, lather, rinse, repeat. What started out as a fine gradient got compressed into a small range of colors, then expanded back again, and you now have very ugly, obvious color bands.

With higher color depth (16 bits per color channel is the norm for good image editors) you have a ton more headroom, so you can mess with levels to you heart's content without losing any color definition.

But once the editing is complete, it's pretty normal to export the final distribution copy at 8 bits per channel. It saves space, and anything beyond 8 bits per channel is virtually imperceptible.

It's kind of like lossy audio encoding: If you do it once, after the editing is complete, the music will still sound great. But if you compress, expand, and compress again twenty times you'll end up with crap.

The one practical use for high color depth displays right now is for color profiles. With extra overhead, it becomes possible to tweak displays warmer or cooler, compress or expand the color gamut, or even slightly tweak certain patches of the display to compensate for uneven backlighting, all without any loss of definition. It's not something the average person would bother with, but it's a good reason to add a few extra bits per pixel to professional displays.

Also, monitors today can't show extremely vivid or bright colors that the human eye is capable of perceiving. Backlight technology is improving this to some degree, but if there is ever a quantum leap in display technology we may *need* a lot more bits to describe all the new colors we can show. In fact, we would probably need to start using floating point color, which is already used for video editing and HDR video games.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Suprised nobody has mentioned HVDs yet. They've been in development for longer, and chances are we'll see one of these out sooner.

Re:Blu Ray

[prisoner-of-enigma]

No. The only people who really care whether they are watching an up-converted DVD or a blu-ray are are videophile snobs looking to justify the expense, who pause the movie to point at some intricate pattern in the corner of the screen and gloat.

While I've been around a fair number of videophile snobs (who pale in snobbery comparison to audiophiles, by the way), I can honestly say that if you have good-quality gear, it's properly calibrated, and the screen is reasonably large (50+ inches) the difference between upconverted SD and native HD is rather obvious. And I'm not talking about a $40,000 Runco projector on a Stewart Greyhawk screen as the definition of "good-quality gear," either...although such gear does ensure the quality difference is blindingly obvious.

Now, for someone looking at upconverted content on a 37" CRT of reasonable quality, I'm sure there is practically no noticeable difference between SD and HD, especially in cases where the SD transfer is very good (as most recent releases are) or the HD transfer isn't very good (as several early Blu-ray releases were), or both.

But go view a DVD on a 65" screen. The inherent limitations of NTSC -- something that's survived largely unchanged since the 1950's -- and the limits of MPEG-2 -- developed in the early 1990's -- show up loud and clear. Macroblock noise. Banding in areas of subtle gradients. Crushed blacks. Blown-out whites. You don't have to be a snob to notice it. AVC and VC-1 both do superior jobs with the same bit budget, or they do much, much better jobs with a larger bit budget.

If you can't tell the difference between SD and HD on the gear you're using, fine, no problem. Enjoy your upconverted DVD's and more power to you. But do not case aspersions on those who do have gear that can show off the difference.

Re:Blu Ray

[bartok]

It's not about re-purchasing your entire DVD collection. BD players can also read DVDs so there's no point in that. It's about future purchases. If you have the choice between one or the other [when BDs become as cheap as DVDs], BDs will become the default choice.

Re:Blu Ray

[eharvill]

On a less piratical note, distributing movies on HDD would be interesting. The HDD would be in a study case and easily inserted into the player. The HDD would not have the same data through-put issues the optical media has, but would suffer being less reliable due to the mechanical nature of the HDD. And not as study if you drop it or allow your toddler to gnaw on it while they are teething.

How might this change once Solid State hard drives are "affordable"? Current USB keys, etc?

Re:Blu Ray

[sveard]

Allow me to go OT for a bit...

I must say that I really do not like the evolution of distribution entertainment media is going through. It seems that more and more is moving online (iTunes, or Amazon's UnBox like you say) and I prefer to just have a CD and be done with it. Something physical, something I can hold in my hands. Putting it on display in a rack looks nice too. That way, I have it and it will be forever mine, unlike a file on some giant corporation's server.

Re:Blu Ray

[prisoner-of-enigma]

The downside, though, is that they're not using the right compression scheme. Artifacts which I would not have noticed on DVD are readily apparent on BluRay disk. Either they need a better algorithm or a lot more bits.

Don't blame Blu-ray. Blame the studio producing the disc. Some of the early BD and HD-DVD releases were done quickly and with very little attention to detail. The quickest and most well-known codec for the studios was MPEG-2, despite AVC and VC-1 being superior. But that was only part of the problem.

The other problem was the source the discs were mastered from. Studios have been mastering DVD's from 2K sources for a while, and the results are very good. Why? Because you're starting with much higher resolution than the end product. But with 1080p, a 2K source just doesn't cut it. You need a 4K source to really do it justice. The studios didn't want to foot the bill for 4K re-mastering, so we ended up with crappy initial releases. After early adopters complained, the studios got off their duffs and did it right.

Last, there's an issue of the equipment the disc is mastered on. Believe it or not, many high-end Hollywood studios preview their masters on tiny little studio monitors. I'm talking itsy bitsy, anywhere from 24" to 36" usually. Anything looks good when it's scrunched down onto a tiny screen. It may look like crap on a 100" screen and the guys mastering it will never know it. And that's exactly what happened.

You should head over to Joe Kane Productions and see what the guy has to say about film and video. He produces discs that are the de facto standards for calibrating equipment. He's also the most amazingly anal-retentive, nitpicking, perfection-obsessed videophile I've ever met. But he's great fun to listen to when he's giving a seminar on video standards and quality.

Re:Blu Ray

[negRo_slim]

compress it down in DivX or XVid to about 250-300 meg an episode, and you can fit an entire season on a dual layer disc.

Yup, each season of my Arrested Development collection was ripped and converted to Xvid for play back on my 25 dollar kick ass Wal-Mart DVD Player :)

3 Seasons, 3 single layer DVD+R's.

Re:Blu Ray

[negRo_slim]

Honestly, I don't even need 1080p

For some content I disagree, adult movies in particular... but for most practical applications the increased resolution is unneeded.

Most films these days aren't worth the millions invested into them, let alone worth me investing a couple thousand to see and hear whatever flavor of the day actor is spitting out his face hole. Nah my biggest concerns are with the TV collections. I don't see the need for 1080 on those, but it will come. And then what, I will have a mismash of SD and HD volumes because I didn't finish my collection before they start to release HD sets only?

F that I say. Get your HD TV because Xbox/PS3 and OTA sports broadcasts are pretty awesome in 1080p/i, just don't buy into the whole media upgrade cycle. It's pointless and it stresses our wallets and our resources while fattening a few greedy assholes at the top :)

Re:Blu Ray

[negRo_slim]

So, not really that drastic then. A good VCR with a good tape is pretty much flawless to my eyes.

But it really depends on what form of VHS we are talking about here...

• * 350x240 (250 lines): Video CD
• * 330x480 (250 lines): Umatic, Betamax, VHS, Video8
• * 400x480 (300 lines): Super Betamax, Betacam (professional)
• * 440x480 (330 lines): Analog Broadcast
• * 560x480 (420 lines): LaserDisc, Super VHS, Hi8
• * 670x480 (500 lines): Enhanced Definition Betamax
• * 720x480 (520 lines): DVD, miniDV, Digital8, Digital Betacam (professional)
• * 720x480 (400 lines): Widescreen DVD (anamorphic)
• * 1280x720 (720 lines): D-VHS, HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc, HDV (miniDV)
• * 1920x1080 (1080 lines): D-VHS, HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc, HDCAM SR (professional)

Re:Blu Ray

[mattack2]

Umm, isn't that close to what AppleTV is? Not a "media center" exactly, but people have apparently put a lot of stuff (e.g. their own DVDs) on AppleTV.

