Beyond Blu-Ray: 2,000 movies on one disc

I can see the value of this for backing up your drives

but who could afford to buy 2000 movies at once?

or want to spend the time transfering everything to this?

that said, it still makes me drool

4th? You obviously didn't own the LD special edition of T2.

It sounds like a great way to store a lifetime's worth of family photos, videos, favorite music all on one 1.6 TB disc, perhaps making this a competitor with the several data backup services, with monthly or annual fees, that now exist.

Goodbye commercials, mp3, long consumer lines, and the world of nothing interesting to oneself!!!!! 24/7 entertainment for months on 1 disk, image how much info the government could process then? Just perfect for our society!

Someone should inform the scientist at CERN of these new revolutionary disks. As a scientist, storing huge amounts of data in a small place is fantastic! Also, if holographic tv comes around some day, these new disks might find a home. That would be cool!!!

Bigger is not better...
Explanation: those discs are going to be mainly used for backup and safe keeping of whole systems.
this is the problem, very few people will actually go out and buy discs of that size because its price will be very high. Also when I imagine the time it would take to write 1.6TB of information onto a DVD even with fast burners I am repulsed from this product.
I see more convenience in flash media that can store tremendous amounts of information and also fits in your pocket.
I wouldn't mind paying for another copy of “The Terminator” on a USB flash stick with a cool case :p.
In all seriousness I don't see much future for this product.

Ultra High Defination (UHD) which will prove 16 times the amounts of pixels that current HDTV provides will be one use of such a disc. And the 3D Movie will become common in another 5 years, will also increase the size of a the Data file required.

When Blue-Ray was conveived Im sure there many that didn't think a disc that large would ever be filled up with one single movie either.

1.6 tereabyte disc could also be used in the vidoe game industry also.

1.6 TB = somewhere between ~32 and ~70 Blue Ray movies
1.6 TB = somewhere between ~200 and ~400 DVD movies

Where are you guys pulling 1.6 TB = 2000 movies from?
The movies would have to be pretty compressed (low quality).
You speak nothing of compression in this piece.
You only speak about Blue Ray and DVD discs.

Please compare apples to apples.

Keith

"But will the everyday consumer need such a huge optical storage medium?"
Sure they will. You can put entire "google street view" on this disc and let say you will have your GPS display your directing using real pictures instead of computer generated view.

Yes, a 1.6TB optical disc is useful for other things besides holding a bunch of movies; chief among them is data archival.

Moreover, I suspect there will come a time when a 1.6TB disc will required to hold the data of a 3D / holographic entertainment experience.

a disc that can hold 2000 movies. I wonder how this will effect video game in the future. Oh, the possbility.

It's a good thing for those with lots to backup. The price is definately going to be a problem however, seeing as the quality jump for say, movies, isn't going to be anythign substantial. even at higher that 1080p resolution, technology to view them on a standard flat panel tv won't be widespread for years to come. I'm not sure if they can swing a high install base on computer backups alone.

Well, if your watching the Techie Buzz.. There will be even Higer Definition Movies in the future. So at least there is a new Medium to store this on... Now if they can get a Display to show the SuPer High Definition.. that will be amazing..... or Maybe they could develop a way to show True 3d... without the glasses... what next? Ita ll way to amazing......

The math just doesn't add up in this article. A standard DVD movie (not including all the extra features) is approx. 5GB. 1.6TB = 1600GB. That's roughly 320 movies of standard DVD quality (far fewer in HD quality).

2000 movies on one of these discs would equate to a movie size of 800MB. Movies of this size would look nice on a PSP, iPhone, or other portable video devices.

I've been waiting for the last 4 or 5 years for this technology to come to market. Today, many people have HD camcorders and the vast amounts of storage required to store the footage is crippling and costly. Imagine being able to backup a decades worth of home movies on one disk!? Imagine being able to actually have backup copies on affordable media. They can't bring this technology to market fast enough! From all the articles I've read, it could take a long time for the technology to become affordable for the average Joe. Here's to hoping that won't be the case because I've got over 6TB of HD video WAITING to be backed up

When I first heard of DvDs, I was all doom and gloom. I had collected over 1,500 VHS store bought movies.

I was eventually won over by the size factor. I can store hundreds of DvDs in a binder and take them on trips. So DvDs had something to offer. I'm not overly impressed with Blu-Ray. The high-resolution is so high that it makes most sci-fi computer graphics scene's look fake. The lower resolutions hide the reality of what you were watching.

