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Sony's Blue-Violet Laser the Future Blu-ray?
JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese researchers from Sony and Tohoku University announced the development of a 'blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser,' which Sony is aiming to use for optical disks. The new technology, with 'a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region' and a power out put 'more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology, while retaining a practical size. Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated."
Here come some more shark comments. Sheesh!
Of course, as soon as Sony brings this to market, some other company, or group of companies, will unveil a competing product incompatible with Sony's, starting yet another format war. Too bad these guys can't just work together and agree on a common format and save us all time, money, and having to deal with dead formats (e.g. HD-DVD).
People haven't even moved from DVDs to Blu-Ray yet, judging by the amount of shelf space still given to DVDs.
Is Sony TRYING to kill off blu-ray?
We'd already be walking around with 500GB USB sticks.
Or worse, we'd be walking around with 1Gbps wireless connections and we'd be streaming HD movies from YouTube.
So unless they've figured out how to cram like 1PB or even 1EB on an optical disc, they're walking down a blind alley.
The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
*props to RvB
Oh, wait, I get it. This is a manly laser. It holds manly shows like "24." It will refuse to store shows like "Days of Our Lives" and "The L Word."
i'd rather they worked on SSD technology and digital distribution than working on physical disks.
I'm curious if the "more than 100 times the world's highest output value" means that we will soon see a 100W version of the WickedLasers Spyder III...
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html
I thought we were pretty much done with physical media?
We'd already be walking around with 500GB USB sticks.
Or worse, we'd be walking around with 1Gbps wireless connections and we'd be streaming HD movies from YouTube.
And the "HD" YouTube videos would still look like shit.
The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
Use it too many times, the media is burned to a crisp.
"Why isn't this thing working - let me look in and see if there's anything clogging the ....AGGH MY EYEBALLS!"
Now if they can make a switchable converter that will let it emit in visible light, little Johnny the future serial killer can also tease cats from a block away - then nuke them!
According to wikipedia, the light used in a bluray laser is also 405 nm, so that isn't the new part, in case that was confusing for anyone else.
You're right, I think the article is way off the mark. I don't think there will be another viable packaged video disc format. The article makes no mention of possible use in fiber optics, the higher information density could allow much more information to be transmitted, assuming it is at all compatible with fiber.
I'm not sure what Blu-ray is currently up to, GB-wise, but during The War, I enlisted with the side that claimed it could store the most data. Capacity was supposed to increase to 250GB at some point, based on things I was reading early on.
Instead, the maximum size a standard Blu-ray player can read is apparently 100GB, and I've never seen one that big. Everything is 50. 200GB discs exist, but rare as unicorns, and I guess unplayable with a special 200GB-Blu-ray drive.
That article doesn't even mention GB of storage. For some reason, I care about the laser's wavelength in nanometers, but I need to have the capacity of the disc described as "number of high quality movies".
Good, now can we get rid of spinning discs and move to something not based on shellac records?
Goodie! A more powerful laser for my blu-Ray phaser!
damn I still only have a dvd player.
The limit on drive capacity is not switching speed, but focal spot diameter. If this is a 405nm laser, its minimum focus spot will be exactly the same size as the spot of existing Blu-Ray lasers (they're 405nm, too). What am I missing?
Just like current blu-ray, it's just not practical. Why would I pay $25 for 4 25GB discs, when I can pay $100 for a 2TB external hard drive? Even for archiving purposes, it's just not practical unless you use the argument that the discs last longer.
... I suspect this will be another format I will wish I could have, but that Sony will make impossible to get behind.
Sony does sometimes innovate, but they also almost always lock down the product in the most idiotic way (mini discs, memorysticks, blueray, ebookreaders and so on) so I can't do anything but hate them. So cool but so stupid.
If your storage medium has to explicitly allow your content then someone is doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
I recently became a Netflix convert. The DVD-in-the-mail trick is okay, as I'm a patient guy and don't mind planning ahead. What really impressed me was the streaming. True, it's not perfect, but the value of convenience far outweighs subtle quality issues.
