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Data Storage

Blu-Ray/Standard DVD Hybrids Planned 174

Posted by timothy from the spy-vs.-spy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Recently stories about hybrid HD-DVD and regular DVDs were in the news. This was supposed to be an advantage for HD-DVD in its battle with Blu-Ray. But that advantage will not exist, as according to this story on PhysOrg, the same technology will be available for Blu-Ray. And it is even better than the HD-DVD solution, since instead of two sided media, it uses a triple layer structure on one side (one layer of 33.5GB for Blu-Ray, then two layers for 9GB of dual layer DVD data)"
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Blu-Ray/Standard DVD Hybrids Planned More

Blu-Ray/Standard DVD Hybrids Planned

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  • Behold. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Blapto ( 839626 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:33PM (#11181806)
    Now little Timmy can store days of HD porn under the mattress! Oh the march of technology...

  • Forward compatible (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think the best feature of this is that regular DVD drives can read the DVD data, no need for early upgrades. This will make a transition to the new media format MUCH easier.

    • Re:Forward compatible (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nkh ( 750837 )
      I don't think the transition will be better: you don't know yet which technology will win. You'll stick to one kind of hybrid DVD and hope that it won't be dropped by manufacturers in the future. Worse, you'll have to upgrade to the format of your DVDs, not the format widely accepted later. Your choice is now, the real choice is later (but it will be too late to change :(

  • Err, umm, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:40PM (#11181829)
    ---And it is even better than the HD-DVD solution, since instead of two sided media, it uses a triple layer structure on one side (one layer of 33.5GB for Blu-Ray, then two layers for 9GB of dual layer DVD data)"

    Its not the amount of space you have, but the content on it..

    When there's Umpteen Million releases of the same movie, who gives a flying fuck?

    Do you wanna buy Lord of the Rings 1?

    LOTR 1 stripped no goodies.
    LOTR 1 some goodies.
    LOTR 1 lots of goodies not found on "some goodies"
    LOTR 1 3 disc crammed set of goodies, but not same goodies as "lots of goodies"

    (REPEAT LOTR 2, LOTR 3)

    LOTR COMPLETE BASIC BOXED SET
    LOTR COMPLETE Booklet BOXED SET
    LOTR COMPLETE (no booklet) 9 DVD set
    LOTR SUPER-COMPLETE 12 DVD set with T-Shirt
    LOTR SUPER-DUPER-ABSOLUTELY-COMPLETE Boxed SET
    LOTR Extras not found on "SUPER-DUPER-ABSOLUTELY-COMPLETE" Boxed set.

    Now tell me.. Will the Blu-disc technology make Movie producers from stop making this many releases to bilk buyers into buying extras after extras?

    Some reason, I dont think it will....
    • About movies? Not me. However, 33.5G is room enough for all of Debian on one disc.
    • And who the hell said this is interesting because of movies? Normal DVDs are more than enough for one movie. Bigger Media are interesting for Data Storage and I don't know about you but 33.5 GB sounds almost small compared to harddisks of today to me.

      • Re:Err, umm, who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by JKR ( 198165 )
        Ahem, high definition, anyone? At a raw bitrate of over 120 MB/s, and _maybe_ halfway decent compressed quality at 8 - 12 MB/s (personally I'd say not but I spent a summer looking at the real thing), bigger optical media are a prerequisite for high definition.

        Otherwise, you're looking at maybe 20 MINUTES of footage on a disk, max.

        Jon.

    • Consumers themselves have to stop buying the multiple revisions. They can't blame other people for their own impulses to own the latest version of everything. Those that behave like sheep, deserve to be treated like sheep and be sheared.

      I don't think I've bought multiple revisions of a movie yet. There are times I have waited a remastered version because the first release was crap, but that means I have only bought one version.

      I really don't care for the series, but I consider the LotR situation to be

    • Why flame LotR? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      They've been very clear from the start that there'll be two versions, one plain and one with extra everything. So far, that is exactly it. The collected series is nothing but those combined, there is no "extra-extra".