I dont see what this has to offer for the movie industry at the moment. They obviously can't sell you 2,000 movies on one disk for $19.99. Unless of course, they are giving us a Terabyte of gag reels and actor bios.

I suppose that doesnt justify giving up on research. The format that will require this much space is probably unthinkable to us now, but will be valuable in the future.

1.6TB disks would only store around 64 movies when comparing them to Blu-Ray disks. While it is true that you can store approximately 2285 standard definition movies on a 1.6TB disk, the movies stored on a Blu-Ray disk are recorded in high definition. A standard defninition movie requres between 700MB and 4.5GB (4,500MB). Depending on the compression standard used for Blu-Ray movies, one high definition movie could require up to 25GB of disk space (25,000MB).

For some reason this doen't make much sense to me.
1.6TB = 1600 GB a DVD movie is about 4GB or 8GB in a dual layer disc. So the most you could fit in this new discs id about 400 movies at 4GB each or 200 at 8GB each. Am I missing something here?

If this comes in an affordable write format, it could fill a desperately needed nitch for home data backup that is currently not well met by DVD.

Imagine the gaming possibilities! Game makers would never have to worry about craming all the details in the newer more in depth games onto a simple dual layer dvd.. they would have plenty of room to expand. Loving this!

I don't know why they're wasting time researching this. CD/DVD media is a dead technology. Mainly because it has a horrible lifespan and it's fragile. The thoeretical lifespan does not hold up when you consider practical use. Additionally, the quality during manufacturing varies widely. One small flaw leads to a complete failure of the disc. I have old 1.22MB floppy disks that have outlived CD's! That's a horrible track record for CD/DVD. You can also write to a hard drive freely and much faster. SSD technology is pushing the limits in speed even farther.

When you look at the overall comparison, a hard drive is cheaper per megabyte, much faster, extremely versitile, and reliable. Also consider the cost of buying a new drive to read new optical media.

Optical media is old technology. Some people just don't want to let go and realize it's over. I have nearly finished turning all my discs into ISO images to store on hard drives, which can be loaded as virtual drives. It's simply easier and more cost effective.

BTW: Flash drive technology is moving fast enough that it will soon be able to offer 2TB of fast, rewritable, and reliable data, on a little card. Optical media already lost!

The advantage for a physical disk goes beyond how manymovies it can store. If this 2000 movie disc can write 1 movie every 10 minutes it will be viable, but that is part of what is holding blu-ray back, the write speed doesn't keep up with the storage amount.

Also there are the data centers that are trying desparately to replace tape backups.

I'd love for this to happen. As a person that travels a lot taking one or two of these discs would be a lot more viable (and cheaper) to travel with. I already have my whole music collection on one platform and if movies can be done the same way I'd be first in line for them.

I don't think this will compete with blue ray in terms of movies, but I can definitely see this being heavily used to back up hard drives and for some really mind blowing games. I could see a game console using this for sure.

Blu-ray was already dead when it won the war against HD-DVD. This disk has no future. The future is digital downloads with off-site, online back-up systems.

Yes yes, and we can call this Multi-Ray Rom! W00t! lol

"With hard drives exceeding 2TB and the future of movies heading towards digital downloads through services such as Netflix, the future of DVDs, especially Blu-Ray, may be in peril."

I really wish there was a broad survey done on this quote. I don't see Netflix causing a huge disturbance in store sales for DVDs or Blu-Ray, much less rendering them obsolete. The average family is probably a decade away from being technical enough to manage watching digital downloads.
Plus there's always the ever-elusive P2P network that makes even the blockbuster titles readily available for download months before it hits the DVD shelves. That to me is hurting store sales more than Netflix.

For techies such as myself, it's a wonder. I have over a terabyte of podcasts, let alone music, apps and other files. This will enable one stop burning instead of multiple dvd's as well as the ease of creating disk images. I have to use multiple dvd's to create a single disk image which is a waste. It's too bad it's 5 years in the future. By that time, we'll need more storage still and this will be a that's-great-but-I-need-more scenario.

wow. those movies would have to be pretty compressed to fit 2000 on 1.6 terabytes

"There is nothing like having your entire movie collection on one disc."

