Blu-ray Proposes Incompatible BD-XL and IH-BD Formats

adeelarshad82 writes "The Blu-ray Disc Association announced upcoming specifications for high-capacity write-once and rewritable discs. The BDA proposed two new formats, BDXL, the name given to new 100GB and 128GB discs; and IH-BD, a so-called 'Intra-Hybrid' disc that will incorporate both read-only and rewritable layers. Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months. Both formats will be incompatible with existing hardware; however, new players designed to take advantage of the new formats will be able to play back existing Blu-ray discs, which are available in both 25 and 50GB capacity points."

Comments

Designed Obsolescence

[WrongSizeGlass]

How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats? I bet they keep this sh!t up until the next video format wars. Asshats.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Highly unlikely this is intended for movies. This is almost certainly designed for backup storage only. Given the exceptionally low penetration of BD on computers, it's fine.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[cbensinger]

Agreed. I've got a XBOX360 HD drive and a couple of stand-alone HD-DVD players that gather dust while we watch movies on the PS3's and/or PC's with Blu-Ray drives...

Blu-Ray burners and discs still (at least in my opinion) aren't to a price point where they are common; but yet lets throw another format into the mix. How many of these do they really think the market will bear? These guys never learn....

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:

"Professional industries have expressed a desire to find optical disc solutions that enable them to transition away from magnetic media for their archiving needs."

Not that anyone expects you to RTFA.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Nerdfest]

I'm hoping everybody remembers this and the ongoing gouging for BD movies next time Sony is involved in a format war.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[cbensinger]

And given the size of hard drives how beneficial is this? Why not make try and make the existing drives and media more cost effective instead?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[WiglyWorm]

And yet, we nerds keep buying the "latest greatest" technology and enabling them. Remember when people used to say paid DLC would never catch on because we were to used to free patches? Same basic principal, certain people gotta have it, though, and that's what gives these companies the ability to keep pushing incompatible the time frame for designed obsolescences shorter and shorter.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that any media sales that the market wont bear will be blamed on piracy =/

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

Highly unlikely this is intended for movies. This is almost certainly designed for backup storage only. Given the exceptionally low penetration of BD on computers, it's fine.

Had there been no format war I doubt this would be the case. Apparently they haven't learned that lesson and now we again have two competing formats. In terms of customer adoption and marketshare, this deserves to fail in order to send the message to companies that "useless format wars" == "financial losses". What else would provide a strong enough incentive for them to cooperate long enough to reach agreement on a single good standard?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? I already have a player that supports all current formats as well as all future ones. It's called a PC.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[maxume]

I would suggest none.

Unless you really really need your movies in high resolution.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[DragonWriter]

How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats?

The succession of newer, higher capacity formats stretches way back before blu-ray. Personally, I think that the fact that, since CD-ROM, there's been a focus on allowing older media to play in newer devices is a good thing.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[future assassin]

Thats why nothing in my house has a Sony label on it anymore or will ever have Blue Ray player. DVD FTW! When companies stop bringing out products that restrict my rights as a consumer then I'll bring them into my house hold. For now there's nothing wrong with DVD and the only thing that could possibly replace DVD for me would be digital files but only if I could play them on any device that is capable of playing/displaying that digital file. If not I'm fine with not having to see new movies. Most of them suck anyways.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

Don't forget that any media sales that the market wont bear will be blamed on piracy =/

This is physical media, not copyrighted content, so I think this is the one case where they won't try that one.

It may even be the opposite. Those countries which place a tax/levy on blank media and then send that money to the copyright cartels are assuming that at least some of those blank media will be used to make copies of copyrighted works. So if these new blank media don't sell because of another needless format war, they would be blatantly contradicting themselves if they blame that on piracy. It would be amusing to watch them try. It might even create a "boy who cried wolf" situation where any laments about piracy are no longer taken seriously by anyone.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this article a few days ago, and the new formats are not intended for movies. They are for a very small niche market.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully since these are both proposed by the same association, they'll pick one to go ahead with before any hardware is on the market. They won't want to be competing with themselves, they just want to shop both formats around a bit and see if there are any bites.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What else would provide a strong enough incentive for them to cooperate long enough to reach agreement on a single good standard?

Pah, you forgot that the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Jeng]

Depends on how many of the players can be firmware updated to deal with the formats.

The two formats they are talking about appear to be in pipedream stage. They will be obsolete before they are released, if they are released at all.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I just download the 5-10GB Bluray rips. That way I don't have to worry about keeping up with their new formats every couple years.

According to the studios, am I going to hell for downloading them? Probably. But I refuse to purchase crap that is going to be useless with new media in 2 years.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Enderandrew]

Sony doesn't set movie prices.

I don't understand why Best Buy and other retailers keep trying to charge $35 for a BluRay movie, when Amazon.com has tons for $15-$20 or less. Blame retailers and studios for jacking up prices.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

Hopefully since these are both proposed by the same association, they'll pick one to go ahead with before any hardware is on the market. They won't want to be competing with themselves, they just want to shop both formats around a bit and see if there are any bites.

The problem is that if this association is one single block of harmony, it would be quite rare among trade groups. That there are two formats already tells me that there are at least two factions within this association who disagree about design decisions. If they don't come to a consensus before hardware is manufactured it will be their declaration to the rest of the world that they are not only too stupid to learn from history, but could not even learn anything from extremely recent history.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

Yeah, time to run out and buy all new stuff!

Seriously though, I hope movie studios recognize that this is part of the reason their movie sales are down. It's not just piracy. It's a variety of reasons, but I believe one of the main reasons is that people who buy lots of movies are collectors.

I say it as a collector: I don't really want to collect things that are transient in a way that makes them a huge money hole. Back in the day of VHS tapes, I bought a bunch of VHS tapes. When DVDs came out, I bought a bunch of DVDs, including repurchasing a couple of titles I had previously bought on VHS. Then came the MP3 revolution. I realized that it made far more sense to rip CDs to my computer so I could easily store, sort, and retrieve an enormous library, and I realized that those days would be coming for movies sooner or later.

By the time DVD ripping become easy and commonplace, we were into the format wars. I might have bought DVDs and ripped them for my computer, but I knew HD was coming, and so I'd wait it out to see if Bluray or HD-DVD won. Then Bluray won, but it was still expensive and hard to rip. Then there's iTunes and Amazon to contend with, that save you the trouble of ripping and tagging, but aren't compatible with all devices. Now there's new and incompatible Bluray discs? The whole thing just keeps getting more and more complicated, and it's more and more clear that whatever movies I buy today I'll probably need to re-buy later. The only way that they could make me more unlikely to buy anything today is by announcing they'll release a new format in 2 years that supports higher resolutions and 3D displays.

Sorry, it's a long rant for ideas that everyone has probably read before, but damn these companies need to get their crap together. They could stand to learn a thing or two from Gabe Newell on copy protection.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're not buying any blank media anymore because everyone is pirating... FROM THE CLOUD! They don't need their own media anymore thanks to that evil cloud hosting and streaming, putting us out of business!"

Seriously, I think these asshats will keep finding excuses to sue people until the courts and society put them in their place permanently. I can only hope that happens soon.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

Depends on how many of the players can be firmware updated to deal with the formats.

The two formats they are talking about appear to be in pipedream stage. They will be obsolete before they are released, if they are released at all.

No joke, and that's why I am having a hard time understanding the point of this. If you are just now going to start designing a new optical disc format, why only 100-128GB? Why not use ultraviolet lasers (or whatever else it takes) and aim at a 1TB optical disc? That way, by the time you have gone through the design, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing stages and finally bring a product to market, it will have a useful quantity of storage for backup and archival purposes.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[RapmasterT]

Sony doesn't set movie prices.

I don't understand why Best Buy and other retailers keep trying to charge $35 for a BluRay movie, when Amazon.com has tons for $15-$20 or less. Blame retailers and studios for jacking up prices.

Sony doesn't set movie prices? So who sets the prices for Sony Pictures releases then? If you think Sony doesn't have a vested interest in high BD prices, you're wrong.

That being said, they're just plain stupid for not realizing there's a LOT more money to be made by selling a lot of BD disks at LOW prices than there is at selling fewer at high prices.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[BikeHelmet]

How many Blue Ray players am I supposed to buy before they stop coming up with new formats? I bet they keep this sh!t up until the next video format wars. Asshats.

If they don't compete with themselves, then some other alliance of companies comes in to produce high capacity discs.

Screwed if they do, screwed if they don't.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[517714]

None! You didn't see this coming?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nomadic]

Remember when people used to say paid DLC would never catch on because we were to used to free patches?

Nope. I don't remember that. They've had game add-ons for decades, nothing particularly crazy about selling it online.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[DrXym]

What are you talking about? If you had bought a profile 1.0 player you could still play discs which were profile 2.0, 3d or whatever. You'd miss out on the new functionality that your player would ignore but the movie would still play. Of course, new players are so cheap that I expect most people would probably go through at least 2 or 3 different players over the course of the lifetime of the format rather than stick with some crappy 1st gen player. In that regard it would be no different from DVD, or VHS probably.

As for the new format, go ask the BDA what it's for, but I doubt they intended or expected it to supplant the existing and set-in-stone 25/50Gb disc formats. More likely it's for data storage or something exotic which has no bearing on consumer kit.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[EyelessFade]

And how was the DVD prices when this format was new? Exactly how Bluray is now. And I've seen a significant drop in Bluray prices the last 6 months also

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Enderandrew]

Sony sets prices on their movies, but Sony Pictures isn't exactly Disney, Fox, Warner Brothers, etc.

Sony doesn't control ALL movie prices.

You also completely contradict yourself. You suggest Sony is part of some massive conspiracy because it is in their best interest to have high prices, and then immediately after say it is in their best interest to have low prices.

Retailers ultimately set prices. And most retailers are being stupid because Amazon is massively undercutting them.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Same basic principal

That word. It does not mean what you think it means.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[BobMcD]

You've honestly never suspected 'planned obsolescence'?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[DragonWriter]

If you are just now going to start designing a new optical disc format, why only 100-128GB? Why not use ultraviolet lasers (or whatever else it takes) and aim at a 1TB optical disc?

Because neither is really intended as a completely new optical disk format, they are incremental updates of Blu-Ray for specialized needs, where it is assumed that continued use of existing blu-ray disks in the same devices is important. One is essentially "BD-ROM plus BD-RW", the other is "High capacity BD-ROM".

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nurb432]

As many as they can make.. Feed the beast and be happy about it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Ogi_UnixNut]

But that is the point. You (as a customer) are the antithesis of what they want. The want people to keep re-buying things all the damn time, in fact in an ideal word, the MPAA/RIAA would charge you for every time you set eyes on a movie or heard one of their songs. Failing that they probably would not mind a rental modal where people pay forever to be able to access the content. As such DRM is designed to fulfil these goals, which is why it ends up being so frustrating that enough people put their heads together to break it.

Ideally they want the transition from one medium to another to be impossible. Failing that, making it so complicated that the majority of people just re-buy it all is an acceptable alternative. Once you realise this, why they implement DRM the way they do (or at all) and their general attitude make a lot more sense.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

You also completely contradict yourself. You suggest Sony is part of some massive conspiracy because it is in their best interest to have high prices, and then immediately after say it is in their best interest to have low prices.

