FMD. Throw away your DVD player

[Jorden]

Read some of the conscripts on Constellation 3D's pages and ask yourself why you want a DVD player for Christmas

"The introduction of the Fluorescent Multi-layer Disc (FMD) smashes the barriers of existing data storage formats. Depending on the application and the market requirements, the first generation of 120mm (CD Sized) FMD ROM discs will hold 50 - 140 Gigabytes of pre-recorded data on 12 - 30 data layers with a total thickness of under 2mm. In comparison, a standard DVD disc holds just 4.7 gigabytes. With C3D's proprietary parallel reading and writing technology, data transfer speeds can exceed 1 gigabit per second, again depending on the application and market need."

On another page you'll find "Research has shown that media containing up to a hundred layers are currently feasible, thereby increasing the potential capacity of a single card or disk to hundreds of Gigabytes. Use of blue lasers would increase the capacities to over 1 Terabyte." ... Jikes !!

Vapourware? Hell no. They just shown the full movie Bounce in a New York cinema on October 12th 2000.

Looks like we want something else from Santa

Jord




[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 08 December 2000).]

[Gurm]

Jorden, Jorden, Jorden...

It has taken half a decade for DVD's to become "mainstream". Even now, many movies come out on VHS first, despite DVD being cheaper to make. Many older films still aren't available on DVD. Some never will be.

FMD may be wonderful, but it won't catch on any time soon. Minidiscs have utterly failed to replace DVD's. DAT utterly failed, period.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Jorden]

Hiya Jason,

Welcome back from the land of beyond

Who said anything about it being used for movies? Oh, errm, I did above, right?

What about you showing up with your PC at a LAN party, hdd's (all 3) wiped clean, and the only thing you have lying in the for the rest empty CD-BOX is one FMD CD? Containing all your games, all your drivers and a working version of Windows? And on the side a couple of movies to watch when the rest play games you don't like... or ... shock... didn't burn on that FMD

???????????????

Jord.

[Liquid Snake]

Originally posted by Jorden:
"With C3D's proprietary parallel reading and writing technology"

I don't like the word proprietary.

[spoogenet]

Well, I'd like to add a couple of things to this. First off, they conveniently neglect the capacity of a dual layer DVD. While they're talking about 30 layer MFD's, they only mention the single layer DVD. Dual layer DVD can hold close to 9 GB/side.

However, MFDs are a very promising technology. While DVDs have taken a while to catch on, it really doesn't take much to rig a CD player to read MFDs. Simply put, MFD drives can easily be integrated with DVD drives without adding too much to the cost, and thus also put into OEM systems. This means, oh wait, what does it mean? Oh, it means that MFDs may become a well-used technology in the near future.

It does not mean that they will just up and replace DVDs, although the possibility is there. We are already getting a little close to the limits of DVDs and will soon need more capacity. They also have many other applications other than just video. For instance, the amount of library data that can be held on a single MFD is extraordinary, and I mean books when I say library. 140 GB is a good amount for an encyclopedia.

One way or the other, even if they don't catch on mainstream, they have some potential uses where current technology isn't really a great solution. Personally I look forward to their popularity and success. But that's just my $0.02.

But then again, right around the time MFDs catch on, some other technology will come along and be so much better, right?

b

[Jorden]

True... by the time FMD's catch on, the next gen FMD's are around the corner.

Btw, what you said about ordinary CD-ROM Players reading these discs, is what they said last year on their site: A simple firmware update would do it... but at that time they said their FMD's would be capable of holding 40Gb maximum

I hope that anyone picking up this medium picks it up to the max, meaning what they said about the CD-ROm in it's hayday: "Play your program from the CD, instead of installing half the software from the CD to your harddrive..." (Or more, like these days )

Jord.

[spoogenet]

Yeah, last year they also talked about 120 GB disks, and how they can hold 20 hours of full quality HDTV video/audio. Too sweet.

I'm not sure how well they'll do, since DVD is just being adopted still and many companies have invested too much in it to just switch, but assuming it is as easy as they claim to read FMDs, then there's no reason to not support them as well.

We'll see, time always tells. I just look forward to having a 140 GB CD.

b

[The Rock]

And here I was, eagerly looking forward to plain ole 99 minute CDRs.

Bart

[Thundrchez]

"Proprietary", eh? Just remember that Beta was proprietary and VHS was not. Here we are 20 years later... how many of us have VHS vcrs compared to how many of us have Beta vcrs?

In order to succeede in the home market, it has to be an open standard. It has taken them many years to get DVDs to where they are today. Divx went belly up even though it was compatible with regular DVD.

[spoogenet]

Yes, but Beta is still used, just not for the home market. They are bigger, and bulkier, two things the home market do not appreciate. Can't say that all VHS's success is due to being an open standard.

Divx, well, I don't suppose you remember the Circuit City lawsuit, do you? While Divx was compatible with DVDs to some extent, many consumers were blatantly misled and did not know what they were buying into, thus causing Circuit City to pay quite a toll, and hence Divx is dead. Personally, I think Divx would have been the perfect solution to the rental market, which is where it really fits in well, because renting a scratched DVD is a waste of time. However when you purposely poorly market products and mislead customers, you will eventually suffer the consequences.

b

[superfly]

That's very nice tech and all but as far as dvd's go,has there been any games or apps released on them so far???

I can only remember one game being available on dvd and even then,only because it had tons of fmv sequences.

It was...(drum roll,please.. )...blade runner....

I mean dvd's have been out now for about 4 years now and even today when almost every computer user has a dvd rom drive,games and apps are still released in cd-rom.

even in large games where all the data needs several cd-rom's to fit and is surely more expensive than using only one dvd disk.

[xortam]

Riven is available on DVD.