Blu-Ray + Traditional DVD media Hybrid

Original date: December 25, 2004 5:41 AM by sonnik

I'm sure you've heard of Blu-ray, the new optical ROM technology that can potentially hold over five times more (50 Gig) than traditional dual layered DVDs (approx 9 Gig). It appears as though the discs (in addition to the players) will be backwards compatible.

Movie studios (at least Disney) will be backing this technology, and I'm sure the PC market will be quick to jump on it also. I just stumbled onto this article that states a Japanese company has developed a type of media that can be read by both traditional DVD players and Blu-Ray discs. (Other studios are backing the HD-DVD Format)

This is pretty interesting, as to the best of my knowledge we've never had a single media that would be read as both a DVD or a CD depending on the type of player you insert it into. It's promising, because it means studios will be more likely use this as a low cost method of putting out both Blu-ray material for early users of the technology and those still using a DVD player at the time. It also means you can utilize the disc as a DVD prior to buying a Blu-ray player (or BD) without having to upgrade your entire movie collection.

There is one caveat that I can see. With early DVDs, different MPEG2 compression schemes were used. This format offers studios up to 25 Gig for high definition video. As mentioned, traditional Blu-ray media can reportedly hold 50 Gig of material. According to the article, it looks like a 58.5 Gig format disc is in the works.

I'm unclear on just how much room the studios will need to release their movies in HD video format on Blu-ray. At first glance it looks like Blu-ray employs a bitrate of 36Mbps. An approximate calculation is that a present day DVD-9 release would require about 41 Gig for the same material.