I wouldn't call it conspiracy, I would call it collusion. It's reminiscent of the USA cellphone industry. For example, text messages cost next-to-nothing for the carrier of a CDMA network, and absolutely nothing for the carrier of a GSM network. Yet despite multiple competing cellphone networks, none of them have text message pricing that remotely reflects the actual cost of delivering SMS.

It's not difficult to understand why. It benefits all of the cellphone companies to continue overcharging for this service, and the one company that undercuts the competition and forces all of them to lower their prices is going to ruin the high profit margins for everyone, itself included. No conspiracy is required; they didn't have to get together and plan this ahead of time. Each company only has to realize that changing this status quo will result in less profit, and they can realize this independently without consulting the other companies.

Until and unless they start losing serious sales volume because customers feel that the price is too high, the movie producers have no incentive to engage in competition that they know will reduce their profit margins. Unlike the cellphone providers, they are not even directly competing with each other because of the monopoly nature of copyright. No one but Sony can produce and distribute copies of a movie for which Sony owns the copyright, so if you want a movie made by them you cannot purchase that same title from a competitor. So there is even less competition for each unique movie title than there is among cellphone providers for mobile phone services. That means there is even less incentive for any one company to rock the boat with aggressive pricing.

Retailers ultimately set prices. And most retailers are being stupid because Amazon is massively undercutting them.

If Sony's wholesale price for copies of its movies is X, then Amazon cannot charge less than X for those titles and expect to remain in business. That's why Sony's influence on the ultimate retail price is quite strong and should not be so quickly dismissed. I would venture that Amazon's lower prices have more to do with sales volume and the fact that they don't have the expenses of maintaining brick-and-mortar stores.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[PitaBred]

I place Blu-Ray along with DVD... if I can crack it and use it like I want, I'll deal with it. AnyDVD HD seems to work pretty well for me, so I don't mind getting movies on Blu-Ray. If that stops, I'll stop getting Blu-Rays (I already don't pay more than $15 or so for them. Screw new release prices). DVD has encryption on it just like Blu-Ray. Using one but not the other seems like a meaningless protest, along the lines of "get off my lawn!"

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

What else would provide a strong enough incentive for them to cooperate long enough to reach agreement on a single good standard?

Pah, you forgot that the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!

Haha.

Seriously though, when they are interoperable open standards this isn't a problem. The problem is that if you want to make a Blu-ray player, you need Sony's blessing in the form of licensing agreements. Not to mention that Sony has no incentive to make Blu-ray compatible with anyone else's standard. This makes it more difficult to economically produce a hardware device for which supporting several multiple standards is only a matter of firmware.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Remember: your "principal" is your "pal"

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[tsm_sf]

I think the phrase "B2: Keep on the Borderlands" should put his argument to rest.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The succession of newer, higher capacity formats stretches way back before blu-ray. Personally, I think that the fact that, since CD-ROM, there's been a focus on allowing older media to play in newer devices is a good thing.

I agree. For most people, this is no different than the transition from CDs to DVDs, they are just trying to leverage the branding by sticking with the BD in the name.

What's worse - BD-XL with backwards compatible hardware or trying to read a 5.25" floppy disk on a 3.5" floppy drive?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[RobDude]

I don't mean this as a personal attack against you; but I see this sort of thing a lot and it always annoys me.

You've got this big 'evil'/'greedy' entity that everyone seems to agree is out to make money, even if that means screwing over the customer. And it's normally not just one evil/greedy thing; it's a whole lot of them, fighting, to get customers (to screw over) because really, all they want is money.

But then, in the same breath, we get people (like you) who seemingly have found a BETTER business model - that would get the company MORE MONEY. I mean, it's not like these big evil/greedy things don't have full-time employees whose job is to come up with ways to get more money. Because, apparently, even if they've managed to beat out all the other evil companies to get a monopoly on the industry - they are also stupid. And you have found a much better model. That not only makes them more money; but makes the customer happier.

People use this argument against CDs and the RIAA ("Yeah man - they like totally should sell CDs for like a dollar!") or ("Yeah man, I'd totally pay to download this stuff I'm downloading illegally - if it were like 25 cents - plus they'd make more money!")

People use this argument when they pirate software ("Yeah - well, lolz, like I'm gonna pay $50 dollars for a game? Pssh! They should just make it $2 dollars and they'd like totally get a ton of money and I'd buy it then!")

I guess I just find the argument hard to believe.

I'd guess they have some pretty smart people who spend a lot of time deciding what the optimal pricing strategy is.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

"They're not buying any blank media anymore because everyone is pirating... FROM THE CLOUD! They don't need their own media anymore thanks to that evil cloud hosting and streaming, putting us out of business!"

You make a very convincing argument. I'd like to tell you why that couldn't happen but unfortunately I can't because I think you're right. I have to concede that your scenario there is more than plausible. I know of only one thing that weakens your prediction, but does not contradict it: at least some people will want to produce physical media for use with the hardware players they own. Most people I know would prefer to watch a movie on their large-screen TVs using a set-top player, rather than play a .avi file on their much smaller computer monitor.

What I don't know is how unusual it is for people to connect a PC to their TVs and use that as a media player, but I suspect a relatively small minority of folks are doing this. A leisure activity like watching a movie is especially an area where non-technical people "just want it to work". They may not find a media PC appealing because of its complexity when compared to a set-top disc player. Then again, the people doing most of the piracy might be an exception.

Seriously, I think these asshats will keep finding excuses to sue people until the courts and society put them in their place permanently. I can only hope that happens soon.

When that happens they're going to wish they had quit while they were ahead. They remind me of the criminals who steal millions of dollars and get away with it, except that they don't know when to quit. So they keep doing it again and again and finally they get caught. The cartel behavior of the major copyright holders and their constant push for ever-tyrannical new laws is like this. It will catch up with them. The more greedy they get, the worse the customer backlash is going to be, both for them and the politicians who are in their pockets. I'd love to see a day when supporting the RIAA/MPAA becomes a great way to end your political career and be voted out.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[RobDude]

Not really.

Your PC won't be able to read the physical storage media of the future without upgrading it's hardware. Likewise, given enough time, your PC will be unable to meet the requirements to play the media.

It'd be like trying to watch a high-def/blu-ray movie on a 486 DX2. The old CRT won't properly display the video anyway, and even if so, it'll be choppy and crappy because the 486 can't handle playing the movie.

But sure - if you keep upgrading your PC - yeah - you can handle anything. Unless they come out with content that can't play played on a PC. Like a console video game, for example.

So yeah - I'm not sure a PC is really the answer.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[RobDude]

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't there all sorts of ways to limit the rights of the consumer with DVDs? And even VHS before that? And before that, even the old Cassette Tape had copy protection.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

If you are just now going to start designing a new optical disc format, why only 100-128GB? Why not use ultraviolet lasers (or whatever else it takes) and aim at a 1TB optical disc?

Because neither is really intended as a completely new optical disk format, they are incremental updates of Blu-Ray for specialized needs, where it is assumed that continued use of existing blu-ray disks in the same devices is important. One is essentially "BD-ROM plus BD-RW", the other is "High capacity BD-ROM".

True, but isn't that goal defeated by the fact that these new formats are already incompatible with existing players? If you are going to have to buy new hardware anyway, what's the point? A device that supports BD-XL/IH-BD with backwards compatibility for Blu-ray could also have been built to support a 1TB format with backwards compatibility for Blu-ray.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[causality]

You've honestly never suspected 'planned obsolescence'?

I certainly did. Sometimes my intention is to raise a question and see if others independently come up with the answers that occurred to me. At least, I sometimes do that in cases like this, where no one has evidence either way so all of this is speculation.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

Why? Hard drives are fantastic, 1TB for $100 and have superior read/write characteristics. Why worry about WORM when you can digitally sign the data and replicate it offsite cheaply without having to invest in niche burning and changing equipment that would be necessary to switch away from hard disks?

Switching to optical media is like switching to tape. Unless you're already invested, I don't see why you'd want to get involved there.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[DragonWriter]

True, but isn't that goal defeated by the fact that these new formats are already incompatible with existing players?

No.

If you are going to have to buy new hardware anyway, what's the point?

Expense, for one thing.

A device that supports BD-XL/IH-BD with backwards compatibility for Blu-ray could also have been built to support a 1TB format with backwards compatibility for Blu-ray.

Maybe, maybe not. The proposed "different wavelength laser 1TB" format from GGP would involve less common hardware between the new format and existing BD, so that backward compatibility would be more expensive (it would probably also involve more development risk compared to an incremental update, ignoring backward compatibility issues.)

Its essentially like asking why people making high-density 3.5" floppies didn't instead make something that used a radically different technology from existing double-density floppies, but that was also backwards compatible, so that existing floppies could still be used.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[somersault]

Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.

Now that I have bought them, I probably will have no qualms downloading FLAC versions of the albums if I ever want better fidelity. Same goes for my DVD and blu-ray collection. I have bought Star Wars on DVD as well as VHS - and I bought a couple of things on blu-ray after previously getting the DVD, but I suppose I may as well just get a decent sized HDD and rip or download copies of all the movies I own onto it in the next couple of years. I really can't be arsed ripping all my movies though - it was bad enough going through my CD collection at a higher bit rate.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[somersault]

Shhhhh - you're cramping all the Sony haters' and sensationalists' styles with you logic and general lack of ignorance!

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony's MS had about 5 iterations to be able to support 8GB cards compared to SD which took 2. CF I think took2 to get to 32GB. So I guess that's the Obsolescence knowhow they're bringing to BR.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Xeno man]

Do you even know what the word "archiving" means? Hard drives are great for backup and storage but if you want to archive data for a long time, say over a decade, A hard drive is not guaranteed to last, it's life span is only about 5 years. If the technology proves to be reliable and an accepted standard hardware component, there would be many places that would invest in something that allows them to archive their entire database, store it and forget it until needed.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

The BDA is going to have to do a lot better than a measly 100 or 128 GB if they want to make a viable alternative to magnetic media. You can buy cheap 1TB hard drives for $75 these days, and I doubt these new BD discs are less than $7.5 each. Plus, hard drives are fast, and you don't have to swap them out as often with their huge capacities.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

I think you're giving these companies too much credit. Companies are ultimately run by their executives. These people aren't geniuses, or even extremely in-touch, in most cases. They're just regular people who have worked their way up the ranks by ass-kissing, going to the right college, belonging to the right country club, etc.

There's a lot of truth to the old argument that people bought more stuff during Napster's heyday than they do now. Do the record company execs care? Probably not. They're not hip, young people who care a lot about music, and who know what's going on in popular culture; they're a bunch of old guys who probably cared a little about music back in 1960, but then got into the business side. The idea that people downloading music for free on Napster translated to people buying more CDs is a leap of logic they simply can't comprehend, even though there's countless people who have made that claim (including myself; I haven't bought a CD in years).

Finally, exactly how do you think they arrive at these prices, anyway? It's not like they have a crystal ball that can look into multiple parallel universes, each with a different price, to see what the sales will be at each profit point. It's all just guesswork and hand-waving.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[KillShill]

Since this is Slashdot, shouldn't that be assFedoras?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Because... RW media never has issues either *Rolls eyes*

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

That depends. In a sense, I'm using the same PC I was back in 1991. I've been upgrading it over time of course, but I never bought an all-new PC. I'd upgrade the hard drive, then the motherboard, then the case and power supply, then the hard drive again, a new monitor, etc.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Enderandrew]

There could be massive price fixing in the industry if everyone was in fact charging $35 for movies. But the problem is that Amazon often has a $15 BluRay that Best Buy wants to charge $35 for.

