128GB BDXL Blu-ray Disc Specification Finalized

I'm sorry, where's the article? I can only see the girl...

Seriously though, not compatible with current players? No thanks.

...unless it's cheap (or comes with the girl)

PS4 will probably have BDXL and Xbox720 will probably feature some crappy BDXL cloned format that only lasts 3 months, kinda like PS3 BD versus Xbox 360 and its HD-DVD. Personally I think 128GB is impressive. And let's compare the cost of a single BDXL disc to a 128GB flash drive. __-_-_-__ seems to think that this will fail and that a 128GB flash drive would somehow be cheaper than a cheap disc. I think he's insane.

How long would it take to write 128GB worth of data onto a BR compared to an hard drive? That would seem to be the biggest obstacle to them being used in data archiving.

That's why people use external HDD's and RAID for data backup. You wouldn't back up your 1TB hard drive with dvds or blurays, but you could certainly pack some movies onto them and take them around with you or share them.

Still the Blu Ray disks/Writers are expensive... I am young but did it take this long for DVD writers to drop in price?

Bluray writers are pretty much just now hitting the market. But they've already dropped in price quite a bit.

expense is not the problem. if bdxl is not compatible with the current hardware, are we to just throw the current players to the dustbin for the sake of bdxl compatible players

oh thank god! for a second there I was afraid I'd have to split my porn collection across TWO disks!!

"Because the new media specifications are extensions of current Blu-ray Disc technologies, future BDXL capable recorders can easily be designed to play back existing 25GB and 50GB Blu-ray Disc formats, but current laser hardware aren't compatible with the newer media."

so effectively, this format is as different from original BD as BD is from dvd...

I guess they are trying to make it seem like they are the same so as to not look like they are introducing yet another impractical and obsolete laser disk media, when real time read AND write, high capacity AND higher density hdd are available, almost certainly FOR CHEAPER per gigabyte than these use once disks.

I think in order for it to catch on it would have had to be compatible with current devices. Still pretty cool that they can squeeze that much data onto a single BL Disk.

REALLY?

if you ask me they could make them 1tb and i would still not be impressed. my most capable optical drive is a dvdrw (on my desktop) and it will probably remain that way. i use it less than one time a month. optical disks are obsolete. blurays are a joke when it comes to price. disks occupy too much space, are too fragile, too slow. when i bought my acer aspire timeline 13,3" i looked for something that lacked optical drive, modem and discrete vid card. seems i have to live with the vid card but the optical drive missing makes my lappie some hundreds of grams lighter and much slimmer.

let's get over optical drives. one can use a bunch of mechanical hdds, usb penflash drives, online storage. think also about the bunch of usless dvds and cds that take up space and have no use.

CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray discs will get outdated very soon, with so many people switching over to External HDDs/ USB drives, no matter how much you increase capacity.

A laptop that you can't do anything on other than read email is a much bigger waste of space than a little bluray disc. And really, if you wanted a tiny little screen to browse the web, why not just get an Iphone or netbook, since you're so concerned with saving space? It's not like a 13" screen at 768 is watchable without having to clean off breath smudges from having to sit that close to the screen to be able to see anything.

I just want them to put entire tv seasons onto one disk

I agree. I have Raid 1 on my media drive. 128 gigs is nothing when you think 2 TB drives are becoming the norm.

I think it's the beginning for 4k/2k movies. Now we have to wait for the TVs.

Let me fix that for ya

That's better.

If all people do is pop down the shops and buy a movie, they don't really care what the capacity is they just want to put it in and watch it. So as far as once-only recordable media is concerned, 128gb is simply laughable. In an age where recordable media is being outstripped in every area by flashdrives, SSDs and SD cards we should dump rotating disks to the history bin. I have already said in previous posts that BluRay will be the last optical disk format and I stand by the statement. Eventually someone will make a decision to manufacture a player with a simple memory card reader, like SD, and movies will be distibuted on the same format. It wouldn't be rocket science, lower production, packaging, warehousing and shipping costs. Smaller footprint at point of sale and no issues with compatability - backwards or forwards - and even better they don't scratch.