      I'd much rather you go after the movies that have
      a) normal version
      b) extended version
      c) director's cut
      d) remastered edition
      e) special edition
      f) ultimate edition
      etc etc.

      They typically told noone that their movie was so crappy they needed a dozen releases to get it right. Or that they had anoth
    • Me.

      I don't care what the industry does. I want Blu-Ray. This fixes any issues I had before, because now it has a better chance of not dying. I want to use Blu-Ray because it holds more, if the industry supports that, even better, because that means the stuff I use won't be obscure like Beta.

      Now all we need is people to support multi-format players to start off, if everyone did it wouldn't matter.
    • There is goo dreason to want more space for higher quality. Yes, you technicly can get 1080p at DVD rates (7mbps) using newer, better codecs. You can see it with T2 extreme editon. If you have a Windows PC with about a 3+ghz P4 (or equal Athlon), you can watch a DVD that contains an HD version of the movie. It's damn impressive and a whole lot better than SD-DVD, but you can see artifacting on a good monitor.

      Thus what we'd like to be able to do for HD-DVD is scale the data rate up a bit. Double would be ni

  • China: Only Winner in Format Battle (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The only winner in the format battle of HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray is China [phrusa.org]. It does not enforce the claims by foreigners (i.e. non-Chinese) to intellectual property developed anywhere in the West. Many American companies have discovered that their applications for patents in China are purposefully delayed by some bureaucrat. Then, a Chinese company will access that patent application and file another application for the very same patent. The Chinese application will be approved, and Americans (i.e. the origina

  • Both sides simultaneously? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:46PM (#11181847)
    Do any of these systems plan to have the ability to read/write both sides at the same time? Double-sided media with no cartridge is kind of limited for labeling, but it is a cheap and easy way to double storage without a lot of engineering.

    I'd also think a two-sided medium could be faster than single-sided medium if you combined the surfaces together in a RAID-0 kind of striping setup.

    Would it really be that much more expensive to put a R/W head on top of the drive in addition to on the bottom?

    • It would probably only be about twice as expensive, but it wouldn't fit as well in current cases.

      I know it's an easily remedied problem, but it is something.
    • I'd also think a two-sided medium could be faster than single-sided medium if you combined the surfaces together in a RAID-0 kind of striping setup.

      Downward compatibility. A two sided disk one side at a time assures the fact that it can be read, at least in part, by a single sided drive.

    • I'm guessing the second head is rather more expensive; in dual-sided laserdisc players its apparently more economical to have a mechanism for moving the head to the other side of the disc (a nightmare of mechanics in there ...)
    • I still want to know why hard disks... dvds.. floppies etc have never had multiple heads per platter and side. I mean come on people.. the slowest parts of disk usage are seek time and read rate. If we build 2 independant heads that can read the same side of the same disk at the same time we make the device able to handle double the read rate with the potential of lower seek times.

      Also means you can read 2+ files at the same time or read with one head and write with the other.

      Stop the size wars guys and s
      • Well, something close was made and produced commercially with the Kenwood label for a couple of years on CD-ROM drives. Zen Research developed what they called "True-X" technology which was their attemp to help debunk all the ridiculous leap-frog marketing of touted drive speeds which we all know was, at the time, less fact than fiction. Very few drives actually reached their advertised speeds and even fewer could actually sustain those claimed speeds over the entire surface of the disc. "True-X" technolog
      • Been there done that. Harddisks with multiple head racks was not uncommon on large (18") drives and Connor tried to market a model around 1990 iirc. The engineering is just too hard, especially on small drives and it's mostly a moot point as all performance critical systems are running RAID anyway. In a way, you can look at a 6 drive RAID array as a single drive with 6 head racks :)
        • Unfortunate problem is that with raid one head can't write while the other is reading. Since they don't exist on the same physical storage media. Especially in mail servers and the like you would get a tremendous gain from being able to do contiguous read/write operations. Plus... what is so hard about the engineering? Just make another head array on the other side of the disk, that is trivial. The only added hardship is the software to maintain a correct state on the drive during write operations and steal
          • Plus... what is so hard about the engineering?