50 High quality movie titles had been produced since Blu ray started shipping.
Nullius in verba
If your storage medium has to explicitly allow your content then someone is doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
Yeah, they were very stupid about licensing, and that's why, even with, what a year+ lead, HD-DVD died an embarassing death. This is one case where the market really DID decide.
Is there such a thing as "compatibility" with fiber? I mean, I know that optic fiber's frequency-transmission characteristics aren't perfectly flat, which probably yields more or less signal attenuation, but it's not like photons come in different 'formats'.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The porn industry will make billions. Imagine getting one of these discs a month crammed with High Quality movies. Not the free crap on the porntube websites. You will never leave your house...EVER.
if pointing that laser at a 20 million year old rock
in a cave-painting cave will yield a sh1t-load of pr0n (and maybe
some philosophy on decay)
They still would be useful for doing backups. Flash is too expensive for write-once data.
guess I'll have to buy the White Album again
[...]easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24.
I can already fit an entire HD season of a TV show on one DVD using x264 or Theora.
On a single layer DVD I've got all 6 episodes of Star Wars... Most people don't mind swapping discs every 12 hours or so.
Hell, I've got a cheap ($30) DVD player that can play Xvid or DivX, and on one 8Gb (dual layer DVD) disc I've got FOUR seasons of a TV show.
Some of the entire seasons I have stored on a single DVD have dual or triple audio streams (multiple languages and/or commentary).
Blu-ray is capable of storing entire runs of most TV shows (except exceptionally long running shows),
yet they insist on using crappy compression and dividing up the seasons into multiple discs.
As long as more disks per show == more money per show we'll still have tons of cheesy
"special features" and/or half blank disks wasting our digital and shelf storage capacity.
Its worth noting that techies were talking about using blue lasers back in the 90's as a way to fit more information onto a "CD" for computers, way before any of had DVD players in our homes. I remember it was pointed out the blue lasers transferred data slower than the lasers being used in CD-ROM drives of the day.
I think a Blue-Violet replacement for BluRay is longer off than most other slashdot posters seem to believe.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I get that it's bigger, but can I get that in "Libraries of Congress"?
I look forward to the day spinning optical media dies. Hard disks are decent, but optical media is fiddly stuff. Lot of poor quality optical drives out there. They don't last, and they often error out halfway through a burn. They're slow. As if a motor to spin the disks isn't enough of a mechanical weak point, they insist on powering the trays. Device drivers for both Linux and Windows are flaky. And the disks! They decay, warp, and scratch. And lastly, the politics. There are the format wars of course. But worse is lock in and damaging attempts at DRM. Bad enough that a rogue employee might slip malware onto a CD, but that corporations could dare adopt policies to deliberately do so, and think that's within their rights...
When I use optical media at all, I prefer the RW over the R so I don't lose disk after disk when trying to figure out yet another problem. Right now, some mysterious Linux kernel bug has rendered most of my computers unable to read full sized CD-Rs, though all other kinds of optical media, such as CD-RWs and mini CD-Rs, work as well as can be expected. The only computer equipment that gives me more trouble is ink jet printers. Now that most computers can boot from a USB stick, and hard drives are so gigantic that my modest data storage needs will never exceed their capacity, the only real use I still have for optical media is transferring data where networking isn't available. A networked movie server beats the pants off a shelf full of DVDs.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
to download these files on bit torrent... :(
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
But hard drives aren't, even with necessary migration to mitigate drive failure.
> easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24.
24 shows? Which ones?
After 1 minute I wondered if the newsstory is talking about 24h, with that Sutherland (?) guy.
Not that an "h" would help much. But it's me: I pay for cable and don't watch it (specially 24h/CSI and other tr*).
but I envision Nagahashi Mirimoto (the head of the miniaturization dept), screaming at the top of his lungs:
"THE PITS! MAKE THEM SMALLER!!" :)
Dang those guys are so good at making everything smaller.
