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."

Arr

[crummynz]

How long before the xxAA guys shut this down as promoting piracy?

A timeline is emerging?

[Staplerh]

Wow, from TFA:

HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual-layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs, meanwhile, hold about 4.7GB. HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.

Hmm, there's a format war going on with the Blu-ray and HD DVD, and they're already plotting the successor. Of course, they don't give a date in the article or anything firm at all, so perhaps it is a bit of a pipe dream. I must admit, I liked this quip from the article:

If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up.

Considering when I got my first computer, and the salesperson chuckled and said 'there was no way in hell I'd ever fill up a 40 megabyte hard drive', it's nice to see that people finally understand the capacity of users to fill up every nook and cranny of a storage medium!

Hard disk bottleneck

[macklin01]

Too bad that a hard disk would be nowhere near to keeping up with a 1GB/s transfer rate. Heck, IIRC (and please correct me if I don't!) RAM would have trouble keeping up with that ... -- Paul

But....

[CastrTroy]

But will they put some kind of protection around the disk similar to 3.5 Floppies or MiniDiscs? That's my one big beef about CDs. They're so fragile. I'm careful, but one false move can really mess them up. If you can fit so much on a disc, make them smaller, 2 inch diameter? but make them protected.

Re:Can you say worthless?

[rokzy]

I have TB hard drive for my simulations. if I want to back up my data, you suggest 200 DVDs?

this is progress. if you're so lacking in imagination that you can't think of a use for this then just remember that you are not psychic and don't know what secondary discoveries pursuing this technology will bring. when the electron was discovered how many people do you think knew how it would change our lives?

Less hole

[Doc Ruby]

While they're increasing the density in a new format, how about making the spindle hole and clampable hub a lot smaller? Throw this density at a 1" disc, and a CD/DVD hole/hub will eat most of the usable area. Let's have a 1mm hole/hub, and use the whole medium. And while we're at it, let's finally get doublesided drives (without flipping discs): they've been promising doublesided media since DS/DD 5.25" floppies, and we're still waiting.

magnetoptical

[Doc Ruby]

How about a multilayer, "multiphysics" disc? Lay down several optical layers readable by focusable laser. Beneath them, a magnetic layer readable by HD heads. We might be able to get over 50% more capacity, without needing greater areal density. With doublesided discs, and pinhole spindle hubs [slashdot.org], we might be looking at 2" discs with 1TB capacity.

Add a flexible layer of hw gen. redundancy data.

[eddy]

It'd be cool if they could put in a function in the hardware that would calculate and fill out the media with [standardized] redundancy data. You'd want it do be done in hardware to be fast, compatible and not generate unneccesary bus traffic.

Basically, the burn software would feature a '[X] Fill out with redundancy data and finalize disc'-option box together with the '[X] Finalize disc' one.

I've sometimes done this by hand [par2.net], but it takes forever to calculate the data, and you don't get it properly distributed over the disc, etc, etc. I think it'd be better done in hardware.

Guess there's no hope though, it'd up the cost a dollar, and we all know that's just impossible to bear. <sigh>

Re:Souvenirs

[AlfredoLambda]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've read such a story in some 80's sci-fi comic book. It was written by Alan Moore in 2000A.D., IRC. But it was'nt a CD, it was a planet with a strange continuous groove over it's surface, where some kind of creatures lived. Yup, you played the planet with a giant laser beam and it made sounds while the animal life in the planet died. Talk about DRM :-D

Re:Can you say worthless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently have 6 of those flip book cd cases each holding 240 dvd-rs full of random backups from my main system. You make a 1Tb disk available to me and I will be using plenty of them!

Re:time for lossless video compression

[PeterBrett]

32 GB = ~ 1 minute HDTV

I went for a job interview at Snell & Wilcox (Google it) and they showed me a huge rack. They said, "This is a realtime HDTV compositing platform." I said, "That's a bit big, isn't it?" They said, "Yes, but it needs to be this big. It has 128 GB of RAM in it, because content producers need to mix in segments up to four minutes."

At which point my jaw hit the floor.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.

TFA said a few hundred movies... but I see the benifit of offering entire series on a disc or two rather than the current bulky boxed set. Currently a TV season is about 26 episodes at about 45min a piece so 19.5hrs. TFA also said that HDTV = 15 to 25GB per 2hr (I don't have HDTV presently so i'm using their numbers). So 146 to 245GB per season. A 5 season series could be 730GB to 1.225TB.

Re:While higher and higher capacities are exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

Which PHB uses a spreadsheet program that kan keep _any_ spreadsheet undert 1MB?

Re:200 dvds ?

[SuperIceBoy]

No.

3 billion pairs x 2 bits = 6 billion bits

6 billion bits / 8 = 750,000,000 bytes

750,000,000 bytes / 1024 = 732421.875 kb

732421.875 kb / 1024 = 715.2557373046875 mb

So it would be 1 700mb cd and a little bit on a second cd. And thats without running any sort of compression on the data.