And there's nothing like scratching that one disc and rendering all those movies worthless in a split second. Woot!

Optical media has peaked out I think, it's too unreliable in the longrun, and I certainly wouldn't really recommend using it for large backups. Imagine having your 1.6 TB disk that took you probably all day to fill up, and you pull it out of the burner, accidentally drop it, your dog runs for it, and gets a good 'paw' on it. Waisted day, and probably a lot of wasted money on the disk, as it won't be out for cheap for some time I'm sure. And that's just one scenario, what if you took the disk somewhere and were relying on that data, and something similar happened? Flash drives are just coming along too fast, and too reasonably priced for this to be a viable option in my opinion. My dog could probably play with my flash drive for a bit, and I would still be able to get the information off of it without a problem most likely, as long as he didn't bit it in half. Another thing is the external HD, while a bit more expensive than flash drives, HD prices are fairly reasonable, and provide a much better backup than a DVD. Even back with CD's I never really used them to back up anything that I didn't have in like 2 other places on physical disks, I just never banked on them to be 'super reliable'. And finally, yeah, the math is off, unless the articles was refering to Divx rips (probably was) you are not going to get 2000 DVD standard def. movies on that disc. I think this type of technology does have a place somehwere, but I just don't think it's going to be in the mainstream.

Fifteen or so years ago, many people thought it was rediculous that there could be such thing as a "mobile telephone" or a computer that is so compact that you can actually take it with you from place to place. But today cellphones and laptops are as commonplace as any kind of technology that has been in our society for decades. CDs were a breakthrough at the time even with their pricetag, but look at their application today. Same story with the DVD and currently with the Blu-Ray disc. The idea of having a multi-laser disc that can hold 1.6TB isn't a strange thing to me and it only shows that history is repeating itself with tech that is coming out bigger and stronger than ever. Yes, the media format and its required hardware will have a heafty cost when it first hits the market, but rewind to ten years ago when DVD players cost hundreds (and even in some cases thousands) of dollars. Now you can run to your local BestBuy and pick one up for less than $99.

Flash media may be the next biggest thing and I'm all for that as well, but for archival purposes multi-terabyte optical media will be huge–especially when you need to burn it to a closed-disc so that information cannot be altered. Also, if properly cared for, these discs can last a very long time. I've had CDs burned in 1996 or earlier that still are in great condition, even when I've gone through multiple hard drives and flash drives within that same time frame.

What a waste. Hardly anyone cares about Blue-Ray, and this new format will be even more useless for the average person. No one except a few tech junkies will ever use it. The only hope it has it to catch on as an archival backup system, but even that is useless because data disks don't last more than a few decades, much less the technology used to play them.

The average size of a movie compressed to an .avi file is about 700MB. I guess you could fit 2000 of those on one of these discs, but as people have said, its not quite the same as DVD quality.

Still though, this new technology is pretty cool.

Who needs a disc anyway when there's hard drives?

There are always new technologies popping up promising tons of data storage. But they all fall by the wayside primarily because there are not universally adopted by media producers. This could see a market share in movie theaters. The 4K or 8K movies in 3D with uncompressed video and audio would be glad to have that space. Home adoption will never happen. Hollywood must first see absolute success with blu-ray before they jump in bed with another format. If Hollywood decides they're not interested they may have a place in backup storage at a several hundred dollars per disc.

WoW geeks will agree:

Will all the expansions that Blizz will have five years from now combined with all the patches, we'll need this. No more installing, downloading, and patching for an entire day! w00t! (Heh, it'll probably take up at least a terabyte of space on your HDD at that point anyway...I'm up to 20GB atm)

David Lewis- When you lose a full Tb of data on a failed 3-month old drive as I just did, you will realize that going from optical storage to HD storage is foolish. Current large HD's are MUCH more prone to failure and data loss than any current optical format.
As others have said, I still have CD-R's from the mid-90's that are fine, but yet I haven't had a HD live longer than seven years or so.
Both technologies have and will continue to have their uses.

well if you convert the dvd's to a format such as AVI M4V or MP4, direct convert, they average 1.5-1.7gb each after conversion and still look dvd quality when streamed to a tv, you could get betwee 900-980dvd's on the disk. Still no where near the 2000 he estamated, but alot none the less.

The promise of the device is as a cheap backup medium.

Do you know how many CD's it takes to backup a 2TB hard drive? Who wants to sit around and change all those out!

