23/01/2009, 05:58 AM
Just some random thoughts I had, so decided to dump them into a post >_>
By the way, this article refers to Blu-ray as a data storage medium, not as a medium where you buy movies on - however, I will refer to the latter often in this, since it has a large effect on the former.
Note, I'm basing most of this info from what I've observed here in Australia - the conditions may be slightly different in your part of the world.
Turn back about 10 years, and you may recall everyone using CDs to carry their data. A few years later, DVDs rose up and are now pretty much the standard optical data storage medium. Now Blu-ray has come out, but will it take over DVDs as the standard?
Optical media
Optical media is typically very slow, with seek times which sometimes go into seconds, and read speeds which seem like 10 year old HDDs (and I won't even go into write speeds). The drives sound like mini-washing machines when reading/writing to them, and the media isn't even the most size efficient (can get memory cards which store more than a single optical disc).
So why do wee use them? The purpose of optical media is to provide a cheap medium to deliver mass digital storage (primarily single use - rewritable media do exist of course, however USB drives seem to be today's preferred method of portable multi-write devices despite being more expensive than DVD-RWs).
Adaption of CDs
So why did people ever use CDs in the first place? Back in those days, there were two primary uses - firstly as an audio storage medium, then later, data storage. For audio storage, the CD aimed to replace those old records (and perhaps casette tapes, though tapes were still used if you wanted to record something).
As an audio storage medium, there are quite a number of benefits over the old record, including:
- Much higher audio quality
- Less wear since there's no pin scraping the disc each time you play it
- Much smaller in size
- Ability to skip/repeat/shuffle tracks (well, you chose tracks with records, though you'd have to be fairly precise to stick the read head over the gap)
- Probably more audio per disc (don't think those old records could store over an hour of audio, but I can't remember)
Now I would probably say that its popularity in the audio industry was one reason which drove its popularity as a data storage medium (the CD production plants were already built). In those days, before CDs, pretty much data storage was done via 5.25in or 3.5in floppies - I recall Windows 3.11 was distributed on 6-10 floppies. (I believe Windows 95 also came out on floppies (can't imagine how many), but when wee got our computer, it was one of the few that had a CD-ROM drive, so wee got the CD version of it.) As you can see, floppies had trouble satisfying the storage requirements during that time, thus CDs had obvious benefits as a data storage medium of providing more storage per disc. (not to mention a bit of a speed boost over the slow floppies, plus, with not too many people having CD players in those days, a CD-ROM drive meant that you could listen to your audio CDs as well)
Adaption to DVDs
So everyone was on CDs... CDs pretty much replaced the old records for audio storage, but what about video storage? Sure, VCDs existed, but they never really became massively popular, yet they did get some widespread usage but DVDs were around the corner anyway. If DVDs never came, perhaps people would've eventually moved from VHS to VCDs but adaption may not have been that fast.
Like with CDs, DVDs only really became adopted as a data storage medium long after it became popular as a video storage medium.
So why did people move from VHS to DVD?
- Like with CDs, much higher video/audio quality
- Also like digital CDs, there's less wear on the physical medium
++ no more tape getting stuck in the machine... :/ (though DVDs are more susceptible to scratches and the like than VHS)
- And again like CDs, DVDs are much smaller than the clunky VHS tapes
- Menus & extras which you can get on DVDs, but not on VHS
- Multiple language/subtitle support (though I don't really think this is that big a point, unless you're multi-lingual and like watching things in different languages) - this is probably a little more of an advantage to the producer since they can just make one DVD and distribute it globally (though they don't usually do this)
- Ability to skip parts etc (without having to revert to rewinding/fastforwarding the tape)
Again, you can see quite a number of benefits to the consumer to adapt to DVDs over VHS.
For data storage, at the time when DVDs started becoming popular as a storage medium, various things, such as Unreal Tournament 2003, Linux distributions etc were coming out on 4+ CDs, so as you can see, CDs were also having trouble keeping up with data storage requirements of the time, thus the logical choice to shift onto DVDs.
Are DVDs rather problematic these days?
Easiest way to look at this is, does it satisfy data storage requirements today? I haven't yet really seen a game or app distribution exceed much more than 7GB for compressed install files. A dual-layer DVD can store around 8.4GB, so there's still a bit of headroom for expansion. Plus, people don't seem to mind that much over 2-disc distributions, so it looks like DVDs will be suffice for data storage for a few years going forward.