Re:Blu Ray

[hey!]

Sounds like your dad might benefit from some time sitting in front of HD.

In what way will realizing he "needs" a much more expensive TV benefit him?

I agree, once you've seen sports in HD, you don't want to go back. But once you've adjusted to HD, you don't really enjoy them more. You just enjoy them less if you don't have HD.

Save the money, and treat yourself and dad to game tickets.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, about 320 GB worth.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

So then buy him one?

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

If you can't tell the difference between SD and HD on the gear you're using, fine, no problem. Enjoy your upconverted DVD's and more power to you. But do not case aspersions on those who do have gear that can show off the difference.

I didn't say you couldn't see the difference, I said it didn't really matter in normal setups. You can see it, it doesn't usually matter.

The way you are framing the situation is almost dishonest.

First you talk about 37" CRTs and agree that there is no difference between SD and HD, and I don't disagree. And then you jump to a 65" HDTV (presumably viewed within 6 feet?) and claim the difference is blindingly obvious. Again I don't disagree.

BUT...

What about 'most people'?

The majority of HDTVs being sold right now are in the 42-50" range. The vast majority of living rooms and even bedrooms are setup such that the TV is 8'-15' away from where its usually viewed from. (Think about it, even if its on a dresser at the end of your bed with just enough space to walk between comfortably, you are still a good 10' away if you are propped up on some pillows at the other end of the bed.

This puts it well out of the "THX recommended viewing distance", and even outside the maximum thx viewing distance.

And in this situation, the situation I'm talking about, viewers -can- see the difference between SDTV and HDTV, but the difference is pretty minor.

Given this is the situation most people are in, should they bother with blu-ray?

But do not case aspersions on those who do have gear that can show off the difference.

I'm not. But unless you've got an honest to god theatre in your house, your probably deceiving yourself. The fact that you can stand 6 feet away from your 65" TV and delight in the picture quality is moot if you are like most people, and sit on a couch 10+ feet away from it, at that distance the difference really isn't that great anymore. I have a 56" myself, and from 5 feet away I can really see the difference, but I sit some 12 feet away when I'm actually watching movies and not 'inspecting the picture quality'. And from 12 feet away, the difference between up-converted DVD and blu-ray isn't nearly so blinding.

Now, if you -do- have a thx compliant theatre in your house, great, more power to you, but don't kid yourself that that most people should buy blu-ray for the blu-ray -you- experience, because most people aren't going to get it.

Remember, when I say blu-ray is only a minor improvement, I am talking about the experience most people will have with it. Not some idealized microcosm inhabited by people with honest-to-god home theatres, with viewing distances THX would certify.

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

It's not about re-purchasing your entire DVD collection.

That's a big part of it.

BD players can also read DVDs so there's no point in that.

And when I bought a DVD player I could still leave my VCR hooked up. Yet there was still a point in re-purchasing a lot of my movies on DVD. The quality and convenience of DVD was that much better.

As you agree yourself, BD isn't nearly as compelling. Its a much more minor upgrade.

It's about future purchases. If you have the choice between one or the other [when BDs become as cheap as DVDs], BDs will become the default choice.

When BDs become as cheap as DVDs, absolutely.

In the meantime though, while BD's routinely cost 30% to 300% more, and BD players cost 400% more, what should the choice be? I buy most of my DVDs PV for $5-12. I would have to pay $20-30 for the BD.

If they were the same price, sure I'd pick BD, and when BD can be had PV for $5-12, I will... unless they die out and are replaced with something else before that happens. But until then...

Re:Blu Ray

[Disfnord]

Yeah, progress sucks. Why did we even bother to leave the trees?

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

HD is already giving an experience as good as or better than 35mm film in practice. If we take our current 1920x1080 format to 60 pogressive frames per second and encode the picture as RGB, we'll have something markedly superior to cinema-quality 24fps 35mm film prints.

Re:Blu Ray

[squiggleslash]

There are a number of faults with your argument. First off, the DVD Forum's decision to go with a maximum of two (later three) layers for HD-DVD had absolutely nothing to do with what was technically possible at the time. It had everything to do with accommodating existing DVD production lines, all of which could (supposedly) produce HD-DVD discs with only minor changeover costs. This was supposed to give HD-DVD a production price advantage over Blu-ray, as Blu-ray production required a complete overhaul of production facilities.

Increasing the number of layers does not significantly add changeover costs, a fact HD-VMD's promoters are quick to point out. Indeed, given the fact the exact same equipment can be used to master DVDs and HD VMDs (which is not true of either HD DVD or Blu-ray), the changeover costs are significantly lower. In any case, given the choice was between Blu-ray (expensive readers, new disc duplication plant) and either blue-laser DVD (expensive readers, no new disc duplication plant), or a multilayer alternative (which you suggest, incorrectly, would be new disc duplication plant, but would definitely be cheap readers), the DVD Forum could still have settled upon multilayer technology and ended up ahead of Blu-ray, even if you'd been right about expensive plant replacement costs.

And why did Blu-ray require a complete overhaul of production facilities? Was it because of the use of a blue (violet, actually) laser? Nope. It was because of how Blu-ray was layered, with the data-bearing disc surface being much closer to the physical surface than DVD's. There were several reasons why Blu-ray chose this approach, but one of them was (drum roll please) to accommodate a larger number of layers in the disc while preserving the "standard DVD" thickness.

Blu-ray's decision to put the layers nearer the surface of the disk have nothing to do with adding layers. It's to do with increasing capacity. The reason why Blu-ray has around 66% more capacity than HD DVD per layer is due to the use of a different aperture, made possible by the change in location of the layer. That simple change means that the capacity per layer is significantly higher than it would otherwise be. I don't really need to point out the flaw with your belief: if it were to do with Blu-ray's backers wanting to make room for 8 layer discs that somehow would be unable to fit in a regular optical drive, then you might want to ask yourself how HD-VMD does it - that's a very real format that uses regular DVD pressing equipment.

HD DVD is cheaper (at a media level) than HD-VMD not because the equipment is cheaper - it's the same - but because adding layers adds costs directly at the media level. If it takes 10x as long to make a ten layer disc as a single layer disc, it's going to cost several times as much too, and that's exactly what happens here. Worse, as every layer's integrity matters to the final product, you're increasing the chances of a bad disk by 10x by increasing the number of layers this way.

If this was a viable technology, HD DVD would have used it with red lasers. It would have ended up ahead of the game. It's not viable not because of plant changeover costs (the costs are minimal, as with blue-laser HD DVD), but because you need to throw away four-eight times as many discs as you would a regular DVD or Blu-ray disc, and take four-eight times as long to make them.

Re:Blu Ray

[Hurricane78]

...until your CD dies after two to ten years... ;)

Why not having everything on a large hdd-archive with backup? Large like an unbox-server and you can put it into your hands and put it on the shelf like a CD.
Of course a hdd can die too, so refresh you media at a still safe moment.

Re:Blu Ray

[Firethorn]

I don't have a media library for it's nice looks. I have a library because I like to read, listen, and watch stuff.

Over time I've gathered enough books, CDs, and movies to make tracking down the specific piece is a pain in the butt, thus my preference for digital media disconnected from a specific storage medium.

Re:Blu Ray

[AbRASiON]

The law of diminishing returns has and will kick in to full effect with movie discs.
VHS to DVD was a noticable increase and DVD to Blu ray is possible to notice with either exceptional eyesight and a 42" or mediocre eyesight and 50" (and beyond)

I do believe blu ray will actually end up completely adopted but DVD will linger around for a long long time.
The format after blu ray however, if on disc, will definitely flop if all it offers is more resolution.

Re:Blu Ray

[Hairy Heron]

My half blind dad can tell the difference between upscaled DVD and Blu-Ray. If you can't tell the difference you are clearly legally blind.

