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Data Storage Media Television Hardware

Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July 220

Posted by timothy from the japan-gets-all-the-good-stuff-first dept.
lunarscape writes "Forbes is reporting that 'Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. on Wednesday unveiled what it calls the world's first DVD recorder that supports single-side, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs with a maximum capacity of 50 gigabytes.' It looks like Sony's own Blu-ray recorder will now have some competition."
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Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July More

Panasonic's Blu-ray Recorder To Hit Market In July

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  • Goody! (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrYGuY101 ( 770432 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:43PM (#9572897) Journal
    Another toy that I can't afford!

  • Will it be ready in time? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <k4_pacific@yahoo . c om> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:45PM (#9572924) Homepage Journal
    But will it get to market before it is illegal? [slashdot.org]

  • So long, tape drive! (Score:5, Funny)

    by PeterPumpkin ( 777678 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:47PM (#9572937) Journal
    I wonder if there's gonna be a Knoppix version that takes advantage of this...

    /*cue old time movie dream scene harp*/

    "All new Knoppix 6.0! Every Linux distribution can now be tested on a bootable live CD! :D

  • Great for independent film makers (Score:5, Funny)

    by gphinch ( 722686 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:47PM (#9572943) Homepage
    So now indie film makers can record super-high-res bad acting, tired dialogue, and shoddy set production. Joy!

  • Not good enough (Score:4, Funny)

    by SteroidMan ( 782859 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:48PM (#9572959)
    I mean I still can't watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy directors cut without swapping discs so whats the point!

  • Backup solution (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bob McCown ( 8411 )
    How long until something like this is viable for a backup solution? Im not talking about writing a few hundred megs to CD, but full-scale 40G drive backup?

    • Re:Backup solution (Score:3, Insightful)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )
      Hmm, let's consider:

      Backup method 1:
      Lots of data, burned to several blueRAY DVDs. Backup takes hours, you have to swap, and using your system for other things while burning is likely to produce coasters. Price: $500 plus for a burner, plus an unknown amount for the media. The backups take up very little room, but must be treated as gentle you treat your cornea.

      Backup method 2:
      A cheap/old PC, equipped with a couple of big hard drives, hooked up through ethernet. Backup is reasonably fast, and you don'

      • Re:Backup solution (Score:4, Insightful)

        by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @02:21PM (#9573905)
        Backup method 3:
        Lots of data, the whole of the aforementioned 40 gig disk burned to a single Blu-ray disc. Backup takes a couple hours, but no big deal, as you kick it off before you go to bed. Price: $30 after rebate from Office Max for the cheap no-name burner, plus a couple bucks a disc. At pennies per gigabyte, you can make a hundred copies of your data and never worry about what happens if your dog sparky manages to chew on them. Time until this is feasible: about a year after the next-generation storage technology is released.

        • Backup method 3:
          Lots of data, the whole of the aforementioned 40 gig disk burned to a single Blu-ray disc. Backup takes a couple hours, but no big deal, as you kick it off before you go to bed. Price: $30 after rebate from Office Max for the cheap no-name burner, plus a couple bucks a disc. At pennies per gigabyte, you can make a hundred copies of your data and never worry about what happens if your dog sparky manages to chew on them. Time until this is feasible: about a year after the next-generation sto

          • What is NAS backup? What is staggered Tower of Hanoi method? Thx.
            • NAS = Network attached storage = a big array of hard drives he puts all his stuff on.
              NAS backup = backing up his NAS array, probably to an attached tape drive or tape autoloader drive that spans several tapes for that night's scheduled backup (every night.)
              Tower of Hanoi method = a way of cycling the sets of tapes in and out of the backup queue that lets you use a limited number of tapes while insuring that you have both a baseline tape (generally made on the weekend) in which the entire system is backed up
      • I think you're being a little unfair, there are many situations where offsite backup is required.

        In your particular case, you'd want a reliable connection through the lan (or is it a wan you're backing up to - how much bandwitdth does your ISP allow? Is it always working when you need it? etc), and you'd want the storage to be fault tolerant, and hosted in a secure location - probably off site .. There is a reason corporate servers are backed up to tape which is then taken home by the admins.

        Blue-ray soun

  • Crap (Score:5, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:49PM (#9572968)
    Does that mean I'll have to buy another set of Star Wars DVDs, The Blue Ray Edition?

    I hope this time Han shoots first.
    • Does that mean I'll have to buy another set of Star Wars DVDs, The Blue Ray Edition?

