200 GB Blu-ray's on the way

[hmurchison]

Convenience is great but having everything on one disc means that a loss or destruction of one disc equals the whole series being gone.

Frankly I don't mind that EE verisons of LotR are 4-Discs. I don't mind seeing series that have multiple discs and packaging. Less chance that I lose or damage my discs. Less chance that a glitch in the disc prevents me from viewing other content.

Next is the feasibility of mass producing 200GB 8-layer discs. I'm a wee bit skeptical considering that they are struggling to mass produce DL discs. Sure they'll eventually get the process down but the next hurdle will be QL discs which come with yet another hurdle to jump and then OL discs.

Will my player accept movies in this format? Despite the seemingly incessant "hey look at us we have 1 trillion byte discs working in the lab" PR from some BDA media manf no one has told us if there's even a possibility of our players supporting these discs in the future.

We're up against basic physics here...as the lasers light passes through each layer it changes ever so slightly meaning the tolerances get tighter and tighter. The process alone to bond 8 individual layers together and keep them seamless must be very costly as well.

I think the safe bet is to move towards a higher efficiency codec over MPEG2 and perfect the 50GB discs so that they yield very well. There aren't many series that couldn't be handled nicely across some 50GB discs using AVC.