Re:Blu Ray

[mattack2]

At least whoever wrote the wikipedia entry claims differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd-dvd

HD DVD supports video encoded in MPEG-2 which is what is used in DVDs as well as the new formats VC-1 and AVC which are more efficient. All movie titles released so far have had the feature encoded in 1080p, with most supplements in 480i or 480p. Almost all titles are encoded with VC-1, and most of the remaining titles encoded with AVC.

Re:Blu Ray

[llZENll]

I understand your point but I think you underestimate how prevalent home theaters are, even ones with screens larger than 100". Anyone with such a setup would benefit from bluray, even average people would see the difference, and I assure you anyone spending the money on a theater would care, a lot. There is a multibillion dollar market for home movie projectors, there is definately a market for bluray.

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

I understand your point but I think you underestimate how prevalent home theaters are, even ones with screens larger than 100".

As of the end of 2007, 70% of households in the US did not have an HDTV. bluray is pointless for them.

Of the remaining 30%, 40-60% have never viewed any HD programming or content. Clearly these guys aren't setting up dedicated home theatre rooms.

So that leaves about 15% of households who have an HDTV -and- use it for HD content. What percentage of them do you think have 100" TVs in home theatres with a blu-ray player vs 42" TVs in living rooms with an ATSC tuner, or HD satellite, etc?

The percentage of the total market that would really benefit from bluray is a probably Anyone with such a setup would benefit from bluray, even average people would see the difference,

Sure a tiny fraction of the population would see significant benefit from bluray. Far less than 10%. Probably in the 1%-2% range. That's not 'average people', that's the home theatre elite. "Average people" still don't even have an HDTV.

and I assure you anyone spending the money on a theater would care, a lot. There is a multibillion dollar market for home movie projectors, there is definately a market for bluray.

I agree. But its billion dollar niche market, and will be for a several years yet.

Re:Blu Ray

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Yeah, but as I said, then it is not blu-ray. It is something else.

Re:Blu Ray

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Remember, when I say blu-ray is only a minor improvement, I am talking about the experience most people will have with it. Not some idealized microcosm inhabited by people with honest-to-god home theatres, with viewing distances THX would certify.

Then it's my turn to call your assessment dishonest. Would it be fair to say that Linux is far inferior to Windows because "most people" are unable to grasp the intricacies of its foibles? Would it be fair to say that a Ferrari Enzo is no better than Honda Civic because "most people" cannot drive a Ferrari hard enough to bring out its pedigree? Would it be fair to say Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is no better than an arts & crafts store copy because "most people" aren't art experts and wouldn't know the difference?

And it is not some idealized microcosm where people enjoy a good set at reasonable viewing distances. I know people who've literally spent over a million dollars on their home theater -- inside a $30 million mansion, no less. Me, I have a far more humble setup that I've spent less than $10,000 on (that's video, audio, and furnishings all put together), yet it's not difficult to tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray. I think you either give too much credit to those with uber-theaters or take away too much credit from the average consumer.

Re:Blu Ray

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Increasing the number of layers does not significantly add changeover costs

Really? That's funny, because Toshiba would beg to differ. As would Sony, who had to spend a lot of time and money convincing people to go with a standard that requires scrapping a lot of DVD fab gear. As would the folks who are producing (or trying to produce with reasonable yields) these multilayer discs you say are so cheap and easy to come by.

Blu-ray's decision to put the layers nearer the surface of the disk have nothing to do with adding layers. It's to do with increasing capacity.

Perhaps your reading comprehension skills are a bit off, so I'll type this slowly a second time: I said there were several reasons why Blu-ray went with a different layer location. One of them was indeed greater capacity due to a different numerical aperture of the lens. Another reason -- you could almost call it a happy side effect -- was more room for layers. Even someone with elementary skills in mathematics can deduce that if you have a fixed disc thickness and you reduce the height of the non-data-bearing portions which are merely coatings, you have more room for data-bearing layers.

you might want to ask yourself how HD-VMD does it - that's a very real format that uses regular DVD pressing equipment.

I don't have to ask. The data are available on the web for anyone to peruse. I will point out that HD-VMD is nowhere near the volume of either Blu-ray or DVD in production. I will point out that at 5GB per layer, HD-VMD must go with many, many layers in order to even be remotely competitive with Blu-ray's two layers. I will point out that no HD-VMD producer has released numbers indicating what yields they are getting for quad-layer HD-VMD discs.

HD DVD is cheaper (at a media level) than HD-VMD not because the equipment is cheaper - it's the same - but because adding layers adds costs directly at the media level. If it takes 10x as long to make a ten layer disc as a single layer disc, it's going to cost several times as much too, and that's exactly what happens here. Worse, as every layer's integrity matters to the final product, you're increasing the chances of a bad disk by 10x by increasing the number of layers this way.

Now you're contradicting yourself. You've been going on and on about how much nicer this all would've been if the world had just gone with HD-VMD, but in the same breath you say that more layers results in lower yields -- a fact I established quite some time ago. So, what you're arguing is that a ten-layer HD-VMD (50GB) would've been a superior solution to a two-layer Blu-ray (50GB). Your argument does not add up, my friend.

If this was a viable technology, HD DVD would have used it with red lasers. It would have ended up ahead of the game. It's not viable not because of plant changeover costs (the costs are minimal, as with blue-laser HD DVD), but because you need to throw away four-eight times as many discs as you would a regular DVD or Blu-ray disc, and take four-eight times as long to make them.

You underestimate the plant changeover costs. If nothing else, Blu-ray discs require additional coating steps for the Durabis coatings (which is itself not a cheap substance) beyond the additional costs of plant mechanicals, higher costs for masters, lower overall yields, etc. Costs for Blu-ray production are noticeably higher than HD-DVD, which was in turn slightly higher than that of DVD's.

I run a small video disc production business, by the way. This subject is not foreign to me.

Re:Blu Ray

[vux984]

Then it's my turn to call your assessment dishonest. Would it be fair to say that Linux is far inferior to Windows because "most people" are unable to grasp the intricacies of its foibles?

Yes it would, if it were true. I think at this point though, Windows edge is largely momentum and mindshare. Linux is not far inferior. To put it in terms of blu-ray, though would 'upgrading' from XP to Linux really benefit your average web-app/email/mp3 playing/photo sharing person? Not appreciably. Same with blu-ray... some small set benefit a lot, most gain little. (and in the case of linux, have to potentially give up a lot too.)

Would it be fair to say that a Ferrari Enzo is no better than Honda Civic because "most people" cannot drive a Ferrari hard enough to bring out its pedigree?

It would be fair to say that the average person is not well served by a Ferrari Enzo. They are terrible commuter cars, lousy for grocery shopping, spend far more time in the shop than a Civic, and cost orders of magnitude more to purchase, maintain, fuel up, and insure. If on top of all that you aren't going to have the opportunity to drive it hard enough to 'bring out its pedigree' the only point in owning one would be as part of a dick waving contest with your peers. Is that a good reason to own one? Or buy blu-ray?

Would it be fair to say Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is no better than an arts & crafts store copy because "most people" aren't art experts and wouldn't know the difference?

Good analagy. If you can't tell the difference between the original and a copy, what is the point of shelling out for the expensive original? Some sort of internal satisfaction of knowing that you have the real thing? Is that a reason to invest in blu-ray? 'I can't tell the difference from my couch, but I get great satisfaction in knowing its better'?? Seems like faulty logic to me. At least the mona lisa original has investment value...your home theatre is obsolete and depreciating fast before you've finished plugging it in.

I think you either give too much credit to those with uber-theaters or take away too much credit from the average consumer.

