GE Bets On Holographic Optical Storage

Lucas123 writes "Years after announcing they had developed holographic optical disc technology that could store 500GB of data, GE this week said they're preparing to license the technology to manufacturing partners. At the same time, InPhase, which failed to actually get its holographic disc product out the door for years, says GE's product is nothing more than a 'science project,' and its own optical disc is almost ready to go to market — again. But, as one analyst quipped, the old joke about optical disc is that 'there's more written about optical disc than stored on it.'"

Re:Day late and a dollar short

[ZenDragon]

Except what they are talking about is not your typical old opitical disk technology. They are basically talking about storing data in a 3 dimensional photosensitive material. I read an article in Wired a while back that was talking about something like a 500GB capacity in a 1cm square block I believe. Its much more efficient than magnetic storage, and more resilient than non-volitile solid state storage. The technology holds a lot of promise I think if they can make it affordable. GE is appears to be intent on preparing it in a disc configuration, but if this technolgy becomes readily available I would imagine we might start seeing things like the crystals in Supermans fortress of solitude with terabytes of capacity. I really dont understand enough about the technology to speak on its limitations and roadblocks, but the possibilities are fascinating to say the least.

High Efficiency Video Coding

[westlake]

That means that hardware will be in production and quite probably in place before the media groups start to even think about their next DRM / license encrusted format.

Work began on the next-generation codec in 2004:

HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.

HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.

The timescale for completing the HEVC standard is as follows:

February 2012: Committee Draft (complete draft of standard)
July 2012: Draft International Standard
January 2013: Final Draft International Standard (ready to be ratified as a Standard)

High Efficiency Video Coding [wikipedia.org]