If there ever was a victory for "late adopters", this is it. The Blu-ray Association of DVD technology manufacturers has announced a brand new disc format for Blu-ray and it will not play on existing Blu-ray players.
Called "BDXL", the new Blu-ray format doubles the capacity of the discs to 128GB, to make room for more all sorts of new features. While new BDXL players will play all older formats of Blu-ray, DVD and CD discs, the old Blu-ray players will not be able to use the BDXL discs. Sales of Blu-ray players has been trending up recently, but it certainly hasn't swept the market yet, so I think we get to chalk up a win for the "I'll wait till the dust settles" crowd.
The wait won't be long -- just a couple of months. And because Blu-ray adoption is accelerating, the prices will drop quickly for BDXL players. But, for what can we use all this huge new capacity? ..
Well, the movie industry is happy to have it so that they can store longer movies in higher definition on a single disc. But the really big deal for them and for TV makers, is so that they can store 3D movies on a single disc. (3D movies are, in essence, two visual versions of the same movie, so, roughly, they need twice the space. Roughly.)
There are other cool tricks in the thinking for BDXL too. One is that a rewritable version of the technology will be able to store up to 100GB. Nice for critcal data backups and for sharing HD family movies or keeping albums of the massive RAW image files that newer digital cameras make.
But an even cooler trick in the new BDXL bag is called "Intra-Hybrid Blu-ray Disc (IH-BD)". In this format, a part of the data on the disc is in permanent, read-only, non-erasible form, but another part of the disk is in re-writable form. It's not a very catchy moniker, but I think that the idea will catch on.
Think in terms of margin notes -- except, of course, that the data is digital and can be any material that you'd like to keep with it. A text book with margin notes. Medical records with comments added. A disc of National Geographic articles about the canals of Northern Europe in the read-only part, and all of your notes and photos added from your own trip there. (A fantasy. Send me, Nat Geo.),
In any case, whew; glad I waited for the dust to settle!
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