      One of the scrapped special features of the Star Wars DVD was a "Virtual Lucas Ego and Self Worth" featurette. Word has it that they may be able to squeeze it onto one of these discs.

  • Come on. (Score:5, Funny)

    by brewin ( 776684 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:49PM (#9572972)
    They went from red laser to blue-ray. Why don't they just skip straight to gamma-ray DVDs? Sure, you'd have to wear a radiation suit to watch Return of the King, but that's a small price to pay for ultra-high capacity, right?

    • Re:Come on. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:29PM (#9573382) Journal
      Why don't they just skip straight to gamma-ray DVDs? Sure, you'd have to wear a radiation suit to watch Return of the King, but that's a small price to pay for ultra-high capacity, right?

      Gamma rays you say?

      But if I skip the suit, I'll become the incredible Hulk when I hear about Darl McBride!

      I think that sounds much more cool than staying like a sad geek posting on Slashdot when hearing about the same McBride.

  • Blue Laser (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jedi-monkey ( 762035 )

    This has to be a giant step forward in bringing optical disk capacities closer to being in line with current capacities of hard disks.

    Furthermore, this may just be the media necessary to actually record the new streaming formats that are GB's in size.

    • Why don't you jsut record i to the harddrive, the article doesn't give details but I thought writing to the HD was quicker than burning a disk or is that and buffer underuns not an issue anymore? I don;'t know I could be wrong, I've been out of the loop for a while.

      • Re:Blue Laser (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Bi()hazard ( 323405 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @02:05PM (#9573768) Homepage Journal
        The current generation blu-ray systems aren't aimed at people who see hard drives as a practical solution. HD's are fine if all your data is already sitting on another hard drive, but some have very different requirements. As a video editing professional, I have to deal with issues like these-

        1. The data source isn't a computer! A movie camera captures video and outputs through its favorite cable, and all of this happens in the middle of a forest where we're filming a scene. Bringing a huge RAID array along just isn't an option, but bringing a blu-ray burner and possibly a dedicated middleman computer to manage the burns is an interesting possibility.

        2. DVD's can be thrown on spindles of hundreds and stored in the back room until needed. Hard drives take up a lot more space, need to be packaged for storage, and when you take them out you can't just toss it in a reader, you have to hook it up . Sounds easy to you, but these are artists trying to do it, and the tech team doesn't want to have to hold their hand every time somebody hits the archives. Think about your breathing! You have to manually control it or suffocate. Sure, hard drives can be left online all the time, but that still takes up more space while running up huge electricity bills and generating network traffic. Going over the internet is a pain when you want to move 5 terabytes to a different site, and you could just grab a spindle of dvds instead.

        3. Buffer underruns are not an issue, current generation burners are pretty fast, can rely on large amounts of ram for buffering (yes we do put our 8 gig of ram macs to use), and use a lot of high tech tricks to improve reliability. State of the art burners are nothing like those crappy cd burners that used to pump out coasters 5 years ago.

        4. ???

        5. Profit!

        6. All of this is why these things are so ridiculously expensive, and limited in convenience and features at the moment. They're not going to be sold to the guy up near the top of the replies who was complaining about how its yet another toy he can't afford. They're going to be sold to the tech departments of groups like movie studios, who will evaluate them, run some trials and see if it's a viable platform for #1-5 above. By the time everybody's ready to put these into mainstream production work economies of scale will have kicked in and the technology will have matured. Those sales will pay for the third generation blu-ray devices, which will be cheap enough for consumers. And then you can get one and try to underrun it's buffer using a beowulf cluster of linux-based Soviet surplus machines with a 9 megapixel display, bitches.

    • This has to be a giant step forward in bringing optical disk capacities closer to being in line with current capacities of hard disks.

      Furthermore, this may just be the media necessary to actually record the new streaming formats...

      Problem is, you could have made this statement about any of the optical disc formats. Yes, Blue Ray will be able to hold as much as a lot of hard drives right now. But how long before we start seeing the need for yet more space?

      It sure wasn't long for DVDs, which actuall

  • Big enough to be useful, finally. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilNight ( 11001 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:50PM (#9572982)
    4.5GB DVDs just weren't big enough to back up my data (well, unless I wanted to burn 166 DVDs every 8 months or so). Until something like this I'd had nothing I could use but hard drives... tapes were just too expensive and unreliable (and slow). This will still be slow, I'm sure, but at least it'll make for a good backup medium. It's about f'ing time. Sign me up for one, at least once media prices for it become reasonable. I wonder what the shelf life on their dual-layer media is...
    • Depends on the tape drive your using. SDLT and LTO-2 have shown themselves to be quick and reliable.