            Okay...let's take the somewhat 'easy' case of one set for reading, one for writing. First - do read and writes happen at the same speed? Probably, but maybe not.

            Second - are the reads and writes that are happening at the same time the same length? Almost definitely not.

            Third - are the reads and writes going to be occuring 180 degrees apart all the time? Almost definitely not. You could say "just stop or start a little bit before or after the other", but that
            • Yes, valid points. And, you have the mechanical problem. The track and bit density is so high that even the slightest air turbulence can cause problems. As the heads would often be at different tracks, the turbulence would be changing and higher than with just one set of heads. The seek-vibrations could be a factor too.
          • Doesn't matter. If I/O is a bottleneck, just add disks to your SAN/RAID storage system. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Four drives will be cheaper and faster than two drives with twin-heads.

            It was a good idea tho, just not feasible today.
    • At least not easily. You would need to spin the disc down and reverse the direction to read the spiral track on the other side. Remember that clockwise on one side of the disc means counter-clockwise on the other side.

  • Not such a huge leap forward (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:46PM (#11181850)
    Unlike the poster I actually read the article. The blue layer only stores 25GB, not 33.

    I imagine that the extras and interviews wouldn't have to be duplicated in the HD layer, so that's decent amount of space. Still from 9GB to 25GB seems like a pretty small jump. Notice that the jump from CD (700MB) to DVD (9GB)is more than an order of magnitude, which makes sense. Compared to that jump, an improvement from 9 to 25GB is a bit underwhelming. I think it would have been better to wait for a denser format, since there are so few playback devices out there which can display in true HD anyway.

    • ...but also about format. Assuming they don't release in the MPEG2 "compatibility" format, but actually release in MPEG4 or WMV (not going to fire up that flamewar by suggesting which), the effective gain will be much greater. 25GB MPEG4 should easily be equal to 50GB MPEG2, perhaps more. Most DVDs don't fill to more than 6-7GB anyway, so ~6(less sound) *(3*3 res upgrade less) = 54GB should be fully doable.

      Kjella
      • Yeah, but I think it's already settled in the Blu-ray specification that the encoding will be MPEG2. I agree with you. We have much better, proven compression methods, and we should be using them. I bet we'll be kicking ourselves later... or not; maybe it will be like with CD's, where only certain annoying "fidelity freaks" will complain about the various observable artifacts of compression. Or, maybe the big media companies are waiting to see whether some Norwegian kid figures out how to decrypt these thin

    • the jump (Score:3, Insightful)

      by way2trivial ( 601132 )
      from 'standard' consumer equipment is
      700 mb to 4.5 gb..



      the 9gb DVD is 2nd generation DVD burning.. want to guess what second gen blu/hdvd will bring?

    • I think it would have been better to wait for a denser format, since there are so few playback devices out there which can display in true HD anyway.

      Exactly my view. There is just too much in flux within the home video market at the moment for my taste; HDTV, digital broadcasts, replacements for DVDs and, of course, PVR systems that can cope with it all. With so many choices, the chances of getting stuck with another Betamax are so much higher, especially with integrated media stations. A PVR with H

      • The only thing that changes with the switch to HDTV (which is likely to be the standard for some time) is the video, which roughly quadruples in resolution.

        720x480->1920x1080 = 6x the pixels. Not counting any other possible improvements like color space or frame rate.

        Kjella
        • While we may see some improvements in color space or frame rate, the current HDTV standard doesn't include them. And, considering how long it has taken to get HDTV going, I don't suppose that we will see a huge level of penetration of "HDTV2" until we can watch it snow during a "Hell Devils" football game. (home game, naturally)
        • Actually, the parent post is correct wrt the # of pixels, its not exactly telling the whole story.

          DVD is 480p 720x480 progressive scan.

          Most HDTV's are only capable of 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced); although there is a 1080p standard, I have yet to see TVs supporting it.

          So actually the calculation should be
          720x480 vs 1920x1080/2 (for 2 scans per image), which is actually 3 times the # of pixels per second.
      • Think outside the box. There are other kinds of data out there except the "one movie per media" type.
    • I believe there is a dual layer blu-ray standard that allows for nearly 50GB, which is apples-to-apples comparison with the dual layer DVD at 9GB.