What about optical storage as a medium for burning personal stuff to? Unfortunately, this has small impact (see below).
But as seen before, and what is happening now, the popularity of optical media seems to be driven by use in the audio/video industry before it becomes a popular data storage format. HD-DVD lost to Blu-ray, and thus, it's unlikely you'll ever be burning stuff to HD-DVD in the future (unless it's for the Xbox).
What does Blu-ray offer?
CDs are still pretty much the standard storage medium for audio. If you didn't know, yes, there is an audio DVD standard, but hardly anyone uses it (if you get songs on DVDs, it most likely comes along with video). What does DVD-audio offer above CD-audio? Better quality for one (yes, the DVD audio standard samples audio at 48kHz meaning audio doesn't need to be downsampled to 44.1kHz for CD audio; which implies less audio artifacts with DVD audio), and the possibility of storing more audio on a single disc. But that's about it really.
So what does Blu-ray offer above DVD? Better quality and potentially more storage. That's the main selling point. There's some other improvements (like more advanced menus), but I can't see anyone really caring too much about these (for menus, as long as they work, I don't think people worry too much over the fanciness of them).
For more video on a single disc, chances are it won't be utilised much in the industry. Generally, movies fit on a single dual-layer DVD already, so there's really nothing else to add. Probably only use would be TV series, assuming the producers actually decide to make use of the extra storage (selling more discs makes it look somewhat better). Maybe replace box sets? Not so likely either, since they probably want to use box sets to clear out stock of previously single discs, and these won't require reauthoring the disc either.
So in many cases, the only thing that Blu-ray offers above DVDs is quality.
Is better quality enough to drive the medium?
In the long run (ie many years), yes, as long as there is enough support (I'd say there is enough support for Blu-ray at the moment), and something better doesn't come out beforehand. Eventually, people's old TVs will die, and/or newer HD ones will become attractively cheap and people will move onto the HD bandwagon.
However the time this takes to occur will depend on demand, on a mass scale.
Here in Australia, I personally know many people who still use VHS, and are perfectly fine with DVD quality (in fact, they consider DVDs to be very good quality). Not too many people have nice big 42+in LCD/plasmas in their house - after all, the old TV works fine, so why dish out $2000 to get something that just is more attractive to the eye?
Whether quality will drive you depends on your values, but on a mass scale, I think people aren't unsatisfied with DVD quality, and neither do I think they really crave about the extra quality brought by HD. At the moment, HD seems to be more popular amongst enthusiasts and geeks rather than the general population.
Blu-ray market so far
Whilst there may be quite a few stores selling Blu-ray media at the moment, the price of players and burners have been pretty stagnant over the past 6 months. Releasing a movie in Blu-ray is relatively cheap (it really probably doesn't cost them more than about AU$2 to make one, and they can sell those 10 year old movies for a nice AU$36) which would explain the abundance of movies. For players, yes, the price will go down, even if it's just the PS3 pushing down the prices, but how long this will take to occur is yet to be seen. (as a side note, one of the advantages HD-DVD had over Blu-ray was production costs since production plants only needed a relatively small upgrade to cater for HD-DVD)
Supply and production is a big driver of prices for Blu-ray players. The fact that prices haven't moved much evidently suggest that the manufacturers aren't anticipating much demand, thus they simply aren't increasing production. In Australia, a Blu-ray player will cost you upwards of AU$300. In comparison, you can find cheap DVD/DivX players for around AU$30-50 - nearly a tenth of the price.
But Blu-ray will be good for backups/my stuff!
Unfortunately the market for using optical media as backup storage is relatively small - not to mention that price is still a primary factor in whether you'll use the medium or not. I wouldn't suppose that a lot of people out there need to be able to backup 25GBs on a single disc; perhaps a few of your geeky friends might want to, but on a large scale, I'm doubting there's a real want.
As for "backing up commercial discs", if it never really gains that much popularity anyway, there's no need to duplicate it.
Alternatives?
As it stands now, there doesn't appear to be any successor or competitor (now that HD-DVD is dead) to Blu-ray at the moment (there are some other optical standards in development, but with little common knowledge about them, it's yet to be seen whether they'll succeed), which suggests that Blu-ray is likely to eventually succeed DVDs, as long as wee don't ditch optical media altogether.
