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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Blu-ray Disc Alphabet Soup – Part Five IH-BD

May 11
2010
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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 »

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Blu-ray Disc Alphabet Soup – Part One

Mar 31
2010
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I went to my local nerdy electronics store a few days ago and was slightly dazzled by the many options a person can have if he or she wanted to install a Blu-ray drive into a home or office computer.  (Even the term ‘Blu-ray drive’ is one that lacks a single definition.)

The basic drive is one that is similar to the one used in home entertainment sysems — it does ONE thing, and should do it well.  That one thing, of course, is ‘playing’, or ‘reading’ the discs put into the drive.  These discs don’t necessarily have to be Blu-ray videos or games – the drives should be able to also read DVDs and CDs.  It should be able to read discs that you get commercially, like a game or movie, and also those that have been created with a DVD or CD or Blu-ray recorder.   This type of drive, with no settings for anything other than reading a disc, is the basic type of Blu-ray drive you can buy.  A drive of this type often goes by the name BD-ROM.  No recording media (BD-R or other) is supported by a BD-ROM drive.

A Combo drive adds functionality (and cost) and goes beyond the basic Blu-ray drive.   In addition to handling the reading tasks, a Combo drive is also capable of recording onto Read the rest of this entry »

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