Blu-Ray in a PC? Why? Options

[teh roxxors]

The only practical reason to have a Blu-Ray drive in a PC is to watch movies, correct?

I'm thinking the $15 price of a single blank Blu-Ray disk makes data archiving impractical, as dual-layer DVDs are now just under $1 each.

The only other reason I can think of would be bragging rights, which some guys care about a lot.

[Slipstreem]

The cost of CD burners and blank CD media was extortionately high when they first appeared on the market. Early adopters are always the ones to pay the premium for what classifies as a luxury item. Give it a year or two and Blu-ray will drop to the price where normal people can afford it.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

[pdq]

I'm just guessing here, but I would think that it would be cheaper to manufacture a blank single-layer Blu-Ray disc than a blank dual-layer DVD disc, once the volumes are similar. The price of Blu-Ray recorders should also come down quite rapidly once they get past the low part of the S-curve.

In the mean time I am quite willing to wait until there is a price crossover.

[smok3]

it appears that blu ray recorders adoption will be slow, since:

a. there are people who are happy with single or double layer DVDs
b. people with extremly large/safe hd arrays (HDs are getting cheaper and cheaper)
c. people who have mucho more to backup than blu ray can offer
d. new video codecs (namely h.264) can make HD video look good at SD DVD bitrates
e. highly annoying protection scheme that really wont help with adoption

[Fandango]

The only practical reason to have a Blu-Ray drive in a PC is to watch movies, correct?

Correct, but also "ripping BD movies" could be added, for those without a complete HDCP pathway in their system. Although I would file that under "watching movies", too.

I wonder when the first BD games come out for PCs. Currently the big games use DL-DVDs so far.

Concerning using BD for backups... cost per gigabyte isn't the whole issue at the moment. There's been no tests or experience with long-term durability of BD-Rs. Durability of certain brands of DVD-Rs extents that of hard disks tremendously, been astonished by that myself but it is true... http://www.heise.de/ct/08/16/116/ (sorry, it's in German)
BD-Rs have to compete with those DVD-R discs before they can be seriously considered a backup solution.

This post has been edited by Fandango: Jul 23 2008, 19:56

[Funky Monk]

The only practical reason to have a Blu-Ray drive in a PC is to watch movies, correct?

....

Concerning using BD for backups... cost per gigabyte isn't the whole issue at the moment. There's been no tests or experience with long-term durability of BD-Rs. Durability of certain brands of DVD-Rs extents that of hard disks tremendously, been astonished by that myself but it is true... http://www.heise.de/ct/08/16/116/ (sorry, it's in German)
BD-Rs have to compete with those DVD-R discs before they can be seriously considered a backup solution.

mmm, Good point. So many people forget that disk durability is a big thing esp for new disk formats. I think the big thing for Blu ray disks will be kepping them from being scratched. The protective layer keeping the data safe on those is significantly less then that of dvds or cds and as a result might effect intial up-take of these disks into the IT industry. But really, when you can back up many many gb onto an external hdd these days and keep it locked away there isnt tooo much need for Blu-ray disk as of yet. Although they would be handy to have really important big files on when they get big enough to have to put them on a Blu-ray disk.

[richms]

Look at dvd-r vs cd-r - we have just got to the stage where the blanks cost the same in the last year, and its being around for ages.

I think its almost at the stage where cd-r prices will go up above dvd-r since noone needs them anymore much.

[pdq]

I have not heard or read anything about stability of blu-ray recordable discs, but strictly from a chemical standpoint I would think that a dye that is recorded by blue light would have better stability than a dye that is recorded by red light.

Also, there will be a need for CD-R discs as long as there are CD players that don't play DVD discs.

[insane_alien]

Isn't this a bit like the people who said: DVD in a PC? Why? back when DVD's first came out.

well, for one, there is the movie aspect, and i don't think it will be too long before games start getting released on bluray and 25GB a layer is a lot. basically, it will serve the same purposes as CD and DVD only better.

[Lashiec]

I wonder when the first BD games come out for PCs. Currently the big games use DL-DVDs so far.

