Sony & Panasonic Plan Next-Gen 300 GB Optical Discs By the End of 2015 289
SmartAboutThings writes "If you think optical discs are dead and are a sign of the past, maybe you need to take this into consideration – Sony and Panasonic have just announced in Tokyo that they have signed a basic agreement with the objective of developing the next-generation optical discs that are said to have a recording capacity of at least 300GB. The two companies have even set a deadline for this ambitious project: before the end of 2015."
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Unfortunately that describes Blu Ray, and that, also unfortunately, worked out just fine.
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lots of people have blu ray players
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This is correct. I would actually be interested in Blu-Ray if it were open and not DRM'ed to death. 50 GB per disk with a $1 cost per disk in an unlocked format would have its followers but instead they would rather keep it locked up.
Re:Who'll bet against... (Score:5, Informative)
I would actually be interested in Blu-Ray if it were open and not DRM'ed to death. 50 GB per disk with a $1 cost per disk in an unlocked format would have its followers but instead they would rather keep it locked up.
Writable Blu-Ray discs don't have any kind of DRM. If you have a Blu-Ray writer and software, you can write whatever you want on the disc. There is free and libre software available that runs on a variety of operating systems.
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And yet no-name 50GB bluray writable discs still cost $4 EACH! And it wasn't long ago that it was many times that, and remained that for years. THAT is why it had no future as a general file storage medium. Not enough bang for the buck.
Meanwhile, blank NAME BRAND 4.7GB DVD's are $0.22 Even per GB, that is still half the cost. New formats need to be at least as cheap on a per GB, if not significant less expensive. Plus they need to be much faster and at least as reliable.
I suspect if Sony is involved
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The CD was created by Sony. DVD was created by Panasonic.
I wouldn't put it past them to put in DRM. It wouldn't surprise me if the DRM was completely bypass-able.
Re:Who'll bet against... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Who'll bet against... (Score:4, Informative)
300GB is expensive to store?
What year do you live in?
You can get 3TB drives for $115. Building a Raid out of these is cheap and easy. Besides by the time these come out you will be able to likely transcode the video to a better type and save lots of space. As we do now with transcoding dvds to h264.
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How exactly would they put DRM on a blank, recordable disc?
ask dvd consortium or audio-cdr or.. it's possible. doesn't make much sense for anyone involved though!
I guess... (Score:2)
They need something to store 4k stereoscopic movies.
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Meanwhile the USB flash drives are quickly growing in capacity - already there are 512GB USB [kingston.com] Sticks on the market. (OK, expensive, but considering the fact that they are getting cheaper all the time it's not a big deal, and when the optical disks comes out they may be obsolete already)
That's fine and dandy (Score:5, Insightful)
But what are they going to do about the I/O? It takes me about 20-30 minutes to write a single 5 GB DVD and verify the data on the disc. Now with a 300 GB disc, it will take me a full day to write a disc?
I hope they have a plan to address the bandwidth limitation of these discs, and not just focus on "EHRMAGAWD BIG DISC!" for the consumer shock value.
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I really don't care about insane high resolutions, but I'd love to get movies on 60 fps.
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Yes and no.
"2:3 pulldown" [wikipedia.org] has been used to interpolate a frame in-between two source frames (mostly) in order to convert 23.976 fps to the standard NTSC 29.97 fps. This has been done for years at studios for VHS sources, and then done on the digital player in your home for DVD.
When you use Handbrake to convert a DVD that has the source material in 23.976 and don't tell it to use the telecine filter, you'll get jittery video if you play it on some devices that don't properly perform this technique. Most me
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I really don't care about insane high resolutions, but I'd love to get movies on 60 fps.
Some high-speed cameras can go as high as 100000 fps (maybe higher?) So, I guess there's that?
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We all said the same thing about CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays when they first came out. Eventually the technology will be available for this to be a consumer device at an affordable price. While it is appealing to have a single disc for full system backups, it looses a lot of it's value if it runs at DVD drive speed. I could use a USB 3.0 external drive that is cheaper and faster.
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I expect they will be primarily for reading, much like current optical discs. Primary uses will be selling 4k/8k video and games consoles. Both Sony and Panasonic see 4k/8k as the next big selling points for TVs now that 3D is dying down.
I doubt writing will ever be very affordable. PVRs will use HDDs and like BluRay the recorders and blank media will remain expensive. There just isn't demand, even for BluRay. Also, why make pirating your media easier?
