RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 68

By Chris Angelini

Format wars are rarely good for business, and the current blue laser snafu is up there with the industry’s top technology squabbles. Should people buy Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD, both, neither? Helping your customers make smart decisions means understanding blue laser’s inner workings and the extra factors needed to turn them into a full solution fit for consumers and businesses alike.

Most of what DVD technology offers over old school CDs is common knowledge, but a quick recap will help demonstrate the significance of today’s emerging formats. Physically, DVDs and CDs look very similar. They’re the same diameter and constructed using several plastic layers that yield about 1.2 millimeters of thickness. Yet CDs top out at around 700MB of data while DVDs hold 4.7GB—almost seven times as much information. The discrepancy is a result of the distance between the tiny pits that represent ones and zeros. The track pitch, or space between tracks on a disk, of a CD is measured at 1,600 nanometers. DVDs shrink that to 740nm. Moreover, CDs have a minimum pit length of 830nm, while DVD pits measure at 400nm. Between those two statistics alone you can fit 4.5 as many pits on a DVD versus a CD of the same size. The rest of the capacity comes from optimization of on-disc error correction information.

Reading the smaller bumps and grooves on the surface of a DVD requires a laser with a shorter wavelength. Whereas CD players employ a 780nm laser, DVD drives use 650nm red lasers. Both of the next-generation optical disc formats take evolutionary cues from DVD in miniaturizing even further.

Blu-ray: TKO?

If you judge solely on capacity and data density, Blu-ray is the better of the two next-generation formats. Blu-ray reduces the 740nm track pitch and 400nm pit length of standard DVDs to 320nm. The smaller bits of data are read by a 405nm blue-violet laser, which is where Blu-ray gets its name. Incidentally, the rival to Blu-ray, HD DVD, also uses a blue-violet laser. But because the two disc formats situate data at different depths in their recorded media, each requires a unique aperture that renders the technologies incompatible.

The Blu-ray and HD DVD standards are separated in their respective approaches to how data should be stored. Rather than sandwiching data between .6mm polycarbonate substrates like a standard DVD, Blu-ray discs are said to take a page from hard drives, which put the information layer right on the media surface. The technical reasons for the change make sense—adding .6mm of plastic between a smaller laser and miniaturized data tracks makes it much more likely to encounter distortion. Taking data to the disc’s surface enables higher density. And that’s why single-layer Blu-ray discs hold up to 25GB of information.

On the other hand, hard drive circuitry is housed in a sealed enclosure, protecting against any possible chance of contamination. CDs and DVDs get tossed in the back seat of your car, set on top of entertainment centers, and stacked on top of each other in spindles. No business in the know is going to archive data on an exposed optical media so susceptible to damage. In response to the concern over Blu-ray’s vulnerability to abuse (and in a move to avoid having to house the discs in plastic cartridges), Sony, Panasonic, and TDK developed their own hard-coating technologies less than .1mm thick to protect against scratches or stains.

HD DVD: Affordable Alternative

Right on the surface, HD DVD suffers an inherent capacity disadvantage. Whereas a single-layer Blu-ray drive packs in 25GB of data, a comparable HD DVD disc tops out at 15GB. Again, there are good technical reasons for the discrepancy. HD DVDs are built exactly like DVDs. A data layer is protected on both sides by a .6mm plastic substrate. Accounting for distortion introduced by the thicker plastic, HD DVD employs 200nm pits and a 400nm track pitch. The extra protection against scratches thus comes with a tradeoff in available space.

Don’t count HD DVD down and out, though. The technology’s more conventional media is significantly easier to manufacture, so your customers can expect to pay two or three dollars less per disc for blank media versus Blu-ray. The burners are also turning out to be less expensive than their Blu-ray competitors. As a lower-cost solution you can use to help get your customer onboard with the next generation of optical technologies, HD DVD is very attractive in its own right.

Next-Generation Entertainment

On top of capacity, the Blu-ray and HD DVD specifications define support for audio codecs, video codecs, Internet support, content protection, and maximum bitrates, which affect quality. The idea is that, with so much extra space available, next-generation media should enable playback that looks and sounds better than the content stored on 4.7GB DVDs.

Both formats add the MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 video codecs to DVD’s familiar MPEG-2 scheme. MPEG-4 AVC, perhaps more commonly known as H.264, uses a much more efficient compression algorithm than MPEG-2, matching the quality of its predecessor at roughly half of the data rate. As a result, dual-layer HD DVD discs have room for a little over five hours of high-def video content encoded at 13 Mbps. A Blu-ray disc holds more than eight hours of video at resolutions up to 1920x1080.

Those numbers don’t take the next generation of audio codecs into account, though. Blu-ray and HD DVD require Dolby Digital and DTS at a bare minimum. Standard DVD only dictates the need for Dolby Digital. Blu-ray incorporates optional support for Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio. Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD succeed their respective standard-def platforms. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio go a step further, shedding the lossy compression algorithm in favor of lossless audio and up to 14 discrete channels. HD DVD players support the same standards as Blu-ray but add Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD to the mandatory audio codec list.

