Vegetano1 Wrote:i have't read all,. but the blu-ray menu's are interesting too(movies menu's),. more posibility's.

This is difficult to advertise to the general public...

squee666 Wrote:write speeds are quite fast considering

a dvd can burn 4.7gb at 16x in jus unde the speed a 52x cd burner can burn to a 70mb disc

...and how fast can HDDs write these days?  SSDs?

Mr. Shizzy Wrote:The thing that excites me most about Blu-Ray, is the storage space on them.
Each Blu_Ray disc, is like a portable HDD, in the respect that it can hold so much.

Writing to it multiple times is problematic.  And by the time the prices fall, 32GB USBs will probably be quite cheap.

feinicks Wrote:- the ever growing demand for Internet based services such as direct download and online purchase. Some artists even release their media to the internet before it is even launched on CDs. Movies are directly downloadable in some parts of the world shortly after their screen debut. Of course, the lack of uniformity of bandwidth and expense of high bandwidth currently acts as a barriesr or a filter, whichever suits you, for people to access these services. However, the internet schernario is always ripening with every passing period of time. Earlier, Wi-Fi was a geek myth, and now almost every major city in world in wi-Fi. 3G enables fast net services onto the phone.
The point in this that eventually, people might not need optical storage devices at all. They are cumbersome and inefficient, in todays scenario. All your media might as well be available to you on the go, without carrying anything except a device which taps into your network. (I am aware that this is still currently complicated and expensive. But so are Blu-Rays now, and DVDs when they came out)

I did acknowledge it in "rise of online streaming", however I didn't explore this idea in detail.  Thanks for explaining it more however :)

feinicks Wrote:- One cannot simply forget the significance of USB drives. I do not recollect the last time I burned a CD to trasnsfer data. Most humble and inexpensive USB drives have a greater usability, storage capacity and redundancy than an optical drive can have.
Wee all read about Sony and whoever, jointly creating a 64 GB memory stick. Now that is more than enough storage for most people. It takes people of normal category, quite some time to fill a 160 GB hdd. With all their music and movies etc. Nowadays, almost every manufactures or dealer provides 500 GB hdd by default. Only a fraction of people find this insufficient.

Also mentioned this in "large HDDs and flash drives becoming awfully cheap" :P
The other thing to consider is popularity of portable video players.  These are unlikely going to read full sized optical media, so in the future, you may end up carrying your videos on one of these.

feinicks Wrote:In my opinion, bku-rays will not be that overly popular as storage devices. The simple reason is that it is time consuming and tedious and expensive to do so. To burn a blu ray, you need the appropriate media and an appropriate recorder on both ends. Besides the current cost concerns, Blu-Rays will still suffer from that weakness of Optical drives, that too many scratches ot such, will render it useless... of course no device is foolproof, but I think a disc has more chances of damage, while being carried out, compared to a flash drive or such. (unless you make it a habit to drive over these devices with a humvee).

Same issues apply to DVDs, however the price per GB on a DVD is still an attractive factor for mass data archiving.  I can get a single layer write once DVD for around AU$0.30, which stores 4.38GB.  If wee assume I only use 4GB per disc (since it's difficult to fill it to the brim), that's still 7.5c/GB.  The best value HDD out there is the Samsung 750GB retailing at AU$112.  The drive will give you around 680GB of usable storage after formatting, or the price being 16.5c/GB - over double the cost of optical storage.  Hard drives are also susceptible to shock - flash drives aren't, but also cost a lot more - prices typically starting at AU$3/GB.
Now I do realise whether you need this amount of storage is another issue.