DivX players?
This is something a bit more interesting - especially with upcomming DivX7 players supporting the H.264 codec. This essentially allows you to fit a HD 1080p movie onto a single layer DVD - so in fact, you get Blu-ray's quality without paying the Blu-ray premium... Of course the issue here is that it's unlikely to be "officially" supported by the movie studios, and thus only really works if you download all your movies. You could also argue that since Blu-ray also uses H.264, the quality you could get out of a H.264 DVD isn't quite Blu-ray level, however, most people would consider 4+Mbps for a H.264 video pretty decent in terms of quality (or ~8Mbps for a dual layer DVD). Perhaps the biggest issue with DivX players, would be inability to render high resolution videos.
However, among a general public, this is unlikely to be a terribly popular thing, unless a lot of people suddenly decide to download their movies instead of visiting their local video store.
What may cause Blu-ray to become widely adopted (in only a few years time)
Conclusion
With relatively little benefit, and really, little need for it at present, adaption from DVDs to Blu-ray is most likely going to be rather slow at best. With manufacturers not really anticipating much demand for the format (and trust me, they aren't dumb) prices are likely to remain pretty stagnant for quite some time, which means you probably won't be using Blu-ray for storing data anytime soon. From what I know, there doesn't appear to be anything "big" left in Blu-ray - just more movies and PS3 games perhaps - nothing that is likely to cause a sudden great swing in demand or prices.
Unless you have some need for it now, it's probably wise to stay away from Blu-ray at the moment and see how the market develops.
On the other hand, with no clear viable alternative at the moment, adaption will probably eventually occur. However, wee're assuming DVDs get replaced with another optical medium. With various interesting forces here, such as large HDDs and flash drives becoming awfully cheap, rise of online streaming, popularity of portable video players, the next major upgrade, for data storage, may not even be optical media storage, assuming of course, the need for such large capacities is even there...
Comments please :P
By the way, this article refers to Blu-ray as a data storage medium, not as a medium where you buy movies on - however, I will refer to the latter often in this, since it has a large effect on the former.
Note, I'm basing most of this info from what I've observed here in Australia - the conditions may be slightly different in your part of the world.
Turn back about 10 years, and you may recall everyone using CDs to carry their data. A few years later, DVDs rose up and are now pretty much the standard optical data storage medium. Now Blu-ray has come out, but will it take over DVDs as the standard?
Optical media
Optical media is typically very slow, with seek times which sometimes go into seconds, and read speeds which seem like 10 year old HDDs (and I won't even go into write speeds). The drives sound like mini-washing machines when reading/writing to them, and the media isn't even the most size efficient (can get memory cards which store more than a single optical disc).
So why do wee use them? The purpose of optical media is to provide a cheap medium to deliver mass digital storage (primarily single use - rewritable media do exist of course, however USB drives seem to be today's preferred method of portable multi-write devices despite being more expensive than DVD-RWs).
Adaption of CDs
So why did people ever use CDs in the first place? Back in those days, there were two primary uses - firstly as an audio storage medium, then later, data storage. For audio storage, the CD aimed to replace those old records (and perhaps casette tapes, though tapes were still used if you wanted to record something).
As an audio storage medium, there are quite a number of benefits over the old record, including:
- Much higher audio quality
- Less wear since there's no pin scraping the disc each time you play it
- Much smaller in size
- Ability to skip/repeat/shuffle tracks (well, you chose tracks with records, though you'd have to be fairly precise to stick the read head over the gap)
- Probably more audio per disc (don't think those old records could store over an hour of audio, but I can't remember)
Now I would probably say that its popularity in the audio industry was one reason which drove its popularity as a data storage medium (the CD production plants were already built). In those days, before CDs, pretty much data storage was done via 5.25in or 3.5in floppies - I recall Windows 3.11 was distributed on 6-10 floppies. (I believe Windows 95 also came out on floppies (can't imagine how many), but when wee got our computer, it was one of the few that had a CD-ROM drive, so wee got the CD version of it.) As you can see, floppies had trouble satisfying the storage requirements during that time, thus CDs had obvious benefits as a data storage medium of providing more storage per disc. (not to mention a bit of a speed boost over the slow floppies, plus, with not too many people having CD players in those days, a CD-ROM drive meant that you could listen to your audio CDs as well)
Adaption to DVDs
So everyone was on CDs... CDs pretty much replaced the old records for audio storage, but what about video storage? Sure, VCDs existed, but they never really became massively popular, yet they did get some widespread usage but DVDs were around the corner anyway. If DVDs never came, perhaps people would've eventually moved from VHS to VCDs but adaption may not have been that fast.
