DVDs Could Hold 100 Times More...

[ejai]

Take a look at this link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3696306.stm

[glockjs]

as if the first layer wasnt hard enough to get a good burn. then two layer came along and its ugly...now 4???? gonna be some expensive coasters

[bazooka]

That sounds good, but you would probably need a special player in order to read or play it.

[Darth Paris]

Yeah it would require a new player if the light is going to reflect differently. Every episode of the simpsons is impressive, but is that MPEG-2? What if it used MPEG-4? That would be incredible.

[bazooka]

It may use a different compression technique altogether and blow Mpeg-4 out of the water.

[chicola]

Interesting technique! But, with a 10 degree angle detection the player should be "somewhat" expensive.

It seems to me that you wouldn't be able to produce -R or +R versions of the technology...

And, they don't need to go to the 4 layers. With 2 layers they would be able to have 500 GB which would be enough to have Blue Ray people thinking!

[lordsmurf]

Think of how big menus would be.

[ZAPPER]

Just talking out of my ass, but why not try to increase the surface area of a disk by using faceted grooves or some other geometric shape and light it with a laser through a multi faceted prism that corresponds to the shape of the disk?

[deh707]

insane.

now i will be able to store all my porn vids/pics on one disc!

no more multiple dvd-r's to switch through.

[mgh]

No compression needed for audio or video-Bye Bye DivX, XVid and the lot so also ac3 etc

[anubis13]

with that kind of space you could do uncompressed HD and still have room left over.

[SatStorm]

Those Discs are needed because of the existance of the HDTV material.

I can only speak about what happens in Europe: We have two HDTV "formats". One based on MPEG 2 (there are already TV channels using it, more to come) and one based on MPEG 4 (proposed by the French and the Germans seems to like more...)

Those based on MPEG2, have bitrates more than 25.000! And from what I read, for perfect picture you need more (about 40.000). How you can store those? You can't! The market needs media to store those huge files.

The french proposition for mpeg 4, is more an alternative for broadcasting. It has a better commercial potention, but I don't feel that they gonna use it for storing video. Mpeg 2 seems to offer better picture.

So, there is a huge close future market for those discs.

[Thomas Anderson]

If they can seriously make such high capacity discs why bother with compression at all? Surely they could put films on discs as uncompressed AVI or something, new plays would be needed to read them anyway, so why not use AVI instead of MPEG. They could also have uncompressed surround sound, so no more dolby or dts, and perhaps even more things in 96/24 or 192.24 even.

[ejai]

That's a very good point, why bother to compress with that much space available? 8)

[chicola]

That's a very good point, why bother to compress with that much space available? 8)

Maybe because they will start recording in 3D...

[Darth Paris]

So how much space would a high quality uncommpresed HD movie (about two hours) take up?

[bugster]

That's a very good point, why bother to compress with that much space available? 8)

You need to compress it for broadcast, there simply isn't that much bandwidth available.

So how much space would a high quality uncommpresed HD movie (about two hours) take up?

Do some maths

HD (720p) is 1280*720 (I believe)

SO this is 921600 pixels per frame. Assuming 32 bit colour this is 3686400 bytes per frame. If we use the PAL framerate of 25fps this is 92160000 bytes per second or a little over 87Mbytes per second. I will let you work that out for a 2 hour movie!

[leebo]

insane.

now i will be able to store all my porn vids/pics on one disc!

And I'll be able to store all mine on only 12 discs!!!

[Darth Paris]

Well that would be (60)(60)(87)=313200 MB. Divide that by 1024 and it comes out to 305.859375. So around 306 GB. That is awsome.

What if they made these as double sided disks. Then they could make players that could read both sides of a disk without having to flip it over. 2000 GB per disk.

[kyemeng]

Most imortant would be the player. In order to be backward compatable in that information on the disc could be read by most consumer, compression in the form of MPEG2 or others would be employed.

[ZAPPER]

Compression is Evil! 10 hours of uncompressed AVI or what ever turns out to be the biggest baddest video file type is enough for one disk! I mean shit I got to do some other things in my pathetic little life at some time besides sit and watch movies that I have already seen. I think that durability is what needs to be improved. Scratch resistant disk, better dyes or even better movies would be nice. If every movie ever made was put on one disk what fun would that be? Instead of bragging about your 1000 disk collection you would have to say "Yep I got the disk"

[Darth Paris]

Most imortant would be the player. In order to be backward compatable in that information on the disc could be read by most consumer, compression in the form of MPEG2 or others would be employed.

It could support MPEG-2 as well as uncommpresed video.

[Bschuler]

I'm with Zapper... Better durability would be a huge PLUS.

[ViRaL1]

I mean shit I got to do some other things in my pathetic little life at some time besides sit and watch movies that I have already seen. I think that durability is what needs to be improved.

HUH? If you're not watching the same movies again, I'd think durability wouldn't be as big of an issue. Unless you mean being able to be abusive with them.

[leebo]

Instead of bragging about your 1000 disk collection you would have to say "Yep I got the disk"

Ah, but what if you didn't have "The Disc"?
Or if you have the disc, but the other guy doesn't, who do you think is getting laid???

[BetaMaster]

I took a deeper look at the technology, but these MODS DVD's face a big hurdle - they aren't expected to get to market until 2010. HVDs (Holographic Versatile Discs) already have a 200GB capacity, and are aiming for 1TB. They should start hitting the shelves at the consumer level in 2-3 years. By the time MODS hits the market, HVDs might be entrenched.

[ZAPPER]

Ah, but what if you didn't have "The Disc"?
Or if you have the disc, but the other guy doesn't, who do you think is getting laid???

It wouldn't make that much difference to me I aint getting laid anyhow.

I realize that all that storage capacity will be great. But for me I don't really need portabilty. I mean I dont really see me taking my entire collection with me to work or on vacation. A Terabyte or two of harddrive will most likley fill my storage needs. Even the kids grand parents can only stand an hour or two of the home movies once or twice a year.

As for durability I really mean for long term high quality archival purposes. I consider CDs and DVDs disposable. I just think that they are not going to hold up to time and or use. That is a big part of why most people backup.(Err or so we tend to claim) I would like to see something that will last a 100 or 1000 years, but I ain't going back to stone carving (atleast not without a laser beam)

[ice-berg]

by the time this comes out approx in 2010, the UHDV might also be out.
if nobody knows what UHDV is well here is an old link from cdfreaks:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/8067

To store 18min of video with UHDV will require 3.5TB (Freak'in Crazy).

So for all of you thinking no compression any more and lots of free space on these 1TB discs, think again (assuming UHDV actually takes off).

[Alan69]

Guys this will likely be read only at best. Facets in the pits, to give more storage per pit by scattering. Very hard to burn facets into a pit in a reliable manner.



" partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project."

Anyone else read that as "HE invented it, I'm just taking all the credit!"

lol

[Capmaster]

Guys this will likely be read only at best. Facets in the pits, to give more storage per pit by scattering. Very hard to burn facets into a pit in a reliable manner.



" partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project."

Anyone else read that as "HE invented it, I'm just taking all the credit!"

lol

Yep. I saw that. It happens all the time in my line of work .....engineers or scientists are assigned a student intern to mentor, and kype the poor kid's ideas and put their name on it to further their own careers :P

My previous manager did that with one of my formal reports. I wasn't an intern, but I did about a year's worth of work on it ...countless revisions. When I left his group, he took my drafts, did some minor wordsmithing, and published it with only his name on it. Nowhere in the report did I get credit for any of the work. Needless to say, he's not my favorite person here

Let's hope this wasn't the case, and the student gets due credit for his work.