      This hybrid version allows for multi-format compatibility with the same disc (like SACD/CD hybrid discs), I don't think it is meant to expand capacity because it falls short of the dual layer version's capacity.

    • Re:Not such a huge leap forward (Score:4, Interesting)

      by anum ( 799950 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @05:27PM (#11182174)
      I don't think the CD->DVD->HD-DVD comparison is valid. Remember, CDs replaced audio casettes and DVDs replaced VHS tapes. A spinning disk was a huge upgrade over reels of tape. Not having to mess with all of that tracking and tape breakage/streching plus having to clean the heads. God, what a nightmare and thank God we're past all that.

      I think the media executives have learned the wrong lesson from CDs and DVDs. They now seem to be looking for the next break away format which will convince us to once again replace our entire entertainment collections. To them this is like free money. They think they can get us there by offering something with improved resolution or fidelity.

      Most of us however, our reasonably happy with what we have now (just like most of us were reasonably happy with VHS except for the mechanical difficulties noted above). Now us geeks and the hardcore video/audio folks may think HD is a good upgrade but I noticed that very few chose laserdisk when they had the option. Price and convenience is why we moved to CDs and DVDs not better quality, that was just the bonus.

      Now I can't think of a more convenient media than spinning disks but what if we could find a way to get rid of the media all together? Why that sounds a lot like an iPod doesn't it? iTunes? iVids?

      My prediction: The next big thing for delivering entertainment to the user will be TCP/IP. Shocking I know but there it is.

      • IIRC, some cable systems already have video on demand. People seem to be slow in accepting it.

        I really don't think HD players will be outrageously expensive. LD media was expensive because they costed 10x more to make than a CD or VHS.

        No one has to replace their entire collection, I'm pretty amazed by that idea. I just want a better format moving forward, the stuff I already own will remain in their respective formats except for a very few favorite movies.

        Even when video is delivered over internet, th
        • I really don't think HD players will be outrageously expensive. LD media was expensive because they costed 10x more to make than a CD or VHS.

          I should expand on this. Pressed Blu-Ray and HDDVD discs are already being made at $1 a piece in volume, marginally more than that of a pressed dual layer DVD. LDs costed about $10 a piece to make in volume because of their large size.
      • And then you will eventually be locked into pay per view on everything as the content will only be available from streams from the studios. These streams will not be savable.

        The studios will have achieved their holy grail.

  • I wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder what kinda redundancy these discs have?
    Over the years ,I have stored lots of data on cd's and I have lost some data because the cd's went bad for whatever reason. That was just on a one layer disc, now imagine having 3 layers of data, even more to worry about!

    What I forsee is, lots of corrupted data due to dust,smudges,scratches and enviromental changes. I'm sure cotton or rubber gloves will be nescesary to hand the discs.
    • More worrysome is the thin protective layer next to the BD layer. The diagram is not to scale, but this outer layer is only 0.1mm. Kinda like the thickness of the label layer on the other side. If this outer layer is too thin/fragile, it will be as vulnerable as the label portion of CDs.
  • This article does not talk about the error correction and detection at all.

    Higher the density and capacity of the data stored on such disk makes life miserable for error detection and correction against the scratches on the surface of the media. The standard DVDs are more prone to scratches while scratched CDs have more chance of recovering the data back.

    I think this problem will only increase in these Blu-Ray/Standard DVD Hybrid disks.
    • No kidding, the arrival of the 1.44 MB floppy started the era of unreliable ejectable media. Zip, CD, DVD have all had less than stellar reliability.
      • Floppy had a lot more errors than CD and all other optical media I know.
        • Leastwise, they're quite a bit more succeptible to engineering quality than other media- do note that post-floppy, all of the moving parts have been moved into the reader and we're basically jamming disk platters into drives these days. So in addition to "platter" quality, floppies, zips, syquest, etc. had several additional points of failure in the physical disk hardware.

        • Re:CD/DVD too many errors (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Floppy had a lot more errors than CD and all other optical media I know.

