A report recently released by a research firm called Centris confirms the continuing adoption of Blu-ray players in American households.  According to the research, the number of households with Blu-ray playback devices doubled between July 2008 and July 2010, with the firm reporting that 17% of households own at least one Blu-ray device.

Any videogame player knows that there are more than just dedicated Blu-ray players being used.  According to Centris, the number of dedicated Blu-ray players and PlayStation 3 game systems (which can play Blu-ray discs) was roughly equal.

These figures may make it somewhat difficult to determine HOW the Blu-ray players are being used.  Are the PlayStation 3 systems being used primarily for game play and infrequently used for Blu-ray playback?  Was the Blu-ray playback capability a key part of the decision on which game system to buy? Or was the decision to buy a Blu-ray player that also played games?  The Centris numbers provide no answer.

Further, it may be somewhat difficult to know how some of the higher-end Blu-ray players are being used.  Because many Blu-ray players also have the ability to connect to the Internet, are these devices used primarily for downloading content from services like NetFlix, or sites like Hulu or Fancast, and not for playing Blu-ray discs?

With the increasing number of devices that connect HDTV sets to the Internet and that are designed specifically for accessing online video content, many Internet functions of high-end Blu-ray players will, essentially, be duplicated.  As all of these various devices ultimately fulfill the same demand – providing content – it will be interesting to see how these overlaps affect the market.

The question of whether Blu-ray disc sales – the movies and other content being sold so that they can be viewed on HDTV – is similarly difficult to answer.  Many Blu-ray movies are sold with a DVD version included.  Are people buying these movies so that they can play them now on a DVD player they already have, and hoping to someday soon be able to play the Blu-ray version on a Blu-ray player?  Are they buying the Blu-ray version so that they can play the DVD version on the player in the bedroom and the kids can play the Blu-ray version on their PlayStation 3s?  Or, perhaps, they may be buying the Blu-ray version so they can play it in full High Definition, with the DVD version sitting in its box on a shelf.  We just don’t know.

Clearly, while the reports that show an increase in the number of Blu-ray playback devices over the last two years is encouraging, there’s probably not enough other data to understand how Blu-ray is being used.  Perhaps sales and rental figures for theatrical releases on Blu-ray will help shed some light on what’s really happening.

3-D has been an experiment that is almost as old as the motion picture itself.  At a film festival in September 2010, 3-D film experiments were shown dating back to the first half of the last century.

While the success of the recent motion picture Avatar may have thrown some studios into rapid production of 3-D movies, Avatar and other efforts at creating 3-D titles have been an ongoing effort.  Films in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and again earlier this decade also experimented with 3-D.  One good example of how technological development has paralleled the recent production of 3-D content is how the Blu-ray Disk Association has released a standard for 3-D television and for the 3-D Blu-ray disc.

A Blu-ray disc that carries 3-D contains 50% more data than a typical 2-D Blu-ray disc.  The extra 50% is used for data Read the rest of this entry »

In previous blogs, we explored Blu-ray standards, and looked at Blu-ray as a storage medium.  Blu-ray discs can be used for data backup, for data distribution, and can be used for saving your own video made with a camcorder or other high definition device.  Proposed standards even define a Blu-ray disc format that can hold 128 GB.

This month, we’ll look at the consumer end of things.  Movies on disc have been around for years.  To see films in high definition usually requires a Blu-ray disc, and a Blu-ray player.  Although the original movie isn’t changed, the actual film is re-captured at 1080P resolution – more than four times as high as a standard 480p DVD.  The difference between a DVD and the same movie in Blu-ray is often amazing.

Blu-ray players have been around for a few years.  Prices have dropped.  In fact, some retailers throw in a Blu-ray player with the purchase of a particular High Definition television.  This demonstrates a few things – to get the most out of an HDTV, you need good source media to show it (a Blu-ray disc in a Blu-ray player, connected via HDMI) and there are some models of Blu-ray players that are inexpensive enough that they can be bundled in with Read the rest of this entry »

A colleague told me how being able to store 40 gigabytes of data on a single medium helped save a large project.   He was asked, last minute, to bring the screener for a movie to a movie theater for a preview.  The movie was digitized, and was designed to be projected using a digital projector that read the data and projected it, at film quality resolutions, onto the movie screen.

He drove his backup copy of the movie from San Diego to Santa Barbara, a drive that takes four to five hours.  Meanwhile, at the theater, the coordinators of the preview were in a panic.  The hard drive that stored the movie had crashed.  They weren’t able to bring it back, and may have to cancel the special screening.

