Cheaper BR player on the way from Sony

[Hulk]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6231

[Nowhere]

Can't wait for cheap PC Bluray recorders personally...I think I'd prefer them than HD-DVD as storage medium...

[Hulk]

$550 is about as cheap as you can get one right now.

$200 is where I'm in.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2010100005+1038406820&Subcategory=5&description=&Ntk=&srchInDesc=

[Elie]

I'll wait for the combo HD-DVD/Blue-Ray player!

It doesn't make any sense in buying seperate players.

[Nowhere]

I'm in at the point when it will ~the same price to buy recorder + recordable discs instead of DVD blanks for a year or perhaps a half...

[wkulecz]

I'm sitting this out until I see burned disks -- HDDVD or BR, actually playing on the players in people's homes.

I want no part of the DVD-R/DVD+RW mess repeated at higher resolution.

--wally.

[Jerry Jones]

I'm sitting this out until I see burned disks -- HDDVD or BR, actually playing on the players in people's homes.

I want no part of the DVD-R/DVD+RW mess repeated at higher resolution.

--wally.

I'm with Wally on this one.

I'm tempted to buy Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 6 to burn HD discs, but even I am choosing to wait until all of the bugs have been worked out.

I seem to recall it took about two or three years with standard definition discs -- loads of patches and software updates -- and I'd be willing to bet that's how long it's going to take with high definition discs.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

You guys are probably right. Even though the switch to HD discs should be just a matter of allowing different content I'm sure there will be all kinds of compatibility problems.

[Hulk]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6448

Not looking good for HD-DVD.

[Jerry Jones]

Not looking good for HD-DVD.

...and not looking good for "Blu-ray Disc" either.

Read the Jan Ozer's nightmare about trying to play HD content on his new Samsung BD-P1000 "Blu-ray Disc" player and the massive incompatibility between players that support what is called "BDMV" vs. "BDAV."

It's a royal disaster:

http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=12495

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[wkulecz]

If y'all want Blu-Ray for data, condider this, Fry's regularly has 500GB SATA drives on sale for $140. This is equal to probably at least 10 Blu-ray disks and has proven reliability. Optical media has consistantly failed to match the reliability of hard drives in our lab -- we've used them all.

For video, until I can give someone a burned disk and expect it to work in their player its a waste of time and effort. We still aren't there yet with DVD+/-R/RW, but since a new player is only ~$40-50 these days the issue is kind of moot if someone insists on holding on to an old player nothing I can do about it. I know our original Toshiba that wouldn't play burned disks died well over a year ago (cost $250 new!)

I think smart money should stay in your pocket and let the titles rot on the shelf until the companies get their act together.

To be honest, a really good SD DVD at 480p (like Lord of the Rings) on our 65" Toshiba 1080i rear projection set is not much of a step down from the best HD Time-Warner delivers (Mark Cuban's HD Net channels, HBO HD & CBS).

--wally.

[Jerry Jones]

That's interesting stuff, Wally.

So you've done some long-term testing to determine that hard disks are one of the most reliable forms of storage.

I'm definitely leaning in this direction, myself.

And it's the least expensive form of storage, too.

And the data retrieval is also fast.

Yes, I'm leaning toward the idea of just buying a two very large capacity hard disks with identical content so that there's a backup in case anything goes wrong.

That looks like the most economical and safe way to store data.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

Wally,

What did the testing involve?

I have NO faith in rewriteable optical media but the record once brand has never failed me if the initial burn was good. I always burn at one speed below the max for the media.

I have discs that are 5+ years old an not one has failed on me thus far.

I'm not disagreeing with you. My anecdotal evidence hardly makes a case. I'm just curious as to the tests you've done.

[wkulecz]

No formal tests we are a research lab not a testing lab, just real world usage storing (archiving) large volumes of various data using just about everything available over the past 20+ years. Main problem with tapes/floppies/zip/SyQuest/Jaz magnetic media has been the short production run life of the devices to read the media -- planned obsolesence. Its been a constant effort to move the data off the media before the readers become unavailable (please don't bring up 9-track real-to-real or FM modulated analog tapes ) but the only data we've actually lost on magnetic storage was when a file server was stolen -- it held backups and was itself backed up in a different location. We have lost data on specific systems due to windows updates or hardware failures but that's why there is a backup policy and people have been fired for not following it. Remember I'm making an important distinction between on-line drives (spinning every day) vs. hard drives that are formated, copied to, powered down, removed and stored.

Way too many optical burned media have been verified, put on a shelf and later found to be unreadable, only our two on-site and one off-site backup policy has saved us. All media have failed individually, its just my experience that the failures/GB stored with the optical media is way higher than any of the magnetic have been.

Storage space is another issue, a hard drive in a removable carrier can be 750GB now in a physical space of maybe 10 CD/DVD/BluRay disks. Having to move the data to other media periodocially due to drive/player unavailablity has been the major way to discover the bad "backups". Lots of old burned CDs just aren't readable in the DVD combo drives in some new computers, fortunately we can usually find an older computer to read it. I've no idea why this is happening, its just an observation. I've saw this just yesterday when a driver disk (not burned) was unreadable in my Sony DVD burner but mounted fine when inserted into the Emprex DVD burner above it! The burned disk that had been in the Emprex mounted fine in the Sony drive, go figure. I see this kind of thing often enough to have lost confidince in optical storage for anything but causual use or distribution.

We recently had a notebook hard drive failure lose some work being done for an important presentation. OnTrack Data Recovery Services was able to recover all of it for far lower cost than the man-hours it'd have taken to re-create -- the original data was backed up, it was the analysis and presentation of that data that was being worked on that was lost just before being complete enough to be backed up. My colleague has learned his lesson and changed the definition of "complete enough". I drop my day's work onto a network drive every night before I leave the office.

Other that for my own work, I'm not involved in the day to day backup or archival activities, I only get called in when there is a problem and its almost always optical media that is the problem.

--wally.