I'm glad it's happening though. The nightmare scenario i
Re:That's fine and dandy (Score:5, Interesting)
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DisplayPort 1.2 has way more bandwidth than necessary for 4K video in HBR2 mode - 17.28Gb/sec. DTS-HD Master Audio is 7.1 lossless, and uses up to 24.5Mb/sec. That leaves over 17 Gbps for video, so let's do the math:
4096 x 2160 x 32bpp = 283,115,520 bits per frame.
283,115,520 x 60Hz = 16,986,931,200 bps = 15.82 Gb/sec
They'll be fine with DisplayPort 1.2, which is available on hardware from a year or two ago.
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That seems a tad slow. I can write and verify a 5GB DVD in about 8-10 minutes, and that's using a four-year-old burner. You may want to see if something on your machine could be tuned a little better.
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They don't care about consumer writing of discs, just consumer reading (preferably in blu-ray players made by Sony themselves).
Re:That's fine and dandy (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously do not understand I/O. My DVD drive is SATA 6 GB/s, but the disc cannot spin fast enough to be read at 6 GB/s. Hence the reason it takes 30 minutes to write/verify a disc. The bottleneck is not the interface, but the mechanical spin of the disc.
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True... One would assume then that the density of the data would be much higher (more bits in the same length as well as more tracks per disk), so if we are looking at the same physical limits on the spindle speeds, would not the data rates go up?
Also, be careful because SATA III maxes out at 6 GigaBITS per second (3.1) with 8 Gigabits in the pipeline. 300 Gigabytes would take something like 400 seconds (under 10 min) at the maximum sustained transfer rate.
I'm just guessing, but it seems likely that 30
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You are correct. Even so, 6 Gb/s is much faster than the mechanical write speed of a drive.
who cares (Score:2, Funny)
by then everything will be so locked down the only thing able to take up 300gb space will be all the fucking laws we need to follow to be on the internet
Capacity ain't everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Capacity's all very good, but what about speed?
Current-gen optical disks are, as I understand it, dramatically slower than SSDs, which is where a lot of storage is moving these days.
If these new ones aren't significantly faster than the old, I don't really see them catching on in the mainstream.
Dan Aris
Re:Capacity ain't everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
SSDs aren't really what killed home-burned optical media, it was USB sticks in multi-GB size at reasonable cost. For storage a 4TB HDD for $179 [newegg.com] beats a stack of optical discs by miles and makes discs unfeasible even as backup, the reason to burn discs was portability but USB sticks mopped up that market. Today either you copy to your stick and bring it (push) or your buddy visits with his stick to bring home (pull), either way you don't need any one-time discs. Or using any online service instead, that too.
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
Optical's not good for archival, either. (Score:2)
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
Just because you can put an optical disk in a safe deposit box and not have it suffer from magnetic degradation doesn't mean it's not going to suffer from any degradation over time. (IIRC, the dye used in burnable optical disks degrades over time, so after X
Too little, too late (Score:5, Interesting)
Wake me when optical disc capacity exceeds harddisk capacity again... like it used to when the CD was released.
7 years late to the party.... (Score:2)
Too little too late (Score:2)
By the end of 2015 USB sticks will probably be twice that capacity and 4 times faster without needing a special drive to write/read them.
Loaded with MP3's how much jail time is that (Score:3)
So 300GB of bootleg songs.
Say 4MB/song
300/0.004 => 75,000 songs -> ~ 1/2 a year songs
at $2,250 per song thats $168.75M
at $222,000/24 songs thats $693.750M
I bet wallmart will sell full discs for $50.
80 years as min wage riaa jantor to work off the (Score:2)
80 years as a min wage riaa janitor to work off the fine
Not for general consumers (Score:2)
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If they cant get as robust as SDLT then video professionals will not care.
WE already spool to SDLT for archival. It's robust enough to not worry about data degradation for long term storage. Plus it's already past that mark. SDLT600 is highly common in professional video and film studios for archiving.
i hope they sell TV runs in one box (Score:5, Interesting)
at a reasonable price
i get it selling game of thrones season by season. but there is no reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an entire TV run of a 20 year old show in one box for $40 or so
Sony wins! (Score:2)
Not big enough (Score:3)
Great! Now I will only need 27 optical discs to backup my data.
Backwards compatibility? (Score:2)
Makes sence (Score:2)
considering how irrelevant both companies are anymore. Sony and Panasonic have lost in the consumer electronics markets, partially because they insist on stuff like this. In an era when everything is moving into the "cloud", Sony and Panasonic are looking to make a new generation of optical disks? Will all their TV's have slots built in to insert these disks in?
I am surprised Sharp and RCA don't join them in their alliance of irrelevancy.