Seems like id is considering that option for Rage. So far, I guess all games can fit easily in a DVD, unless you make a movie that pretends to be a game like Mr. Kojima and MGS4

[Gow]

it appears that blu ray recorders adoption will be slow, since:

a. there are people who are happy with single or double layer DVDs
b. people with extremly large/safe hd arrays (HDs are getting cheaper and cheaper)
c. people who have mucho more to backup than blu ray can offer
d. new video codecs (namely h.264) can make HD video look good at SD DVD bitrates
e. highly annoying protection scheme that really wont help with adoption

Agreed.

well, for one, there is the movie aspect, and i don't think it will be too long before games start getting released on bluray and 25GB a layer is a lot. basically, it will serve the same purposes as CD and DVD only better.

Yet we are on the cusp of the holographic medium age that will kill all the optical medium. Why push a newer format for desktop use that uses Microsoft's VC-1 codec when h264 can be used on computers without the need of a huge disc and at the size of a Dual layer DVD or slightly larger?

Why must space be sacrificed to achieve a certain quality when that certain quality can be achieved without the sacrifice of space?

Not to mention what part will flash medium play in this whole affair as flash medium is becoming bigger, faster and cheaper.

[Fandango]

BD also supports H.264, and I'm guessing that this codec is/will be dominant over VC-1.

[HotshotGG]

Seems like id is considering that option for Rage. So far, I guess all games can fit easily in a DVD, unless you make a movie that pretends to be a game like Mr. Kojima and MGS4

Speaking of that does anyone know how much space an actual PS3 game takes up on a Blu-Ray disc? I am guessing it's between 3 and 5 GB. I mean it can't be that much? If that's the case and they have all that space to work with then why aren't they writing purely cut scene games? What about for video how much does say a two hour movie encoded with H.264 take up for space? Do we have some estimate?

[insane_alien]

Speaking of that does anyone know how much space an actual PS3 game takes up on a Blu-Ray disc? I am guessing it's between 3 and 5 GB. I mean it can't be that much? If that's the case and they have all that space to work with then why aren't they writing purely cut scene games? What about for video how much does say a two hour movie encoded with H.264 take up for space? Do we have some estimate?

i don't know how much space a PS3 game takes up but flightsimulators can take up a lot of space as a detailed world texture is absolutely massive. Flightgear needs 3 DVD's for full world scenery XPlane v9 ships on 6 DL DVD's+1 for the game itself and needs 70GB for its world scenery(its compressed on the DVD's). so we already have games that would be multibluray discs.

i doubt it will be long before other games catch up, data proliferation and all.

basically any current multi DVD game sold today would benefit with bluray.

[kornchild2002]

BD also supports H.264, and I'm guessing that this codec is/will be dominant over VC-1.

It depends on the movie studio. Both Warner Bros. and Universal continue to use Microsoft's VC-1 codec while Sony, Disney, and Paramount use the mpeg-4 AVC video codec. From my experience, both provide exactly the same quality with movies. That is why I never understood the reason why Blu-ray had the extra 20GB of storage (other than for HD extras) as I have some really long movies on HD-DVD and they look and sound exactly the same as their Blu-ray counterparts. There were only a couple of times when a Blu-ray release was better than an HD-DVD release (I Am Legend had more special features on the Blu-ray version and Blazing Saddles looked better on Blu-ray) or vice versa (Training Day looked better on HD-DVD as many of the other earlier cross platform titles as that was back when Blu-ray was still using the mpeg-2 codec while HD-DVD was using either the AVC or VC-1 codecs).

I recently purchased a new desktop drive and I opted to get the Blu-ray reader in it. Why? So I can have more than one Blu-ray player. My PS3 is currently in my living room along with my other consoles yet I have two HDTVs; one in my living room and one in my bedroom. I now have my new PC hooked up to the TV in my bedroom via HDMI and I can watch movies on Blu-ray. I will never use the drive to rip Blu-ray movies as I think it is just too much of a pain. However, I was in need of a new computer to hook up to my HDTV in my bedroom and I thought the extra $180 was well worth it for a Blu-ray reader.

[j7n]

What about for video how much does say a two hour movie encoded with H.264 take up for space? Do we have some estimate?

From my experience it's about the same as with DVDs. Main movie takes up around 21-27 GB. The rest of the dual layer disc is filled with audios and extras. One of the stupidest things I've seen is usage of multiple identical audios, like lossless DTS + uncompressed, or lossless MLP + lossless DTS.