You're correct in that Amazon won't price far below their wholesale prices. (It isn't uncommon however to take a small loss on a movie to encourage other sales.) However, if Amazon can afford to sell that same movie for $15, then the wholesale price (which again, Sony only controls their studio) can't be more than $15.

So Sony is not responsible for Best Buy charging $35.

Best Buy gouges prices on all sorts of products. As more and more sales go to online retailers like Amazon every year, Best Buy's strategy seems to be to raise prices to try and maintain profits, rather than compete on prices. They're counting on customers to be too stupid, too lazy, or too scared to buy online. They're intentionally creating a death spiral for their business.

Why would I pay considerably more to buy from Best Buy when they lie to me, give me terrible customer service, and it is a hassle for me to drive to their store? Amazon is cheaper, has better customer service, and ships for free.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[PRMan]

I just got a bunch of Blu-Rays at Best Buy last weekend for $9.99 and $14.99...

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing professional industries = multimedia producers. They need to send large amounts of data to clients for proofing. Sending it over the internet is too expensive or too slow, and an optical disc is a lot more likely to survive being couriered across town on a moped than a hard drive.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I have yet to buy a blu ray player.

Guess it's good I waited.

I should be able to get an all in one by the time they release this format.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[spidr_mnky]

No one but Sony can produce and distribute copies of a movie for which Sony owns the copyright...

The word is "may". Not that it just tears apart the rest of your case or anything, but many can and do.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[fyoder]

And yet, we nerds keep buying the "latest greatest" technology and enabling them.

Really? Is it us nerds? I've been thinking of Blue Ray as a home entertainment thing for people with hd televisions. If I end up with something like that for a computer it will be because I need a dvd reader/writer and they don't exist anymore to buy. In short I don't have it because I don't need it, don't want it, and haven't been compelled in any way to get it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

None. Wait until they come out with the Bluray equivalent of 1,44" Floppy discs. The only thing you have to worry about is knowing when we're there.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

Yes, DVDs have region coding, and CSS protection. However, these are trivially easy to crack, unlike the protections on BDs.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[bertoelcon]

It would be amusing to watch them try. It might even create a "boy who cried wolf" situation where any laments about piracy are no longer taken seriously by anyone.

I thought that already happened.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

Its essentially like asking why people making high-density 3.5" floppies didn't instead make something that used a radically different technology from existing double-density floppies, but that was also backwards compatible, so that existing floppies could still be used.

At the time, 1.44MB was a decent amount of space, and a worthwhile upgrade from 720kB.

Later, some companies make a 2.88MB floppy format that was backwards-compatible with existing floppies. However, no one bought it and it became irrelevant. 2.88MB simply wasn't enough space any more to be worth upgrading your drive, when there were 100MB Zip drives and 640MB CD-ROM drives available.

Later on, when CD-Rs and CD-RWs had come along, Iomega tried to sell a 250MB Zip format, and others tried to sell a 100MB LS-120 format to compete with Zip disks. Both failed miserably. 100 and 250MB simply weren't enough to bother with.

This is the problem with this silly new BD format. 100MB is pathetic, and not worth buying a drive for. The amount of common hardware, the expense of backward compatibility, etc., are all completely unimportant if no one is going to buy your product. The question is: why are they bothering with this? They might as well just save their money, because this thing is going to be a big flop.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

Planned obsolescence is when you plan for your product to become obsolete some time AFTER it is sold. What we're looking at here is a new format that will already be obsolete when it first comes to the market.

There's a rational reason for planned obsolescence: it allows you to make more profit by convincing your customers to upgrade to a newer product in the future.

Releasing a product that's already obsolete usually results in zero profits, as what few sales you do achieve are less than your initial investment in R&D and promotion. This is a strategy usually only seen with businesses run by morons. Of course, many businesses are run by morons, so it's not that unusual, but that's no reason to refrain from criticizing it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dakameleon]

Unless you're operating on some inside knowledge the rest of us don't have, Blu-ray licensing comes through the Blu-ray Disc Association, which administers the licensing on behalf of patent holders. Sony doesn't hold all the patents around Blu-ray, though it'd be true to say that they (along with Pioneer) were the ones pushing the format originally.

The issue here is that the Blu-ray Disc Association is itself creating a format which isn't backwards compatible; the idea that Sony has no "incentive" to make Blu-ray compatible with "anyone else's standard" is an entirely false one, since there's no major competing standard for Blu-ray any more, and the only incentive they would have would be if they were losing significantly in the market. See the recent conversion of Sony from being Memory Stick exclusive to including SD support in many of their products.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[ravenshrike]

Except for archiving purposes you'd only use writable media. You wouldn't need rewrite capability.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[LarrySDonald]

v1.0 is always a sucker bet. There will always be a sucker, because word on the street is one is born every minute but it doesn't have to be you. Working out your delayed gratification gland is good for you anyway.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

Are you serious?

No one has an answer for long term media over twenty five years. No one. CD-ROM has barely been around that long, tapes that old cannot be read in any current players, and hard drives back then used IDE, which I can still get adapters for.

The only realistic way to archive digital media is to have a planned rotation policy. So, if I were to start today I'd start with 1 or 1.5TB disks in bulk, in 3 years consolidate those 2:1 to 2 or 3TB disks, etc. And keep consolidating (reducing the number of disks while also storing the data at multiple sites) perpetually. That's the only solution that keeps your data yours, and not at the mercy of a technology that you know won't be supported in twenty five years.

And of course, just because I recommend hard drives don't mean I recommend throwing everything else out the window. Judicious use of ECC, storing archive data at multiple sites and even biting the bullet and storing data multiple times at a single site are all options that should be explored when determining your archive policy.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

I work full time IT, part time as a movie theatre projectionist.

Guess how all our digital movies arrive?

Hard disk.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[CottonThePirate]

I remember buying mission packs at the store for the original Wing Commander series, must have been 1992 or 93. The difference to me is that with modern games (Looking at you bioshock 2). I really didn't feel like I got my $60 worth, and then right away they are pushing expansions. I feel like the value eqaution has changed.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

GP's GP: The industry wishes to move away from hard drives.

GP: Hard Drives are very non-ideal solution.

You: Hard drives are the current solution

Your statement really doesn't conflict with the others.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Yvan256]

So what you're basically saying is that you've been using the same PC case for the last 19 years.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Yvan256]

Disabling CSS is pretty trivial too. Just enable the "Develop" menu in Safari, then select "Disable Styles".

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[MikeBabcock]

Umm, this has very little or nothing to do with your BD player unless you watch BD movies on your PC or laptop.

Also, the PS3 since it came out has played every BD format thrown at it, and still does. If you bought one of those, there's no requirement to have bought anything else yet.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

No, I've changed the case and power supply too. What I'm saying is I've never changed everything (including monitor and keyboard and mouse) all at once; there's always been some part that's been kept in any upgrade. So at what point do you say it's a "new" computer? Sure, between 1991 and 2010, there are no parts in common, but at every point in between where something was changed, there was some part that stayed the same.

There's a similar argument over what constitutes a person. Supposedly (I am not a biologist), your body's cells all die at some point, and are replaced by other cells. After around 7 years or so, all your cells are new (i.e., none of your current cells are older than ~7 years). Of course, some cells live longer than others; your blood cells are pretty short-lived, but your bone cells last longer. So, if after a decade, all your cells have died and have been replaced with new ones, are you the same person as you were 10 years ago? Before answering that question, consider this: suppose we invent the matter replicator like on Star Trek, and we put you in it, and make an identical clone of you (like the transporter accident that created a second Riker). Even though the clone is exactly like you in every way, down to the memories up to the point of cloning, it's obviously not you, because you're still there. We call you "you", and the clone we just call "a copy" of you. So if an exact copy isn't "you", but you're not composed of any of the same cells as you were 10 years ago, are you really the same person? Or are you a different being?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dgatwood]

And remember that as usual, by the time these things hit the market, hard drives will be comically larger. I commented on this problem way back when Blu-Ray came out. Basically, the comment was that 50 GB capacity would be great because I could back up my entire hard drive on just three or four discs, but that by the time they were actually available at a reasonable price, they would be worthless. They're still not affordable as a backup medium and at 50 GB apiece, it still would take nearly an entire 25-pack mini-spindle to back up my home machine (not to mention taking 12 hours with somebody swapping discs twice an hour).

It was the same story for DVD-Rs, and CD-Rs before that. The only difference in this case is that the format is already obsolete in terms of capacity and was just proposed. Anything short of a terabyte disc capacity at this point is a complete joke, and is a pretty clear signal that the optical media format is likely to fall further and further behind hard drives on the cost-capacity curve. In short, optical discs as currently designed are unlikely to ever be a viable backup medium. (Well, maybe holographic optical or something, but certainly not any optical discs that are remotely similar to what we have today.)

For anything other than distribution of fixed content (movies, computer games, etc.), optical media doesn't make sense, and those types of content really don't have much need for larger and larger capacities beyond a certain point.

Stick a fork in it. Optical is done.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dangitman]

Then there's iTunes and Amazon to contend with, that save you the trouble of ripping and tagging, but aren't compatible with all devices.

They what? You'd be hard pressed to find a modern device that isn't capable of playing tracks downloaded from iTunes or Amazon.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dangitman]

But that is the point. You (as a customer) are the antithesis of what they want. The want people to keep re-buying things all the damn time, i

How is he the antithesis of what they want, when he said he re-bought stuff several times? Sounds like a good customer to me.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dangitman]

I say it as a collector: I don't really want to collect things that are transient in a way that makes them a huge money hole. Back in the day of VHS tapes, I bought a bunch of VHS tapes. When DVDs came out, I bought a bunch of DVDs

It's a rare person who bought movies on VHS rather than renting them. Serious collectors and movie buffs bought Laserdiscs in those days.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[$pace6host]

No, I've changed the case and power supply too. What I'm saying is I've never changed everything (including monitor and keyboard and mouse) all at once; there's always been some part that's been kept in any upgrade. So at what point do you say it's a "new" computer?

This is my grandfather's axe: my father fitted it with a new stock, and I have fitted it with a new head.

See also Ship of Theseus

Have you been reading Hofstadter recently?

Anyway, if you had an Amiga in 1991, you might have found it harder to do this. As a result, I don't think I have the ability to read the old QIK tapes that I made back then, even if their magnetic coatings are still good.

I don't think I'm going to spring on a BD-XL or IH-BD any time soon. I still haven't even put a BD in my computer yet. I think anything really important gets copied from medium to medium as I go. I find all the current optical media (DVD or BD) too small and too slow for much. I do burn my photos to DVD, but that's just a last ditch save if the RAID fails and the backup HD doesn't work. And given the (lack of) care with which I store my backup DVDs, that's a very small hope.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dangitman]

Yes, DVDs have region coding, and CSS protection. However, these are trivially easy to crack, unlike the protections on BDs.

Right, so this is where the hypocrisy kicks in. DRM sucks! Evil limitations on consumer rights! But if it's easy to crack, then no problem, I'll spend money on protected media.

If you're shouting from the rooftops about your principled objections, you would stand on those principles, no matter how hard or easy it is to bypass the copy protection.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Scarletdown]

Yes. Remember: your "principal" is your "pal"

Or...

"I intend to put the pal back in principal."

"And I intend to put the super back in superintendent."