Like with CDs, DVDs only really became adopted as a data storage medium long after it became popular as a video storage medium.
So why did people move from VHS to DVD?
- Like with CDs, much higher video/audio quality
- Also like digital CDs, there's less wear on the physical medium
++ no more tape getting stuck in the machine... :/ (though DVDs are more susceptible to scratches and the like than VHS)
- And again like CDs, DVDs are much smaller than the clunky VHS tapes
- Menus & extras which you can get on DVDs, but not on VHS
- Multiple language/subtitle support (though I don't really think this is that big a point, unless you're multi-lingual and like watching things in different languages) - this is probably a little more of an advantage to the producer since they can just make one DVD and distribute it globally (though they don't usually do this)
- Ability to skip parts etc (without having to revert to rewinding/fastforwarding the tape)
Again, you can see quite a number of benefits to the consumer to adapt to DVDs over VHS.
For data storage, at the time when DVDs started becoming popular as a storage medium, various things, such as Unreal Tournament 2003, Linux distributions etc were coming out on 4+ CDs, so as you can see, CDs were also having trouble keeping up with data storage requirements of the time, thus the logical choice to shift onto DVDs.
Are DVDs rather problematic these days?
Easiest way to look at this is, does it satisfy data storage requirements today? I haven't yet really seen a game or app distribution exceed much more than 7GB for compressed install files. A dual-layer DVD can store around 8.4GB, so there's still a bit of headroom for expansion. Plus, people don't seem to mind that much over 2-disc distributions, so it looks like DVDs will be suffice for data storage for a few years going forward.
What about optical storage as a medium for burning personal stuff to? Unfortunately, this has small impact (see below).
But as seen before, and what is happening now, the popularity of optical media seems to be driven by use in the audio/video industry before it becomes a popular data storage format. HD-DVD lost to Blu-ray, and thus, it's unlikely you'll ever be burning stuff to HD-DVD in the future (unless it's for the Xbox).
What does Blu-ray offer?
CDs are still pretty much the standard storage medium for audio. If you didn't know, yes, there is an audio DVD standard, but hardly anyone uses it (if you get songs on DVDs, it most likely comes along with video). What does DVD-audio offer above CD-audio? Better quality for one (yes, the DVD audio standard samples audio at 48kHz meaning audio doesn't need to be downsampled to 44.1kHz for CD audio; which implies less audio artifacts with DVD audio), and the possibility of storing more audio on a single disc. But that's about it really.
So what does Blu-ray offer above DVD? Better quality and potentially more storage. That's the main selling point. There's some other improvements (like more advanced menus), but I can't see anyone really caring too much about these (for menus, as long as they work, I don't think people worry too much over the fanciness of them).
For more video on a single disc, chances are it won't be utilised much in the industry. Generally, movies fit on a single dual-layer DVD already, so there's really nothing else to add. Probably only use would be TV series, assuming the producers actually decide to make use of the extra storage (selling more discs makes it look somewhat better). Maybe replace box sets? Not so likely either, since they probably want to use box sets to clear out stock of previously single discs, and these won't require reauthoring the disc either.
So in many cases, the only thing that Blu-ray offers above DVDs is quality.
Is better quality enough to drive the medium?
In the long run (ie many years), yes, as long as there is enough support (I'd say there is enough support for Blu-ray at the moment), and something better doesn't come out beforehand. Eventually, people's old TVs will die, and/or newer HD ones will become attractively cheap and people will move onto the HD bandwagon.
However the time this takes to occur will depend on demand, on a mass scale.
Here in Australia, I personally know many people who still use VHS, and are perfectly fine with DVD quality (in fact, they consider DVDs to be very good quality). Not too many people have nice big 42+in LCD/plasmas in their house - after all, the old TV works fine, so why dish out $2000 to get something that just is more attractive to the eye?