The 'average consumer' still doesn't even have an HDTV. From that its trivial to conclude that the average consumer doesn't benefit from bluray. The percentage of HDTV consumers who -might- benefit from blu-ray starts off a distinct minority. Even if we were to agree that 100% of HDTV owners would be blinded by the difference blu-ray made to their setup, it would still top out as significantly less than the majority of consumers. And I contend that the percentage of HDTV owners would see blu-ray as more than a minor upgrade to their setup to be FAR LESS than 100%, marginalizing the group even more. Even if it were HALF of HDTV owners that would be 1/6th the population... there is simply no way a 1/6th or smaller minority can represent 'average consumers'.

Re:Blu Ray

[zippthorne]

Which is why I call the sales beast over and ask 'em to fetch a blu-ray disk and player. Then proceed to annoy them by asking them to move from screen to screen (but only after complaining that the disk they chose is a mash of compression problems and inexplicably added fake "film grain," and the first five minutes are footage of old, blurry news on an an even older television set, complete with visible scan-lines or spinning-color-wheel)

Re:Blu Ray

[vaz01]

Flash drives offer an even neater version of that, whenever they get big enough and cheap enough... no moving parts is a plus.

Re:Blu Ray

[Blackhalo]

Why would anyone get the first 3 seasons? They were awful.

Re:Blu Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe hdtv cameras are digital so they don't have grain..

anyway the claims that mpeg2@8Gb is as good as H264@50Gb are pathetic. I really wish those people NEVER buy bluray.

Re:Blu Ray

[Saffaya]

For every new medium, you need a core market of enthusiast adopters, that will later expand to more casual consumers.

In the case of DVD-A and SACD, bear in mind that the enthusiast who spend big $$ on the new digital audio discs cannot .. link them to their digital audio hi-fi set-up.
You are forced to use analog outputs only, on your brand new high resolution audio player.
You also cannot import your bought music onto your PC or any other device (disc formats are unreadable).

If the new formats doesn't make buying sense to the enthusiasts, how would it make to the casual buyer ?
Answer is it doesn't, and we have yet another still-born format(s).

Re:Blu Ray

[adolf]

It sounds like you've never seen high-definition content on your new-fangled TV.

Speaking as the owner of a recently-procured 52" 550 Samsung LCD, let me tell you: Yes, upscaled DVDs look great, in the grand scheme of things. But they look look like complete, blurry trash compared to well-produced HD content. And I'm not just talking about Blu-Ray (which can be quite good) -- even the Tonight Show, received with a (nearly) free UHF antenna looks amazing in 1080i.

That said, I'm not about to go out and re-purchase my DVD library on Blu-Ray in compensation for this. But it's a big enough difference that I generally do consider buying new movies on Blu-Ray instead of DVD, and depending on the nature of the film, I'm very happy to spend the extra cash. Having seen the difference, it was totally a no-brainer to pick up a basic HD package when we decided to get cable TV.

YMMV, but you don't have much to lose by putting that antenna together and having a go at seeing what you've been missing. It worked fine for me, 40 miles from the broadcast towers, just sitting on a table in my living room a few feet above ground level.

Re:Blu Ray

[xalorous]

Ishtar - went there, bought a ticket, went shopping, showed back up to go to the movie, had lost the ticket. Bought a new ticket. Left before the end. No redeeming qualities.

Watched it on cable just to see if I missed something the first time. Nope. Filed a complaint with the cable company for showing such contentless drivel.

Re:Blu Ray

[xalorous]

I agree. I'm done being an early adopter of new formats. I have too much invested to convert to Blue Ray. I despise DRM as well.

Re:Blu Ray

[RiotingPacifist]

Of course a hdd can die too, so refresh you media at a still safe moment.

I thought a HDD would only die when a) in use b) physically harmed. if you put it somewhere safe, the data on it will last 1000 years. but i may be wrong.

Re:Blu Ray

[RiotingPacifist]

Also, monitors today can't show extremely vivid or bright colors that the human eye is capable of perceiving. Backlight technology is improving this to some degree, but if there is ever a quantum leap in display technology we may *need* a lot more bits to describe all the new colors we can show. In fact, we would probably need to start using floating point color, which is already used for video editing and HDR video games.

Lies everyman knows there are just 8 colours Red,Orange,Yellow,Green,Blue,Purple (+ black & white) anything else is just a fancy way of describing them

Re:Blu Ray

[RiotingPacifist]

Call me a snob if you like, that does not change the fact I can tell the difference very quicly on my 56" HDTV between HD content and DVD content, especialy when the HD content was recorded with a HD camera, not upconverted from film.

Fine your a snob and an idiot, film is much better quality than HD meaning film doesn't need to be upconverted at all. Making a stupid statement like that shows that not only are you a videophile but your also a pretty shity one too. your the equivalent of an audiophile that says he prefers his music in 256kbps to an audio CD.

Re:Blu Ray

[RiotingPacifist]

If your setting up a home theatre with a 100" screen, why not just go the distance and get the actual films.

Burn time?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Anyone care to venture how long it would take to burn such disc, if it is loaded full?

Re:Burn time?

[Red Flayer]

Sure. Same as blu-ray write-to-capacity time, x25.

Unless of course you think there will be hardware to burn layers in parallel.

Re:Burn time?

[Anonymous Coward]

x25 at the fastest. I've noticed that the second layer on dual layer disks is slower to burn, I suspect that because of attenuation going through the first layer. Whatever the reason, it might apply as well to 25 layers disks making deeper layers even slower.

Re:Burn time?

[X0563511]

Sure, a few seconds.

This is not "burnable" media - you would need to stamp it.

Re:Burn time?

[owlstead]

"Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data.."

Well, forever I suppose.

Re:Burn time?

[AbRASiON]

About four foot one, but only if it's jolly, jolly good content.

No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[ergo98]

This is one of somewhere closing on quadrillion (give or take a gazillion) super-duper high capacity optical formats that have been prematurely hyped and then disappeared.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[sexconker]

Interestingly, many of these formats were bought by SONY and led out to pasture.

FMD (Fluorescent Multi-Layer Disc) being the most promising (back in the day).

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

How is that a bad thing considering SONY have released a useful disk format. You're suggesting that they'd buy a load of companies and then not bother to look into any interesting tech that those companies had been researching? Blu-ray is theoretically capable of holding just as much as these disks if SONY can work out how to do multi-layer work effectively, as Pioneer claim to have done. I'd expect SONY are either close on their heels in R&D terms, or could just license the tech.

The main difference between these 2 formats are that SONYs was out in the market over 2 years ago, and Pioneer has yet to get this tech out of the lab. 2 years ago, a 50GB optical format (dual layer blu-ray) was quite useful, and it still is today. Blu-ray also has rewritable disks in the market.

Really, I don't see what use in the extremely-mild-conspiracy type comment serves.. companies like google and MS always buy out other companies and assimilate their tech. In some cases that can be negative, but in other cases it leads to some great products.

BTW, Wikipedia points out that FMD died because one of their demonstrations was proven to be a hoax. I presume they did have some working tech though because DMD is being developed by a company who acquired Constellation 3D's patents.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[sexconker]

Constellation 3D was bought out by SONY and killed.
They sold off the patents piece and parcel to random no-name companies to ensure that it never got anywhere.

I don't know what Wikipedia says, and I don't care.
But most tech demonstrations could be considered "hoaxes" if you expect a tech demo to represent a final product perfectly, and most spec sheets could be considered "lies" if you take them literally and don't account for a little thing called the development process.

Was the Xbox 360 a hoax for having development units on display at E3, mocked up to look like an actual system was running? If it's at a trade show, it's glitzed up like a whore and may not be representative of the final product or the current state of development.

FMD promised to provide MUCH higher capacities than we currently have now, years and years ago.