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Avatar 3-D will be coming out soon... in like 5 BluRay disks.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[drinkypoo]

On the other hand, GTA IV was worth the money IMO (just barely though; somehow it's less fun to replay than GTA:SA) and $40 for the two follow-on episodes also seems an excellent price. I have played through Lost and the Damned already, but am looking forward to The Ballad of Gay Tony. I actually paid $30 used for the two-pack, but anyway. And then there's games with DLC you don't need, like additional cars for Forza 3. 400 cars plus the dozen or so in the pack you get to download for being the original purchaser (i.e. with the code in the package) should hold me.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Raul Acevedo]

If you had bothered to read the article:

In general, the two new formats will be geared toward broadcast and document archiving, both industries that need to record and store massive libraries of digital content. But consumer versions will be available, "particularly in those regions where BD recorders have achieved broad consumer acceptance, " the BDA said.

So, this isn't really to replace the existing Blu-ray format for movies. This is for mass storage.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

Anyway, if you had an Amiga in 1991, you might have found it harder to do this.

True, but not impossible. You could dig up your Amiga, design an adapter board which interfaces to the Amiga's keyboard and converts it to USB, and then plug that into your current computer. While not part of the main chassis, a keyboard is still a component of "the computer", so in effect you'd be using the same computer from 1991.

I don't think I'm going to spring on a BD-XL or IH-BD any time soon. I still haven't even put a BD in my computer yet. I think anything really important gets copied from medium to medium as I go. I find all the current optical media (DVD or BD) too small and too slow for much. I do burn my photos to DVD, but that's just a last ditch save if the RAID fails and the backup HD doesn't work. And given the (lack of) care with which I store my backup DVDs, that's a very small hope.

Same here. BD is a waste of time (unless you want to buy the movies on them and watch them on your computer). It's a case of too-little-too-late for backup storage. They're way too small and way too expensive. I used to use DVDs for backups, but I've given up on that now and just use hard drives. These new BD-XLs are again, too little too late, and sure to be way too expensive again. It'd be nice if someone came up with an inexpensive, reliable, and dense storage medium for backups. Tapes are expensive (especially the drives), and optical discs are way too small, and in the case of BD-R, too expensive. I don't even need it to be that fast, just big and cheap.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

I'm not the one shouting about principles, I'm just explaining the situation with DRM on DVDs.

I imagine most people are pragmatic. DRM is an annoyance, but if it's trivially easy to work around, then why cut yourself out of something out of principle if you can just work around it? These days, you don't have to do anything at all; any DVD-copying software has the workarounds built-in. By contrast, Blu-Ray (last I heard, I don't keep up with this stuff that much) isn't so easy to work around. I guess it's been broken now, since I've heard there's Blu-Ray rips of movies on the torrent sites now, but this is probably a more recent development. Perhaps the inability to copy them was part of the reason they were so slow to be adopted by consumers?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

(Same AC)

What I tried to say (and failed miserably to convey, I suppose) is that I don't need an X-player because my current computer, and whatever computer I might have in the future, has or will have the ability to play the same thing in a digital version of it - ripped dvds or blu-rays right now, for instance. It was more of a comment of my disillusionment with hardware and my preference of digital formats wherever it makes sense (i.e. movies, audio).

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

It's reminiscent of the USA cellphone industry. For example, text messages cost next-to-nothing for the carrier of a CDMA network, and absolutely nothing for the carrier of a GSM network. Yet despite multiple competing cellphone networks, none of them have text message pricing that remotely reflects the actual cost of delivering SMS.

I have never understood this argument. The infrastructure is not free. That the marginal cost may be zero but that is irrelevant until you pay your share of the infrastructure (via a texting plan). I agree that pricing for texting may be irrational but only an irrational person texts beyond their package level (I *am* assuming unless they have more money than sense). People that text have to pay for that infrastructure too. Why else would *I* - as a phone user - want them on my f-ing network? I would end up paying more. As Sprint is losing money, it is not as if their texting fees are adding to profits. They haven't any!

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[ImYourVirus]

Yeah I was looking at borderlands and all their dlc, to buy it all was like 80 or 90 bucks I just laughed at that, killingfloor has some dlc too that's pretty reasonable priced at $1.99 each but I still haven't bought it because why should I have to pay *more* money so I can have a couple more character models (I think the game has like 4 or 5 base and each dlc pack adds like 4), I don't think you can even use a model you made yourself, it was a good price back in december when it was like 10 bucks, but I'm not sure if it's worth much more than that.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

their practices make sense until everyone is just renting instead of buying. that's the way to protest...with your pocket-book.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[ImNotAtWork]

There's also people called Business Analyst and the good ones will tell you where you can save and make money. This role pays out anywhere from 40-150+k US. I've worked with one outside of my department and it's amazing to see small little changes he promotes rack up millions of dollars over 5-10 years. Saying he is worth his weight in gold is an understatement.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Grishnakh]

Yep, but again, companies are made of humans. Some employ good people like the one you talk of, and others employ crappy ones. It probably comes down to who the CEO likes. Mine is probably in the latter category; they're always being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[gig]

> The only realistic way to archive digital media is to have a planned rotation policy.

It's like gardening. You don't get to put your data on a disc and put it on a shelf for 100 years. It will be dead, even if the disk survives intact.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Khyber]

The hybrid write-once and re-writable discs would seem for more than that - dedicated game image with updatable OS on the disc for performance tweaks/patches?

I mean, given how big some patches have to be just to fix a few things, this sort of thing makes sense.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Vectormatic]

as others have mentioned, this most likely wont be comming to movies soon.

But i am 100% with you here, last december i decided to get a Blu-ray player, they where getting affordable, and my GF wanted one. If they start to push these new generation discs in movies, then i wont be getting any of those movies, because i will refuse to buy a new player.

Meanwhile, last month i got an asus o!play media streamer, also does HD over HDMI, SPDIF out.. now please remind me why i actually still cope with those physical media bastards?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Vectormatic]

which still are hit-miss when you want long-term storage.

In 2003 i burned a few CD-Rs, in 2005 those same discs where degraded to the point where i couldnt use them anymore (software installation, so like a backup, a few corrupted files screws the whole thing). These discs where stored horizontally out of direct light.

Granted, they werent the best discs, but when the use case involves "put disc in cabinet, wait 10 years", then i wouldnt really be all that confident that optical writeable media will work all that well

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anne Thwacks]

Or you could use a spread-sheet yourself!

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[bemymonkey]

Exactly. I don't see why you would invest in a BDXL burner and 100GB discs when you could probably buy 10 2TB SATA hard drives and an eSATA/USB/Firewire dock for the same amount...

Now if the discs came in capacities beyond or close to the maximum available hard drive capacities, and the price per TB was less than 15% of that of hard drives, I'd be a bit more interested. Until then, I'll just keep buying hard drives with the biggest capacity available and swapping them out.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[ColaMan]

The problem is that if you want to make a Blu-ray player, you need Sony's blessing in the form of licensing agreements.

China, don't fail me now.

(waits impatiently for the first Sorny All-in-one Blu-ray player to hit the market)

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[bazorg]

talk about a fox guarding the hen-house :)

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Zarhan]

I specifically bought a Blu-ray burner a few months back for archival/backup purposes. Reason: Totally anecdotal. I've had flash cards/sticks/SSDs fail on me. I've had hard disks fail on me. One USB HDD was destroyed by a kid taking it off the table and accidentally dropping it.

On the other hand, I have had NO optical media destroyed, ever (And I must have 200+ burned CD/DVD's and now some BD-REs). I first transferred all my floppies to a single CD-R back in 1992, and I can still read that CD just fine. Optical media - I can drop it, throw it to a wall, and still get the data out. Only circuitry is in the drive, so if the drive gets fried, I can easily get another one. In case of HDD, not so trivial (yes, you can replace circuit board).

Only real precaution you have to do is keep the discs away from UV, so don't leave them lying in sunlight all the time.

Of course I'm running RAID5 setup to mitigate HDD failures, but RAID is not a backup solution.

External hard drives are nice for transporting lots of data (never underestimate bandwidth of car loaded with HDDs), but durable they are not. SSDs are better in that respect, but I've had way too many flash cards corrupted for me to trust them.

Yes, this is completely anecdotal and personal experience, but these are my reasons for going for BD for archiving my photos and videos. And yes, it costs more per gigabyte than other solutions.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[cffrost]

Probably because accelerated-aging hasn't shown electromechanical magnetic disks to be a dependable medium with a predictable lifespan for long-term archival purposes. NIST hasn't published anything about using HDDs as an archival medium, and NARA makes no indication that they use or recommend HDDs for that purpose. However, both organizations have published longevity estimates and storage guidelines for optical media.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[makomk]

Sony controls the price and availability of Blu-Ray disk replication facilities, as well as some of the per-disk licensing costs. One of the anti-piracy measures in Blu-Ray is tight control over disk replication.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Aceticon]

Funilly enough, with both DRM and constant cycles of "here's the same thing again but now in a new and improved format" the Movies (and Games) industries are causing more and more people to get burned by going with DRM-restricted/new-format media and thus teaching even the less technology-savy people to be weary of both.

Just like the GP, more people are thinking-through their buying decisions due to painfull memories of "what happened last time".

Me, I'm sitting on the sidelines and aplauding every time I see the industry going a little bit farther and doing it a lit bit more (hi Ubisoft) all the while more and more people get bit by it - eventually only the really dumb people will be asking "How high?" every time the entertainment industry says "Jump!".

[PS: The latest and greatest fad is 3D movies. Here in the UK they're pushing it really hard, even with 3D TV channels. I expect all the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hearly adopters that just 3 years ago went for new HD TVs (at the time replacing their "HD Ready" TV sets that turned out not to have HDMI connections) to rush to get the new 3D TV sets. Hopefull some people learned a lesson or two in the meanwhile and will wait in the sidelines]

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[PastaLover]

He was talking about ripping and tagging, specifically in the context of video.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM 34xx tape does last the distance. Ultrium 5 tapes - 1.5 TB. and pretty good indicators they last the distance.
BluRay was always going to shift the ballpark, and they have remained quiet about 'rust' being spotted.
So far indications are that CD's outlast DVD's and both benefit a lot by backing up with extra redundancy/reconstruction checksums.

The multilayer high capacity DVD's are not out there- probably some patent shit tying up progress. Until then a mix of drives and non toy tapes seems the way to go.
Dont forget idle drives get stiction, and the caps on the controller board dry out with age.
Also, with tape, the encryption and compression on the fly makes it harder for light fingered ex-employees.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

We're talking about two different use cases. For large amounts of data, a hard drive by courier can be a lot secure and reliable.

For long-term archival, hard drives are just now becoming popular as a temporary means of data storage. The problem is archivists seem to think that if you get just the right media and store it in just the right conditions, it'll last forever because that's how archival has always been done. But technology advances so quickly that even if you do everything right, you can end up with something no one has a reader for in ten, twenty, fifty years. Do you think fifty years from now many people will have Blu-Ray readers? Really? Do you think they'll be anything but niche products sold at extravagant prices (or on eBay) to people who bought into the BD-ROM archival marketing?

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

Find me a place that sells a twenty five year old tape reader that can read twenty five year old tapes, and tell me that it's going to be cost effective to keep having to use that technology.

