Combo Blu-ray/DVD to Ship Soon, Promising End of Dual Inventory
A disc that combines HD and SD content on a single side will arrive soon, possibly fulfilling retailers’ and studios’ desires for a solution to dual inventories. The technology, shown in prototype since 2005 (CED Jan 11/05 p4), will become real in February in Japan. But cost remains a drawback.
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The hybrid disc will have three content layers on a single side. Closest to the surface is the Blu-ray layer, with 25 GB capacity. That’s followed by two layers of DVD data, each equivalent to current 8.5-GB dual-layer DVDs. The disc is read by a blue laser for the Blu-ray content and by a red laser for conventional DVD. All current Blu-ray players have dual lasers to play HD and SD content, and they recognize the different discs when they're inserted in the player. But no combo discs have carried both HD and SD content.
The hybrid technology was first demonstrated by JVC at CES in 2005. It requires layering a disc with special films that limit the travel of blue-laser light to the HD content layer just 0.1 millimeter below the disc’s surface - but allow beams from a red laser to penetrate farther, to the 0.55-millimeter and 0.6-millimeter layers where standard- definition is stored.
The 25-GB limit on the Blu-ray layer was originally seen as a drawback, because it was anticipated that Blu-ray content would need the greater space afforded by the format’s 50-GB discs. JVC later refined its process, by patenting a way to shoe-horn more content through the use of the more efficient MPEG-4 compression scheme (CED Nov 17/06 p6).
The first hybrid Blu-ray/DVD disc will come from Japanese studio Pony Canyon in February. That will come on a multidisc set of the studio’s hit sci-fi TV series Code Blue Emergency Helicopter. The four-disc hybrid set is priced about $400, compared with about $260 for a conventional seven-disc DVD set. The premium is consistent with what that JVC projected for hybrid discs at its 2005 news conference.
The first replicator for the hybrids is Japan’s Infinity Storage Media. It seems to be using JVC patents and manufacturing techniques. Details couldn’t be obtained from Infinity on Tuesday, or from JVC, because of a national holiday in Japan.