      The treick isn't to back right up to tape. Get yourself enough space that you can write all your backups to disk and then stage from that disk to tape.

      On a side note, I'm not sure how interested I'd be in this blu ray disk vs. the one that Sony is creating. Considering that I'm probably going to buy a PS3 and considering the time table, it's probable that Sony will end up using their blu ray format for di

    • tapes were just too expensive and unreliable (and slow).

      Expensive, sure, but unreliable? A decent Digital Linear Tape drive is a far superior backup solution to optical disks -- plenty of capacity, and the storage medium doesn't have the annoying habit of rusting or decaying as it sits on the shelf. The same can't be said of CDs and DVDs...

      Of course, for real reliability, there is only one proven solution. Clay tablets. We've got those going back to the dawn of civilization; but, tellingly, there are

    • Dude, just buy extra magnetic redundancy. Or, just backup files you've modified in the last X months, rather than messing with those you haven't.
    • 4.5GB DVDs just weren't big enough to back up my data (well, unless I wanted to burn 166 DVDs every 8 months or so)

      Let's see, 4.5gb * 166 = 747gb

      747gb * 12mon/8mon = 1120.5 gb/year.

      You know, at some point, you can have too much porn.

      -Ted

  • No version for computers yet?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ryu2 ( 89645 ) * on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:50PM (#9572985) Homepage Journal
    It's interesting that the first Blu-Ray recorders are being first marketed as standalone recorders, and there's no version for a computer yet. Usually, it's the other way around (CD/DVD)...
    • No it's not. It's always been this way. You're thinking about stuff *you* can afford. Currently this is just big price tags, and you weren't on the internet back when the first CD burner came out
    • My understanding is that Sony, Matsushita and the other big consumer electronics companies are developing these high density discs for one specific purpose; to hold HD quality video content. Currently DVDs only have enough storage for average length movies at 480i resolution. A 25-50GB disc could hold a movie at 720p or 1080i resolution, which would be a serious improvement.

      Maybe the idea is to shake the bugs out of the format by beta-testing it on the Lunatic Fringe... I mean, early adopters that are wi

  • Nice Pricing Scheme (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:50PM (#9572987)
    What is open-price basis? Sounds like a "we'll let people bid until we like a number" pricing scheme. The 50GB capacity is definitely nice - for HD content - but 63 hrs of regular analog? Don't know if that would actually happen or alot of burned DVDs w/1% storage used. I would not think that current DVD owners would burn multiple movies into 1 DVD backup. It would be nice to have a DVD backup of my computer DASD (only 4 disks!!!)
    • "I would not think that current DVD owners would burn multiple movies into 1 DVD backup."

      Those of us that have entire seasons of Television shows might be interested. Depending on how easy it is to do, yadda yadda yadda. (Transcoding sucks!)

  • Not much competition to DVD though (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:51PM (#9572990)
    for the moment anyway. The price tag, form factor and lack of HDTV will I think put most people off these. DVD is adequate for the masses and until something clearly better and more affordable comes these are just expensive gadgets.

  • Reliable? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dayflowers ( 729580 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:51PM (#9572996)
    Can we really trust these discs? I mean, the CD is a reliable digital support, it will tolerate alot of abuses. We all know that sometimes, a CD with lots and lots of scratches will work just fine. The DVD on the other hand, is alot more sensitive. I've had problems with dvd's where I could hardly see any scratches on the surface, and I've heard some other people complain about it as well. Maybe we're just dumb and don't know how to properly handle them, but still no one can deny that a DVD is alot more sensitive. If these guys says they pub 50gb on a single disk, I can only imagine how sensitive the damn thing will be. They should have some kind of enclosure, like the old 3.5" disks. Those were never reliable, but I can only imagine how much worse they'd be if they had the exposed disk.

    • Re:Reliable? (Score:2, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      DVD media is actually less sensitive, because it has much more robust error correction built in. The players are more sensitive, because they use lasers that put out less light at higher frequencies.

      Since the principle is bounce the light off the disk, and if it comes back it's a 1, the less light the laser emits the crappier it works. But if you simply turn up the juice you run the risk of creating light in the wrong spectrum.

      In the end, most players are just cheap shit and thats where the problems com
    • First, paragraphs and whitespace are friendly and are easy to get along with.