BluRay was not birthed out of FMD, it was birthed in spite of it. That's like throwing a quarter into a well and wishing for a shiny new penny.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

Wow, you live in your own little world, don't you? "I won't believe anything you show me, I'll just believe what I want to believe!". I can't find much googling various combinations of Sony, FMD and Blu-ray, perhaps you could enlighten me with a link to a news story of Sony buying FMD tech.. (and not Flash Memory Drive technology either, I mean the optical kind).

Most real tech demonstrations are not hoaxes, they are basic proof of concepts, and the companies would admit which parts aren't developed yet. Faking a demonstration on a hard drive instead of a basic proof of concept of the optical drive is ludicrous. Yes a prototype doesn't have to work the same as the final system, but what they did is like demonstrating a new electric car and running it on an internal combustion engine, without telling anyone (otherwise it wouldn't have been called a 'scandal').

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[sexconker]

Your own bullshit wikipedia article has "citation needed" for your claim of a hoax presentation.

Yet you believe it wholeheartedly.

Sony, Blu-Ray, FMD?

Try Constellation 3D

http://www.secinfo.com/$/SignIn.asp?ReturnTo=%2F%24%2FSEC%2FRegistrant.asp%3FCIK%3D1080290
SEC info about the company.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/digeststorage2k1jan/index.html
Read down below about Lite-On and C3D. Oh, and who's Lite-On's bestest buddy at the time? (SONY)

http://www.thocp.net/hardware/fmd_rom.htm
1999 first published in september
2001 first license given to Sony
2002 august C3D disappeared
2003 D Data Inc aquired the patents of C3D en will develop HD DMD

They licensed to Sony and folded.
Then some other no name company was sold the patents.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

I can't see the first link, but fair enough. That's better than just saying that SONY killed it, but still not exactly conclusive, I think that's what you call 'circumstancial' evidence. There are plenty more reasons for companies to fold than conspiracies. Licensing tech to other companies would not hurt C3D, and the last link you provide mentioned that several companies licensed the tech, so it obviously wasn't an exclusive license to SONY, which would have put them more in a position to kill C3D for killing's sake..

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[sexconker]

You can get around the SEC site's registaration through google cache, or sometimes just through a regular google search.

There are various other sec / sec-related sites that provide the exact same info in almost the exact same format that don't require registration.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

Yep I saw an SEC page in one of my searches before and used the Cache, but I didn't find anything beyond http://www.secinfo.com/dV5Ff.4fjbj.htm , which only mentions Sony, MS etc because they are PDA makers, not because they bought licenses. I can believe that SONY bought licenses, and would want to outdo competitors, but if they were trying to stifle innovation then they wouldn't have even bought a license surely. All that did was give C3D money and give SONY more toys to play with, to make better products for us. Perhaps they are going to release FMD devices for the next generation, or perhaps we will just be using broadband wireless tech everywhere by then.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[sexconker]

Typical practice is to license something with certain restrictions.

In this case Sony was the very first licensee of FMD tech, and would have had an easy time getting some sort of exclusivity built into the license.

No competitors, then, could ever license the tech in a way that violated the original license between C3D and Sony.

Sony never has to do anything with the license, either.

Re:No burning. Less useful than Blu-ray. Lame

[somersault]

Sounds like a lot of speculation to me :p I'm not disagreeing, but it is just a load of ifs. Even if SONY did do that, it is perfectly good business sense, though personally I'd rather not operate using such underhanded tactics. That's probably why I'm not a millionaire though.

I'll believe it when I see it

[jandrese]

Frankly, given the track record of optical formats, I'd be surprised if this ever makes it out of the laboratory, especially given the fact that it has so many layers. With DVD a lot of production companies basically gave up on the dual sided dual layer discs because the yield on 4 layer disks was so bad. Getting a good yield on a 25 layer disc is either an achievement worthy of talking about over the disc, or it's a bunch of lies and marketing hype.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[sexconker]

When I read the article on this yesterday (or the day before? either way, OLD!) they basically had a lot of marketing-speak about how they did just that.

Many layers, and lots of reliability (and tiny American flags) for all.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[jandrese]

TFA suggests that they just improved the laser diode assembly (and probably the firmware) on a drive in the lab, it didn't say anything about mass producing a cost effective systems for consumers though. That's why I'm dubious.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[sexconker]

The made a 'wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism'.

The point is, they say they've gotten it to be reliable. These aren't assclown no-name companies looking to be bought out, it's Pioneer who has very little to gain from hyping up some vaporware.

Less than 20 seconds

[jbeaupre]

There is some evidence it can be done very quickly: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dDFJndnv_60

Re:Less than 20 seconds

[rob1980]

Clearly that evidence does not apply, as that is a CD being burned in that video and not a Blu-Ray disc. Maybe if you used the "potato" button you might get it down to 2-3 minutes though. ;)

Oh yeah, well I'm promising more

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, Tuesday July 8 2008 will be seen as the day that I announced the greatest optical disk ever.
I am promising to come out with a 14.6 TeraByte disk by the end of this year. Yes, it will be five feet wide and access times will be measured in tens of seconds...but by gosh it will be the biggest!

Re:Oh yeah, well I'm promising more

[n1ckml007]

Yes, it will be five feet wide and access times will be measured in tens of seconds...but by gosh it will be the biggest!

That's what she said!

Re:Oh yeah, well I'm promising more

[sexconker]

I don't know what an optical disk is, but an optical disc greater than your already exists in various telescopes and such.

They're very shiny.

Lifespan?

[s31523]

With so many layers, I wonder if the useful lifespan of the disk is shorter than a conventional DVD. The obvious application for these discs is backing up servers and home storage drives.

Re:Lifespan?

[sexconker]

The obvious application is for a patent, so you can sue anyone who tries the next logical step in giving consumers greater capacity.

AND you get to stick it to those pirates at the same time.

This will never see the light of day.

Read Only?

[JakeD409]

So essentially these are high-capacity coasters?

Re:Read Only?

[sexconker]

If you use it as a coaster, it won't be storing much data, now will it?

Re:Read Only?

[ColdWetDog]

So essentially these are high-capacity coasters?

No, Laserdisks are (were) high capacity coasters. You could put an entire six-pack on them. These will just hold one drink, like all the other AOL disks.

Re:Read Only?

[trrwilson]

Yes, this coaster can hold 25 glasses or cups, as opposed to the 1 glass or cup that a normal coaster can hold.

Re:Read Only?

[at_slashdot]

I suggest an improvement in the technology. Coasters should come without the hole in the middle.

Re:Read Only?

[EchaniDrgn]

That may be true, but you have to stack them one on top of the other. Thus the "layers."

I didn't RTFA but I guess that's the skill it involves. I've never gotten past stacking seven beer cans one on top of the other before someone wanted a drink. :-)

Re:Read Only?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the glasses need to be stacked on top of each other.

Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Doghouse Riley]

the cost/GB of HDD's. I can buy 750 GB of SATA storage now for the cost of 125 GB worth of BD-RW blanks, and plug it in to any USB2 port I want. For the same cost, I can get a 250 GB USB laptop drive in a self powered enclosure that fits in a shirt pocket. I can only imagine what these 400 GB disks will cost when they hit the market, and what HDD's will cost by then.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[EmagGeek]

Hear hear... and for data fault tolerance, it'll be cheaper to simply mirror a drive than to use one of these things. BR burners are still several hundred bucks and give you 25-50GB of storage. A 1TB drive is $200.

HDDs will always be cheaper than optical media.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing apples and oranges. Optical discs such as DVDs and BDs are for permanent storage used for distribution and archives. HDDs and Flash devices are for temporary storage for easy read-write activities.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point yes. However in 5-10 years? A burnt disc uses nearly 0w of power over its lifespan. A spinning HD?

The price for it is probably huge. So at this point it is only for those who have gobs of data and are low on actual physical storage space (not byte space). So instead of having to buy say another large fire safe (think hundreds of discs) at a hefty cost. I can use the same one I have and hold say 4x the volume of data?! If the cost of the Safe is more than the cost of the burner and media. Then it is a sound economic move.