And I never said hard disks were for long term storage. What I'm saying is, nothing is anymore. You can't count on being able to buy any of the necessary components for a technology that exists today in fifty years, or a hundred years. You'll be lucky if you can find it on eBay in 25 years or that some company might cater to your business by then. But it's just a terrible idea to think that you can set your data aside in some media and forget about it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anpheus]

No one said anything about using hard disk for long-term offline archival. I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[SenseiLeNoir]

Go read up on "CSS" on DVD, then revise your offtopic statement.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[TheRaven64]

It would have been ideal for games if it had been designed before the PS/3 shipped. You wouldn't have needed a hard disk in the console at all, you could have just stored the save data on the disk itself. With 25GB of writable space, that's enough for a fair amount of DLC and patches as well. Now though? Distributing games on physical media seems to be on its way out. On a typical consumer connection, you can download enough of a game to start playing in a few minutes and download the rest in the background. You can comfortably stream movies in 720p and 1080p won't be too far behind.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[TheRaven64]

I wouldn't be surprised if people had drives that can read BD media in a few decades. Unlike floppy disks and tapes, average consumers have a large investment in optical disks. DVD drives sold because they could read DVDs and CDs. People have a lot of audio and data CDs, and getting a DVD drive lets them access their old content as well as new content. BD drives have the same advantage. You can read CDs and DVDs in them. People are still buying CDs, so they'll probably want to have something that can read them for a long time. The same is true of DVDs.

Now, I imagine that people will stop buying physical media bundled with content in a few years (where a few is probably somewhere in the 10-20 region for most people), but they'll still have a large investment in them until then. They won't want to have an optical drive in every computer that they own - most of them will probably be too small to fit one anyway - but they'll either keep one around for ripping their old optical media or they'll get a specialist to do it, and there will still be a market for the new drives for the specialists to use.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[TheRaven64]

I'd guess they have some pretty smart people who spend a lot of time deciding what the optimal pricing strategy is.

But do they listen to them? A paper from Harvard Business School a couple of years ago said that the optimum price for a music track was five cents, to maximise profit. I don't see this as too far off. I don't pirate music, but I don't buy much either. At under $1 for an album, however, I'd be tempted to buy an album if I heard a track on it that I liked on Radio Paradise. At the current prices, I buy a couple of albums a year.

It's incredibly difficult for an analyst to persuade a manager that reducing prices will cause profits to go up. I've seen this same thing in small businesses - custom is down so they increase prices to compensate, which causes custom to go down, and so on. Decreasing prices makes profits drop immediately, but (hopefully) makes them go up in the long term from increased sales. A manager who has to take responsibility for the next quarter, but may not take credit for the same quarter next year, won't want to do it.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Just as another anecdotal data point I've never had a media failure after backup to CD/DVD disks or DAT tapes and have retrieved data off them 10 years after writing with no problems at all. I do tend not to burn at the highest possible speed and I always verify after burning... at the verify stage I occasionally find a failed archive (even though the burn operation reported success) or one that is iffy (takes multiple retries to read it), but for the most part things have worked quite well.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[commodore64_love]

This is modus operandi for Sony. They think like engineers, not customers, and are constantly tinkering with their projects:

- Betamax I became Betamax II which was the new standard for store-bought movies. Early adopters couldn't play these movies on their Beta-I machines.

- SuperBetamax increased the resolution to broadcast quality, and although Sony claimed it was a compatible standard, in reality it created strange white lines on older machines.

- Umatic became Umatic SP and Betacam became Betacam SP, which forced TV studios to upgrade to new machines.

- MiniDisc adopted new formats (codecs) which forced previous owners to throw-out their devices and buy new.

- The PS2 became the PS2slim which not only can't use a HDD (for final fantasy 11), but also isn't 99.9% compatible with older games like the original PS2 was.

- And now it appears Sony is doing the same thing with Bluray, and eventually the BRD Player I bought will not be able to play the new format.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.

I was talking about their video service. You can buy movies and TV shows, watch them on your computer or Tivo. Nice idea, but if I buy from Amazon, can I play it on an iPad? If I buy a movie from iTunes, can I play it on an Android-based phone?

Nope. I'm locked into a handful of supported devices. What's more, not everything is available in HD (even if the Bluray has been released and the studio obviously has an HD copy), so they're *already* trying to force you to buy a crappier version so they can force you to re-buy it in HD down the line.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

I'm not saying I was a *serious* collector. I was young and had no money. But I was amassing a collection none the less, since I failed to realize in those days that VHS would be dead in a handful of years.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

AFAIK neither PS3 or XBox360 have Amazon Video On Demand support. None of Apple's devices (iPod, iPad, AppleTV) do.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

Yes, I know they want me to re-buy everything every 5 years, but my point is, that ain't happening.

So the next question is, do they want me to buy stuff at all? Because trying to get me to re-buy everything every 5 years is stopping me from buying things at all. Their sagging sales are the result of market forces: they aren't serving their customers, so their customers aren't buying their products.

The ball is in their court. Fix the problem for me, and you might have yourself a new business model to replace selling me cardboard boxes with little plastic discs.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Go read up on "woosh", then revise your comment.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[dangitman]

I'm not the one shouting about principles, I'm just explaining the situation with DRM on DVDs.

The thread started with screaming about DRM and principles, so in context, your comment reads as support for that.

I imagine most people are pragmatic. DRM is an annoyance, but if it's trivially easy to work around, then why cut yourself out of something out of principle if you can just work around it?

Exactly. I'm not sure why you would post this to a thread about sacrificing practicality for principles, though.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[somersault]

Ah, we don't have that service here in the UK yet, I didn't even know it existed. Shame, I've always thought Amazon provide excellent service and the DRM free MP3s just made me love them even more.

Me I'd probably just buy it on Amazon and then illegally download a watchable copy. I've done that a couple of times when I couldn't find some albums in the MP3 store, buy the CD and then just torrent the album.

The Sony movie store has similar deficiencies, I haven't bothered to use it yet on my PS3. Even the "HD" versions are probably going to be compressed to hell compared to a blu-ray.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[nine-times]

I'm curious: what's the point of buying a CD and still torrenting the album? Once you've bought the CD, it's easy enough to rip it, right?

Video really is a problem. It's worth understanding that the record labels largely allowed DRM-free music because Apple backed them into a corner, but Apple doesn't hold the same sway over video that they do over music. No one is really doing DRM-free video yet, which is a shame. Hopefully video is simply behind the curve on this one, and improvements are coming.

I tried renting an HD movie on my PS3 once, just to test it out. I'm pretty sure it was a high quality 1080p version, and as I remember it took a full day to download on a ~10Mbps connection, but I don't know if things have changed since. Such long download times aren't worthwhile for rentals, and I'm not going to buy movies at full price if I can only watch them on my exact PS3 (last I heard, if your PS3 died, you lost all your movie purchases).

Anyway, all this is probably pretty off topic, but I just like to be vocal about this issue because I think these big companies are doing a really crappy job. Unfortunately they have a lock on their products (copyright doesn't really allow for a free market) and so they're essentially holding our culture hostage to their poor planning. I know that's a melodramatic way of putting things, but it's not altogether unfair.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Moochman]

I don't about you, but I thoroughly enjoy using CDs and DVDs for storage, particularly of pictures, music, videos and applications. They fulfill the purpose wonderfully, as Bluray will (/might) when (/if) Bluray burners become standard equipment. The point is not to back up the entire hard drive; the point is to share information with others and/or back up enough of the hard drive, in sensible categorized chunks, at a cheaper price point and theoretically with a longer shelf life than what you get by buying a second hard drive.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[somersault]

First, it takes a couple of days for the CD to arrive unless I pay extra for postage. That by itself is most of the reason, given that I do pretty much all my shopping apart from food shopping at Amazon - it's pretty much always cheaper than going to a "real" shop. Secondly, I don't even have a CD drive on my netbook - which is my primary computer both at home and work - so I have to plug in an external CD drive to even use a CD, and also I have to have a CD ripping app configured the way I want it - which I'm not even sure I have on my current Ubuntu install. I have a machine at work that I can definitely do my rips on, but I prefer to just avoid CDs these days where I can. I even used to be one of those types that preferred CDs, I'll admit I enjoy having a large and impressive stack of CDs on some level, but now I have no use for CDs at all. The last bastion for them was in my car, but now I've installed a head unit with a USB slot, I'm 100% digital :)

Definitely agree about the large companies and lack of competition on content.. management in the entertainment industry is obviously just completely clueless about the realities of DRM and new distribution systems.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[acohen1]

Theres a small handfull of movies that cannot be copied but most have been available before retail release for two years or so.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[mattack2]

It's not like this hasn't happened before. For example, 4X and faster DVD-RWs won't work on older DVD burners (at all). (I run into this problem because I have a standalone hard drive/DVD recorder that, among other formats, uses 1-2X DVD-RWs.)

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

about that "my backups are HUGE!"... incremental/differential.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

you aren't supposed to buy any more, you're supposed to buy those thumb sized things which you stick in a USB port, have better data integrity, are easier to store, typically have faster R/W speeds, and can be rewritten as many times as you want without losing storage space... not to mention it isn't about to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Seriously though, the 'investment' in blu-ray was never really worthwhile, optical media has too many drawbacks when considered against the falling prices of flash. I'm really not sure why it wasn't just decided to distribute HD content on flash memory considering how cheap it's becoming.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Ogi_UnixNut]

I think all of us here on slashdot are aware of that. The problem is that rather than fix their business model, they are claiming every lost sale as being due to piracy, and trying to legislate their business model, effectively giving them a state-granted monopoly on distribution. They are forcing their business model upon us (and one which none of us in particular like the idea of) and that is one the main reasons for the general revulsion shown towards them here.

I know how crap it is, as I am a collector as well. I collect mostly CD's, which is lucky for me as they are DRM and lossless, allowing me to rip them and format shift to my hearts content. Fact is they lost me as a customer in the late 90's/early 2000's.

Even to this day I only really buy second hand CD's from fairs and local shops. Someone already paid money to the record industry so my purchase is not adding to their income, hence I too, am probably put down as a "loss due to piracy" for the last decade. At least I help keep the locals in business.

My main worry is what will happen if they succeed to phase out CD's. Downloads are rarely DRM-free, and never lossless (so far). Plus it entirely kills the second hand market, which I think is their goal (precisely because they don't get any money from it). They are already pushing this with their concept for BD's which are tied to a particular player so you can't resell the disk.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Man, I just miss the days before the EU WEEE Directive forced manufacturers to "recycle" the old machines from the customer. Back then I could find 1 or 2 year old machines thrown out after every windows upgrade cycle, essentially getting me a nearly new PC (with no problems, bar Windows) that would run Linux like a champ for years afterwards.

I would have loved to have gotten my hands on one of those HD-ready TV's once the locals decide to splash out on a new 3D TV, but as it stands, the manufacturers now take them back (sometimes for a fee) and resell them in other countries (east-europe/middle east/etc...) leaving me no option but to buy one, thank god for the second-hand market, lest I be forced to buy brand new all the damn time.

Re:Designed Obsolescence

[Hurricane78]

I could have told you that before. There was a really well done test of all CD-R/RWs on the market in a magazine around 2000. The used modern climate chambers to simulate years of laying around. The conclusions were more than clear: All. I repeat: ALL CD-Rs die at an average age of 2-3 years. Because the write layer is an organic material. (There were non-organic [gold-based] ones, but you couldn’t get them anymore in 2003, as far as I know.)
CD-RWs on the other hand lasted an average of 10 years.