Don't keep a backup of all those digital photos, movies, etc? Your loss when it fails.

This is great. With such a fantastic progression in data storage technology, and the already existent awesome graphic processing technology, now visual displays will have to come up with something MEGA-SUPER-AWESOME so that we can properly utilize all this functionality.

This could mean a revolution in console and PC gaming, as well as in the way movies are recorded. Not to mention all the billions of other applications, non-geek related.

Could u imagine an in-home 3-dimensional image projection system that would use, something like, 9 camera angles simultaneously in conjunction with surround sound and environmental lighting to display the most amazing virtual experience you've never even dreamed of?!

All data required for each viewing on this single disk, of course.

Good for backing up those large TB drives, me personally I have my whole dvd collection and all my media on demand in Vista Media Center connected to the Plasma. I could defintely see value for backups however the cost would defintely be a factor...

Have you ever realized that one of your optical disc's was ruined by one scratch?

Can you imagine having that much data ruined all at once?

The future is flash media, in whatever form they think of next

i could foresee Imax theatres using this.

now if game consoles used this type of cd, now that be worth paying 50 bucks for games.

i stopped buying brand new 360 games for 50 bucks cuz i didnt get enough game for my buck.

after i paid 50 bucks for a game that last 3 hours total game play, i called it quits and went ebay,gamestop and amazon.

I will never, EVER, get tired of buying new copies of the Terminator!!!

I would not buy a disk with 2000 movies on it. But it would certainly save room to condense all of the movies and music I own onto a single medium so I can watch/listen to whatever I wanted whenver I wanted.

If PC hard drives are increasing tremendously in storage capacity and we constantly see the releases of high memory flash drives, why the heck would I stick with a CD thats 1.2 TB? It is only a matter of time before we get a 1.2 TB flash drive. Also I enjoy the ability of tranfering and deleting data throuh a USB port rather than burn it on to a disk that might not be rewritable.

This 1.6 TB disk would be great for future technologies such as a virtual movie or a highend video game, but as of right now, it's just good for a big backup. It's been a hot minute since I've purchased a Blueray DVD. I just download movies and store them on large external hardrives to stream throughout the house whenever I want so I don't have to play around with disks anymore. Digital media servers are the future, not physcial discs.

Where's this 2,000 movies figure coming from? Blu-Ray movies are 80gb on average so that's more like 20 movies. The best you can hope for with HD video is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4gb/hour of video, or 8gb for a 2-hour movie of any sort of decent compression. 2,000 movies is like 800mb, which is pretty horrible quality, even at SD resolution.

I for one would use these discs for backup but one has to wonder how much storage we need given the compression technologies we have available.

15 years ago my computer's HD was 800 MB and the CD could hold 650 MB and burn at 1x speed. To burn a whole disk it took 45 minutes or more. Now we have HDs that are 2TB, blue ray disks that are 50 GB, and I can burn a DVD in 12 minutes or less. Do you see a trend here? As computers become more powerful and information content becomes more dense, we will require media that can meet the demands of increase in data requirement, whether it is music, movie, gaming.

This technology is certainly not a waste of time. It may have been said the same about CDs when they were first introduced. "Who needs 700 MB of data!!! That is so HUGE!!!" Now we can't even install an OS with one CD.

In 5 years, HDs that are 10TB will be common and an inexpensive trasportable media will be needed. It will be costly at start like Cds or DVDs have, but eventually prices will drop like flies. The disc can even be encased like the old day CDs to protect it and burners that can burn such period of time will be available as well.

Who is going to pile up 1.6 terabytes on their hard drive before they burn a DVD?

No, not again, I already bit the bullet from VHS to DVD, I'm skipping blueray for now but then I'm not biting on a 50" flat panel 1080 till the price gets under a grand either, I'm cheap that way.

This will make most folks go, "Uggggg, not another format", but it's really going to be beneficial if someone wants to buy the series of movies without having a big, clunky 20-DVD box set.

I'd love the opportunity to buy ST TNG whole series on one disk! BadaSS!

Or buy all the James Bond movies on one disk, etc.

Other than that, I don't see a real need for this level of storage.

I can only imagine the processing power needed to read that thing! One can only wonder if Samsung is going to make their own gaming consle around it much like Sony has with the Blu-ray and Playstation 3.