      Second, I do agree that in many ways, DVDs are more sensitive than CD.

      The quickest fix I've seen is just to use a disposable eyeglass wipe, preferably the ones that are safe for anti-reflective lenses. Use these to wipe the disc radially from the center. The pits are a lot smaller and I think they are a lot more succeptible to optical distortions of whatever invisible film is on the disc.

      I also see better read rates on CDs too
  • ... exist on my HD.

    Now I've archived them all to DVD, 2x for security. That means I need 56 dvds (23 go in an offline jukebox, 23 into a spindle around the block) to be 'safe'.

    Now editing those photos typically creates 89mb images for printing. The largest are the scanned chromes, at 8000LPI from a drum scanner. To give you an idea, this prints natively at 40x60x400LPI on photographic paper.

    What's this mean? It means I damn well want this to hit the commercial market, hard, and cheap ;) It's pretty bad when you have to buy 200 gb HDs and use them to backup your images and stick'em in the closet. There are better uses.

    Of course they have not addressed the longetivity of these disks. Just like Epson made a little blunder, I'd hate to have my data on it offline and find out, 3 months later, that the high levels of smog have eaten it into oblivion.

    (Canon 10D generates 6.4mb/image; each image generates 36mb 16bit Tiff; each tiff is manipulated to create a minimum of a 16x20 print which may have multiple images/reprints)
    • So why don't you buy a few 200 gb hard drives? They'll be more accessable than dvds, cheaper than the blu-ray writer and media, they're scalable and probably most importantly, your data will still exist after a few years. Ever try to load a 5 year old CD-R?

    • Re:As of today 120 gb of photographs.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:18PM (#9573266) Journal
      It's pretty bad when you have to buy 200 gb HDs and use them to backup your images and stick'em in the closet. There are better uses.

      Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.

      When I see that USB drives are about $0.50/gig, I wouldn't really have a problem with buying hard drives for backup devices, and swapping them out when I need the images. You can store a LOT of pictures before you start to reach the price point of your blue-ray burner, and (I don't know how compatible blue ray dvd's are with red-ray tech) the images remain a lot more universally portable.
      • Swap, schmop.

        Put them all in the box and get a RAID [linas.org] running on them and USE THE ERROR CORRECTION [linas.org] modes (R1 or R5 depending on whether you want to keep the most speed or space).

        You'll never have to "back up" again, because your data is backed up automatically with every read or write.

        RAID is also available for Windows [duxcw.com].
        • Put them all in the box and get a RAID running on them and USE THE ERROR CORRECTION modes (R1 or R5 depending on whether you want to keep the most speed or space).

          You'll never have to "back up" again, because your data is backed up automatically with every read or write.

          Ha ha ha ha!

          RAID is not a backup solution.

          If you're not backing up data stored on a RAID, then you will lose it sooner or later. Either via multiple drives failing before the hot spare can be rebuilt or the operating system (or oth
      • Not to be contentious, but these drives are going to start at what, $700-$800 for at least the first year they're out? Media's probably going to be a minimum $6-$10 per disc for the short to medium term.

        Prices that I saw for the Sony Blu-Ray drive a month or three ago was $3500 for the drive, $30 for the media. Makes DLT look reasonable.

        However, the big advantage of putting your data on multiple pieces of media is the same as not putting all of your eggs in one basket. (Nothing beats a 3 or 4 generat

  • Excellent - back to sneakernet! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@@@deforest...org> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:53PM (#9573020)
    I'm in the middle of downloading 30 GB of data from one of the SOHO [nasa.gov] instruments; it will take 3 days to get it over our T1. The only advantage of doing the transfer over the net is that putting it on DVDs for mailing would require somebody on their end to monitor and swap out 6-7 DVDs as they're burned, and then somebody on my end to monitor and swap out those DVDs as they're read onto my hard drive. With a Blu-Ray disk they could burn a single medium then drop it in the mail. And I'd still get the data at the same time as my network transfer will finish.

  • Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scovetta ( 632629 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:57PM (#9573057) Homepage
    The storage industry is always too far behind, IMHO. By the time this technology gets affordable, it'll catch the back end of it's usefulness. When tapes were out, I needed 4 or 5 tapes to get my stuff backed up. Then I switched to CD-R, then to DVD-R, now to hard drives. I have around 300 GB to back up, but I refuse to pay for an autoloader or something crazy. If the format held a terabyte, then sure, I'd consider it, but 50 GB = 10 movies. Also consider the cost of storage these days: as of right now, I'm seeing less than $0.50/gig for EIDE hard drives. Unless you're bringing gigabytes of data around with you in your pocket every day, you'd get more for your money with a cheap file server and a bunch of huge drives. As far as the consumer/home market goes, what takes up 50 gig? Are they really going to release all six Star Wars on one 50 GB DVD? Hells no! The only application I see for that is for "Season 1"-type packages, where you're getting 6 or 8 DVDs now anyway, but this technology will not be pervasive anytime soon.
    • I think the intended application is not bundling large numbers of NTSC quality movies; the application is shipping more pixels per frame of a single movie.
      • Of course they could always ship the low def movies with less compression and more extra features.
        I realize that for the most part current compression on dvd's is 'good enough' or slightly better. But I'm one of those that prefer reduced compression. Espicaly if I'm gonna grab a frame and play with it for my own amusement.
        With 50gb you drop compression on a two hour movie to somthing like 10-15 instead of the >100:1 they use now. For a one hour tv show you might be able to do it without loss. (es

  • How robust is the media? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:58PM (#9573068)
    Are these blu-ray disks as robust as normal CDs and DVDs (hah!) or do they decay like many CD-Rs? I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place. Will this thing be useful for archiving stuff or only for same-year viewing?
    • I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place.

      I have a few dozen CDRs I burned over ten years ago. I recently checked them (and made dupes). No errors.

      Aside from the obvious (avoid sunlight, humidity, unsupported stacking) I think a lot of people made the mistake of writing on their CDRs using Sharpies or other pens with non water-soluble inks. I suspect that any oil-based inks used react with oxygen and ultraviolet and slowly co
    • I recently tried to load a few old CD-Rs that had been lying around for a while... nothing. Errors all over the place. Will this thing be useful for archiving stuff or only for same-year viewing?

      The solution for this (if you don't want to burn everything twice) is to put additional recovery data on the disk. Current, the best program is QuickPar [quickpar.co.uk].

      The idea is that you collect 600MB of data for archival onto a CD-R, then you generate another 95MB of recovery data that will protect the original 600MB. As

  • Sony Mediascape (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:58PM (#9573070) Homepage Journal
    Look for Sony to complete it's "merger" with BMG, throw the MGM movie library on the pile, and issue HDVDs (HDTV DVDs) for loading onto your Media Vaio, and taking with you on your PS-ultra, docking in your car for those long drives to Sony IMAX. Trailer spam to your Sony smartphone!

  • ... not that they're supported by the DVD Forum :( (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:04PM (#9573137) Journal
    I guess that's why I'm using only DVD-R discs today. DVD+R won't play in my DVD player and when I asked about why it didn't support it, the salesman said that DVD+R isn't the standard, and while DVD-R was supported on basically all DVD players, not all supported DVD+R.

    And since I don't want to decide when I buy the discs if I should have DVD movies on them or data, I simply don't bother with DVD+R at all since DVD-R works with both on all standalone DVD players (as long as they support recordable discs of course).

    I wonder if Blu-Ray will face the same destiny: unsupported by next generation DVD players => only widely useful for data storage => impossible to use as a generic format => don't bother with them at all.

    There's a slight difference from today though -- Blu-Ray will get a higher capacity than the standardized HD-DVD format. That will make it interesting to see where things go, since Blu-Ray isn't compatible with the existing DVD spec which HD-DVD is, possibly making it harder to create combo drives like the DVD+/-R drives. I doubt I'd use Blu-Ray though even with that advantage, if I can't play burned DVD's on my standalone player.

    Maybe Sony will get into the same situation as Hewlett-Packard (and more?) currently seems to be in. I recently saw a laptop from HP with a DVD writer that *only* supported DVD+R. Since they want to push their format. Of course, everyone I know saw that as a major disadvantage, and they might even have lost customers for it.
    • the salesman said that DVD+R isn't the standard, and while DVD-R was supported on basically all DVD players

      The salesman was full of shit. A salesman told me the opposite.

      They're both standard. Some units work well with one, some with the other, some with neither (older ones).

      The only "right" answer is to stick with what works, which has been DVD-R for me too (mostly because thats what my PS2 and XBOX like).
      • I don't think he was completely full of shit, since I agree with the DVD Forum being the standardizing body when it comes to DVD discs, and not a random group of companies deciding to form an alliance [dvdrw.com] and push their format. Although I can understand if they wish to call their format a standard.

