Blu-Ray Vs HD-DVD… The War Continues….

In Jan 2007, Korean Electronic Giant LG decided to go for it, the Dual player that plays both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. So where does this really lead to? The end of the war, where the consumer finally is happy with something that supports both?

Well I see that this kind of a player will only help a small segment of undecided buyers. Most others have decided on what they really want, but since the new generation players a burn in the pocket, the consumer himself is playing a wait & watch game.

The dual players are again a lot more expensive? So how long are these players going to survive? Well the answer lies with what Movie studios & game developers decide. The final format that they think is the best one to support. The reason behind this is the huge storage needed now, is only for better quality movies & high graphics games. If it is for any other purpose, a DVD should really suffice when it comes to storage.

So when it comes to the wait & watch policy, who are the other electronic giants doing it? HP & Samsung seems to be the only other companies that have openly agreed to support both the formats. Ruling out HP as a "player" manufacture, but as only a Drive manufacturer, Samsung seems to be the next in the lead to make a dual player.

Are they going to make it? Well they are looking at LG’s success as a benchmark & would go on with it only if LG succeeds. So what the big deal with having both the formats on a single player? Nothing much for a consumer, except that you have a choice of buying what format you feel like.

How is it different for a retailer? Warner Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer stated in a press release that "The retailer wants to sell hardware and doesn't want to be forced into stocking two formats for everything". So what does Warner come up with a Dual Format Disc, which has Blu-Ray on one side and HD-DVD on the other. So all that the consumer has to do is pick up what he needs and play it on whatever kind of player he has at home.

Doesn’t all of these seem a unnecessary? Why cant we just have one format and get on with it? Well all I could think of with this is that Corporations have gotta make money & how best to do that? Force more on to the consumer. It’s us who finally pays :-|

I have no clue as to how long is this war's going to go. If Pioneer has their way with the UV Disc ( See my previous post). The Blu-ray & the HD-DVD both gotta did their grave.

Copyright © Dennis D Maliekal
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Ultra Violet Disc (UVD), The next Generation of Optical Storage.

The Blu-ray Disc’s just out & it seems to be obsolete already???? Talk of the town, with the community who’s crazy with optical storage is the way Pioneer come out with their new disc called the Ultra Violet Disc.

So what’s so special about this circular chap, who stores data? Nothing much, all that it can do is store around 510 GB ;-) !!!!!!!

Yup, you read it right, FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN Giga Bytes of raw storage!!!!

The way that this is done is by using an Ultra Violet beam to read and write to the Disc, which basically can let you have pits & lands 20 times closer than what they are in a Blu-ray disc. The distance between the pits is around 70 nanometer, which is like a single hair split a thousand times. Boy that sure is small.

When is this dude hitting the markets? Well pioneer as of now says that this is available only in there labs in Japan. They are themselves not sure as to when it could be commercially possible for this to come out. This was a lot similar to the press statements in 2002 – 2003, when the Blu-ray was to be out too. So I guess another 2 -3 years from now… we have a 12 cm disc that store half a Tera Byte.

I actually vaguely remember reading about this disc in How stuff works (I was working on a technical presentation on the Blu-ray disc for my College Project), but they then were themselves (i.e. How Stuff Works) not sure of the technology.

Well anyways, let’s see what the futures got in store!! Till then, way to go guys who’re making it technology like this possible :-)

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DVD's Not Recognized On DVD Combo Drives In Windows

DVD's Not Recognized On DVD Combo Drives In Windows !!!!



This was a interesting problem that i faced for quite some time. CD’s seem to work perfectly fine , I could even burn CD’s , but then DVD’s  :-( I even called service center and told them that I had a problem & needed a replacement.

On one fine day, I decided to install a Linux on my PC & surprisingly the DVD combo worked just fine, with it recognizing DVD's very well .. Whoa !!! Time out ... This is cannot be true,works on one OS & not on the other ??? I switched back to windows, the same old crap .. DVD's .. they seemed alien to the drive !!!

That's when it flashed to me, the engineers in Microsoft with their Abundant intelligence when they developed windows.. ( As Usual ) never bothered to correct the bug ( I Just hope those guys have seen my blog to know that the a problem like this exists  :-) ) Well this is nothing close to a problem in Linux Though :-D

The solution to this problem is very simple, make sure that if your Combo drive is connected to your PC, it’s a master drive.

I had it as a Secondary slave all the time & that’s why I had to go through this entire nightmare  I switched it to be a seconday master & viola it worked :-D !!!!!!

If you guys ever faced this problem & you found this solution helpful, do post me back a reply :-)


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