Professional use only (Score:2)
What's with the second link, to the idiot with the blog? It adds nothing to the discussion at all, throws in some factual errors just for giggles... He specifically says this is going to be for "consumer use" when the Sony press release explicitly says "professional-use" right at the top.
Sony is big into MO discs, as a more expensive alternative to tape for archiving and backup. So I expect this will be just another entrant into that market, still lagging far behind magnetic tape in capacity. They claim
New and Improved DRM! (Score:2)
It's more about DRM refresh than anything else. BluRay has been completely cracked, same for HDCP. Watch to see a NEW digital video design come out along with this to protect that precious content from all you scumag consumers!
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Exactly. This is more about the content and how to cheaply produce and distribute it securely than something for next gen computers. This will be more for broadcasters, movie theaters, and perhaps game/media consoles. It wouldn't surprise me if the big leap in the technology is being able to press each disc with it's own unique encryption key that has to be 'activated' over the Internet before it can be decrypted and played.
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[citation needed]
I agree w.r.t. HDCP being broken, but AACS, unfortunately, is still very (too) strong. Some brave folks are capable of using a cracked version software BluRay players to extract the keys of some popular discs, and that's about it. As long as this procedure can't be automated, we won't see a BluRay/AACS-encoded mplayer/vlc on Linux (or some other OS) anytime soon.
As long as AACS isn't totally broken, steer clear of BluRay discs at any co
Seek times should be fun! (Score:2)
We already have PS3 games on blu-ray that have to install to the Hard drive to deal with the seek times and supposedly have the same data in multiple places on the disk. This should be even more of that fun.
Coasters (Score:2)
What the hell ad you people doing to get coasters all the time? The times I get coasters is if the laser is flaking out (or in the case of the very expensive Ricoh drive I had years ago, inadequate lubrication on the optical sled. I went through five drives under warranty then when warranty ran out I fixed it for good with lithium grease), or if the software doesn't detect I put a CD instead of a DVD in and tries to write a DVD-sized data image to disk. Other than that, no problems- and I have discs from 19
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Another year another multi-100s GB optical disc announced. So is this one going to actually come to market this time?
Will there be any optical drives left in the wild by the time such a beast makes it out of the lab?
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Indeed. Now that everything is 'streaming' and 'cloud' i wonder what their intended market is. For me personally, in the last year I only handled optical discs to copy them to my NAS. For long term storage the technology is too immature and delicate. Why would I buy this?
Non-connected users (Score:5, Insightful)
There are people who don't have fast internet.
There are people who PREFER to view content on non-Internet-connected devices to avoid tracking.
Re:Non-connected users (Score:5, Informative)
BluRay players require "updates" for DRM, and those are typically done via being Internet Connected (optionally USB Stick). The new DRM will most likely require Connectivity at some point as well. Some of my older BluRay discs no longer work in new players, even with updates. Broken ... by design.
Re:Non-connected users (Score:5, Informative)
welcome to the definition of why people torrent. Torrent a bluray/rip it, and you'll never have to deal with random restrictions of rights which exist on Bluray players, etc. #1 cause of alleged piracy aka copyright infringement right there.
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hahahaha, what?
the price is arbitrarily set and has no reference towards trailers or anything other than a completely arbitrary price range set by the MPAA.
a real price range for a DVD is in the range of $4-9 maximum for the life of the movie, including from release day. This "$19.99 for a movie and $24-30 for a bluray" pricing has actually been sued, and there have been lawsuits over price fixing for disc media before. Trailers have nothing to do with that, and neither does the FBI warning.
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Not if you use it to store plain old data (which might or might not include mp4 files).
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So my sticking to DVDs was a good idea?
Which titles no longer play, and do you know why? Sounds like a classic class-action setup (and the content owners need such things brought against them).
My Atari cartridges still play in my 2600 console. And all of my DVDs still play in my DVD player. Sounds like the next-gen was a step back (I have a nice upscaling DVD player, I've compared directly with BluRay on my 57" HD panel, no noticeable differences except during excessive movement).
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I think I'm done with optical on a PC unless they come up with a 5TB disc that writes quickly to be used as a backup medium. Hard drives are just too large and low-cost for optical to make sense in most use cases.
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my newest computer doesn't even have a disc drive...
Mine still does.
I've yet to figure out another way to backup my music and movies to my NAS in a manner that also produces interesting coasters.
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Re:Non-connected users (Score:4, Informative)
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DVD Life Time 2-5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
An optical disc will outlive a hard drive by decades.
