Battle Brewing Over Successor to DVD

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106796,tk,dn110802X,00.asp">http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106796,tk,dn110802X,00.asp</a><br /><br />Augh! :evil: These guys never learn. Weren't the lessons from the DVD-R and DVD+R debacle obvious? If you <i>CONFUSE </i>consumers, they <i>WON'T BUY</i> your product. Bam - it's that simple. Consumers want to burn a DVD - they don't want to try and understand why -R is better/worse than +R. This article concerns the two next-generation standards for DVD - the boost in capacity will be awesome, but neither one will take off unless there's a standard. And I don't even want to think about what standards will be warring when it comes to burning these next-gen DVDs. :roll: <br /><br />"The AOD is based on a 405-nanometer-wavelength blue laser and can store up to 20GB of data on one side of a disc of the same size as a conventional DVD disc. AOD drives are expected to be commercially produced next year, according to Mitsumasa Fukumoto, an NEC spokesperson.<br /><br />Blu-Ray, which also uses a 405-nanometer blue laser, can store up to 27GB of data on one side or 50GB on two sides, and is expected to be commercialized soon but no targeted launching date is set, Sony's Tsuyoshi Sakaguchi said. High-capacity DVD drives are expected to be in demand in Japan once high-definition broadcasting begins next year. The 20GB capacity is large enough to record about two hours of high-definition video.<br /><br />The industry is concerned about a battle between the AOD and Blu-Ray standards in future, according to Irie."

[kagayaki1]

CBS news reported about this yesterday. While they did not speak specifically about the two standards, they did say since all broadcast signals in the US are supposed to be digital by 2007, there should be an increase in the number of HDTVs purchased (I don't necessarily agree, BTW). Because of the HDTV thing, they talked about the current standard for DVDs doesn't support the maximum potential of HDTV.

They pointed out that any video stream would have to be much larger to accomodate an HDTV maximizing movie. What's the size? 27GB...

Interesting connection.

[vincentsiaw]

50 gig in one disc? wow it's bigger than my laptops hardrive cool !

[ThomasC22]

50 gig in one disc? wow it's bigger than my laptops hardrive cool !

I strongly suspect data storage capability is going to be pointless in 4 or 5 years. I used to think 640megs was great and count all the things I would store on it, now I use them like disks most times only using 10 or 15 megs on each disc. I think DVD-R's will be the same thing before too long.

As for standards, two is good, I don't think two is a problem. Writable DVDs failed beause they had 6+ standards at one time (most of which wouldn't even play in most DVD players)

[Newsboy]

The sticking point is the laser itself. One standard wants to use an actual cobalt blue laser, which is exceedingly expensive and consumes large amounts of power. The other standard (being pushed by Panasonic I believe), uses am infrared laser with an 820 nm wavelength that passes through a passive waveguide (a crystal of some sort). After passing through the passive waveguide, the laser beam has a wavelength half as long, or 405 nm, the same as the blue laser. The advantages are that a red laser is cheap, the passive waveguide material is cheap and easy to produce, and b/c it's passive, the waveguide consumes no power in the conversion process.

More information at Sound and Vision Magazine's (http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/hot_topics/PrintArticle.asp?ArticleID=109) website.

[ECOslin]

I've been intending to buy a DVD burner for a while. I try to buy my electronic goods so there is some type of cross compatability between them. Doesn’t always work, my stereo component CD player was a gift, and my Panasonic DVD player was a good deal. Both of them have some excellent feature that my other components should have had but don’t. Oops, no S-video on the TV. My camera, my pda and my desktop all can do CF.

I have a CDr, and I’ve tried Backup software that made use of it. I ran off 20 backup CDr disks and I had chosen not to use compression. I found that the program had encrypted the files on the disks so that only that software could read the disks thru a sequential file compression restore that took first disk, last disk, first disk, last disk, first disk to build a file directory for me to retrieve a file, then it stored the directory build info on the backed up hard drive. Bye-bye backup software.

I’ve wondered about how fragile the media is. I can scratch 700 megs down the drain with a fingernail just by damaging the paint on top of the CDr. I wonder how destructive I could be with DVD media? 4.7 Gigs gone.

I saw a really good comparison chart between DVD recordable types. It listed which could do what and listed which manufacturer supported that type and I don’t remember where I found it to list it here. I’ve found other charts put out on the internet from ‘dvdplusrw.org’ type groups that support one type or another and maybe their fingers are on their scales.

Both my desktop computers have a DVD drive as their primary CD reader, I thought it a problem to solve before ‘the future’ happened and all CD disks became DVD disks. Oops.

Edward

[shawnc]

[quote="kagayaki1"](I don't necessarily agree, BTW).

Try not to flame a "newbe" to much, but what the heck is "BTW"????

[Wiggin]

Shawn, it's an abbreviation for "by the way"..some others you'll ikely see include IMHO - (In my humble opinion) and LOL - (Laughing out loud) :way to go:

[Paragon]

Which one of those 405 nano thingies has 20gig. One can put 27gig on each side or a total of 50gig........I'm getting confused again. I don't think I'll bother. I'll just watch the show when it runs on TV. Besides with future DRM my TV will likely choose to self destruct if I try to copy a movie on it.

Dave

[shawnc]

Shawn, it's an abbreviation for "by the way"..some others you'll ikely see include IMHO - (In my humble opinion) and LOL - (Laughing out loud) :way to go:

Wiggin - Thanx for the info. It took me a few weeks, but I finally figured out that BTW was NOT one of the Site Administrators intitials :n00b:

[vetteguy]

It's just VHS vs. Betamax all over again. The problem with recordable DVDs is that they are trying to simultaneously target two markets: generic "consumers" (who want something as simple as a VCR) and techno geeks who want bleeding edge and are willing to work through some problems to get the latest and greatest. If you'll recall, when CD recorders started to become mainstream you could get the ones for a PC or standalone units (well, you still can, but I wonder how many they really sell).