Whether quality will drive you depends on your values, but on a mass scale, I think people aren't unsatisfied with DVD quality, and neither do I think they really crave about the extra quality brought by HD. At the moment, HD seems to be more popular amongst enthusiasts and geeks rather than the general population.
Blu-ray market so far
Whilst there may be quite a few stores selling Blu-ray media at the moment, the price of players and burners have been pretty stagnant over the past 6 months. Releasing a movie in Blu-ray is relatively cheap (it really probably doesn't cost them more than about AU$2 to make one, and they can sell those 10 year old movies for a nice AU$36) which would explain the abundance of movies. For players, yes, the price will go down, even if it's just the PS3 pushing down the prices, but how long this will take to occur is yet to be seen. (as a side note, one of the advantages HD-DVD had over Blu-ray was production costs since production plants only needed a relatively small upgrade to cater for HD-DVD)
Supply and production is a big driver of prices for Blu-ray players. The fact that prices haven't moved much evidently suggest that the manufacturers aren't anticipating much demand, thus they simply aren't increasing production. In Australia, a Blu-ray player will cost you upwards of AU$300. In comparison, you can find cheap DVD/DivX players for around AU$30-50 - nearly a tenth of the price.
But Blu-ray will be good for backups/my stuff!
Unfortunately the market for using optical media as backup storage is relatively small - not to mention that price is still a primary factor in whether you'll use the medium or not. I wouldn't suppose that a lot of people out there need to be able to backup 25GBs on a single disc; perhaps a few of your geeky friends might want to, but on a large scale, I'm doubting there's a real want.
As for "backing up commercial discs", if it never really gains that much popularity anyway, there's no need to duplicate it.
Alternatives?
As it stands now, there doesn't appear to be any successor or competitor (now that HD-DVD is dead) to Blu-ray at the moment (there are some other optical standards in development, but with little common knowledge about them, it's yet to be seen whether they'll succeed), which suggests that Blu-ray is likely to eventually succeed DVDs, as long as wee don't ditch optical media altogether.
DivX players?
This is something a bit more interesting - especially with upcomming DivX7 players supporting the H.264 codec. This essentially allows you to fit a HD 1080p movie onto a single layer DVD - so in fact, you get Blu-ray's quality without paying the Blu-ray premium... Of course the issue here is that it's unlikely to be "officially" supported by the movie studios, and thus only really works if you download all your movies. You could also argue that since Blu-ray also uses H.264, the quality you could get out of a H.264 DVD isn't quite Blu-ray level, however, most people would consider 4+Mbps for a H.264 video pretty decent in terms of quality (or ~8Mbps for a dual layer DVD). Perhaps the biggest issue with DivX players, would be inability to render high resolution videos.
However, among a general public, this is unlikely to be a terribly popular thing, unless a lot of people suddenly decide to download their movies instead of visiting their local video store.
What may cause Blu-ray to become widely adopted (in only a few years time)
- Big prices drops for the PS3 [unlikely - console prices don't go down too quickly] + people see it as a viable alternative to a Blu-ray/DVD player
- Movie studios abandoning DVDs or releasing a lot of Blu-ray only content (such as extras) [also unlikely]
- HDTVs become a lot cheaper [possible, but TVs tend to drop in price slower than consoles]
- Blu-ray movies become awfully cheap [would be nice - IMO would certainly help against piracy, but I doubt this will ever happen]
Conclusion
With relatively little benefit, and really, little need for it at present, adaption from DVDs to Blu-ray is most likely going to be rather slow at best. With manufacturers not really anticipating much demand for the format (and trust me, they aren't dumb) prices are likely to remain pretty stagnant for quite some time, which means you probably won't be using Blu-ray for storing data anytime soon. From what I know, there doesn't appear to be anything "big" left in Blu-ray - just more movies and PS3 games perhaps - nothing that is likely to cause a sudden great swing in demand or prices.
Unless you have some need for it now, it's probably wise to stay away from Blu-ray at the moment and see how the market develops.
On the other hand, with no clear viable alternative at the moment, adaption will probably eventually occur. However, wee're assuming DVDs get replaced with another optical medium. With various interesting forces here, such as large HDDs and flash drives becoming awfully cheap, rise of online streaming, popularity of portable video players, the next major upgrade, for data storage, may not even be optical media storage, assuming of course, the need for such large capacities is even there...
Comments please :P