Blu-ray Disc
Encyclopedia
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc
storage
medium designed to supersede the DVD
format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVD
s and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB
(23.31 GiB
) per layer, with dual layer discs (50 GB) being the norm for feature-length video discs. Triple layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple layers (128 GB) are available for BD-XL Blu-ray re-writer drives. Currently movie production companies have not utilized the triple or quadruple layer discs; most consumer owned Blu-ray players will not be able to read the additional layers, while newer Blu-ray players may require a firmware
update to play the triple and quadruple sized discs.
The first Blu-ray Disc prototypes were unveiled in October 2000, and the first prototype player was released in April 2003 in Japan
. Afterwards, it continued to be developed until its official release in June 2006.
The name Blu-ray Disc refers to the blue laser
used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVD
s.
Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association
, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, computer hardware, and motion pictures. , more than 2,500 Blu-ray Disc titles were available in Australia and the United Kingdom, with 3,500 in the United States and Canada. In Japan, , more than 3,300 titles have been released.
During the high definition optical disc format war
, Blu-ray Disc competed with the HD DVD
format. Toshiba
, the main company that supported HD DVD, conceded in February 2008, releasing their own Blu-ray Disc player in late 2009.
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format was limited by the wavelength of the laser diodes used. Following protracted development, blue
laser diodes operating around 400 nanometers became available on a production basis.
Sony
started two projects in collaboration with Philips
applying the new diodes: UDO
(Ultra Density Optical), and DVR Blue (together with Pioneer
), a format of rewritable discs that would eventually become Blu-ray Disc (more specifically, BD-RE). The core technologies of the formats are similar.
The first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled at the CEATEC
exhibition in October 2000 by Sony
. A trademark for the "Blue Disc" logo was filed February 9, 2001. On February 19, 2002, the project was officially announced as Blu-ray Disc, and Blu-ray Disc Founders
was founded by the nine initial members.
The first consumer device arrived in stores on April 10, 2003: the Sony BDZ-S77, a $3,800(US) BD-RE recorder that was made available only in Japan. But there was no standard for prerecorded video, and no movies were released for this player.
Hollywood studios insisted that players be equipped with Digital Rights Management
before they would release movies for the new format, and they wanted a new DRM system that would be more secure than the failed Content Scramble System
(CSS) used on DVDs.
On October 4, 2004, the name "Blu-ray Disc Founders" was officially changed to the Blu-ray Disc Association
(BDA), and 20th Century Fox
joined the BDA's Board of Directors.
The Blu-ray Disc physical specifications were completed in 2004.
In January 2005, TDK
announced that they had developed a hard coating polymer for Blu-ray Discs. Cartridges, originally used for scratch protection, were no longer necessary and were scrapped.
The BD-ROM specifications were finalized in early 2006.
AACS LA, a consortium founded in 2004, had been developing the DRM platform that could be used to securely distribute movies to consumers. However, the final AACS standard was delayed, and then delayed again when an important member of the Blu-ray Disc group voiced concerns. At the request of the initial hardware manufacturers, including Toshiba, Pioneer, and Samsung, an interim standard was published that did not include some features, such as managed copy.
) were shipped in mid-June 2006, though HD DVD
players beat them to market by a few months.
The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006: 50 First Dates
, The Fifth Element
, Hitch
, House of Flying Daggers
, Underworld: Evolution
, xXx
(all Sony
), and MGM's The Terminator
. The earliest releases used MPEG-2
video compression, the same method used on standard DVD
s. The first releases using the newer VC-1
and AVC
formats were introduced in September 2006. The first movies using 50 GB dual-layer discs were introduced in October 2006. The first audio-only albums were released in May 2008.
The first mass-market Blu-ray Disc rewritable drive for the PC was the BWU-100A, released by Sony
on July 18, 2006. It recorded both single and dual-layer BD-Rs as well as BD-REs and had a suggested retail price of US $699.
, chaired by Toshiba
, was split over whether to develop the more expensive blue laser technology. In March 2002, the forum approved a proposal endorsed by Warner Bros.
and other motion picture studios that involved compressing HD content onto dual-layer standard DVD-9 discs. In spite of this decision, however, the DVD Forum's Steering Committee announced in April that it was pursuing its own blue-laser high-definition video
solution. In August, Toshiba and NEC announced their competing standard, Advanced Optical Disc. It was finally adopted by the DVD Forum and renamed HD DVD
the next year, after being voted down twice by DVD Forum members who were also Blu-ray Disc Association members—a situation that drew preliminary investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice.
HD DVD had a head start in the high-definition video market, as Blu-ray Disc sales were slow to gain market share. The first Blu-ray Disc player was perceived as expensive and buggy, and there were few titles available.
The appearance of the Sony PlayStation 3
, which contained a Blu-ray Disc player for primary storage, helped turn the tide. Sony also ran a more thorough and influential marketing campaign for the format. 2006 also saw the launch of AVCHD
camcorders, whose recordings can be played back on many Blu-ray Disc players without re-encoding, but not on HD DVD players.
By January 2007, Blu-ray Discs had outsold HD DVDs, and during the first three quarters of 2007, BD outsold HD DVDs by about two to one. At CES 2007
, Warner proposed Total Hi Def
—a hybrid disc containing Blu-ray on one side and HD DVD on the other, but it was never released.
