HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Coming Soon to PCs

An anonymous reader writes "A Yahoo! news piece has some sales details for the upcoming Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. They also have some details on disc drives that read the new formats." From the article: "Sony has priced its first desktop computer that will have a Blu-ray Disc burner. The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively and 50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively. The Vaio RC will be launched in 'early summer' and will cost around $2300. At the CeBIT show in Germany last week, Sony announced plans for a Vaio notebook with a Blu-ray Disc drive."

Hard drives more resistant to damage?

[Curien]

I've never broken a DVD by dropping it.

Could be worse

[CptnHarlock]

They could have called the WriteOnce disks something like "Singlewrite Media" and ended up with "BD-SM".. ;P ..

Cheers...

Re:Not anywhere near the success of "old" DVD...

[Jesus_666]

> The new DVDs aren't big enough to make an impact on the backup market (where
> you need 100s of GB per disk to even be considered), and they are (and will
> remain) far more costly than ordinary CD/DVD-RW media. They have some
> attractiveness for PC and console gaming, but even there, without a huge
> amount of in-game video, current DVD capacity will suffice for years for the
> vast majority of games.

Just wait until the new .NET Generation Secure Gaming Framework comes out! All executables will be stored as Secure Managed Code, which means that the executable comes with 12 MiB of executable code, 25 MiB of security certificates and 120 MiB of Trusted Computing interface code. All videos will be stored via a proprietary XML extension (the .NET Generation Secure Media Framework Professional Edition)...

    <bytestream type="video/mpeg" drm-clsid="{1435:543236:EF32EF:AB543634E:3565363B3 4:432242342:ABAD5}"
                checksum="14758f1AFD44C09B7992073CCf00B43D">
      <byte drm-clsid="{435:AA564:CC922329:32323244AB34:A54654 B3343E32:EEFEEF3434:AB3A}">
        0x15
      </byte>
      <byte drm-clsid="{ABC123:F00BAA:CAFEBABE:DEADBEEF:100010 01001110:123456ABC:ABBA}">
        0x15
      </byte>
    ...

...which will ensure that no one in their right mind would ever want to copy that three-second cutscene. Not if it's 500 MiB big.

Re:And don't forget the *Flash*!!!

[doodlelogic]

every exponential trend
comes to a sticky end

Re:Your kidding right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your subject should be "You're kidding, right?". You also are missing apostrophes throughout your post. Hence, I cannot take you seriously since you appear to have the grammar skills of a 14 year old.

Re:wow... what a bargain

[SirDaShadow]

Yeah, my bad - I divided when I should've multiplied. Guess I really hadn't had enough coffee after all...

Here...have a scratched Blu-Ray disc to hold the coffee on the table...