Only ones you purchase pre-recorded, not ones you write [archives.gov] which have a lifetime of 2-5 years. Even then while hard drives may fail it is easy to keep a RAID array up and they are very easy to copy the data to and from. So in 10 years time when the 8TB solid state memory stick or 1000+-year lifetime quartz technology [phys.org] drive is available you can easily copy all the files over to it...unlike your optical discs which you will have to load into the machine individually to copy the data over a speeds well below that of a hard drive.
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If a drive in a RAID fails, the others are probably close to failure.
Not true. We have drives fail every few months in RAID1, and, so far, we've never had the other drive in the same array fail in less than a year.
Even at consumer level, one of the drives in my home RAID1 failed early last year, I replaced it, and the other drive is still going. Current drives either seem to fail within the first two or three months of use, or run for years.
Re:DVD Life Time 2-5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
If a drive in a RAID fails, the others are probably close to failure. Plus, they have to work harder to make up for the bad one until it's replaced.
When one drive fails it has no implications for the others - drives fail at random times. As the drive ages failures become more frequent at some point but one failure does not imply that the disk next to it is about to die as well. Plus there is no write overhead increase per disk for operating in fail mode and, unless you have a mirrored RAID configuration, practically no increase in read overhead.
The reason RAID is a not backup solution is because there is no "oops I should not have deleted those files" protection i.e. there is no history of changes. However if you just need reliable storage there is nothing wrong with a RAID for that.
I've heard that "2-5 year" nonsense before. I've got discs much older than that, that still read fine.
Anecdotes are not evidence. I also have disks older than that which read fine...but I also have a few which do not. Given that a backup medium has to be extremely reliable I am sure that the 2-5 year limit quoted is probably based on something like a 95+% probability of recovering your data. This means that the large majority of disks will probably be fine after 5 years. However suppose you used those disks to backup your family photos. After 10 years there may be a 10% chance that some, or all, are gone - do you want to take that risk?
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The OP obviously didn't buy DVDs with Taiyo Yuden dye - or is simply LYING.
Well since I have no idea who "Taiyo Yuden Dye" is (I don't know many welshmen) and I have certainly never bought any DVDs with him you have clearly caught me out and I must be lying. In my own defence I do think that including a link to the US national archives where they made this claim was a particularly clever ruse but I'm sure they based this number on a few DVDs they had lying around the office until someone sat on one of them as their lifetime estimate and not on rigorous scientific tests.
I'm par
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unless you're a complete slob, blu rays don't scratch. and if they do its so minor that they will still play
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Streaming hasn't even caught up to the current set of legacy consumer media.
So there's still a problem of content delivery. Networks generally aren't fast enough and they also tend to be owned by competing media companies. Do you really think that Time Warner is going to let someone else stream 4K media to you?
Good luck with that bandwidth cap.
Just the monopoly aspects of the situation make it likely that there will continue to be a need for a consumer media format.
Like with virtual DVD jukeboxes, the problem isn't the tech but all of the companies actively trying to hold the tech back.
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time warner doesn't have a bandwidth cap, at least not in NYC for most plans
the problem is bandwidth. blu ray is 30mbps. real 4K will probably be around 100mbps. why would i pay all this money to time warner every month when its cheaper to buy movies on optical discs?
sheared bandwidth choke points (Score:2)
Will make Streaming at peek times hard and off peak push / downloading is better but say 50GB / 100GB an movie is can add up fast.
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It's possible to use a lot less than that. Pirates generally fit a 720p movie in 4.4GB, or a 1080p in 8GB. Quality isn't quite blu-ray, but it's not far off.
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on a decent TV you can see a difference. not that big of a deal
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The new HEVC codec looks very promising. If that lives up to the hype it should be quite enough to render the difference imperceptible.
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time warner doesn't have a bandwidth cap, at least not in NYC for most plans
Perhaps there are no caps that you *know* about, but there are bandwidth limits that will "cap" the observed speed. I think what you are talking about (but not referring too correctly) is transfer caps. This is a limit on the amount you can download (or upload) in a month, or more accurately what you "transfer". They may be advertising "no limits on transfer" but you can bet there are bandwidth limits of some kind. If nothing else, the hardware will limit you.
All the above being said, I don't expect Tim
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BluRay 1x speeds are 36mbps; however, most drives run at 2x or faster to provide the necessary 54Mbps data transfer rate [blu-ray.com] for BDRom movies. The upper limit of the drive (which has been pretty standard for all optical drives, including CD-ROM and DVD, so I don't expect that to change) - is around 10,000 RPM - which comes out to approximately 12x the "base" transfer rate of BluRay, or just over 400Mbps.