That’s why I chose DVD-RAMs. Specified to last 30 years, and the specs to back it up: A non-organic gold-based writing layer, hard-disk-like sectors and error correction, all-around better.
The only sad thing is, that they are too small for serious backup solutions.

Nowadays I don’t even trust a HDD to survive even the first write. GIT-like versioned storage on ZFS triple-mirroring with constant scrubbing, or nothing. Period.
Fuck RAIDs, fuck “backup solutions”. fuck tapes, discs, everything. Nothing did save me, except the above.

DON'T YOU GET IT?

[Monkeedude1212]

HDDVD lost the format war because it had way too many syllables!

Everyone! We've been Had! Blu-Ray is exerting its dominance by proposing 4 or more syllable formats, forcing technical speak to be less groovy and savvy, making it once again disasterous to be a nerd, instead of the hip trend Apple was starting.

Quick, someone start an internet petition (because those always work) to rename the formats to something catchy!

Re:DON'T YOU GET IT?

[Anonymous Coward]

VHS-- 3 syllable
BetaMax/Beta--3/2 syllables

your point has been invalidated by sheer logic and historical facts. On a side note, I would love to see HD-DVDs starting to be madeout of nowhere again, since this bullshit makes people have to buy NEW Blu-Ray players.

Re:DON'T YOU GET IT?

[Astadar]

Gosh... I hope Xfinity isn't taken!

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

That PS3 just became even less enticing than it already wasn't.

Re:Wow.

[Montezumaa]

I agree; it is pretty enticing.

Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

Aren't writable optical disks pretty much dead these days?

I've not used anything Blu-Ray yet but pretty much every PC and DVD player these days has USB ports into which you can plug thumb drives or external USB hard disks.

And even for DVD-R disks, gigabyte for gigabyte hard disks are still cheaper, let alone for a new disk format where writable media is bound to be at a premium price initially.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[WiglyWorm]

I bet you could burn an encryption key to the disk from the player itself, thereby locking it to a single player. The *IAA would gobble that shit up.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you haven't missed anything. A new re-writable 100Gb optical disk format is already obsolete.

In fact, optical disks are becoming mostly obsolete. I get all my video over the air or over the internet. No CD/DVD/Blu-ray required.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to find a place where you can rent movies on hard disks or thumb drives..

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[MCROnline]

That or make the new recordable format unreadable in any stand alone players..

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

I've yet to find a place where you can (legally anyway) rent movies on writable optical media.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[blackraven14250]

You do realize that the ability to lock a disk to a given player would/could be used by the MPAA to kill rentals of any disc, right? All the studios have to do is refuse to release disks on any Blu-ray format other than the hybrid one, and force player makers to implement locking software.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[QuantumRiff]

Your looking at this from the point of view of a consumer.. From a media companies point of view, a single disk that can hold 100GB of HD disney movies, that your child will utterly destroy the first time you turn around, is a new revenue generator. You have to buy another disk, unless someone can finally will a lawsuit saying they should replace broken disks if they are really just a "license to use"

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

Sorry, this doesn't make any sense to me.

Why would you rent out a physical disk that can only be played on *one* player? Surely you're going to focus on DRM-ing an Internet movie download so that it becomes unplayable after so many views or so many days?

I seem to recall a planned DVD disk format that was supposed to degrade of its own accord within a week or two but that died a death as quickly as it was suggested.

Likewise, why risk writing to an optical disk that could be placed into another machine and be cracked open by some wiley hacker?

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

But why do you need a new format just to be able to do that? It's already the case with CDs and DVDs that you don't get replacements free.

And whilst I do know what havoc kids can cause to digital media, this is still an extreme case - I would imagine the number of parents who re-buy movies because their kids destroyed the disks are a very small minority of the overall consumer base.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about hard-drives being cheaper than DVD-R's. You need at least two drives (mirrors) to put anything important on so that doubles the cost right there. That is even more important when talking hard-drives with platters larger than 320GB which tend to be unstable in my experience (this is the case for all manufacturers, the 500/GB platter technology is just too close to our current physical limits).

In theory most removable media should be more stable because once it's written and verified it should remain that way barring any physical damage. Hard-drives on the other hand can die at any moment because they're always moving parts that have crazy tolerances and are incredibly fragile.

Still, you're right for the most part. Hard-drives are pretty much cheaper than anything else if you ignore the failure aspect.

I would never ever put anything important on flash RAM devices. Talk about unstable.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[tomkost]

Writable optical disks dead? Definitely not. I use them all the time when making backup copies of my 5 year old daughter's movies. She tends to abuse and scratch them a lot. I don't want to mess with back and forth to HDD. I have two drives and make a copy with minimal effort. It's so simple my family can even do it.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[phoenix321]

Nevertheless, the point still stands: when people buy a DVD of "Avatar", do they buy a physical product, a plastic shiny disc, that happens to have the movie "Avatar" on it, or do they acquire the license to watch "Avatar" in DVD resolution that happens to be accompanied with a plastic shiny disc?

Movie studies are the owner of the licenses. They need to decide which kind of merchandise their product is.

It's either a physical thing and then they have no say about how the customer uses it, but when it's damaged, it's gone - or they sell a license and the customer has the right to make a backup, not lend it, not publicly show it but get another copy if one gets damaged.

Currently, they're trying to eat their cake and have it.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

Yes, but you are still missing my point.

Your statement totally applies to the existing DVD and Blu-Ray formats, I fail to see how additional licensing restrictions might be applied to a new writable format that is unlikely to see widespread adoption anyway since, byte for byte, it will work out to be far more expensive than a hard disk or thumb drive.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Thaelon]

The trick is we make sure that the we and the people whose tech we oversee make sure that the people don't gobble that shit up.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[pandrijeczko]

I used to do a lot of archiving to DVD-R disks but discovered that despite being stored in disk cases away from the light and day-to-day use, they still developed read errors within a couple of years of having been written - yet I also have a large music CD collection stored in a similar fashion but have music CDs that are 20 years old that still play absolutely fine. I know for a fact it wasn't a particular brand of DVD-R with the read error problems because I used to make two backup copies to different disk brands....

Yes, a hard disk in regular use is probably going to start failing within a couple of years also - but it's much quicker to slot in a new 1TB hard disk and backup to it than it is to burn about another 200 DVD-R disks to store the same amount of data...

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[nurb432]

Its not about media cost or even common sense. These are the media giants, and their only goal is to screw the consumer.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[BobMcD]

I seem to recall a planned DVD disk format that was supposed to degrade of its own accord within a week or two but that died a death as quickly as it was suggested.

You're thinking of DIVX. (Not to be confused with DivX).

And with Netflix and company streaming the whole movie online, there's little need for such a format today. The DIVX people had the right idea, they just underestimated the delivery mechanism.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no, it would only be unreadable in current standalone players, not the fancy new players they'll sell you to fix the problem!

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Neoprofin]

1 DVD-R = 4.7GB/$.18 = $.03/GB
Harddrive = 2TB/$149 = $.07/GB

1 DVD gets scratched = 1 DVD of data loss
1 2TB Harddrive failure = the end of the world

I still use harddrives for my backups, but it's because it's easier and less time consuming, not because it's inherently the cheapest method, especially for movie rips. (And yes, I should have priced out dual-layer discs too but this was already 30 seconds of shopping too many)

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[PRMan]

I have never had a disk that I have burned fail to be readable. Every old disc I have ever found in my house (DVD or CD) has been readable unless physically damaged due to abuse. This includes discs I burned with the first Ricoh 2X burner in the 1990s.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[jtownatpunk.net]

If I need to move a few hundred gigs of data from the LA office to the NY office, FedEx will get it there a lot faster than our entartube connections. A few optical discs would be much lighter and much less likely to be damaged than a hard drive when hurled across the loading dock. Sure, I could use a few huge thumb drives but those cost hundreds of dollars each.

Or, say you've got a freelance video editor who needs to get a fresh load of raw video on a regular basis. Burn it and ship it. He can live in a cabin in the woods with crackly, crusty dialup and this will get the material to him promptly and reliably. Again, no worries about handling or environmental conditions unless the driver does burnouts on the package.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[EdgeyEdgey]

Stored as audio CDs or data CD's?
CD error correction chips and your ears smooth out any data losses in audio CDs.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[lgw]

If you're sending it within your company, the thumb drives are re-usable (or if you move many TB/month, you need tape). If you're sending the data to others, optical media still has a niche, but "the cloud" will replace it long before these new drives become available. Today it's still a bit geeky to put your data on S3 or Azure and mail someone the key, but give it some time and the slick user interfaces will be here (if there's not already "an app for that").

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[QuantumLeaper]

The only time I have had a hard drive become unreadable was because of a power supply problem, the old data became unreadable but the new power supply the old data was readable again and the newer data was dead, even though I tried the old power supply.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, GB for GB, DVD-Rs are still cheaper than hard drives, by about 2:1 (4 cents vs 8 cents). So no, you are not even close to being correct.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[NevermindPhreak]

And even for DVD-R disks, gigabyte for gigabyte hard disks are still cheaper

Am I missing something? A 100-pack of Verbatim DVD+R's (470 GB) are being sold at Newegg for $27, whereas a 1.5 TB hard drive is going for $100. Personally, each one has its uses. A hard drive is much easier and faster once installed, but I can give DVD's to friends, especially my less tech-savvy ones.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about ease of writing? Writing out two TB of DVDs is going to be a huge pain in the ass. With a hard drive, you just do one copy-paste motion. Thats far more worth it to me.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Neoprofin]

I still use harddrives for my backups, but it's because it's easier and less time consuming,

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Chatterton]

In Belgium with the taxes on blank medias:

CD = 68,90 Euro / 100*0.8 GB = 0.86 Euro/GB
DVD = 49.99 Euro / 25*4.7 GB = 0.43 Euro/GB
BD = 16.14 Euro / 3*25 GB = 0.22 Euro/GB
HDD = 86.89 Euro / 1500 GB = 0.06 Euro/GB

I can make 3 copy of my data on HDD for the price of saving it 1 time on a BD disk.
Personally I keep my photos and source code files 3 times, the .dv files of my camera 2 times and all the rest 1 time or 2 times depending of their availability on internet and my mood.

Re:Am I Missing Something Here?

[Golddess]

Why would you rent out a physical disk that can only be played on *one* player?

Answer, you wouldn't. Which is why blackraven14250 said such locking would be used to kill the rental market.

Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So they'll be able to fit more content I will never watch onto the disc!!! This will also be known as the "3D copy" of said movie.

Is anybody really using current burners?

[ThePlague]

I'm not trying to troll here, but what exactly is the point of 25/50 GB burners? Sure, it was a great tool when CD burners became affordable, and even DVD burners still have some utility, but it seems to me one would be better served by an external hard drive than yet another optical media subject to scratches and incompatibilities. I guess the current burners can act as backups to Blu-Ray movies, though I have to admit I don't see a compelling advantage in moving from DVD level resolution to the new hotness. I guess my point is that as far as data is concerned, why bother with optical media at all anymore?

Probably another agenda here...

