Blu-ray, HD DVD, and Sony Bets the Company

By Jerry Pournelle

March 27, 2006

(Blu-ray, HD DVD, and Sony Bets the Company :  Page 1 of 1 )

DVD drives have pretty well replaced CD-ROM as the default optical drive for small computers. There are still CD writer drives, but they're hard to find; if you want a read/write drive now you're more likely to install one that writes to DVD. There are a ton of DVD R/W formats, but fortunately most of that hoohaw has been collapsed so that most drives you can buy will read and write just about any format.

Comes now the next step: HD DVD (pushed by the Toshiba and Philips consortium) versus Sony's Blu-ray. IBM forced the integration of the original DVD standard, but there is no one with the clout to force this now, and everyone has their own ideas, including their own Digital Rights Management schemes. Movie studios have lined up behind both, with Blu-ray having more adherents. Who will win this battle of the standards is a matter of opinion. There's a lot at stake.

Let's begin with a chart Alex made up for me. It gives the capacities of all the various formats we've been able to find. No doubt it exists somewhere, but I've never seen all this information in one place before:

Capacities of various disc-based recording media. Capacities are per side. DVD-Rs are usually single-sided. DVD-RAM discs usually require a caddy and aren't compatible with standard drives. Sony Professional Disc likely to be phased out for Blu-ray. VMD/EVD is an attempt to make a non-licensed hi-capacity format for, say, China. Sources: Maxell's whitepaper on capacities EVD/VMD CeBIT announcement: "What is HD-DVD" Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio layout info, Sony Professional disc.

Technology	Capacity (GB)
Floppy	0.00140625
CD-R (original)	0.65
CD-R (extended length discs)	0.7
CD-R (other tricks including short FAT, not 100% player-compatible)	0.8
Super-Audio CD (SACD), non-CD (DVD-style) layer; CD-compatible layer OK on nearly all CD players	4.7  Page 1 of 1  BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2006

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