Just because *YOU* cant make a case for it doesnt mean others cant. There are other factors sometimes.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[jmhoule314]

There was a long time when CDs were far cheaper than hard drives. CDRs and CDRWs were around before the 1 GB mark was even reached on hard drives. Do you remember only being able to install a couple of games on your computer and having to run the rest off of the CD?

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[cstdenis]

You don't have to leave the hard-drives plugged in.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Agripa]

I remember buying a Maxtor 8760E for $900 and thinking, "Wow. I could copy an entire CD onto this drive."

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Atario]

$200 will buy you 2TB worth of DVDs -- and not even el cheapos: the good kind, Taiyo Yuden 16X, with inkjet printable surface and everything.

I always laugh anytime someone suggests that hard drives are the cheapest per-gig storage out there...

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Anonymous Coward]

Both film archives and datacenters are still firmly clinging to magnetic tape. Optical storage either takes up too much space (imagine keeping track of 10TB of DVDs) or has a high cost per GB.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[EmagGeek]

I always laugh at people who assume the only value in a media is the physical "thing" itself. I would much rather pay $400 for 2TB of storage that I can quickly access at any time than get pay $200 for it and have to fiddle with media that is not as reliable, not as fast, and requires billable time to manage.

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Atario]

Moving the goalposts

Re:Blu-ray hasn't yet come close to catching....

[Walter Carver]

Yes, you are right, BUT... If you through an HDD and an optical disk at the other side of the room, which one is more possible to survive? But optical disks can handle more abuse than HDDs, that's their advantage.

Aos, optical disks cannot be re-writen (leave re-writables aside, they are a diffent product) but I don't see this a disadvantange. It's for archiving, it's good that it cannot be re-writen.

That slight scratching sound

[MikeRT]

Was the sound of a single scratch wiping out years of corporate data...

Re:That slight scratching sound

[morgan_greywolf]

Was the sound of a single scratch wiping out years of corporate data...

Never worked in an enterprise server room, I take it? 400 GB is nothing. These days, library devices that put 100-200 200GB or 400 GB LTOx tapes are quite common. Multiple backups of the same data are often made -- some to send offsite, some for local storage, etc.

Optical disc storage would have to have similar capability and durability to be used in the enterprise as a serious archival data storage method. Probably some type of cartridge or caddy would be used.

Re:That slight scratching sound

[TubeSteak]

Was the sound of a single scratch wiping out years of corporate data...

Right, because nobody would think to put that optical disc in a cartridge or caddy...
just like every other serious commercial* level product.

*commercial, as in not-for-consumers

Re:That slight scratching sound

[MBGMorden]

Agreed. Loosing a single piece of media isn't going to be detrimental to any good backup plan.

For my current backup server, I have an LTO2 library and a 16-tape capacity. Tapes are rotated nightly for a 2 week period (weekdays only - our data isn't accessed over the weekend). Each night I write a backup to disk, and then a backup to tape. That backup (in both cases) is generally for SQL databases which do nightly full dumps to a backup directory in which I keep 5 days worth of backups stored (I also do incremental database backups to disk throughout the day). Each night the previous night's backup tape is taken off site. Every week on Saturday a Weekly tape is loaded which is written on a 6 week rotation. It's taken offsite the next Monday morning and kept off site until it needs to be overwritten six weeks later. On the last day of every month I also do an end of month tape which is in a 12 month rotation which is treated the same way (off site until it needs to be used again). Finally, at the end of the fiscal year I create two end-of year archival tapes which are sent to separate locations for permanent archiving.

So, yeah, one of the tapes could get destroyed or damaged, but it's probably not going to hurt anything.

But will it play in my HD-DVD player?

[fodder69]

Will it play in my HDDVD player?

Re:But will it play in my HD-DVD player?

[thexile]

Does it run linux?

Limited time offer

[cazbar]

Now you can order a collection of ALL the pornography on the internet on an easy-to-ship 150 disc set. Pioneer drive required.

Re:Limited time offer

[sexconker]

150 discs?

Surely you mean 150 spindles of discs...

Re:Limited time offer

[RulerOf]

They've compressed it to MPEG-1, transcoded it to FLV, added an Ebaumsworld.com watermark, transcoded it to WMV, added a break.com watermark, and then transcoded it back to FLV, cropped out the watermarks, posted it on youtube, and pressed it to 150 fully DRM compliant disks, for your viewing pleasure.

For an extra 15 dollars/disk, they'll even sync up the audio for you.

Re:Limited time offer

[EchaniDrgn]

Nah, the first disc is all you really need. All the rest are just variations on a theme.

Re:Limited time offer

[Blimey85]

My heart skipped a beat when I read this.

Re:Limited time offer

[sexconker]

You sir have not been on the internet very long.

BD++ triple AACS CCS CSS DES CCCCC daily licensing

[heroine]

If this doesn't make them adopt BD++ triple AACS CCS CSS DES CCCCC encryption daily licencing, nothing will.

Thick

[GottliebPins]

Its amazing how much data you can cram on a 12" thick disc.

Re:Thick

[oodaloop]

That's what SHE said.

That slight humming sound

[aristotle-dude]

Was that the sound of an electromagnet or disruptor wiping out years of corporate data? The prudent thing would be to not put all your eggs in one basket. Magnetic tape backup is vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation.

Where have I heard this before?

[hyades1]

Let me guess, it's going to be used to ship the next version of Duke Nukem.

What will you do with it?

[suck_burners_rice]

Oh good, a 400 GB read only disc. That means you get 400 GB of zeros for your reading pleasure! What will you do with 400 GB of zeros?

Re:What will you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pressed (production) DVDs are read only. Obviously as with other read-only material they can be written to, just not by you (who is obviously a hard core videophile =/).

Re:What will you do with it?

[dave420]

Just like when CDs came out. You're always going to get factory-pressed media released before its home-burnable equivalent.

Re:What will you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, considering that my /dev/zero just ran out of zeros, this will do nicely.

Re:What will you do with it?

[Nullav]

Compress it.

rerun

[ILuvRamen]

Too bad InPhase already has had a holographic disk of that capacity for a while now plus a write speed that blows this media away.

Re:rerun

[NeMon'ess]

Agreed. It seems to me that extending optical disc technologies is like Iomega's attempt to keep floppy disk tech alive with Zip disks. Flash memory and the ubiquity of CD and DVD readers eliminated the Zip.

Any new multi-layer blue laser discs only have about five years to live before the market shifts to holographic ones.

Porn

[Peter_The_Linux_Nerd]

So much porn..

Long term data storage

[DragonHawk]

A 500 GB HDD costs less than a single one of these discs, is reliable, rewritable a million times, lasts decades if properly stored, is already available, is faster, and requires no fancy hardware.

I'm curious as to on what you base your statement that a 500 GB HDD will last decades. Can you cite a study on the long-term storage reliability of modern hard disk designs? In my personal experience, disks which have sat unused for several years sometimes don't spin up. They're not designed for that.

I'll also point out that the equipment needed to read an ST-506 hard disk -- introduced circa 1980, thus "decades" -- would likely be somewhat hard to find and integrate into a modern operation. It might not be "fancy hardware", but the end result (high cost) is the same.

I'm not dismissing the use of hard disks for archiving in general; I just find some of your claims dubious.

One thing that seems to be true is that storage is getting cheaper and bigger all the time. Thus for some applications, it may actually be cost-effective to keep all your archives online (disks spinning), with redundancy, and simply upgrade to newer, larger drives as old ones fail. Capacity keeps growing for new data, and old data keeps getting copied to new media. That eliminates the concerns about keeping equipment around to read old media. As an added bonus, everything is online all the time.