DVDs are red
Violet-rays are blue
Do not look into laser
With remaining eye
Note how I removed the last vowel -- pretty hip, right?
The first thing that went through my mind when I read the summary is that for $100 I can go buy a USB external notebook drive that holds in the area of 350Gigs. With the proper formatting it's universally readable and can easily hold 50 movies + a ton of music + a stupid number of documents. Why would they want to do this? Maybe they're worried about the environmental impact of shipping season long episodes on multiple plastic disks?
Paying video stores to only carry your format is not really letting the market decide. The whole things was a weasel-fest, and the more expensive format, with a non-finalized spec and forced DRM (or so I'm let to believe) won. I'm still dreaming the day consumers get together and start asking "in that an open, non-patent encumbered format", and not using it if the answer is "no". In my defence, I do realise it is dreaming.
Geesh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated.
First they mention it being capable of holding 50 high-quality movie titles, following up in the same sentence with the show "24". I'm confused - which is it?
HD DVD was an open format available to anyone who wanted to implement it. As far as content went, it was the more open of the two - you didn't need, for example, to license AACS to press a disc.
HD DVD's failure had nothing to do with licensing, it was a straightforward case in which Hollywood picked the winner. Hollywood, as a whole, didn't like the fact HD DVD didn't require access controls (making it harder to trace pirates), and lacked snake-oil solutions like BD+. Added to the fact Sony is a studio, Blu-ray had the studio support.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How easy is it to copy?
Don't want DRM, don't want restrictions on my right to copy anything I lawfully possess.
... the cost of 20PK of 25GB discs (500GB) is the same as a 750GB-1GB hard disk, with 2TB hard disks going for $99. The media for blu-ray is not cost competitive with hard disks any longer they better hurry up since by the time blu-ray discs become cost competitive so hard disks no longer offer more bang for the buck there will be new Hard drives out.
You underestimate the cost difference between an optical disc and a USB stick. Even if they have 1 petabyte USB drives and this disc only held 250 gigabytes it would still be manufactured and sold due to the fact that it would cost a fraction of a penny to produce compared to a USB stick and the fact that when it comes to movies.
And you will only need by so much space during a given generation and even during the introduction to 3D HD Televisions and all they really won't need more than about 250 gigabytes per disc to hold what they would be willing to sell for at least the next 10 years or so. And yes they could hold more on the bigger drives but wouldn't matter much for Movies and TV series, all they would do is span it out over more discs like they do now. And if you can manufacture 5 250GB Discs for 2 cents or a single Terabyte USB drive for 2 dollars, which would you use as your medium to sell on?
guess I'll have to buy the White Album again...
No left turn unstoned.
Of cause, that is why they're developing 3D technologies as well, so that streaming video would require much higher bandwidths. Granted right now it's only twice the size, but that is also the most basic (one point-of-view) type of 3D tech.
These can hold 20x the capacity, but you'll still have to buy the theatrical and extended special editions of LOTR separately
So really, Hollywood execs will render these discs moot, at lest as far as home entertainment purposes go.
If your storage medium has to explicitly allow your content then someone is doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
By that measure, all three video game console makers are "doing it terribly, terribly wrong." Or what am I missing?
The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
what, like HD-DVDA-DVD?
The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
HD-DVD was supported by Warner Brothers and Universal.
Blu-Ray had Disney.
In home video, that is all you need to know to predict a winner.
Disney was the rocket that launched the ABC television network into orbit in the mid 1950s.
When Disney moved to NBC and all-color programming, the big screen B&W set was on the fast track to oblivion.
The big screen HDTV is family entertainment -
and Disney has 87 years of product to meet that demand.
HHDVVDDBVD.
But in the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with an I!
INDY! NO!!!!
Unless these things are 1TB+ they are useless today, and in 5-10 years they will need to be 1PB+.