Of course, the optical drives themselves don’t decode video or audio like a set-top player, so it’s the reseller’s responsibility to upsell a software package able to do the job. CyberLink’s PowerDVD Ultra supports Blu-ray and HD DVD, along with the Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus codecs. The standard PowerDVD 7 package does not work with either format. If you’re careful when you match hardware to software, your customer is sure to get a combination that’ll enable high-def playback on whitebooks, desktops, or big screen TVs.

There’s one last hoop you’ll have to guide customers through before they’re able to bask in the beauty of HD video. Blu-ray and HD DVD incorporate AACS-128 bit encryption, protecting against illegal duplication like the CSS scheme was supposed to do for DVDs. The technical specifics of how a player decrypts content are painfully complicated, but what you’ll need to remember is that the entire output pathway is carefully built to prevent anyone from stripping away high-def content and sending it to all of their friends. If someone tries to intrude on a protected signal with an unauthorized device, the data stream will be downsampled or cut off. A Blu-ray- or HD DVD-compatible machine consequently needs two or three other components before it can start pushing movies to high definition display devices.

Number one on the list is a graphics card featuring HDCP compatibility, preferably with at least 256MB of memory. Most cards more than one generation old do not include the onboard circuitry to support HDCP, necessitating a more modern selection from AMD’s Radeon HD 2000-series or NVIDIA’s GeForce 8-series. An HDCP-compliant monitor is required at the other end of the display pipeline. Again, most modern displays take HDCP into consideration. Older displays didn’t sport the forward-looking feature though, so check those specs carefully. The rest should be easy. Install Windows Vista or XP Service Pack 2 into a system with two cores and a software decoder.

Picking Up Where DVD Left Off

DVD drives extended backwards compatibility for CD media when they first emerged. You’ll find that most of the blue laser products also incorporate some form of support for older formats. The Blu-ray specification does not require drives to read standard DVDs, but most of the drives currently available do read DVD media. CD support is also fairly standard, although a handful of first-generation Blu-ray drives sacrifice CD compatibility in favor of more modern formats. Just read those specification sheets carefully to avoid upselling a pricey drive that lacks any of the features your customer is expecting.

HD DVD drives should play a little nicer, if only because there are fewer of the drives available. The current claim from HD DVD’s official Web site is that any HD DVD player offers backwards compatibility with existing DVD libraries and audio CDs. The line starts blurring, however, when you start looking at drives that incorporate both emerging formats and leave older capabilities in the dust.

LG’s brand new GGW-H10NI is perhaps the best example of how to do blue laser technology properly. The drive reads and writes to Blu-ray media, reads HD DVD discs, writes to the +R and –R DVD formats, and burns CDs. Armed with dual-layer support, writing to one Blu-ray disc gives your customer 50GB of storage space with which to work. Clearly, the opportunity is there for more than just digital media.

Putting Blue Lasers To Work

SMBs will always need more storage. From departmental servers to backup to long-term archiving, every step of the digital pipeline is in demand. Fortunately, hard drives are getting bigger, making it easy to hold lots of information reliably without incurring enterprise-like costs. Saving data to an affordable NAS box is similarly simple thanks to whitebox storage servers and software like Microsoft’s Windows Unified Data Storage Server. Now, with two blue laser technologies looking for mainstream adoption, you also have very compelling optical options when it comes to long-term storage. HD DVD gives your customer 15GB of space per disc while Blu-ray leverages 25GB. For off-site data protection, that’s a lot of space.

Despite Blu-ray and HD DVD drives now being readily available, there’s still a definite price premium over any other optical medium. But resellers able to turn either format into a compelling solution should have no trouble attracting business customers in addition to the early adopters.

Although the combination of Vista, brand new graphics cards, and high-definition movies are generating most of the buzz around Blu-ray and HD DVD, data archiving is another outlet where the drives do well. Originally, CDs were the best place to drop data. Then USB flash drives emerged with higher capacities and more convenient form factors. DVDs went a similar route. But there’s no way you’re going to enable 50GB of convenient storage without selling a proprietary disk-based solution. The alternative, tape, is hardly as reliable and far from convenient. Once again, optical storage looks like a solid win in the SMB space.

Together with a backup application like NewTech Infosystems’ Backup NOW!, the next generation of optical disk drives fills a niche in enabling archiving. Burn critical files to a dual-layered Blu-ray disc once or twice per week, stash the media off-site, and your customer is protected against disaster.

Despite the immediate uses for Blu-ray and HD DVD, we’re still a couple of years away from mainstream adoption. Until the prices on blue laser technology drop to the point where you see drives on every machine, the opportunity is there to set your customers up with a compelling technology that addresses multiple storage issues and delivers the most compelling multimedia experience available.