Learning About the Blu-ray Disc

The Blu-ray disc is a great invention of our time, as it allows the best high quality picture and sound to be played on compatible televisions. As of now, it is the only high definition disc on the market, but what’s the problem with that when it works so well?

The Blu-ray Disc Association is responsible for creating the Blu-ray standard. It is comprised of almost two hundred mega-corporations, all of which have a stake in Blu-ray’s success. They developed the format over a period of years before completing it in 2004.

Unlike DVDs, Blu-ray discs can hold a whopping twenty five gigabytes of data, which is why it can play movies in high definition. The amount of data also determines other things, such as sound quality and special features.

The storage capacity of Blu-ray discs can be increased by adding more layers to the disc itself. Each layer adds 25MB of space, and as of now, only single and dual-layer discs exist, so the maximum capacity is 50GB. In the future, as many as eight layers could be installed in each disc, meaning the maximum capacity would reach two hundred gigabytes!

The breakthrough with Blu-ray discs is the wavelength of the reading laser, which is around three hundred nanometers shorter than DVDs (blue and red, respectively). The shorter wavelength maximizes the usable area on the disc surface and creates more storage capacity.

As for the speed of a Blu-ray disc, it plays at 36Mbps at 1x. Since future formats will require more speed, the rate will be increased to as high as 8x. Higher speeds can be reached, but the limiting factor is the hardware currently available.

Blu-ray can take a number of different forms, just like the computer form of a DVD is a CD, roughly. All discs share similarities, which enables some formats to be combined, such as a proposed Blu-ray and DVD disc, which could be played on either type of respective hardware. DVD is bound to become obsolete in the near future, so many people wonder what the point of making such a format would be.