          I would beg to differ. Floppy disk errors were caused by mechanical damage that resulted from using the floppy since this is a direct-contact technology. You use it a lot and due to the wear and tear of mechanical contact the magnetic surface gets damaged physically. But with CDs you just put a CD on the shelf for a year and you get data corruption and major data loss eventhough you never even used the CD once that whole time. Now that

          • I have seen plenty of brand new floppies with data written to them sit on shelves for a year and not be readable anymore.
          • But with CDs you just put a CD on the shelf for a year and you get data corruption and major data loss eventhough you never even used the CD once that whole time. Now that is just unacceptable to me, with floppies at least you knew you could expect damage due to use, but CDs just tend to go sour without you touching them.

            Ehhh. I doubt that floppies had (or have) a longer average shelf life expectancy than CDs.

            Googling suggests that floppies are fairly safe for about 5 years, after that all bets are off -
      • Floppy is by far the worst. In fact, even if you don't do anything stupid with the media (bend/light-on-fire/soak/place-near-speakers) - it still can crap out on you at any moment. And... as my box of 5 1/4" floppies can testify - do not age very well either.

        CDs, when done properly - i.e. without using some ghetto glue to attach the substrate to the shiny layer - will last, properly handled, for a long time. I do have CDs that suffered bit rot, but those are thankfully few, and once again... due to shoddy
      • There was a time (late-nineties) that I was too much of a tightwad to bother with CD recorders or Zip disks. I just transferred files using 10-20 disk volumes. Those went bad 75% of the time. There were even times when I made three copies of something just in case two went bad. Did it work? Nope. All three went bad within a few hours of making them.

        There was a workaround though. I can't believe I got my friends to open their computer cases so often so I could use one of my old HDs to do a file transfer. Al

  • Excellent (Score:2, Funny)

    by Deternal ( 239896 )

    This completely negates any reason for the movie companies to:

    1. Increase prices for the new formats since:
      • They can combine the products and thus will not sell fewer units
      • Consumers will, once again be annoyed if they have to decide which format to buy
    2. Try to get consumers to buy the same movie twice, so they can get the BD/HD-DVD enhanced version - it's the same disc, so they will have access to the new parts when they replace their dvd player.

    Of course I'm not too optimistic - this will probably cos

    • That's about the size of it too. Used to be, where I lived, you could catch a first run movie for $4.50 ($2.50 matinee), or go buy the video for about $15-$18, now, movies are $8.50 to get into, and DVDs $30-$35 (the $25 DVDs corresponding appoximately to a $10-$12 tape from then), and instead of $9-$11 tapes, we have $17-$20 CDs. Next few years, I'll prolly see $40-$50 for video discs, and $12 admission into the theaters.

      Why do you think we pirate this stuff! Make the prices reasonable, MAYBE THEN WE'LL
    • Movies are $2.50 to see here for kids, $3.00 for adults. Most expensive I've seen in a 150mi radius is $7.50 both. And I have never seen a movie release for $90. Even if the figures you supplied were accurate, it doesn't justify piracy. Sure, you're denying the MPAA of their cash, but you're also denying everyone else involved of their share, no matter how small. Is it worth it? If this were the software market, would you do the same?

      Go ahead, mod me down. I dare you.

      • Movies are $2.50 to see here for kids, $3.00 for adults.
        Most expensive I've seen in a 150mi radius is $7.50 both.

        Well I was thinking about future pricing, and I probably wasn't clear about that - however here is the current pricing of DVD's and theater tickets in DKK:

        • Theater normal ticket: 85 dkk
        • Theater cheap ticket: 70 dkk
        • Normal release DVD price: 199 dkk
        • Normal dvd offer price: 149 dkk
        • DVD Release with some goodies: 249 dkk
        • Retail price for LOTR:FotR SE: 449-600 dkk

        Currently 100usd are 560 dkk

        • Well, it helps to not slant your argument by using a jacked up economy (Greece) as an example. It makes a much larger differnce than a gradual inflation of ticket prices in the U.S.

          Just to give you an example, many CDs cost around $30-40 in Japan.