We all know that a single disk won't hold more than 4 or 5 episodes, making us buy a bunch of them to have a complete season... They will never allow us to pay a small price for the disk, it will either be a 150$ disk, or 7 to 8 disks at 20$ each...
By the time they've made this into a real product, We'd already be walking around with 500GB USB sticks.
See, this I don't quite get.
If DVDs or other physical media are falling back significantly, wouldn't movies/games/etc be better suited with distribution through USB...ROM? Some form of unwritable flash drive anyhow.
A quick search tells me an 32GB flash drive is about 70 dollars (american) or $2.19 per GB. By contrast, a 25 gig rewritable blu-ray (bd-rw) costs 15 dollars or $0.60 per gig. I'm using a rewritable because the flash drive is also rewritable.
Look at that. Per GB, a flash drive costs 3.65 times more than a blu-ray disc. This shows that they're keeping a significantly cheaper price per GB than their solid state brethren, but there's the heavy issue of lack of backwards compatibility necessitating new players and new recorders.
It seems likely that for average joes, flash drives will reign supreme, but for high density storage or transfer, these new discs could be a godsend. (I saw a 256GB flash drive, but 20x blu ray is already a minimum of 500GB. Even if the 256GB flash drops to 10% of its price, $110 rather than $1108, as long as this violet-ray disc doesn't cost 7x a blu-ray, discs still come out ahead. If it costs 6x or less, in the long term it'll come out ahead even after buying the player/burner.)
The continuous need of new players is what causes the faltering of new formats though. We saw that with HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray. If flash drives become far more ubiquitous as a form of file transfer, it's highly possible that their prices will drop significantly. Further, if read only flash drives can be manufactured for cheap, we might hit an age where everyone buys a media server and movie/tv/etc distributors sell flash drives packed with the latest movies/etc instead of having to keep a cabinet full of discs.
one benefit tho is that a fried drive do not lead to lost data.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Hey, you could easily fit 50 high-quality movie titles on a 1.44 MB floppy disk.
This is one case where the market really DID decide.
Really? As I remember it a bunch of companies got together and decided to pull the plug on HD-DVD right after christmas one year when player prices had been cut.. think that timing was an accident? I also seem to remember that there was a rather large payout involved in the deal as well between said companies.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
It also didn't hurt Sony that the PS3 was a blu-ray player.
I was thinking for more long-distance uses. If you're trying to shine light through a few miles of fiber, you want to pick the most transparent frequencies you have. I imagine that UV would at least be useful in shorter distances, such as within a building, I can't find good information on fiber transmission and attenuation vs. frequency and distance.
Rent, Rip in 640x480 to save hard disk space, Return.
Does it matter? The way things are going, before they could possibly get consumers to accept a new format everyone will be downloading movies and games. Hell, I'm not even sure Blu-Ray will surpass DVD before plastic disks become a niche market.
imagine the cost of 50 movies on one disk with todays blueray prices.... no thanks
So will the cost per GB for this new disks. Just use what any serious person uses for Write Once Read Many backups and TODAY has a capacity of 1.5TB... Tape
>>>The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
You can tell Slashdot's moderation system is boekn when someone gets modded "informative" for telling a lie. HD-DVD allowed porn. In fact many sites offered a package deal - Buy the HD and get both HDDVD and Bluray discs (in the same package).
From Summary:
>>>"capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles"
So short-sighted. These new discs would hold 50GB times 20 == 1000 gigabytes. It would be possible to hold an entire movie without having to use lossy compression. The picture would be flawless.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If this new disk is only 20 times bigger than a Bluray, why should it be able to store 50 HD movies? Shouldn't that be like 20, unless the definition of 'HD' has changed again?
They got us with DVDs nicely. At that time it was cheaper to buy DVDs than hard drive space. Everyone bought spindles of DVDs and stored everything on it, only to lose it all a few years later, not to mention the extreme hassle of dealing with the media, sensitive drives that failed frequently, inability to delete/rewrite easily etc. I remember the pathetic week I spent salvaging whatever I had on 200 DVDs onto an external hard drive.
