O
OhioGuy
I've recently found out that a new video disk standard has emerged - the
Holographic Video Disk. Maxell started shipping 300 Gigabyte versions to TV
stations about a year ago, and they've caught on big. The stations use them
to archive literally days worth of TV programs onto a single disk.
It is only a matter of time before consumer versions start being released,
and ever larger sizes are developed.
Currently, the HVD holds 300 Gigabytes, but due to the capability of using
nearly all of the space inside of the disk for a holographic storage, the
eventual upper limit of the disks should be close to 4 Terabytes.
Here's how things stand currently:
Tech starting eventual
HD-DVD 15 GB 30 GB
Blu-ray 25 GB 50 GB
HVD 300 GB 3,900 GB (that's 3.9 Terabytes)
So, the current HVD's hold 12 times what the current Blu-ray disks hold, and
20 times what the current HD-DVD's hold. That's also the equivalent of about
63 DVD's - all on one disk. Currently, with the HVD, I could archive my
entire hard drive to a single disk.
Using mpeg-4, I can put about 22 hours of video on a single DVD. This means
I could put over 1,300 hours of video on a single HVD. It could play for
over 57 days - nearly two full months - 24 hours a day before it would run
out of fresh material to watch. (assuming the roughly 200 megabytes per hour
that I encode video into h.264)
Considering that these things have been shipping for a year now, that HD-DVD
and/or Blu-ray writing drives are still out of everyone's price range, do
you think that these things might just end up as the next real video
standard?
Sure, Blu-ray and HD-DVD want us to adopt their standard, but what if people
just start buying these as data archiving drives, and backing up all of
their video collections onto them? If pretty much every PC out there has one
of these, it then becomes a de facto standard. Then it might not be too long
until we started seeing stand alone players, and the studios, of course,
would want to start releasing films in the format. Or, if they didn't, we
could keep downloading and archiving them onto the disks ourselves.
The greatest thing about these (other than the obvious huge storage size) -
they have a protective sleeve, just like the old floppy disk! Yes, no more
scratched disks, smudged fingerprintes, or lost data from use.
Take a look here for a pic of an actual HVD
http://aycu07.webshots.com/image/25646/2003064100820218784_rs.jpg
Holographic Video Disk. Maxell started shipping 300 Gigabyte versions to TV
stations about a year ago, and they've caught on big. The stations use them
to archive literally days worth of TV programs onto a single disk.
It is only a matter of time before consumer versions start being released,
and ever larger sizes are developed.
Currently, the HVD holds 300 Gigabytes, but due to the capability of using
nearly all of the space inside of the disk for a holographic storage, the
eventual upper limit of the disks should be close to 4 Terabytes.
Here's how things stand currently:
Tech starting eventual
HD-DVD 15 GB 30 GB
Blu-ray 25 GB 50 GB
HVD 300 GB 3,900 GB (that's 3.9 Terabytes)
So, the current HVD's hold 12 times what the current Blu-ray disks hold, and
20 times what the current HD-DVD's hold. That's also the equivalent of about
63 DVD's - all on one disk. Currently, with the HVD, I could archive my
entire hard drive to a single disk.
Using mpeg-4, I can put about 22 hours of video on a single DVD. This means
I could put over 1,300 hours of video on a single HVD. It could play for
over 57 days - nearly two full months - 24 hours a day before it would run
out of fresh material to watch. (assuming the roughly 200 megabytes per hour
that I encode video into h.264)
Considering that these things have been shipping for a year now, that HD-DVD
and/or Blu-ray writing drives are still out of everyone's price range, do
you think that these things might just end up as the next real video
standard?
Sure, Blu-ray and HD-DVD want us to adopt their standard, but what if people
just start buying these as data archiving drives, and backing up all of
their video collections onto them? If pretty much every PC out there has one
of these, it then becomes a de facto standard. Then it might not be too long
until we started seeing stand alone players, and the studios, of course,
would want to start releasing films in the format. Or, if they didn't, we
could keep downloading and archiving them onto the disks ourselves.
The greatest thing about these (other than the obvious huge storage size) -
they have a protective sleeve, just like the old floppy disk! Yes, no more
scratched disks, smudged fingerprintes, or lost data from use.
Take a look here for a pic of an actual HVD
http://aycu07.webshots.com/image/25646/2003064100820218784_rs.jpg