        I could compare the DVD Forum to the W3C, where the DVD+RW Alliance could be Microsoft and any henchmen that follows their path. Not that I dislike any companies behind the DVD+RW Alliance; just picked Microsoft for
    • ...Blu-Ray isn't compatible with the existing DVD spec which HD-DVD is...

      Actually both of them will be backwards-compatible with DVDs (simply because people will not buy anything else). Sony recently announced a drive head that can read Blu-ray, DVD, and CD.
    • Many older DVD players don't have DVD+R or DVD+RW in their lookup table of book types, so don't know how to read them. DVD+R9 is even worse, of course. You can get around this by using software to force the DVD's book type to DVD-ROM when recording (or, with DVD+RW, at any time).

  • Stupid Question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:04PM (#9573142)
    But is Blu-Ray backwards-compat to "normal" DVD, or will this mean I'm buying a new DVD drive?

    -Erwos

    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:27PM (#9573355) Journal
      Short answer:

      Only drives specifically designed to support Blu-Ray discs can play them.

      Long answer:

      Blu-Ray discs are just "recordable discs", and not DVD discs, since they don't adhere to the DVD specification. HD-DVD discs do on the other hand, and I think they were designed with more backwards compatibility in mind. It might be possible to use tricks on those, like storing "DVD" information in one layer that's backwards compatible and "HD-DVD" in another. Then your "old" DVD player could "see" the DVD information and not even know it's reading from a HD-DVD disc. That's speculation though, but I think there might at least be a small chance things could work with HD-DVD's.

  • Open, yeah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by aka-ed ( 459608 ) <(robt.public) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:05PM (#9573153) Homepage Journal
    The DMR-E700BD...will be put on the Japanese market on an open-price basis on July 31


    Open price? I don't suppose that's free as in beer?

  • I'll wait... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djtripp ( 468558 ) <djtripp@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:09PM (#9573198) Homepage Journal
    I will wait for the HD-DVD [dvdsite.org] format to come about. There are just too many people arguing over the next standard, and until it becomes a standard, I will wait. This is my standard response.
    • HD-DVD will be fully endorsed by the DVD Standards Council, as well as looking like todays DVDs and not terrible late 1980s looking cartridge based discs. Scratch proof for a price markup? I could care less, i've never scratched a DVD in my life, nor have I ever had problems with scratched DVDs that i've rented. Its really not an issue, so there is no need to make it look like some mega-old stale technology. Gimme 1080i movies on DVD and i'll be one happy camper.

  • At least... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Apocalypse111 ( 597674 )
    At least with a disk this big, you can't apply any of the "limited viewing window" technologies to it. When you have 60-some hours of video on the disk, there's no way to watch it all before the disk degrades to an un-watchable state.

  • Great, more retail store shelf clutter... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:50PM (#9573623) Homepage
    One more media category that Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, etc. will need to find room for on their shelves, in among the DVD+RW and the DVD-R and the Music CD-Rs and the Data CD-RW's and the Type 4 DVD-RAM and the Type 2 DVD-RAM and the Type 1 DVD-RAM and the "printable-but-not-by-inkjet" DVD's and the "inkjet-printable" DVD's.

    I wonder what category of media they will kick out in order to make room for it? And what devices will start to become effectively orphaned as once-easily-obtained media become increasingly hard to find?

  • Two words: Blank Price (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikShapi ( 681808 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @04:51PM (#9575923) Journal
    DVD-R sales skyrocketed and everyone all of a sudden wound up getting a writer - the moment the blank price (usually calculated on a per-megabyte basis, though some people put VERY little bytes on each disk and therefore calculate the per-disk price) dropped below that of the departing CD-R technology.

    In my little corner of the world no other DVD*R, DVD/R or DVD^R was adopted. Why? because the blanks cost significantly more than el-cheapo DVD-R's.

    DVD-9 DL may already be there on the market, even the blanks may already be there, but if they don't compete in price with DVD-R, they may as well not be there.
    And same goes for blu-ray.
    - "Show me da money!"
    You want me to show you da moeny? Show us cheap blanks, I show you da money.

  • Blu-ray Knoppix (Score:3, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @08:22PM (#9577533)
    Next thing you know, Knoppix will fit on one of these, with about 120 gigs of programs, development environments, complete source code, and a few free (libre) movies, songs, photos, clipart, and other media to boot... And it will only take a month to download!

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