In my opinion optical media is dead and will probably only have a use case as far as selling retail movies etc. It will all go electronic in a couple of years and then we'll look at this time as the stone age.
The picture would be flawless.
And more importantly (to the studios) it would be impractical to rip even to a 3 terabyte drive. This is the best copy protection the studios could ever ask for.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Added to the fact Sony is a studio
Between Sony and Disney being Blu-Ray exclusive, it was end of story. Even if every other studio had joined HD-DVD, it was fruitless to push any movie format without those two (never mind Fox).
I knew from launch HD-DVD was doomed, it was really too bad for the industry and consumers that the HD-DVD group took so long to realize what was so obvious.
I mean, of course hollywood picked the winner - because any new video format was primarily about movies! Duh!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What happened to Holographic Video Discs? Weren't they supposed to be the next technology after blue ray?
Forgive my question: It's Sony, the PS3 Linux killer company, removing features and fucking paying customers.
When we tear this drive apart to get access to the lazer, will it be capable of more than just lighting a match and bursting a balloon?
as long as they don't encumber it with ultraviolet
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I think your memory may be faulty.
They'd just compress it. A Blu-ray disk compressed to 10GB still looks fantastic, I'm guessing one of these disks compressed to the same file size wouldn't look any worse, only hard core videofiles or people with 60"+ TVs would likely need anything better (and assuming the cost of the disks and burners fell in line with every format that's gone before, and that hard drives don't take a sudden leap forward in the interim, people could always just go back to burning to one of these disks).
Looking at the wavelength (which is the same as bluray) there is little headroom to decrease track pitch and increase bit rate, so it is unlikely they can increase layer density by more than a very small single digit factor over bluray.
So getting to 20 times bluray capacity will require many more layers.
As the disks cannot be spinning much faster it would also be necessary to read several layers or several parallel tracks simultaneously otherwise read speed will be laughably slow compared to capacity.
Obviously, there are quite a few problems to solve. Assuming they are solvable, can they make working prototypes soon enough to get to market while 1T optical capacity still seems exciting compared to other storage and distribution technologies?
Bad example, but the point is valid - if it becomes cheaper and easier to get HD content through the tubes than on a disk, it kills this format dead as a delivery mechanism (it might still have some mileage as a storage medium if it's cheap enough). Of course that looks like a big if at the moment (we've a long way to go to even get everyone on broadband, let alone fast enough broadband or even wireless for this to become reality), but if it happens, Youtube won't be delivering that quality HD content for free, but someone will be charging for said content and they only have to undercut the physical (bricks and mortar / post and package) channels to win the price war.
It was my understanding that the industry as a whole was avoiding any media that would allow all of Uwe Boll's movies to ever be placed on one disc. Looks like sony's betrayed us.
More storage would be great, but if the drives/media are a "world of hurt" with DRM/licensing, will the technology be all that useful?
It's hard to ever trust Sony again after the music CD rootkit fiasco. DRM on audio CDs pales in comparison to Blu-ray, but there's still much more to it than many realize.
Here's a paper (160K PDF) with some excellent background on it:
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/hearings/sonydrm-ext.pdf
HD-DVD had a massive lead over blu-ray. It took a good 18 months of sales post HD-DVD death for blu-ray to even catch up to be on equal footing. The market had nothing to do with the decision, if it was left up to the market it was far more likely blu-ray would have died, it was Sony's cheque book that finally won the war, they paid off the other studios and the consumer in general are worse off for it.
The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
ya got that backwards. HD-DVD did allow porn, initially Blu-ray did not.
There are many things that are already close to killing this tech without even resorting to online delivery. We are already at the stage where HDD space is cheaper than blu-ray discs. USB sticks are also rapidly increasing in size and decreasing in cost, not to mention flash/SD memory. Personally I think they will need to push the limits well beyond 20 times the capacity otherwise it is gonna be still born long before it is commercially ready.