So... assuming these new drives run at max speed all the time and it can magically maintain that rate for the
Unofficial bandwidth caps (Score:3)
time warner doesn't have a bandwidth cap
Maybe. But as a TWC customer, when using their service means you get stuck behind peers with well established shitty performance for months and months and months, the distinction between poor bandwidth and poor peering may be irrelevant to your perspective.
https://www.google.com/search?q=twc+slow+youtube [google.com]
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
People who want 4K video in their homes, for one. Or even decent high-def. I've watched streaming video, and the picture quality just doesn't cut it for me even on a laptop screen, much less on my widescreen TV.
At the core of the problem is the poor quality of Internet service. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the fastest Internet service available to me is 3Mbps. If I change ISPs and add channel bonding, I can push it up to the high single digits. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray-quality movie, even with the newer codecs, that means I would need to download at least 15 gigabytes of data. That translates to 11.3 hours of saturating the connection just to watch a single movie.
Move to 4K, and the download time balloons unimaginably—about a hundred gigabytes for a two-hour movie. At that rate, I could download one every few days. That's just plain insane.
The fact of the matter is that for many Americans, "the cloud" is just plain not able to keep up. Call me when every home in the U.S. has fiber. Until then, we still need optical media for content delivery.
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At the core of the problem is the poor quality of Internet service. I'm in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and the fastest Internet service available to me is 3Mbps. If I change ISPs and add channel bonding, I can push it up to the high single digits.
That is absolutely terrible. The slowest subscription I can find here is 8Mbps (~USD 22/month). That is enough to stream a decently x264 encoded AVC 1080p movie.
If I'm not mistaken, bitrate doesn't scale linearly with resolution, which means that 4k video wouldn't require 32Mbps for equal quality. In addition to that, HEVC is knocking on the door, and can apparently produce good quality 4k video at a 15 Mbps bitrate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding [wikipedia.org] ).
All in all, I think that in a
I want extras, director commentary tracks, etc. (Score:2)
Film lovers/buffs like me love the extras that often come with optical media - commentary tracks, "making of" videos, interviews, alternate versions, etc.
I haven't seen these available on streaming services yet (granted, I haven't checked all streaming services to see). That, plus lag time for HD video makes me far prefer optical media. Even if connection speeds could handle all of this, I think I'd still prefer to have a physical copy. Just old-fashioned I guess.
- Tim
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You wouldn't. This is intended for professional use.
Sony and Panasonic both have thriving business units producing equipment for the television and film industry. Things like pro cameras, that sort of stuff.
The equipment used is quite often rather different to what's available to the consumer, simply because the requirements are quite different.
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More importantly, is the price per gig going to be competitive?
If they can't get the price down then they won't be worth it unless they can prove their disks are shelf stable for extremely long periods of time or they can get up to the terabyte range HDDs and Flash will be the better option in nearly all cases.
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Not multi-100 GB, but I do have a BDXL drive on the desktop which can do 100 gig disks at 4x, using Nero.
Optical may be pedestrian as a media system (especially compared to SSDs), but there is a sweet spot in price that makes it worth using as a long term backup/archival media, especially when combined with fault-tolerant archiving [1]. Nothing is 100%, but I have found when restoring, I have had better luck pulling from CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Ray media than I have had with older HDDs.
As for time burning media,
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Have you seen latest prices on 256Gb USB sticks?
Similar capacity, less hassle, available right now....
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> Why do we care about 300GB optical disks, when I can fit a terabyte of data onto something the size of a fingernail?
Do you have one of those? How much did it cost you?
How does that compare to the bulk unit price of stamped optical media or even BDR blanks?
The real truth of the matter is that you can't fit a terabyte onto something the size of a fingernail. Even if you could, you would never be able to afford it.
also USB 2.0 IO is not that good also embedded (Score:2)
also USB 2.0 IO is not that good also embedded systems may not have alot of cpu power to work usb at a high use rate.
sata is better and less CPU overhead.
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So you dont buy any BluRay discs then.... Because BluRay is 100% sony.
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sony doesn't even own the largest share of blu ray patents
over 300 companies in that patent pool
Why? (Score:2)
If they aren't in your blacklist, why not?
Building the raspberry Pi in the UK. Created the most open commercial Android console 2 years ago. Latest console PS3 making many of the the right moves now. First mainstream waterproof phone.
Re:Check out my optical dick (Score:5, Funny)
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all the discs I still have (only a handful) from 1995 are still readable. . .
The only time I ever get coasters is if the laser in a drive is flaking out, or the software doesn't detect the disc type properly and starts burning a DVD onto DVD media and runs out of space (in the former, it's equipment failure, and the latter, luser error).