Edit: I don't see why there was the need for so many formats. If there was one lossless-hybrid format it would be much easier to support. Hint: WavPack. But not in this world.

This post has been edited by j7n: Aug 3 2008, 02:31

[insane_alien]

What about for video how much does say a two hour movie encoded with H.264 take up for space? Do we have some estimate?

From my experience it's about the same as with DVDs. Main movie takes up around 21-27 GB. The rest of the dual layer disc is filled with audios and extras. One of the stupidest things I've seen is usage of multiple identical audios, like lossless DTS + uncompressed, or lossless MLP + lossless DTS.

yeah, that bugs me. they aren't pressed for space now so full uncompressed is fine and everything supports it. some players don't support some or all of the lossless codecs and even some of the lossy ones used. which again seems silly.

[kornchild2002]

yeah, that bugs me. they aren't pressed for space now so full uncompressed is fine and everything supports it. some players don't support some or all of the lossless codecs and even some of the lossy ones used. which again seems silly.

That is why I like my PC and PS3 as they have the ability to transcode TruHD and DTS-HD MA to surround sound PCM which is compatible with my receiver. My receiver is not compatible with either TruHD or DTS-HD MA. In the beginning Sony was really pushing the PCM (ie uncompressed) format with Blu-ray movies but have since started using TruHD. I believe that Spider-Man 3 was actually their fist release where they were touting TruHD over PCM (though both formats were on the disc). I guess I don't see a need for these other lossless formats as Blu-ray can provide plenty of space for PCM. Most movies take up around 15-20GB anyway (my PC reports some 90 minute titles as being around 15GB) so that means that one single layer is dedicated to the movie. There is more than enough room on the other layer to use PCM audio as support for the lossless formats is sketchy at best unless your Blu-ray player can transcode to PCM on-the-fly.

[smok3]

they say, they say that about 15 Mbits should be close to transparent for 1920x1080 25p (i'am not counting in audio). Reading doom9, people are generally happy with about 8 Mbits for same (which means we are at around max. DVD bitrates).

[DVDdoug]

The only practical reason to have a Blu-Ray drive in a PC is to watch movies, correct?

If you own an HD video camera, an HD TV, and a Blu-Ray player, you're going to want a Blu-Ray burner in your PC to make HD home movies.

[chelgrian]

yeah, that bugs me. they aren't pressed for space now so full uncompressed is fine and everything supports it. some players don't support some or all of the lossless codecs and even some of the lossy ones used. which again seems silly.

The problem is not space it's getting data off the disk, the maximum data rate is determined by how fast you can spin the disk. This in turn is determined by the accuracy which which you can machine the disk and the strength of the material. If you even do lossless compression on your audio you free up data rate for getting video off the disk at the (extremely cheap) computational cost of decompressing the audio.

Having said that I believe that the maximum datarate for bluray is 48Mbit/s so it's less of a problem than the 9ish you could reliably get off a DVD.

[Nick.C]

The only practical reason to have a Blu-Ray drive in a PC is to watch movies, correct?

If you own an HD video camera, an HD TV, and a Blu-Ray player, you're going to want a Blu-Ray burner in your PC to make HD home movies.

How soon before you just link to your online "drive" and stream the content to any player, anywhere....?

[chelgrian]

How soon before you just link to your online "drive" and stream the content to any player, anywhere....?

Given that the internet currently can't cope with SD video distribution it's going to be a while. The infrastructure involved in making high quality streaming work (think akamai for individuals) isn't there. It will be expensive and there is no one to pay for it. Also currently even if you have "broadband" internet access the chances are your connection will be asymmetric and have lousy upload data rate. The ISPs have no interest in offering more upload bandwidth currently all it will get used for is illegal distribution via bittorrent and again who's going to pay for the backbone infrastructure.

[j7n]

they say, they say that about 15 Mbits should be close to transparent for 1920x1080 25p (i'am not counting in audio). Reading doom9, people are generally happy with about 8 Mbits for same (which means we are at around max. DVD bitrates).

People at Doom9 are mostly happy with transcoded 1.5 MBit/s SD material. That's the "portable range" of bitrates. Now would you suggest that all music should be distributed as 128 kBit/s MP3, since it's transparent for most people?

[smok3]

Now would you suggest that all music should be distributed as 128 kBit/s MP3, since it's transparent for most people?

No, i would not.