How Blu-ray Recordable Disks Can Save Your Job

Jul 14
2010
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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 »

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Putting Blu-ray into Business

Jun 30
2010
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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 »

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Blu-ray Disc Alphabet Soup – Part Two

Apr 07
2010
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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 »

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