Re:Long term data storage

[mitgib]

One thing that seems to be true is that storage is getting cheaper and bigger all the time.

How about faster? That is my desire, and hardware SAS and SATA raid arrays are just not fast enough for what I am interested in. I saw a new device recently that was mentioned here, the Fusion IO, that is 1000 times faster, but is cost prohibitive yet, and small in size still, like 320gb is as large as offered. At $30/GB it has a long way to go before it is really mainstream and I don't see that happening for quite some time since they have their production sold out for months on end. At least that was what I was told after contacting their sales department. It is supported in the CentOS 5.2 kernel though, so that was a major plus to me, and no Windows support yet either, another major plus to me.

Re:Long term data storage

[nicolas.kassis]

Electricity wise that's just plain not efficient. There was a story posted here a while back about how Hollywood studios were having the same issue. This is what these disc are good for long term storage. Well stored DVDs can last 20 years or more. Hard Drive will seize and stop working long before that and flopping data over to new hardware every 10-15 years isn't cheap.

Re:Long term data storage

[adolf]

You're in the wrong place for making such claims: I still have an 8-bit ISA MFM controller, circa 1988, originally used with an ST-225.

Let me know if you'd like to rent it.

Re:Long term data storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll also point out that the equipment needed to read an ST-506 hard disk -- introduced circa 1980, thus "decades" -- would likely be somewhat hard to find and integrate into a modern operation. It might not be "fancy hardware", but the end result (high cost) is the same.

Hmmm. I see your point but I think we've got to the point for external USB hard drives that I would be 99.9% confident that in 20 years time I would be able to plug it into a new PC and go. This is from the compatability point of view, not addressing the reliablity issue. I think we'll have backwards compatable USB ports for a *long* time now. Of course, you also need a good choice of filesystem; I'm confident that the ext[n] series will still be going and backwards compatable as it is with ext2, ext3, ext4 (not sure about the original ext) and I expect MS will still support reading today's NTFS filesystems.

If I was relying on such drives for long term storage though, I would have a pair of them as identical copies and run a checksum on both once a month at least; chances of them both failing at the same time and losing your online hard drive must be miniscule.

My read only disc could contain up to 25TB

[Woundweavr]

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to write data to it yet.

Rubbish

[encoderer]

This, frankly, is rubbish.

No matter how good the upscaling chipset is, it cannot divine information that's not on the disc.

It's like taking a 640x480 picture, stretching it to to 1920x1280 and calling it "nearly as good."

All this talk of "bluray not catching" is just a matter of time. I never gave bluray a second thought until I bought an HDTV. Soon after, I bought a bluray.

And before long, everybody will be buying HDTV's. Many will wait until their existing set bites the dust, but it will happen, just as everybody eventually switched to Color, then to Stereo.

Re:Rubbish

[OrangeTide]

It's not rubbish. Because if the different in that data is so marginal that it is nearly undetectable by half the population, then what is the point? People currently are buying Blu-Ray players because it is technically better, not because they experience anything different when they watch movies. I think a good audio system (compared to simple front stereo) has far more impact than adding a little more than double the lines to a film.

The 1920x1280 versus 640x480 analogy is not a good one because the perception of 1920x1280 being better is mostly due to having more desktop space and the ability to have smaller fonts. If OSes really respected DPI and just rendered fonts with more pixels as you increased the resolution then the experience of a higher resolution display would not be so dramatically different from a lower resolution display.

I think a better analogy would be a 4 cylinder engine versus a turbo charged 6 cylinder. Most people don't need the big 6, just like they don't need HDTV.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you miss the point on the picture size. Expanding a 640x480 picture to 1920x1280 does not necessarily mean that it is 8 times as big - it means that there are 8 times as many pixels. The additional pixels either need to be filled in based on some sort of smoothing algorithm - at best, you're "guessing" what it should look like. IOW, you are creating data that you're missing.

In the case of engines, consider a 5.0 liter 4 cylinder vs. a 5.0 liter V-8. Same displacement, but the 8 will run smoother.

(The 4 will probably have more torque, but analogies can only go so far).

Re:Rubbish

[nabsltd]

No matter how good the upscaling chipset is, it cannot divine information that's not on the disc.

No, but it can improve on the existing image.

An example is anti-aliasing. A nearly horizontal line on a 640x480 image might be quite jagged. By merely stretching the image to give more pixels to work with, duplicated pixels can be changed to smooth out (anti-alias) the line. It's computationally intensive and might not help much, but in theory the apparent quality can be better for the viewer.

Re:Rubbish

[OrangeTide]

I think you don't understand what DPI means. I never said the image was larger. My complaint about desktop OSes and DPI is because they don't treat your monitor as being higher DPI when you increase the resolution on a monitor that is physically the same size.

You also must have overlooked my comment about rendering fonts with more pixels but keeping them the same size.

basically you completely ignored my post and just repeated the same rubbish. Thanks for wasting the bandwidth, asshat.

Re:Rubbish

[encoderer]

Of course nobody NEEDS HD. Nobody NEEDS SD, either.

My point about resolution fails in a desktop analogy, because these are two different things.

My point is simply if you have an picture from a sub-1MP camera, say, 720x480 pixels. And if you take that image and enlarge it to, say, 3MP (1920x1080), the result will be a rather poor image.

It will be nowhere near the quality of a picture that was TAKEN at 3MP.

Now, this is not a perfect analogy. A single frame in a DVD does not stand alone. A player has the advantage of information from the 30-90 previous and next frames. As I understand it, it uses this information, as well as meta data from the MPEG decoding stream to produce an image that looks quite a bit better than the standard 720x480 the DVD was designed for.

This is why the DVD scaler chips can work so much better than those in your set. The TV only has access to what's being sent over the HDMI cable, while the player has a lot more information at its disposal.

But any given BR frame holds 6x as many pixels as any given DVD frame.

The best upscaling chipsets developed cannot overcome the limitation that you cannot ADD data after the fact.

My point is simply refuting the claim that an upconverted DVD looks as good as a BR.

It doesn't. It never will.

Re:Rubbish

[OrangeTide]

I'll run with this "My point" business too.

My point is that it doesn't matter that the two aren't exactly the same.

Re:Rubbish

[encoderer]

That's a given. The difference, though, is that you seem to be suggesting it's close.

That a DVD frame, with 1/6 the information, can gain enough of that thru available meta-data and looking ahead at the next few frames, that it's passable as HD content on a HDTV.

I, on the other hand, am saying that i have a rather good HDTV, a blueray player, and recently I bought an HD-DVD player on the cheap only for its very good upscaler. I have hundreds of DVDs and i'd like to only buy BR going forward.

The DVD player does a pretty good job. It makes DVD's look better than they did on my previous unit, a Sony with component-output.

But it's simply not comparable to Bluray. And anybody can see that when you see them side-by-side. And the very existence of Bluray will serve to raise peoples expectations about how the TV they just bought should perform.

Re:Rubbish

[OrangeTide]

it's like trying to talk to a brick wall. well it's been fun (sarcasm).

Re:Rubbish

[encoderer]

My feelings exactly.

When "your point" is that people don't "need" something like HD service, it's a little hard to take you seriously.

People don't "need" most the things we buy. But they still buy them. And so far, that's including a few million BluRay players and counting...

next version

[floatingrunner]

does that mean the next version of windows will be 400GB?

convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

it sure would be nice to have an entire season or even multiple seasons of your favorite tv show on once dvd. right now, a single season is spread between ~8 discs (about 30 GB).

Amazing seek times

[Joe Snipe]

Essentially wouldn't this be the same as having an 8 platter HD (aside from the slower moving read head)? This could easily outperfom a 2-4 platter Hard drive, no?

4096p or bust!

