Audio Video News

No matter how much data storage is available in any medium, people always want more. Take Blu-ray, for example—one might think that 25 or 50GB would be plenty for just about any storage requirement, but some applications need even more. To address this insatiable demand, the Blu-ray Disc Association this week announced a new high-capacity recordable format called BDXL as well as a new hybrid format called IH-BD.

BDXL provides 100 or 128GB of storage capacity on write-once discs and 100GB on re-writable discs using three or four data layers. At first, the primary applications will be commercial, including medical, document, and media archiving, but BDXL could become available to consumers, especially in regions where Blu-ray recording is well established, such as Japan. (I seriously doubt it will be allowed in the US for consumers to record TV shows and the like.)

The other new format, IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid Blu-ray Disc), combines a BD-ROM layer with a BD-RE (re-writable) layer, each with a capacity of 25GB. This allows users to add personal data to critical published data, conveniently storing both on a single disc.

As you might expect, both formats will require new hardware to record and play the new discs, but there's nothing preventing that hardware from being backward compatible with existing 25 and 50GB Blu-ray discs. I can only hope that a high-capacity ROM format is in the works to accommodate extra-long movies, especially upcoming 3D titles, which might not fit on a single conventional disc.