No doubt someone will pipe up now and say that it was the government's fault for interfering in the smooth running of the free market.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A monkey in a shiny gold suit is still a monkey.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Good work, Sony, way to go. This is like saying "Fuck you! Now gimme' more money!" to your current Blu-ray users.
I have an inexpensive CD drive (name brand) which is over five years old. I also have a cheap DVD drive (generic LG) which is over three. The combination has out lasted two hard drives. I don't see a problem with optical media or their drives.
Sony won't let the tech out to become an industry standard. Sony will lock it up and try to control it.
Everytime Sony comes up with a new technology like this they do the same thing. They did it with BETAMAX, they did it with the sony memory stick, they'll do it again with this.
So basically non-news. The industry is wise to Sony and won't fall for their tricks even if it is better.
Can someone explain why this is unique from existing Blu-Ray technology, which is precisely the same wavelength of the visible spectrum as this purported new technology? Also, why are we still developing visible lasers instead of pursuing UV rays, which are a significantly smaller wavelength, therefore permitting even denser optical storage as well as countless medical uses? If this does result in a new format, I see a digital cinema revolution on the horizon (which should have happened already anyway) as feature films could fit on a single disc, eliminating the need for hard-drive caches, tape and film reels. Though home theater technology may lead to this "revolution" being the death of cinema.
I'm not an expert, but I play one on slashdot.
Unfortunately, by the time Sony finishes this technology no one will actually use disc anymore. Everyone will just stream or download their movies... Oh wait, too late.
Sony bought out HD-DVD. The market didn't decide it.
I guess with netflix I don't care so much because it is obviously a rental system.
Still I do want to own things, but lately, I haven't cared much about owning movies/music.
Netflix + radio is enough for me.
and lacked snake-oil solutions like BD+
It seems to be plenty sufficient to prevent an open source BD player from arriving at least. As far as I know, every HD-DVD can be played now using the leaked AACS MKVs but only the very first and simplest BD+ movies. The rest you need a commercial tool for. Of course, BD rips made with one of the commercial tools that remove BD+ don't have this limitation. Just put them on iTunes already with the music and lose those stupid DRM dreams. The music industry had to and last I checked it didn't die.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_(2005_film)
Looks like both allowed this one...
If Sony was able to buy out HD-DVD then HD-DVD was on the market and that market decided the winner. It just wasn't the specific market that you wanted to decide the winner.
This wavelength of light is used to make 1-2um features in the microelectronics/micromachining industry. This could be a an interesting development for hobby electronics, micro-art... or cyborg sharks.
blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology
As you go from infra-red to red to blue to violet and beyond, the wavelength of the light gets shorter (smaller). The smaller wavelength allows you to read and write smaller bits on the disk. It's like printing a book with smaller letters. If the letters are half the size then you have twice as many letters on each row of text, and half the hight letters means twice as many rows on a page. If the letters are half the size you actually get FOUR times as much text on each page.
The data you can store doesn't just increase with the color of the laser, the amount you can store increases with the square of the color of the laser. You can store far more data as you move from red lasers to green lasers to blue lasers and now to this blue-violet laser. This blue-violet laser can store 20 times as much data as a blu-ray disk, meaning many hours of video on a disk.
It's easy to look forwards where the technology is going. And after violet light comes ultraviolet light with an even smaller wavelength. Ultraviolet lasers would mean disks that could hold probably a month of non-stop video. You could store (and sell) pretty much an entire video rental store's inventory on a single DVD-style disk. A plastic disk witch cost pennies to manufacture. Just think about that. Every movie ever made in one box, on just a couple of cheap plastic disks.
And of course after ultraviolet comes X-rays. By my calculations using X-ray lasers would result in the disks holding more video than could be watched during a viewer's entire lifetime. Rimshot: Ba-Dum Dum!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What about DDDDD. Or fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuu.....
