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New BDXL standard announced

by on07 April 2010

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You thought standard Blu-ray was big

With the ability to store 25GB on a single-layer Blu-ray disc or 50GB on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, we thought that in the short term this was more than enough storage. Well, apparently this is not the case: you should get ready for the BDXL standard, which will allow for 128GB of storage on these high capacity discs.

Of course, as with the introduction of any new standard these days, it will not be compatible on existing Blu-ray players or recorders, meaning that you will need a new drive to take advantage of the new standard. Many are comparing it to the transition from DVD-RW drives that could only write to single layer discs, to the newer drives that have the ability to write to dual-layer discs.

While there is no word yet on how BDXL will break into the market space, it seems that manufacturers are confident that it will one day find its way into home players there by cutting down the amount of discs needed in many sets. The biggest advantage could be in episode TV offerings where it could cut the number of discs needed by more than half, which equals higher profits for the studios. We say that you should not look for it anytime soon; it will just be too expensive and not enough people will have BDXL support when it does finally arrive in home players. We are also told that the standard cannot be supported on the PlayStation 3 with a firmware upgrade.

Blu-ray is getting another new format, as well, called the IH-BD. This format features a dual-layer disc with one layer being a BD-ROM and the other layer a BD-RE. The idea here is that the BD-RE will be used for viewing data. Again, there is no support for it yet and it is unclear if any current generation Blu-ray drives could get a firmware update to support the format, but our sources tell us most likely not.

Don’t look for either format soon, but do expect them to generate a lot of buzz in the upcoming months. We just don’t know that those who just took the plunge to buy a Blu-ray drive are going to be all that eager to upgrade this early.

Last modified on 07 April 2010
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