6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance

gardolas writes "'Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second.' HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."

Re:Can you say worthless?

[PMJ2kx]

Back in 1998, when IBM unvailed their 18GB hard drive, I asked the same thing. Now, 120GB is standard hard disk size. So, who knows...you might actually find a use for 1TB.

Can't wait for the Digital Restrictions Managment

[Sanity]

No doubt their top priority will be figuring out all the ways to prevent their customers from from using these disks in the way they want to use them. "Can't pause that there" "Can't watch that on that device" "No fast-forwarding through that" "Can't watch this in that country" ...

Remember when technology used to be about enabling people, rather than disabling them?

Re:Can you say worthless?

[Staplerh]

Oh, bah. I'm sure when the CD-ROM came out, people liked to roll their eyes at people filling up 540 MB of storage. Even TFA answers your argument, and does a damn good job of it IMHO:

If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up. High-definition broadcasting and gaming are also expected to add a heavy burden to existing home storage systems because of the size of the files. Two hours of HD programming takes up about 15GB to 25GB.

There you go, if we do a wholesale switch over to HD TV, finally a terabyte of storage doesn't seem that outlandish does it?

Re:Can you say worthless?

[macklin01]

Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!

Anybody who does scientific work, for instance.

It's not hard to generate a few GB of data in a fluid mechanics simulation. People doing rendering (e.g., Pixar) also run into this ... -- Paul

So depressing

[lo0ol]

Does anyone else find this horrendously depressing that they're already plotting the next format? Sure makes me frown on buying anything new in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format. :\

Re:A timeline is emerging?

[Marko DeBeeste]

Economists call it "Marginal Propensity to Consume." Just think Field of Dreams. "If you build it, they will come."

Re:So depressing

[cnettel]

When CD-ROMs started getting reasonably common for PCs, there were plans for DVDs. Maybe you were happy because you haven't heard of them, but they were planned. That's pretty normal.

Re:But....

[cnettel]

What kind of damage to a CD do you have in mind? No matter how "protected" 3.5 (or 5.25) disks were, the failure rate per disk was, IMHO, far higher, and if we count failures per byte it just gets silly. Of course, this is when the ECC of the optical formats is taken into consideration. If you want protection, I think I prefer separate cases any day, but I wouldn't call a CD fragile. (BTW, what do you think makes them so damn cheap to manufacture that AOL can shell out loads?)

Re:Can't wait for the Digital Restrictions Managme

[IO ERROR]

And with 1TB of data to work with, they could make a movie look different and act differently in every country.

For the rest of us, 1TB is a lot of pr0n, or hundreds of Linux distributions.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Can you say worthless?

[Doc Ruby]

That's only 1800 CDs, at full WAV (uncompressed) - I've got over 2500, so I'd already need to carry 2 discs just for my music. It's only 200 DVDs, so many movie/game collections would barely fit. And that's at full 5" diameter, which dates from the early 1980s as a "handy" (floppy) format. To bring it down to modern convenience, we'd want 2" or 3" discs, which include the spindle-hole "overhead": now we're talking about 250GB per disc, up against those storage requirements already mentioned. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody.

Attention span of humans 50 mins, 40 mins, 30..

[NigelJohnstone]

Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.

Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..

Ironic isn't it?

I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.

Re:Can you say worthless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's what we need, a successor to technology that isn't here yet.

Re:Is there DRM built-in?

[Dolda2000]

I like how this is the comment that is most likely to run through a MPAA employee's mind at the moment of reading this article, and at the same time is rated Funny on slashdot. :)

They're the way they are on purpose

[melted]

That hole serves a purpose. You'd have to spin the disk at a much faster speed to get the same sustained data rate if you made the hole smaller. And CDs/DVDs are already near their physical strength limits.

Re:Can you say worthless?

[(negative video)]

I could use a 1TB disk where I could random access it for read and writes... but just write once?

With appropriate software, write once can give you a versioning file system with a tamper-proof history.

Also: think video. 6000x4500 pixels at 30 fps, using 2:1 lossless compression, is 1215 MB/sec. This technology would be perfect for digital movie production.

I hope they move quickly on it

[erroneus]

Sometimes new tech like this gets passed on to the consumer before the XXAAs get to them. Sometimes they don't. That's why we never had "DAT" really catch on in the US -- too many rules and laws and crap -- DAT is a great format and it was just killed by XXAAs saying "but they will be able to make perfect copies!! We'll never survive!! WAAAAA!"

Well, the CD got out without much hassle in spite of the XXAAs and was quite successful in even boosting the sale of their media rather than seeing countless "friends and families making perfect copies...waaaaa!" until they were out of business.

I think history does a lot to illustrate that the consumer is not a threat to the XXAAs even with movie/mosic file swapping going on all over the place. The fact is, when people like it, it doesn't matter if they can get it for free on the net -- they want a nice box to put on their shelf and a nice piece of 'official' media that contains one of their favorite works. That part will never change and that's the money in their bank.... why they want to take their profits and give it to lawyers I'll never know...

We will NEED this technology when it gets here

[miaDWZ]

It's important to note the comment "HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."

Blu-ray itself isn't due out to 2006-2007, and assuming it has the same sort of live that DVD had, it will be around for about 5 or so years before it is overtaken by some new technology, such as this. So we are looking at maybe 2012 before this technology is actually first seen, at which time early adopters will pick it up.

Add in another year or two for it to become more main-stream, with movies and games being published on it, and we are looking at 2013, 2014.

So, it will be nearly 10 years before we really see people using this technology - that's a lot of time in terms of computers. As a reader above rightfully pointed out, not even ten years ago they thought 18GB drives were insanely big.

Over the next ten years the size of games, applications, movies, music, pictures will all grow as their quality and features increase. As such, they will need greater space.

There will be a need for this kind of technology by the time it is released.