Hard drives are absolutely not cheaper than BluRays.
How much does a 50 GB hard drive cost to manufacture?
How much does a 50 GB BDROM cost to manufacture?
Hence "...without much..."; certainly generally good enough (was SCMS even rigilously followed?)
I have a couple of Sony DAT decks (a PCM-2500A/B and an A7) and a Sony MD deck and I can tell you they respect SCMS perfectly. With the digital output from a CD player fed into either DAT deck, they would not record until I added a Behringer Ultramatch into the signal path; it's an SPDIF / AES/EBU format converter that can strip out the SCMS copy bit.
To me, SCMS was the recording industry having their cake and eating it too. Or double-dipping, whatever you want to call it.
The recording industry successfully lobbied for a tax on blank "Audio-grade" DAT tapes, because surely they would be used to make illegal copies of copyrighted material. At the same time, they were successful in making the equipment manufacturers implement the SCMS copy bit, which prevents re-recording.
Which is it? Do they want to be compensated for unlicensed copying, or prevent it from happening in the first place? The fact that they got both is particularly galling. I feel like they now owe me something.
I have never bought an "Audio-grade" DAT tape, since the data backup 4mm DDS tapes are exactly the same thing and are cheaper due to there not being a recording industry tax on them. There were rumors spread that the lubricant on the tapes was different, but it isn't. I've never had a problem running data tapes in my audio DAT decks.
Putting moderation advice in your
>>>They'd just compress it.
Good point. A lot of the DVDs I download have been squeezed from ~5 gigabytes down to 0.7 GB or even 0.3 GB. The quality is not as good of course, but most of us don't really care. With an lossless movie on this 1000 GB blue-violet disc, the pirates would just squeeze it down to whatever size they need.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You're both wrong. Both HD-DVD and Bluray allowed porn. When Sony heard the rumors that they were blocking porn they said it was nonsense. It was also nonsense that Betamax didn't allow porn (holds up playboy on beta).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The market had nothing to do with the decision...it was Sony's cheque book...
Doesn't that mean precisely that the market made the decision. For the market to work it will always come down to someone's cheque book. And, as is usually the problem with free market economy, the one with the biggest cheque book, or the one willing the write the biggest cheque, is the one that control's the market.
All I can think of are warnings all over the package, "DO NOT TOUCH THE DISK OR IT WILL BE DESTROYED". I really can't imagine you could use a t-shirt to clean these guys. I assume we'll go back to caddy systems in the next generation of optical media.
Yes, the spot diameter(405nm) is the same as blu-ray but the length of the pit is shorter due to the faster switching speeds. This the real breakthrough and where the increased storage density is coming from. Also, 100w peak power at these speeds is not that much actually. Even at 1ghz, the average power is so low I doubt these can barely warm a piece of paper. I have seen IR laser diodes in 5mm plastic cases that are rated at 100w peak. Trust me, the average power is actually well below 100mw. The higher peak power doesn't increase recording density but does increase recording speed (which is a desired trait as density goes up).
They'll be able to fit every high-quality movie title ever created into a handful of discs then. ...oh, you were talking about video compression?~
Uhh, since you're using "leaked AACS MKVs", you can't make an open-source HD-DVD player either.
Hard disks are decent, but optical media is fiddly stuff. Lot of poor quality optical drives out there. They don't last, and they often error out halfway through a burn.
Are you posting from 1999?
Or do you just buy really shitty drives and have a poorly configured system? It's been years since I had an error burning an optical disc, or had a unit fail. I've had many more hard drive failures than optical.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I recall how a group of researchers sometime between 2000 and 2002 had developed ultraviolet fluoroscopy recording, which coupled with a multiple layer disc (7 layers?) could hold massive amounts of data. What happened to that? It was reported on slashdot, sometime between those years (I can be sure of that because of the flat I was living in at the time)
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