They hadn’t figured on my colleague.  He arrived an hour or so before the screening was scheduled to be projected.  The data on my colleague’s Blu-ray disk contained the entire film, in a format that contained more data than a typical Blu-ray movie.  Although the projector wasn’t able to read the data on the Blu-ray disc he brought, using the notebook computer Read the rest of this entry »

Tapping into some of the underappreciated strengths of Blu-ray

As a storage medium, the Blu-ray disc appears to be riding an acceptance curve similar to the one of its predecessors – CD and DVD media.  When the CD first came out, in the 1980s, it was seen as a format for distributing audio files. The use of the CD as one for distribution of programs and data took years to develop.  At the end of the 1980s, CD-Recorders sold for around $2000, and a 700 megabyte blank disk cost $10 or more.  Successfully recording a usable CD-R disc was not a foregone conclusion – so the cost of creating ONE usable disc may have run closer to $20, $30 or more dollars.    Today, of course, CD-recordability is built into the DVD drives in most computers, or into aftermarket drives that may cost as little as $20.  And blank CD media costs just pennies.

The DVD followed a similar path, with the medium used initially for distribution of video.  However, the industry was aware of the potential for using the medium for data storage.  It still took some time for the recorders to become affordable, and for the cost of blank media to become Read the rest of this entry »

RECAP

In previous posts, we explored the many different alphabetic designations that could apply to Blu-ray discs and the drives that could read, read and write to them.  We looked at BD-ROM, Combo Drives, BD-R and BD-RW, and looked at the many different types of erasable media (and drives) available.  We looked at single layer (25 GB) and double layer (50 GB) media, at write once and at erasable discs.

The last post looked at some of the proposed formats for the future, which expanded from single and double layer up to 4 layer (100 GB) and beyond — all the way up to 128 GB.  We looked at some of the uses of these larger (by 2010 standards) discs, and explained that this new standard may require new hardware to read and write to the new discs.   And we hinted at yet another proposed standard – the IH-BD disc.

IH-BD – our last acronym (for now)

The Intra-hybrid Blu-ray disc puts a new twist on the double layer Read the rest of this entry »

The first three parts of this series explored the different types of Blu-ray drives for use in computers (and some game systems).  We looked at the basic Blu-ray disk readers (BD-ROM), that were capable of playing Blu-ray discs, and probably also capable of reading data recorded onto Blu-ray discs.  We also looked at the ‘combo’ drives that not only had the ability to read Blu-ray discs, but also could record DVDs and CDs.

Next, we looked at the Blu-ray Disc recorders (BD-R) drives.  These drives could read and write data onto single layer (25 GB capacity) and double layer (50 GB capacity) media.  An important aspect to the capability of recording data onto Blu-ray media was that you can store large amounts of data (and, of course, not just data, but audio, video, and other content) onto a single disc.  Of course, a BD-R drive could also read and write to DVD and CD media, making a BD-R drive a useful replacement for the older DVD-R (DVD-R and DVD+R) drives — and immensely important if you want to get the most amount of data onto the fewest number of discs.

Part Three took the story a bit further, introducing the Erasable or Re-Writable capabilities (BD-RW, BD-RE).  Erasability (or re-writability) provided the option for reusing Read the rest of this entry »

In the first two parts of this ongoing series I explored a few of the ways Blu-ray has been implemented into computers. The first installment discussed Blu-ray readers that would allow you to view Blu-ray movies and also (probably) read DVDs and CDs. The ‘combo’ drive also let you record DVDs and CDs, in addition to just reading Blu-ray discs.

In Part Two of this series, I wrote about recordable Blu-ray – the rather remarkable technologies that let you store as much as 50 GIGABYTES of data onto a single disc. I discussed how single layer Blu-ray discs (BD-R) can store as much as 25 GB of data, while their dual layer (BD-RDL) siblings can store up to twice as much data. It’s not clear whether all recorders (or even Blu-ray readers) can read the second layer of a dual layer disc; or whether a recorder that can write to BD-R media can also write to BD-RDL.

There’s another twist to the Blu-ray story – Blu-ray rewritable (RE – Recordable/Erasable). Rewritable media has been around for more than a decade – with CD-RW, DVD-RW, and now Blu-ray RE. RW technologies, in the past, don’t seem to have been particularly successful – except with those Read the rest of this entry »

Intro

In Part One of this series , I looked at some of the basic ‘Blu-ray’ drives that can be added to a computer or used as external drives. These included the basic players – whose sole function is to play Blu-ray discs (and, possibly, to read data recorded onto a Blu-ray disc), and the so-called ‘Combo’ drives that, in addition to playing Blu-ray discs can also read and write to DVD and CD drives.

Being able to watch a Blu-ray movie on your high resolution desktop or notebook computer is nice to have. In most cases, you’re sitting closer to the screen than you would be if you were playing the same video on a high-def television, and the fine items on the screen look even better. (You may lose the surround sound that a good home theater system can deliver if you use your computer, although it’s also possible to take advantage of the surround sound processing on many computers and feed the sound to multiple speakers arranged for surround sound.)

It’s a good thing, if your computer is short of slots, or you’ve run out of USB ports Read the rest of this entry »