- Mar 27, 2010
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Over the last year or so, there have been an increasing amount of threads across various forums asking about the next capacity bump in optical storage. When is blu-ray going to get 100GB? Why hasn't it already? What's the largest cap it can go?
There are two sides of the camp I suppose, those from a pure data perspective and those in the home theater camp. I can't say how many PC users actually use blu-ray regularly, but we're going to discount that for the purposes of this discussion.
On the HT side, my reasoning for wanting higher capacity only stems from one thing. Compression. We all know that, while looking relatively good, every last movie on blu-ray is compressed a lot. While on the audio side, lossless compression has given audiophiles what they may want to hear, videophiles are left with color banding, relatively low bitrate, and now with the sooner than later roll out of 4K, it's simply not going to cut it.
To me, I see an easy solution right in front of us with SSDs. The technology to create a read-only variant is mature enough to do it. You don't need the fastest disks there are, though in some cases it can help.
Uncompressed 4K at 24FPS with an RGB 4:4:4 color space is about 3.8Gbps. At YUV 4:2:2 it drops to 2.5Gpbs. Today's drives can easily cope with that.
About five years ago, a friend and I were taking a serious look into digital theaters. Even then, at the time, a lot of companies were somewhat reluctant to upgrade their theaters with digital projection. Simply for cost reasons. At any rate, at the time, a typical two hour digital movie was about 500GB uncompressed. I'm sure that it's increased a bit since then, but the point that tries to make is that its within the realm of SSD capacity today. Let's just say for the sake of arguement that it's a 10:1 compression ratio to blu-ray. We know it's more than that to account for audio and extra features, but we'll use that for now. You take a 480GB SSD and that's now compressed 1.04:1. Much nicer from a video quality perspective.
As a long term storage medium, I don't know how much of an argument that would really be. As tech overall improves, a whole new media will surely present itself to be smaller, faster, lighter and more resiliant. But in terms of longevity, being a read only disk, you don't need to worry about things like garbage collection, trim, write performance, wear leveling, etc. It's read only.
It's a common interface for all intents and purposes. Those with a HTPC are already equipped to handle it. Get a hot swap bay and you're done. No HW required. A standalone device can easily be created to interface with a HT setup.
As far as packaging, other than the box it comes in, a simple dust cap for the pins and you can simply have the drive itself as the case/box/whatever you want to call it to stack on your shelf.
Now, in reality, I can see this not happening, which is unfortunate. God forbid someone can't sell a blu-ray player for $400 anymore. But for those that want the best possible quality picture (low or no compression), is relatively future proof (at the moment) from a speed and capacity perspective, is small, light, and more durable than an optical disc.
Once the price really comes down, it should be considered a more viable option.
What do you guys think?
There are two sides of the camp I suppose, those from a pure data perspective and those in the home theater camp. I can't say how many PC users actually use blu-ray regularly, but we're going to discount that for the purposes of this discussion.
On the HT side, my reasoning for wanting higher capacity only stems from one thing. Compression. We all know that, while looking relatively good, every last movie on blu-ray is compressed a lot. While on the audio side, lossless compression has given audiophiles what they may want to hear, videophiles are left with color banding, relatively low bitrate, and now with the sooner than later roll out of 4K, it's simply not going to cut it.
To me, I see an easy solution right in front of us with SSDs. The technology to create a read-only variant is mature enough to do it. You don't need the fastest disks there are, though in some cases it can help.
Uncompressed 4K at 24FPS with an RGB 4:4:4 color space is about 3.8Gbps. At YUV 4:2:2 it drops to 2.5Gpbs. Today's drives can easily cope with that.
About five years ago, a friend and I were taking a serious look into digital theaters. Even then, at the time, a lot of companies were somewhat reluctant to upgrade their theaters with digital projection. Simply for cost reasons. At any rate, at the time, a typical two hour digital movie was about 500GB uncompressed. I'm sure that it's increased a bit since then, but the point that tries to make is that its within the realm of SSD capacity today. Let's just say for the sake of arguement that it's a 10:1 compression ratio to blu-ray. We know it's more than that to account for audio and extra features, but we'll use that for now. You take a 480GB SSD and that's now compressed 1.04:1. Much nicer from a video quality perspective.
As a long term storage medium, I don't know how much of an argument that would really be. As tech overall improves, a whole new media will surely present itself to be smaller, faster, lighter and more resiliant. But in terms of longevity, being a read only disk, you don't need to worry about things like garbage collection, trim, write performance, wear leveling, etc. It's read only.
It's a common interface for all intents and purposes. Those with a HTPC are already equipped to handle it. Get a hot swap bay and you're done. No HW required. A standalone device can easily be created to interface with a HT setup.
As far as packaging, other than the box it comes in, a simple dust cap for the pins and you can simply have the drive itself as the case/box/whatever you want to call it to stack on your shelf.
Now, in reality, I can see this not happening, which is unfortunate. God forbid someone can't sell a blu-ray player for $400 anymore. But for those that want the best possible quality picture (low or no compression), is relatively future proof (at the moment) from a speed and capacity perspective, is small, light, and more durable than an optical disc.
Once the price really comes down, it should be considered a more viable option.
What do you guys think?
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