To all the people pointing out that the math doesn't add up for the DVD's, the author is using a file size that is around 700MB. That is the standard size of a ripped and compressed (low quality) avi file that usually has a DVD as its source. Almost never does the actual movie on a DVD come anywhere near taking up the entirety of the disk space. A DVD can hold around 4GB of data and the highest quality rip I've ever seen from a DVD only topped out at 2GB. Same for Blu-Ray's, do you really think one movie is going to take occupy 25 or up to 50GB of space? Even if that's an HD source, that's still crazy. You can rip and encode an HD movie, depending on the length, for anywhere from 2GB-4GB usually. So that means you can actually fit an HD movie, minus the extras, to a regular DVD if you wanted to. Feeling ripped off yet?

Now that I got that rant out of the way...
While the concept of a disk holding 1.6TB is impressive, it's not practical. The disc will be rediculously expensive, and once it gets scratched, like they all do, to the point where the disc is unplayable, all your movies on that disk are gone unless you have them backed up on a hard drive somewhere. Which in turn brings to light a better question, since you can just plug in an external HDD, which has the potential for more storage space, to a Playstation 3 for example and watch your movies directly off the HDD, what's the point of the disc!? Sure it's portable, but HDD's are getting smaller in size all the time and are certainly more durable than a scratch prone disc. As another commenter already mentioned, the only practical use I can see for this technology is data back-up. Movies, music, and now even video games are moving to direct download, making disc's more obselete by the day.

So is the disc impressive? Yes.
Is it something I will ever be using? Nope.

I don't really think that optical discs are the way to go anymore, flash memory (solid state memory) is more reliable and wont fade over time like optical discs. Besides most optical discs are not reusable and those that can be reused (-RW) are expensive, slow to erase, and only have a few rewrite cycles before they go bad. Flash memory's capacity is growing every year and is getting smaller and smaller and more convenient to carry and has a much better life cycle.

For everybody who thinks that we don't need this much storage, don't forget that the data always fills the available bandwidth.

My first summer job in college was interning at a company building PC Hard Drives – we were building 20MB (that's megabyte) drives, which were considered huge and a lot of people questioned why somebody would need that much storage.

20 Meg Hard Drive. Thats so funny. My first hard drive was 20 Megs and the salesman told me I would never in a lifetime be able to fill it. Its so crazy when you think about what computers can do today compared to 15 years ago.

I'm really pumped for this. I can finally backup my 5TB of music on one disc. The day can't come quick enough.

What happens if you get a scratch on one... Why not just have a small ext. hard drive?

I actually heard about these '5th dimension' optical discs a while ago. I don't know that I'll ever get my wife to give up the 100s of DVDs that we have, but it sure would be nice to be able to have back-ups of all of our movies on one-disc...of course I'm guessing there with still be the copy controls on all our the discs we have now so what would the point of these huge discs be? Other than to see how much information could be crammed on to the proverbial 'head of a pin'.

for anyone who says we will never need this amount of storage space. Please remember the same thing was said when we changed from 1 Meg hard drive to a 20 Meg, then they said it again when we went to a gig, and again when we went to a TB.

Whether or not this specific product gets marketed the technology is amazing. Just imagine what we'll have available to us in 10-20 years.

Good article, except one minor part "The steeper price of Blu-Ray discs and players have hindered that technology from gaining a large share of the DVD market." Lets change that sentence a little. The steeper price of DVD discs and players have hindered that technology from gaining a large share of the VHS market. Sure, as the price of Blu-ray goes down, it will gain a larger share of the market, no doubt. But DVD has been around for, what, 10 years? Blu-ray has been the sole HD movie market for, what, 1 year? Sure, price is part of the picture, but I think time is a far bigger one.

yea, it will just take you 1 hr to find the movie you want to watch with that 2,000 movies...

This is cool.
But it kinda sucks because i have started to get things on Blu Ray!

You know, it still amazes me to see that CDs and DVDs come in the form that they do, simple piece of plastic that easily scratches, etc. Super disposable and easily damaged.

If this DVD comes in the same form they do today why in the world would I spend an ungodly amount of money on something this cool but something that is so fragile?!

Why aren't CDs or DVDs protected like Sony Mini Disks (MD) used to be? I love the idea of the Sony's Mini Disk players, and really the idea behind protecting the actual storage membrane. Imagine how long your DVDs or CDs would last in perfect condition if they were encased in some type of a case, even during playback...

