New Optical Storage Format - FVD

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115533,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115533,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div>"Taiwanese researchers are demonstrating a homegrown optical disc format, FVD, or Forward Versatile Disc. They developed the format to provide a cheaper way of storing high-definition video on a single optical disc. Researchers at the Optoelectronics and Systems Laboratories (OES) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, are behind the FVD format. It's the latest addition to an alphabet soup of optical disc formats that use red-laser technology, including DVD and EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc). The first players based on the FVD format will go on sale during the second half of this year, says Yung-Sheng Liu, vice president and general director of OES."<br /><br />So far we have been posting on the up and coming Blu-ray Disc, however this uses blue lasers rather than the traditional red lasers that we find in current DVD and CDROM drives. Since blue light is of a shorter wavelength than red light, blue lasers are able to make smaller marks on a disk. However, they are also more expensive. According to this article, "the first version of the new format, called FVD-1, can hold 5.4GB of data on a single-sided, single-layer disc and 9.8GB on a single-sided dual-layer disc. A second version of the format, FVD-2, will offer more capacity. A single-sided single-layer FVD-2 disc can hold 6GB and a single-sided, dual-layer disc can hold 11GB of data."

[Jason Dunn]

I guess the questioin is, why would this get adopted since it offers only marginal improvement over current technology? It's a rule of consumer electronics: unless a new format offers a significant jump in price/performance ratio, consumers won't buy it. This is why DVD Audio will fail - to 99.999% of the people on the planet, CD audio sounds great, and the increased fidelity of DVD Audio will only appeal to the few.

[Felix Torres]

Its a content format primarily; the extra capacity quoted is probably just the equivalent of over-burning.

Think of it as the HDTV sucessor to VCDs.
(If you remember, VCD never really got anywhere in the US but was enormous in the far east...)
It uses WMV9 to achieve the same thing you would otherwise need a blue laser drive to achieve with other codecs.
So they can sell $50 HDTV-resolution players starting *now* instead of waiting for blue laser drives to get cheap.
.
Makes perfect sense for their market, as long as they can get content providers to go along.