Blu-ray Proposes Incompatible BD-XL and IH-BD Formats 252
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."
Re:Am I Missing Something Here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Am I Missing Something Here? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
yay (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
It's more for large data sets (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Am I Missing Something Here? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Designed Obsolescence (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.