          Of course, as a counterpoint, I think I still had to pay $8.50 after student discount to get into the main theater in Oklahoma City, one where something always went wrong during the movie, whether it was A/C failure, speaker channels going out, fire alarms, bad p

  • Release the god damn standard already! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:57PM (#11181887) Homepage
    Jesus Christ, they've been talking about this shit for years and yet there's not a single recorder/player available. Do what Apple does - don't talk about shit until it's ready.
    • It is released - check out the actual retail products here:
      http://www.blu-raydisc.com/Section-13604/In dex.htm l
      Also Disney and 20th century fox will start releasing BD movies no later then 2006 (though maybe late 2005 already).

      AFAIK there are still no HD-DVD products yet tho.
    • Well, it relies on another technology which is also very slow to adapt: HDTV. People aren't going to be interested in Blu-ray until they get a better TV, though I would love the storage space for backups - the general public probably doesn't care enough about that yet.

      The only reasons DVD was so quick to adapt was because of its ability to be manufactured for dirt cheap and the huge quality jump that is to be expected when you come from media that had disappointing quality even 20 years ago.

      And as for the
      • For me DVDs are good enough already if we're talking about movies. I'm not gonna buy a HDTV set until it goes below $1K in price for a decent size widescreen TV.

        I want 35GB per disk for photo backups. I generate about 10GB of data in a "slow" month (mostly 4000dpi film scans), so my hard drives fill up pretty quickly.

  • Something is wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Helpadingoatemybaby ( 629248 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @03:58PM (#11181894)
    The 33.5G capacity of these disks (or the 58G capacity of the future) competition is too small for typical backups in comparison to current hard drive capacities.

    By the time these penetrate the market to a significant extent hard drives will be typically over 400 or 500 gigabytes. And yes they hopefully will come out with higher capacity disks for computing, but the reason that the CD and DVD drives price point was so advantageous was that they were massed produced for consumer and computing needs.

    One of the reasons for the success of CD's was that they were 640M, which was a pretty good ratio for drive backups at the time. Huge, in fact. But this ratio of disk/HD space is too small.

    So in conclusion, we'll need a 640 Gigabyte disk to really grab our attention.

    • I agree. I can remember when I could back up everything to 1 CD. It was huge. But the 4.5 GB of DVD space was lackluster and to be honest the numbers here are not that interesting either.

      Now, if they wanted to talk about 1TB discs ... then I would be thinking about replacing all the drives I own.

    • Optical media is moving faster than HDDs now... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @04:47PM (#11182038) Homepage
      ...HDDs have been very slow. Most of the disk producers pretty much paused at 250GB (3x83). The 400GB Hitachi didn't improve that at all (5x80). Some have gotten 100GB platters out the door, Seagate is leadning the pack with 133GB/platter. But I don't see any major things happening that'd give us 2TB disks instead of 200GB.

      Where as optical media with DVDs, DL DVDs, HD DVD, Blue-Ray etc. seems to have a lot more going on to catch up. Of course this is due to them being extremely long behind. Before I got my DVD drive I would need ~300 CDs to back up my HDD. Now with DVDs it's down to ~100 DVDs. Give it dual layer (and add a disk I might buy), and it is maybe ~70 DL DVDs. By the time Blue-Ray recorders become reasonable I expect to have maybe 1TB of space. But at 25GB each, it'd take only ~40 BDs.

      I'd say the ratio is going in favor of optical media, for the first time in a very long time.

      Kjella

    • Re:Something is wrong here (Score:4, Interesting)

      by solios ( 53048 ) on Saturday December 25, 2004 @05:18PM (#11182137) Homepage
      Hard disk capacities have been outstripping backup media by orders of magnitude for years. 40g drives were already common when DVD-R hit, and now that it's developed, 120-160g drives are common and 40s are on their way out- and good luck finding 9g DVD-R media. Have fun backing up 300g of data to 4.5g DVD-Rs.

      2g and 4g drives were commonplace by the time CD burners became consumer-viable- you still needed multiple disks to backup a full drive.
    • The 33.5G capacity of these disks (or the 58G capacity of the future) competition is too small for typical backups in comparison to current hard drive capacities.