[OrangeTide]

I'll wait for 4096p. The visual difference between 480p and 720p are marginal at best. And 1080i has been a big failure in my opinion. 1080p is interesting in theory, but so far the 1080p Blu-Ray discs out in the wild are .. unexciting.

Re:4096p or bust!

[Gravatron]

Go watch The Shining on blu-ray. It's amazing. Colors are vigrant, detail that we havn't seen in 20+ years shines though, and it's in true widescreen. I was watching it on my friends 28 inch 720p set and it was amazing, I took it home to my 40 inch 1080p set and it was jaw dropping.

400 GB optical drives will happen

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not necessarily useful for movies since movies currently have more than enough space using Blueray or HDDVD. Perhaps such mass storage will be needed for holographic multimedia or gaming but for now once burning is permitted one can store plenty of ripped CDs, DVDs, Divx or whatever else on such a disk.
Overall despite the naysayers this is an exciting accomplishment that will make it into our homes in about 2 1/2 years due to the fact that more people will be switching from 32 bit to 64bit and burning HD content.. I'm never wrong about this shite and rather than argue with any of you who doubt me please save this link for about 2 1/2 years and look at it again. Ill be sure to post I told you so when it comes out.

Quote from Megetron88 in 2007
"Stop banging your sister. No chance they will ever make a blueray/ HD-DVD combo player", quantum computer & have 8 core CPUs by 2008. LMAO.. bahad call bro tell your pop to stop banging sheep.

Fools!

[nko321]

It's read only! How are they going to get 400 GB onto something onto which they can't write?

Do they mean WORM? (Is there some marketing problem with that acronym, maybe?)

Capacity advantage

[DrYak]

The only big advantage that I see helping BlueRay is the important storage capacity, which help to have a whole TV serie season on a single disc in a single box.

Much more space saving on the shelf and convenient to search for episode.
For TV series fan, the jump from DVD to Blueray is similar to what experienced with VHS to DVD.

So maybe they'll drive the market forward and force the prices down to the point that having a DVD or a BlueRay player doesn't make much difference.

Re:Capacity advantage

[RiotingPacifist]

Im not really a box set collector but the few i do have went from 2 episodes a Video, to 3/4 episodes a DVD, because they improved the quality and added more bonus features. an episode of Dr.Who in SD is 250mb of the bbc *cough* streaming* service .'. a dvd could hold 19 episodes, as a series is 12 episodes you could probably upgrade the quality and put out a single DVD with each series of Dr.who on it at SD (hell with blueray it would only take 5 disks for the entire collection at SD). But i doubt we will ever see that, instead they will improve the quality so those with HD benifit and continue to ship 3/4 dvd/bluerays boxsets.

Perhaps because i only watch video on my laptop the 300mb per episdoe number is abit small but a blue ray disk could hold a series of STTNG at ~1G per episode but i doubt well see that either.

Fortunately my HDD can hold all of the X-files (minus the movies OFC) in just 60GB

*p.s thanks iphone owners

Floppy Disks

[nko321]

We measure things in Libraries of Congress; why not start measuring removable media in 3.5" floppies? 277,777 floppies fit on this disc!

Re:Floppy Disks

[stevenvi]

I believe that many years ago, such comparisons were actually made. However, in this modern age, the average computer user now would say, "floppy disk? What's that?"

We can probably get away with some arbitrary measurements though:

• 6,153,846 Word documents
• 421,052 pictures
• 133,333 songs
• 80,000 ebooks
• 571 CDs
• 100 video games
• 85 DVDs
• 59 installations of Microsoft Windows Vista
• 1.6 bandwidth caps from Comcast

Remember IBM's Winchester drives ?

[crovira]

With the mountable packs? (And head assemblies?)

DASDs were fun back then :-)

I have a write-only device..

[Junta]

It's never gotten full. 25TB would be no problem. Perhaps our technologies could combine. Linux even has a driver for it. You can access it using /dev/null.

The read-only device has worked great for me too. I've only ever gotten 0s out of it. /dev/zero and /dev/null combined could be awesome.

Not suited for consumer use? Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: The huge capacity of these discs means that the new technology will be best suited for applications such large volume data archiving, rather than consumer use.

Not suited for consumer use? Are they kidding?

It's a great size for consumer use -- it can back up a typical-sized hard disk.

Actually, I was a bit disappointed that it was only 400GB, as I am probably going to be using 1TB hard disks exclusively within about 3 years.

Obsolete by the time it makes it out of the lab...

[Joce640k]

CD was a hit because it was massively bigger than a hard disk.

Now we're supposed to celebrate something which can't even backup a fairly average desktop PC?

(And by the time it appears probably won't even back up a fairly average laptop)

You don' wanna watch porn in HD.

[crovira]

Because nobody can look as good as your mind can make them.

HD makes Jenna Jamison look like Joseph Merrick.

They don't "stretch" the image

[Joce640k]

It works at the mathematical level, before decompression.

You're right, it's not really as good, it's somewhere in between. But at best HD is only twice as good as DVD so being 50% better is pretty close.

I'll get HD when it's really HD, not some stopgap format which will be obsolete in five years. There's no way I'm paying for a collection of shiny disks until they make me go "wow!".

Re:They don't "stretch" the image

[encoderer]

You're right. The image analogy was imperfect, like just about every analogy ever analogized.

But you're a bit wrong on your numbers. DVD is 720x480. Somewhere around 300,000 pixels.

BluRay is 1920x1080. Any given frame of BluRay movie holds 6x the information a DVD holds.

Upconverting makes a DVD look just ACCEPTABLE on a 1080 screen. BluRay is a dramatically better experience.

I myself was a recent HD adopter. Just in the last few months. So I don't look down my nose at people for something as silly as this.

But making a claim that upconverting a DVD achieves BluRay quality is just false. These things can be measured, and it's just false.

Re:They don't "stretch" the image

[NeMon'ess]

Joce640k didn't say upconverting a DVD achieves BluRay quality. You don't need to apply other's comments to Joce. What Joce said was "it's not really as good, it's somewhere in between. But at best HD is only twice as good as DVD so being 50% better is pretty close."

I agree with the first sentence. I disagree with the second sentence. Don't make straw men arguments.

Here's where your wrong if my memory is correct. HD movies are stored on Blu-ray WITH the black bars. They are NOT stored anamorphically. DVDs do that. Therefore a movie like Blade Runner on DVD has 720x480=345600 pixels. On Blu-ray it's stored as 1920x803=1541760 pixels. So that's 4.46 times as many pixels. Not 6x.

What upconverting does for the Blade Runner DVD is show all 345,600 pixels. When not upconverted, the 640x480 picture only shows 640x272=174080 pixels. That is 50% of the data stored.

So upconverting a wide screen DVD displays twice as much detail than the SD output. The Blu-ray version has 4.5x more detail than the upconverted DVD.

I'll bet a thousand bucks...

[SethJohnson]

Let me guess, MBGMorden doesn't work in the White House IT department. Oh, and he's probably never done a consulting gig for Texas Governor Rick Perry, who claims email must be destroyed every seven days.

Seth

Disk farm power efficiency depends on the app

[DragonHawk]

Electricity wise that's just plain not efficient. There was a story posted here a while back about how Hollywood studios were having the same issue.

As I wrote, it depends on the application.

Anything with larges amounts of quiescent (unchanging) data that does not to be online is going to lose big-time. Most movie footage is going to fall into that category; it never changes once shot, and most of it is rarely looked at after post-production finishes. They only keep it around for posterity and "Special Edition" edits.

But take somebody like The Wayback Machine. What I described is more-or-less how they manage their storage. (Or was, when I read about it a year or three ago.) The whole archive needs to be online at all times anyway, so it's a win for them.

One size does not fit all.

Pioneer? What about the Voyager spacecraft?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Voyager spacecraft is newer so I'm guessing it promises an even higher capacity.