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."

HD DVD R cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see how much HD DVD-Rs cost. They are supposed to be manufactured on a very similar process as DVD-Rs... meaning they have the potential to be cheap. (the key selling point of HD DVD)

About HD and BD

[signore pablo]

For those that don't know much about them (i didn't)
STORAGE:
HD- HD DVD supports 15 gb for one layer and 30 gb for dual layer. A triple layer disc in development by Toshiba will hold 45 gb.
BD - Blu-Ray discs as said in the summary hold 25 gb for one layer and 50 for two. Also in development for BD is 100 gb 4 layer and 200 gb 8 layer discs. Both BD and HD are backwards compatible with the current DVD specification (although for BD it is apparently not compulsory for manufacturers to include it).
COPY PROTECTION:
HD - HD's will employ copy restriction developed by AACS LA. Audio Watermark Technology is also being used. All Hd dvd players will include a sensor that listens for audible watermarks placed in the soundtracks of movies. (read more at the wikipedia site [wikipedia.org]).
BD - Blu-ray has "experimental digital rights management that allows for dynamically changing encryption schemes". This prevents a single crack from breaking the whole protection scheme like what happened with DeCSS and DVDs. Also included is digital watermarking technology. (more at wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Interesting note about Blue Ray discs, original discs made with blue ray technology were very susceptible to scratches and had to be enclosed in plastic caddies for protection. TDK came up for a solution to this in January 2004 that gave Blue ray discs "unprecedented scratch resistance." HD DVD discs use the same coating found on cds and dvds. For my money, it seems like BD is the better technology. We'll see how the copy protection pans out.
All information taken from wikipedia.org
LINKS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc" [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD" [wikipedia.org]

Re:So how's this going to work?

[zootm]

Information on the techniques used is available on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. In short, the content is encrypted when it passes through every part of the system, including the display device itself. Sony said they wouldn't be using the option on this media for the time being though.

That's not to say that the encryption is unbreakable, but certainly ripping is to be orders of magnitude more difficult than with DVD. Not impossible, of course.

Re:wow... what a bargain

[DrSkwid]

Low budget film-makers use DV these days, mini-DV tapes are $5 and you get around 12Gb of DV on one (about an hour in SP mode, 90 mins in LP).

IEEE1394 is the biggest boon to cinema since the video camcorder.

Re:So how's this going to work?

[cnettel]

The not-so-obvious thing here is if the player itself signs data making it different each time it's read. The irony of DVD was that it was a piece of cake (more or less) to rip a copy and burn it on another DVD, it was just transcoding or playing the DVD with an unauthorized player that could be tricky.