Movies on memory cards - FTW.

Every time those girls show up as the pic for articles, I forget to read the articles

Hopefully when these come out the first generation Blu-Ray burners and media will drop in price. Course I'd still rather get another hard drive instead, but we'll see.

But this is a new spec. So new writers. More capacity and higher cost. I just wish they would complete the spec, or that bluray would die off completely. For instance the 3d crap. So now I have to buy another bluray player when I just spend 200 on the one I have now. Its total bs. I know the 128 is used for managed backups, but its the same thing. I think I will just stick with hard drives. (they're cheaper in the long run to)

I still say Blue Ray should have used a caddy system. Think of it as a big UMD or Floppy disk. It would not have made it much larger but sure as hell would have protected the disk. At this new density any minor scratch, dirt will destroy (unreadable) allot of data. Why do you think they hermetically seal hard drives.
Again, it boils down to $$.

I remember when the first CD machines came out and cost over $1,000. That was long ago so at today's prices that would be over $2,000.

byte for byte, an optical disk is always going to be cheaper than flash and take up less space than an HDD. Optical disks will be around for a while.

That won't happen for a while for one simple reason - They're cheap. If your friend wants some files off your computer, are you just going to give him you HDD or your USB drive. I don't think so. You're gonna burn that sucker a 10 cent CD or a 25 cent DVD. Don't forget about music. Even though most cars nowadays have lots of options for playing music (ie. HDD, FM tranmitter, flash drive) a lot of people still use CDs. It'll be a while before they disappear because they're so cheap to manufacture.

Ho there, flash cards do have compatibility issues.
It's not about the card themselves, but the file system used.
Right now optical disks have a specified file system.
This makes it possible to exchange them and be able to play every disk on every player. Unfortunately for flash cards, Microsoft has corrupted most standards by pushing substandard, crappy, fat-derived file systems. This causes great incompatibilities. It's also not designed to last a long time. New SD-card specifications are coming really fast after another lately because the limits gets reached over and over again.

Second point, the multilayer concerns me. Because doing something multilayer is very complicated to make. Thus more room for errors.
I don't thrust all that multilayer stuff. I'll rather do single layer when I can.

All this stuff about optical drives. The future is 3d optical memory that can be read and written to without mechanical moving parts.

The fact a new device is needed is no different from DVDDL. The current laser can't handle it. This really isn't much more packing though when you do the math.
A 2 layer holds 50GB, 25GB per layer.
A 3 layer holds 100GB, 33GB per layer.
A 4 layer holds 128GB, 32GB per layer.
It seems to me the new device should increase single and dual layer capacities as well.

What catapulted DVDDL was the fact that DL was being used in commercial releases, so they were needed to bootleg without shrinking and degrading quality. Until these new discs are used commercially, they aren't necessary to the public.
People don't use optical discs for actual backup. As far as giving to your friends, if you really need to give them 100GB worth of data, 2 discs will probably work as well.

The bright side here is that new tech will push the current tech down in price.

"current laser hardware aren't compatible with the newer media."

For this reason. You will NOT see this new standard take off.

128GB of porn that mom will never find!

I am dreaming of a game that large... lol then maybe it wouldnt be finished in 5 hours lol

Meh, flash-based storage is more reliable, universal, and more damage resistant. If you really wanted to backup 100+ gigs of data, you would be better off saving it in the cloud or in an external HDD

You don't have to buy a new BR player because of 3D. You only have to do it if you want 3D. Since you never had 3D before, what exactly is the problem? You don't like it if new technology comes out that you didn't have before?

All videos will be available in 2D format. Not everyone cares about 3D. But apparently you do. So go buy a 3D capable blu-ray player (or use a PS3) if you want it so bad. And if you don't want it...do nothing.

As for 128GB, it's not targeted at consumer market. They are not going to require upgraded blu-ray readers at this time in the movie market. This is for corporate clients who still are using optical for data storage (why, I do not know).

Every time there's an upgrade to a product, people start to bitch that they have to upgrade. Well, you don't have to upgrade. And in this case, you will not miss out on anything by not upgrading. So chill.