[MCROnline]

I have a feeling this is not about raking in more cash and creating onflicting standards, but about reducing Piracy. They probably want to make a format that has the capacity to hold a lot of data without being used to clone Blu-Ray discs. It stands to reason that if a normal Blu-Ray player cannot read this format, then it oculdn't play a bootlegged version of an ISO downloaded.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[TheSunborn]

That make sense, except for the part where the already have made write-able blue-ray disks available.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[Pulse_Instance]

If thats the case they must not have heard of devices like the Patriot Box Office which will stream a Blu-Ray iso from your computer. Devices like this are definitely cheaper than whatever they will be charging for the new burners when they come out.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[Ziekheid]

There's still such a thing as converting media, it'll be no problem.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[DragonWriter]

I have a feeling this is not about raking in more cash and creating onflicting standards, but about reducing Piracy.

I have a feeling that BD-XL is about exactly what they say -- supporting industries with needs for higher-capacity archival storage.

IHBD might be used a number of ways, most that involve incorporating user data that "goes with" published content on the same bit of media, so that the user content "follows" the published content. This could be used, e.g., to save user preferences or state back to a disc used for video (rather than storing these on the player), allowing, e.g., continuing from a stopping point even if you switch players. Or, similarly, to put save games back on the disc with the game,

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[anthonyfk]

Um, from the review you linked to:
Once again, we had no luck when trying to play our Blu-ray ISO rips over the network as that format continues to be one of the most elusive.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[vlm]

IHBD might be used a number of ways, most that involve incorporating user data that "goes with" published content on the same bit of media, so that the user content "follows" the published content.

Homemade Pr0n, now starring you and ms. whoever?

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[brunascle]

Once you upgrade the firmware, the Argosy HV335T can play Bluray ISOs (I just bought one and it works). It only plays the main title movie, though. It cant play the menu or display subtitles, but it can do both with DVD ISOs.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[cmiller173]

From the article you linked. ...we had no luck when trying to play our Blu-ray ISO rips over the network...

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[Pulse_Instance]

I guess that should teach me to read before I link. That one will play Blu-Ray ISOs with it's firmware update. I haven't tried the iso yet but it has played every other file type I've thrown it's way.

Re:Probably another agenda here...

[Jakester2K]

If thats the case they must not have heard of devices like the Patriot Box Office which will stream a Blu-Ray iso from your computer. Devices like this are definitely cheaper than whatever they will be charging for the new burners when they come out.

Uh, what?

Patriot Box Office page 4, near the bottom:

Once again, we had no luck when trying to play our Blu-ray ISO rips over the network as that format continues to be one of the most elusive.

Though the concept itself does appeal. And since this device is firmware updateable, your first sentence may become true in the future.

Since TiVo has fscked up for the last time AFAIC, I might just check this out... thanks!

So, let me get this straight...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Because we all enjoyed the format war just that much and it didn't hamper adoption at all, they are now proposing a format civil war, where the two or more blu-ray factions fight to the death in a toxic stew of consumer confusion and apathy?

Seriously?

Re:So, let me get this straight...

[DragonWriter]

Because we all enjoyed the format war just that much and it didn't hamper adoption at all, they are now proposing a format civil war, where the two or more blu-ray factions fight to the death in a toxic stew of consumer confusion and apathy?

Seriously?

No, they are proposing two different BD variants intended for distinct use cases that don't really overlap (one is a pure "higher-capacity storage" version, the other is a "fixed content plus rewritable"), both of which would be used on devices that would also be able to use existing Blu-Ray disks. Since the variants aren't designed for the same use case, they don't compete with each other.

Re:So, let me get this straight...

[SakuraDreams]

They will however confuse those who are not BD-related professionals or aficionados.

Re:So, let me get this straight...

[Raul Acevedo]

No, not seriously. RTFA. This "new" Blu-ray format is for mass storage applications, it's not meant to replace the existing Blu-ray format used for movies.

Re:So, let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatcha talkin' aboot ?

Current readers/writers; 25-50GB
New readers/writers; 25-128GB

See the overlap?, there's no war.

Re:So, let me get this straight...

[DragonWriter]

They will however confuse those who are not BD-related professionals or aficionados.

Lots of things exist for specialized markets that are available to professionals and in consumer versions that are mostly used by hobbyists rather than the masses, and they don't particularly "confuse" the masses -- even when they are variants of popular standard technologies -- because the masses just ignore them because they are irrelevant.

yay

[msclrhd]

I like technology, but it seems to me that the media companies are pushing newer technologies faster than ever and are then wondering why they are performing badly. CDs, DVDs and other technology (hell, even colour television) took a while to take off, and it wasn't until the market was effectively saturated, and the technologies became affordable and commonplace, that other technologies were introduced.

First it was High-Def and HDMI compatible vs compliant. Then it was HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray disks are finally starting to become affordable, but they come with the required HDMI upgrade of all your connecting audio/video hardware.

With the RealD 3D televisions and associated content as well, especially with the competing players/technologies coming out soon after HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, it is unclear how things are going to pan out -- for example, are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?

To me, the home entertainment hardware is looking fragmented, and will continue to become even more fragmented as time goes on.

Re:yay

[Intrinsic]

Anyone that supports blueray and all of its DRM hardware complexities deserve what they get. It seems really stupid to support it.

Re:yay

[robmv]

From the article

In general, the two new formats will be geared toward broadcast and document archiving, both industries that need to record and store massive libraries of digital content. But consumer versions will be available, "particularly in those regions where BD recorders have achieved broad consumer acceptance, " the BDA said.

It looks this is not a new format for the most predominant usage of Blu-ray media that is Video/Videogames. It is just a format for people that need that extra storage, They will kill Blu-ray movies if they start producing them on that new standard

Re:yay

[DragonWriter]

It looks this is not a new format for the most predominant usage of Blu-ray media that is Video/Videogames.

For BDXL, I agree.

For IHBD, if its not for video (for storing playback preferences, later premium downloadable features, etc., with the original video) and videogames (for storing savegames, later premium DLC, etc.) back to the install media, so that those can be tied back to the original medium rather than a player device, I don't see the use case for it at all.

Re:yay

[TheSync]

are there going to be 3D Blu-Ray disks that require new hardware?

Yes, "full-resolution" 3D Blu-Ray discs encoded with H.264 MVC need new players, they are just becoming available, such as the Sony BDP-S470 and the Samsung BD-C6900.

Some of the new 3D sets will be also able to use a side-by-side or top-bottom "half resolution" / "frame compatible" modes that are likely going to be used by satellite and cable providers for the time being. Some independents might release "half resolution" 3D content that work with current DVD or Blu-Ray players, but the major studios are unlikely to do so.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I have a Blu Ray burner, and I use 50 GB discs when I need 50 GB, I use 25 GB discs when I need 25 GB, and I use DVD when I need ~5 GB (dual layer DVD writables never really worked out that well) and I use CDs for boot discs, etc.

For me, CD is far from obsolete, and DVD even further. That said, I am making isos of old CDs and reducing my spindles of hundreds of CDs down to just a couple of Blu Ray discs. Not only are my older CDs becoming transparent or dark and either way unreadable, but just thinning out the storage space is a boon.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm on the out of the for front of technology. (Never buy at the front of the line... always at the back)

However, it doesn't really seem like there was a great consumer desire for 3D.

Maybe I'm wrong. I'll never own one unless the technology stops causing me headaches. Seriously, that is some wicked eye strain at least for myself.

Well, to quote someone way more famous than me

[davebarnes]

"Blu-ray is a bag of hurt".
OK, this is insane on their part.
Flash memory is plunging in price (yes, I know not today, but look at the 5 year trend).
Toshiba just announced a 25nm process. What will that do to production costs?

don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

the optical disk should be dead by now.

Wallet voting

[OopsIDied]

BD-XL = blu ray version of Super Audio CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD
Hopefully people will refuse to oblige Sony and instead let the new format remain uncommon, lest Sony finds the practice of removing features from customers' devices as the normal thing to do.

-The PS3 has lost features throughout its life
-If SACD had been widely adopted, regular CD's would've become obsolete and would've been a waste of money for consumers
-if BD-XL and the like become widely adoped, regular blu-ray will become obsolete and a waste of money

Don't let Sony think these kinds of practices are acceptable.

  it's good that they're coming up with higher and higher capacities so often, good for those that need them, but releasing incompatible hardware with the intent of it replacing existing hardware in wide use so often shouldn't be something normally done.

Re:Wallet voting

[foxtyke]

I already voted with my wallet, I'm sticking with DVD until they are done playing games.

Haven't bought a new television for HDMI, haven't bought an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player and you know what? I didn't even buy a PS3, Wii or XBOX 360 for the same reason.

You can't say its a standard or a feature and then change, remove or force me to upgrade anymore. I'm done with that stuff.

I'm satisfied with my standard television, my standard DVD and my standard gaming on a PS2 (more of a PC gamer anyways) and what's more, a lot more people are getting the same way. If there's no explicit reason to change something, don't upgrade, don't buy it and just support what you like or use and save the money for supporting that, it is cheaper in the end anyways.

Re:Wallet voting

[lgw]

WHy on earth is this modded flamebait? It's a perfectly reasonably opinion, and no one is being insulted. If I had mod points I'd fix it, but instead let me just say I agree. I'm also sticking with DVD and non-HDMI displays until this stuff stops changing, or my current stuff breaks and I can't buy the old stuff (if component output gets outlawed, for example).

Dear Corporate Overlords,

[VTI9600]

Kudos on your selection of the term "Intra-Hybrid" (simply being a hybrid is never enough) and an acronym with an "X" in it for marketing your new products. Also, congratulations on having the forsight to not allow these new media to be played on clearly obsolete Blu-Ray players while still selling them as Blu-Ray discs. However, the following concerns me:

Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months.

Don't you realize that publishing specs hurts your bottom line?!?!

Re:Dear Corporate Overlords,

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations bad! Corporations BAD!!!!

Yeah, we get it, asshat.

Re:Dear Corporate Overlords,

[VTI9600]

There are lots of companies I like that have really good track records. Sony is not one of them. Next time I make a joke, I'll be sure to come up with a detailed list of companies, subsidiaries, corporate officers, etc. that are the target of said joke. That'll make it waaay better.

Re:Dear Corporate Overlords,

[Hurricane78]

Also, congratulations on having the forsight to not allow these new media to be played on clearly obsolete Blu-Ray players while still selling them as Blu-Ray discs.

Are you working for FOX? Is your name Glenn Beck?
Because it’s even mentioned in the fucking summary, that the disks are backwards-compatible, and that that was a crucial point!!

And I...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I am still sitting here not caring at all about Blu-Ray or 'HD Movies' as I see it as just another attempt to get more cash for the same product.

It's more for large data sets

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Low coast, loanable, disposable, large data sets. Think more of like medical imaging archives, and regular FULL backups. The need for this is great in the corporate world. Spinning disk is nice, but it's also hard to loan out, and expensive. Networking a 1.5G study is rough, requires a lot of upload bandwidth, and if you look over some patients histories they may have >20 studies that a doctor wants to see YESTERDAY! Burning a patient's whole history to 1 usable disk would be great!

Unfortunately, it will never be because it's not standard in common PC builds yet. It's just a pipe dream that is perpetually > 10 yrs away. The reason for this is as computers get faster, we take more and more data, higher resolution studies, 3D reconstructions, etc.. That outstrip our abillity to keep up on the portable storage front.

Re:It's more for large data sets

[ThePlague]

Yes, I can see that. A large CT scan, say about 200 slices at half a meg per slice would run 100 MB. Throw in multiple CT scans, MRIs, etc, and it wouldn't be hard to exceed the capacity of a CD IF you wanted to and could put all the studies on one disk. However, DVD size is still plenty for the vast majority of patients. Plus, there's the usual problem of collecting all the studies at one site, willing and able to actually burn them all to one disk.