This seems like a great thing, but I would not dare even think about buying it if it looked just like it does in the picture...

oooops, scratch one disk and 2,000 movies are gone...

This is a cool, but I would much rather have a longer life than more storage space for optical media.

I see this having some utility in corporate, government, and media organization environments. My house? Not so much...

okay sounds cool but what if you get a small scratch on the disc, that will probably make 100 movies on the disc skip or not play at all. This would be cool to have on video games cause then they could make them with higher and better graphics to make them look more realistic.

I am glad to see that. I do not purchase digital downloads currently because of the complications of DRM and ths shortcomings of digital delivery. For example, you cannot purchase (that I am aware of) 5.1 music tracks/concerts online, but you can purchase a DVD-A disc. I also always purchase my music CDs as I get the best possible quality, most compatibility, zero DRM, and convenience of a CD that I can do with as I wish. No restrictions, no bit rates, etc. I can convert a CD into an MP3/AAC file all day long, but cannot to the reverse and put the quality back in the music that was taken out by the original compression.

I have 20 dvd's (4.7gb each) and i don't ask for more, i have all my files, images, videos, programs, and games there.

2 TB!! it's too much, for real, maybe i don't need it today, but i'm fine with my dvd's (4.7 gb) i don't need more =)

The concept of such a large capacity medium might be undesirable to some but only part of a natural progression to others. Media technology is always taking these leaps forward much to the frustration of those who invest in every media that hits the market. I have neither the time nor the budget to deal with every new disk, chip, player, device, or do-jigger that comes to market. Instead, I wait to see if we are looking at another Beta Video Tape, Digital Audio Tape, or HD DVD. My patience has been rewarded with reasonably priced VHSs, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, and their respective players. Now, if it turns out I skip the Blue Ray for whatever the market name this will have, I'm okay with that.

Right now I am in the process of converting my VHS home movies to DVD format. Within my lifetime we will see many new recording mediums and formats. I believe the winner will be in the silicone, not magnetic or optical format. I would not be suprised to see a 1.6 TB thumb drive at Fry's selling for $9.95 in the bargan basket.

This is perfect. If you download and save files you can now back up these items without the need for a external hard drive or countless DVDs and CDs

The "2000 movies" the author refers to means DVD rips downloaded by BitTorrent. They're typically around 700MB so they can be burned onto a single CD. You could indeed fit about 2000 of them onto a 1.5TB hard drive and you could have that today, without waiting for new technology. It'd take about 3 months to download that much data at 1.5Mbps.

"we were all getting used to watching movies on Blu-Ray"

What planet do you live on?????

The Hollywood monopoly will never allow that many movies on the disc, even if it was possible (which its not – the math doesnt add up).

But regardless, optical media discs are not worth it. Why would you want to "own" a movie and watch it more than 2 or 3 times ? With all the movies coming out, are you really going to want to watch the same old movie for the 10th time ? Seriously.

I dont buy movies, i rent from Netflix & love it. I have maybe 10 dvd discs (star wars, & some others) mainly as collectibles, but I dont want to watch a movie over & over. And besides, you're harming the environment by purchasing plastic discs, made from OIL, and wasting gas to go buy the disc, not to mention the gas & energy used to manufacture & transport that disc to a store.

I have an Apple TV and I LOVE renting & watching movies on my flat screen LCD tv. It's the future of entertainment, Even Netflix has it's own "box" to download movies too. It's only $99. My Apple TV is fast, only uses electricity, and saves me the time, money & gas of going out to get a movie. There's no monthly fees on it, just the cost of a movie rental or purchase.

Also there is "pay per view" on cable tv, you can get movies that way too. Or download them from your computer & play them on a tv.

Digital downloads will become more popular once the cable companies & hollywood upgrade the technology and solve the piracy issue someday.

Paul...the sci-fi graphics are fake...have you seen a real alien in real life?

Wonder how many of these windows 10 will come on?

What a great idea, spend 10 bucks to back up everything on your comp to one disc, or just spend a hundred for an external drive to back up...Im definitely going with this disc, 1.6 terabytes, man, that could store all my porn, music, and movies and I would have so much free space to work on my mac with, no more bogging down my system! only 5 years to wait, and then samsung, oh man, samsung, thats a scary thought, I hope you dont scratch the disc with your backups on it though what are the chances of recovery once your disc is scratched.

what would be nice is if they found a program that could help people make "main menu"s or something of the sort. They have programs to help people make websites, why not a menu for a DVD? how nice would that be? Like a scene selection: "Bob's 50th, 2005" or "New Year's 2000". I'd definitely invest.