      But these discs are specifically a stepping stone, hybrid, solution.
      Read only, with SD-DVD layers, not for backup use.

      IIRC, the blu-ray standard has always called for 25GB layers. It's just they "can" fit loads of them in.
      So your hope for higher capacity should become a reality.

  • Everyone's missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l33t-gu3lph1t3 ( 567059 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `61legna_hcra'> on Saturday December 25, 2004 @04:11PM (#11181935) Homepage
    The advantage of this hybrid BluRay/DVD-9 disc is that the studios can begin releasing hybrids instead of having a slow painful transition from DVD to the new BluRay or HD-DVD format. These hybrid discs are better than the HD/DVD hybrids because the vanilla DVD part is a full 2 layers - 9GB. This compares favorably to the HD/DVD hybrids which have only ONE layer of DVD. Most DVDs these days are 2-layered DVD-9s.
    • I think you're quite right. If they could make players that don't cost too much more to manufacture, and disks that are maybe $1 costlier than red laser DVDs, they just might have a winner. Blu-ray has a bunch of studios already signed up, and if they just declared that all their disks will be Blu-ray and included some visible reminders of this in their pamphlet, like "you're not seeing the full quality of this disk unless you have a Blu-ray player", they might very well sell lots of players... after which
  • I think we all are dying to know how many Libraries of Congress this thing can hold.
  • Got any tips on stopping the things from getting scratched, smudged etc?

    Make 2 copies of every disk? Manual raid
  • This should be an ideal transitional format (assuming it's not to prone to damage). I applaud the fact that this should beat back HD-DVD once and for all. However, movies will likely be released in 3 formats now: standard DVD, hybrid Blu-Ray/DVD (more expensive), Full Blu-Ray (more expensive still). The Full Blu-Ray being released months or years later with added features and improved HD definition. Until about 30 or 40 percent of people have Blu-Ray players, rental stores will not stock many titles (only a few blockbusters), and HD enthusiasts will have to buy disks at higher sell through prices.


    This probably speeds the adoption of Blu-Ray players and while not a complete panacea in the interim, it is probably better than a protracted war between Full Blu-Ray and the crippled HD-DVD/DVD hybrid.


    For those holding out for a Tera-byte disk of some sort with Ultra-HD, I think 25-50Gig standard HD is just about good enough, and should be around for awhile. My HD experience at home is already superior to going to our local Cineplex. Given that Blu-Ray can vary its bit rate on the fly all the way up to about double broadcast HD, and using better codecs to boot, this should make for some truly stunning Blu-Ray releases in the future. The digital release in theaters of Star-Wars were not (in pixel count) better than HD (about 1 mega-pixel for Phantom Menace and 2 mega-pixel for Attack of the Clones). Ultra HD would be what they call a 4k scan (about 4 thousand horizontal lines, 8 meg-pixel). Expect this to be what theaters start releasing in soon. A good HD (2k) scan will look virtually identical unless you have REALLY expensive equipment and a 10-foot wide screen. Many people can't tell the difference between a good upconverted DVD and HD on a good system. Knowing what a good HD source looks like, I'm pretty sure UHD finally gets us to the point of diminishing returns. Not that UHD won't ever catch on, just don't expect as rapid adoption as DVD or Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. With HD specs already set in stone by the FCC, a custom higher format will have quite the battle to catch on.


    I expect to have a Blu-Ray in my Computer by 2006. I may even start trying to sell off my DVD collection in 2005 before they become completely worthless. Given that most were purchased used on Amazon, it won't be that big a loss.


  • Red vs. Blue (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Bubble ( 827153 )
    This is something that I have not understood from the get-go: The way it was explained to me, while blu-ray is based on the combination of today's video compression technology with an advancement in optical technology (blue lasers), hd-dvd is based on the combination of today's optical technology (perhaps incrementally improved, I'm not sure) with an advancement in video compression (mpeg-4). My question, then, is why is there this unnecessary competition? Why not combine these two standards bring to the

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