As you point out, though, the "one disk dream" will never be for the reason you cite. It could be, but it's not nor is it likely to be. So I ask again, is anyone trusting full backups or large data set distribution to Blu-Ray burners now? If I ever need a CT or other "big data set" imaging modality, the first thing I would do is make absolutely certain I get a copy of the DICOM images from the tech. Then, a digital copy of the read from the radiologist. Finally, I'd throw the whole thing on a USB stick with redundant backups to other storage (external, redundant internals, etc) and archive the optical.

Re:It's more for large data sets

[Anonymous Coward]

Idk what CTs run these days, but I do know that our scanners are now 64 slice scanners! 200 slices is probably out of touch for most current studies. In Echo, a study easily and often exceeds 650mb at a time.

I agree I don't see it in use at the moment, but can imagine it's use in other fields, if DI is so easily over the CD limit.

While I understand what you may want to do for your own personal studies, having some knoledge in the field, the images often need to be transfered to a specialist, and this transfer is taxing either for the sender, the reciever, or both. This is why they still burn CDs & DVDs. Not every doc has a fiber connection! When the exam is performed, a digital copy goes to an archive, and with many newer places an offsite disaster recovery archive.

    The DICOM stored images can vary in size, the spec doesn't call for specific resolutions by modality. It's usually set at the machine level by the vendor anyway. Again some types of studies can be HUGE. One type not shown in the link below is cardiac ultrasound (echo), Cardiac Cath, and MRI. Here's a recent list from DICOMM solutions.com For Cath alone, (5 years ago)one place was knocking on the 10Tb limit, and recently doubled capacity to last just... (wait for it...) a maximum of 2 years (to fill 10TB to 100% capacity). They were buying time to get a new PACS in.

http://www.dicomsolutions.com/archive/pacs/candelis-imagegrid/candelis-imagegrid

my bet is...

[Xenious]

this is to ensure writable BDs for future formats are not compatible with read only ones (read: consumer movies) in the name of copy protection.

Sounds good actually

[oldhack]

100GB burner sounds pretty good as a backup device. 25, 50 don't sounds so enticing - maybe it's the magic of the number 100.

Of course, I have no Blu Ray player/burner, so I don't feel the churn like maybe some of you do. I think I'm in the majority, though.

Re:Sounds good actually

[mirix]

Considering that it's going to be $10+ for a disk, if they ever hit the shelves... you're still gonna be ahead of the game using mag disks. Optical is dead.

Re:Sounds good actually

[camperdave]

Sounds kinda lame actually. Sure, it'll do for a differential backup, but for a full backup... well, let's just say I don't want to be shuffling a couple of dozen disks.

Re:Sounds good actually

[oldhack]

Dozens of 100GB disks? You know, at some point, you have to dump your porn collection. Doesn't your wife nag you enough already?

Re:Sounds good actually

[Malc]

Seems good to me for archiving photos. BDREs and BDRs take up less shelf space than hard drives. I came back from an 18 day trip over Christmas to Asia with 25GB of photos (after deleting 1,100 too!). Easy to make a couple of copies and leave one of them at my parents house. I'm happy to spend a couple of quid a disc for that, and they're getting cheaper too.

Natural development

[Kumiorava]

Since when did you think current Bluray was the final stage of development on optical disks? Most likely it's physically impossible to get old players to play new 100GB disks, they are just not built for that. On the other hand it makes sense that these new 100GB players will be able to play regular Bluray disks. Where is the problem? Your Bluray movies will keep on playing on all Bluray players, only when you want to have writable Bluray with 100GB capacity you need to buy a new player.

This is what happens when Sony wins

[erroneus]

They will do pretty much as they please, especially when it comes to perpetual changes, "new patents" and royalties galore. I'm wishing HD-DVD won the war. I saw it coming with Sony pushing Bluray.

Re:This is what happens when Sony wins

[Verunks]

except that the blu-ray isn't owned just by sony but by many companies that are part of the blu-ray association http://www.blu-raydisc.com/en/about/SupportingCompanies.html
also sony and all those other companies are part of the dvd forum as well so what makes you think that hd-dvd wouldn't have this kind of problem?

Re:This is what happens when Sony wins

[Anonymous Coward]

Man. First they take the "OtherOS" option from my PS3, now they're taking the "blu ray playback" option away? How long before I lose the capacity to play "PS3" games?

Parkinson's law

[Locke2005]

As the corollary to Parkinson's Law states: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."

Re:Parkinson's law

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Thanks for pointing that to me, now I can quote it for projects in the future! I've not seen that before.

Get ready for the confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

If they call it BluRay, this will incite confusion. Why? Because many bluray players won't be able to use this medium that is called bluray, and the mass users don't know what the initials mean. Case in point: My bro-in-law didn't know what the difference between DVD-R and DVD-R DL was.

Additionally, IH-BD looks pointless.

names meh, I gotta better name for you

[ericthughes]

IH-BD 5000 XL EXTREME. Yeah, that should do the trick I think

Re:names meh, I gotta better name for you

[luke_z3]

IH-BD 5000 XL Limited Edition PRO EXTREME.

FTFY

Blu-Ray: Obsolete optical disc format

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear manufacturers,

Number of Blu-Ray players I own: 0
Number of Blu-Ray players I plan to buy: 0

HTH!

Re:Blu-Ray: Obsolete optical disc format

[baka_toroi]

Blu-ray is a bag of hurt.

Re:Blu-Ray: Obsolete optical disc format

[fnj]

Well, that sure puts them in their place. LG can now only expect to sell 7,849,999 players in 2010 instead of the prior estimate of 7,850,000.

(LG Sales Projections)

Erf, shades of DVD-R incompatibilities.

[PhantomHarlock]

Oh man. I thought we got away from this after we left the incompatibility of DVD-R/RW with most commercial video DVD players behind. Currently I can author my HD videos to Blu-Ray recordables and they play just fine on any Blu Ray player. Hallelujah. Fortunately I don't have much of a reason to use higher capacity discs, my videos aren't 6 hours long. At 12 GB / hr I can fit plenty on a stock Blu Ray disc. As a data application, this is probably OK, but hard drives are so cheap these days there's no point in doing optical backups. This might be used for 4k video and other very high end formats in the future, however.

And if you say that there is no need for physical formats, you're wrong. At least in the USA, our level of broadband is not capable of delivering 25 mbits / sec video to the home, on demand and with everyone on your block doing same. With large LCD, plasma and DLP screens, that data rate makes all the difference in quality. Compare satellite HD to the same content on Blu-Ray and you'll see an enormous difference. Most Sat HD feeds I've seen are practically unwatchable due to compression artifacts.

-M

Re:Erf, shades of DVD-R incompatibilities.

[josath]

I'm pretty happy with 720p movies that run around 5-10GB on my 55" 1080p LCD (ie, one DVD5 or one DVD9). The difference between 720p and 1080p is very slight to my eyes. Much smaller than the difference between DVD and 720p.

Re:Erf, shades of DVD-R incompatibilities.

[Hurricane78]

Pff, pussy! Real men used DVD-RAM! :D

YAY!

[WheelDweller]

Now we can start wasting money on players, start arguing over media types that are essentially the same, but won't play.

It'll be utopia again, sort like VHS/Beta!

[Really, guys. Making things incompatible is *always* a loser, no matter what your business school profs might have mentioned.]

Incompatibility? What incompatibility?

[webdog314]

I'm just going to rip (cough-obtain) my movies and store them on my nice compatible hard drive. It's like they WANT to make it difficult to buy and play media. Who would have thought that screwing over the consumer was an actual marketing strategy.

Once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

The general public swayed the war, and the wrong format won.

This isn't a new format, its the same thing as 3DTV, they want you to buy new equipment every 5 years now and none of it will do more than one thing.

What's it for?

[Skapare]

We already have HD video on Blu-Ray. I don't know any software package that needs more than 50GB of media (so there probably aren't that many). They say this is for archiving and backups? I switched to hard drives and flash drives several years ago because optical was such a waste and the rewritable ones were less reliable than USB memory sticks.

Re:goatse

[DJRumpy]

This summary is misleading. There is little need for more capacity given the current specs for HD and the current utilization on a typical BD movie. These disks will target storage, and the only people who would need to upgrade would be those that needed these higher density disks. It was known before the spec was certified that higher capacity media would be in the pipe. That was one of the strengths of BD-Rom; it had lots of room to grow.

From TFA: "In general, the two new formats will be geared toward broadcast and document archiving, both industries that need to record and store massive libraries of digital content. But consumer versions will be available, 'particularly in those regions where BD recorders have achieved broad consumer acceptance,' the BDA said."

This will come in handy...

[AndreR]

... for those extended versions of the Lord of The Rings that will finally be coming on BluRay next year.

"Oh, this would have required so many discs with that old BluRay technology, you know, we just used these new BDXL discs and actually reduced the cost of the box set for you, the customer, by having less discs! Just don't forget to pick up one of those new players on your way to the cashier."

I kid, I kid, they would never do such a thing.

Re:This will come in handy...

[Hurricane78]

... for those extended versions of the Lord of The Rings that will finally be coming on BluRay next year.

What? Another two hours on top of the 30 minutes straight of blurry goodbye scenes?
I fuckin HATE LOTR. Am I really the only one who prefers Sci-Fi over retarded “magic”, monkey dwarves and faggy elves shit?

Good job guys...

[damn_registrars]

The Blu-ray guys win the format war, and then they go and break compatibility within their own ranks. Fantastic job of shooting oneself in the foot, there. I'm surprised that the Blu-ray disc association doesn't include IBM, with a choice like that under their belt...

No not sony!

[Billly Gates]

They would never do anything like this.

I mean I love that I can still use my old memory sticks

New format R&D time

[pastababa]

It takes years to develop new technology and formats. Maybe back when they started developing the new format , 100GB & 128GB was "revolutionary". But other technology like Hard Drive and flash memory had caught up with them that fast, which they did not foresee. Now that you've already spend the time and money on R&D, what do you do? Throw the whole thing into the trash bin or put it out to the market while there is still a chance to recoup the R&D cost and possibly make some profits?

This. This is why.

[dohzer]

This is exactly why I haven't purchased a Blu-ray player. It was obvious from the get-go that they were planning to "upgrade" the format to force new hardware on us.
I'm not upgrading from DVD until the next gen media has capacities of around 100 or 1000 times that of the previous generation, and/or is fully scalable without "upgrading".

Who bought what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never bought a blu-ray player, and I'd consider myself a pretty large nerd considering the home-built i7 920 based computer running at 3.8ghz in my bedroom, it's doing just fine with a 6 or 7 year old Sony, ironically, DVD drive. So far I haven't 'missed' the blu-ray player and find it extremely doubtful that I ever will.

I even encouraged my girlfriend to buy a laptop this last year without any internal optical drive; if there is ever anything she NEEDS to have off a cd, I've always done just fine transferring the content to a thumb drive, I even did her Windows 7 upgrade from one... Not to go off on a tangent, but I do wonder why MS ever decided to go and illegally use an open source utility to create their bootable installation thumb drives, when they've included since xp all of the utilities needed to make your own...

Anyway, I do have to concur with nomadic, the difference between modern DLC and an 'expansion pack' is that DLC is gotten offline, and, typically, broken into multiple smaller pieces available for between $2-$20 each instead of one bulk package usually available for $20-$50