I dont think this new kind of optical disc will replace standard-definition DVD or the high-definition Blu-ray disc formats,since those
disc formats are going to be around for decades and centuries to come.

AxS*: It's called iDvd. Or any of 800 other programs for that matter.

My two cents on this topic is: imagine a world where a videogame developer can make a game as big as they want, without having to worry about being able to fit the entire game on one disc. We could have an Elder Scrolls game that features all 8 provinces of Tamriel, and possibly even the other continents of the planet. Or a Fallout game that would allow you to travel the entire country in the depth and detail of the DC area in Fallout 3. Or a Star Wars game that allows free roam of the entire Republic/Empire (depending on when the game is set). Or, maybe even a Rock Band disc that has ALL the songs from Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and all the DLC.

"The math just doesn’t add up in this article. A standard DVD movie (not including all the extra features) is approx. 5GB. 1.6TB = 1600GB. That’s roughly 320 movies of standard DVD quality (far fewer in HD quality).

2000 movies on one of these discs would equate to a movie size of 800MB. Movies of this size would look nice on a PSP, iPhone, or other portable video devices."

I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about.
I keep ~700mb back-ups of some of my DVDs on my PC. Sure, it's not the original quality, but it's close. So close it's hard to tell.

Get a 700mb DVD copy and see the quality, it's not bad.

we could get all 6 versions of Lord of the Rings, and all of the George Lucas Star Wars opus (all versions, DolbyTrue HD) on one disc!

Who writes these articles????
1) Many people on this thread already noticed – Math doesn't add up! A feature movie on DVD is more like 2GB you still end up with 800 of them in 1.6 TB (Sure you can squeeze a movie into 700MB using DivX or even AVC but try and watch it on big screen)

2) Just like the managed to fill up Blu Ray (25GB single layer) with HD content, they will no doubt find enough definition , dimension and sound quality to fill up 1.6TB in time

3) if you compare early DVD equipment prices (1998-2001) with todays Blu ray prices , you will find prices the same or Blu ray cheaper (inflation adjusted of course)

4) Digital download services currently don't offer the same quality as DVD (although getting close) let alone Blu Ray. So the battle is not over yet – disc manufacturers will try and outpace the digital download industry (limited by broadband bandwidth) with increasingly higher quality of content and thus bigger discs

Well, just pointing out that the format thats most successful is the one used by the blue movie industry.

@compare apples to apples

Using Xvid, you can compress most movies down to CD size (700MB) and still maintain perfectly watchable quality (it's not HD, but life somehow manages to go on in the absence of HD). And at 700MB each, you could indeed fit over 2000 movies on one of these 1.6TB discs.

If this file comparison had been about music, you wouldn't expect them to give you the number of songs in uncompressed WAV format ripped straight off the CD, would you? (No, you wouldn't - you'd expect a comparison in terms of compressed MP3 or maybe even FLAC).

Well, the same goes for video - they're simply giving you the comparison in terms of one of the most common types of compressed video that people currently use when ripping DVDs (Xvid).

they are probably talking abut dadta file stached on the dvd which you can then watch on your xbox or computer no stright burn it asa dvd

I definitely see a LOT of POTENTIAL in this !,

if it is backwards compatible .. people will pay !

and i'm sure even the prices of this will fall 1 yr after it goes commercial..

yes, i do believe HDD storage is easy to use ...but HDD's aren't reliable enough , this is gonna be a nice way to back up the whole HDD in 1-3 discs, rather than 20-40 blu rays , or 200-400 dvdz... ,

1 disc of 1.6 tb will obviously been cheaper than 200~400 dvdz.... + easy to carry , and i'm sure the coating will be much much stronger than dvd... to protect it from scratches and will thus increase durability...

i hope it comes earlier ! ..we need it NOW !

will get one and download every movie i want onto it. Much more convenient than searching though a stack of DVDs that no one watches anymore

BUT. The Xbox 360s ability to play off a flash drive does kind of make this foolish.... you can just rip to your thumbdrive and shove it in the console