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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."
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.
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!
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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?
That make sense, except for the part where the already have made write-able blue-ray disks available.
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.
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.
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.
Specifications for both disc types will be published during the upcoming months.
Don't you realize that publishing specs hurts your bottom line?!?!
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.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
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.
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
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."
... 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.
They would never do anything like this.
I mean I love that I can still use my old memory sticks
http://saveie6.com/
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?