In a June 28, 2007 press release, Twentieth Century Fox cited Blu-ray Disc's adoption of the BD+ anticopying system as key to their decision to support the Blu-ray Disc format.
On January 4, 2008, a day before CES
2008, Warner Bros.
(the only major studio still releasing movies in both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc format) announced that it would release only in Blu-ray Disc after May 2008. This effectively included other studios that came under the Warner umbrella, such as New Line Cinema
and HBO—though in Europe, HBO distribution partner, the BBC
, announced it would, while keeping an eye on market forces, continue to release product on both formats. This led to a chain reaction in the industry, with major U.S. retailers such as Best Buy
, Wal-Mart
, and Circuit City and Canadian chains such as Future Shop
dropping HD DVD in their stores. A then major European retailer, Woolworths
, dropped HD DVD from its inventory. Netflix
and Blockbuster—major DVD rental companies—said they would no longer carry HD DVDs.
Following these new developments, on February 19, 2008, Toshiba announced it would end production of HD DVD devices, allowing Blu-ray Disc to become the industry standard for high-density optical discs. Universal Studios
, the sole major movie studio to back HD DVD since its inception, said shortly after Toshiba's announcement, "While Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray Disc." Paramount Studios, which started releasing movies only in HD DVD
format during late 2007, also said it would start releasing in Blu-ray Disc. Both studios announced initial Blu-ray lineups in May 2008. With this, all major Hollywood studios supported Blu-ray.
has stated that they are not planning to make a Blu-ray Disc drive for the Xbox 360
.
Blu-ray Disc began making serious strides as soon as the format war ended. Nielsen VideoScan sales numbers showed that with some titles, such as 20th Century Fox's Hitman, up to 14% of total disc sales were from Blu-ray, although the average for the first half of the year was around 5%. Shortly after the format war ended, a study by The NPD Group found that awareness of Blu-ray Disc had reached 60% of U.S. households. In December 2008, the Blu-ray Disc of The Dark Knight
sold 600,000 copies on the first day of its launch in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A week after launch, The Dark Knight
BD had sold over 1.7 million copies worldwide, making it the first Blu-ray Disc title to sell over a million copies in the first week of release.
According to Singulus Technologies
AG, Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD format was at a similar period in its development. This conclusion was based on the fact that Singulus Technologies has received orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines during the first quarter of 2008, while 17 DVD machines of this type were made in the same period in 1997. According to GfK Retail and Technology, in the first week of November 2008, sales of Blu-ray recorders surpassed DVD recorders in Japan. According to the Digital Entertainment Group, the total number of Blu-ray Disc playback devices (both set-top box and game console) sold in the U.S. had reached 28.5 millions by the end of 2010.
Blu-ray faces competition from video on demand
and from new technologies that allow access to movies on any format or device, such as Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem
or Disney's Keychest
. Some commentators have suggested that renting Blu-ray will play a vital part in keeping the technology affordable while allowing it to move forward. In an effort to increase sales, studios are releasing movies in combo packs with Blu-ray Discs and DVDs as well as Digital copies
that can be played on computers and iPod
s. Some are released on "flipper" discs with Blu-ray on one side and DVD on the other. Other strategies are to release movies with the special features only on Blu-ray Discs and none on DVDs.
As of 2011, Windows Media Player cannot play Blu-ray disks even on a machine that is equipped with the suitable hardware, and third party players may offer this feature only as a paid additional option.
red laser, Blu-ray Disc uses a 405 nm "blue
" laser diode
. Note that even though the laser is called "blue", its color is actually in the violet
range. The smaller beam focuses more precisely, thus enabling it to read information recorded in pits that are less than half the size of those on a DVD, and can consequently be spaced more closely, resulting in a shorter track pitch, enabling a Blu-ray Disc to hold about five times the amount of information that can be stored on a DVD.
The lasers are GaN (gallium nitride) laser diodes that produce 405 nm light directly, that is, without frequency doubling or other nonlinear optical
mechanisms. Conventional DVD
s use 650 nm red lasers, and CD
s use 780 nm near-infrared lasers.
The minimum "spot size" on which a laser can be focused is limited by diffraction
, and depends on the wavelength of the light and the numerical aperture of the lens
used to focus it. By decreasing the wavelength, increasing the numerical aperture from 0.60 to 0.85, and making the cover layer thinner to avoid unwanted optical effects, the laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot, which effectively allows more information to be stored in the same area. For Blu-ray Disc, the spot size is 580 nm. This allows a reduction of the pit size from 400 nm for DVD to 150 nm for Blu-ray Disc, and of the track pitch from 740 nm to 320 nm. See Compact Disc
for information on optical discs' physical structure.
In addition to the optical improvements, Blu-ray Discs feature improvements in data encoding that further increase the amount of content that can be stored.
standard, it was at first more vulnerable to scratches. The first discs were housed in cartridges
for protection, resembling Professional Discs introduced by Sony in 2003.
Using a cartridge would increase the price of an already expensive medium, so hard-coating of the pickup surface was chosen instead. TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch-protection coating for Blu-ray Discs. It was named Durabis
. In addition, both Sony and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are spin-coated, using a scratch-resistant and antistatic coating. Verbatim's
recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs use their own proprietary hard-coat technology, called ScratchGuard.
The Blu-ray Disc specification requires the testing of resistance to scratches by mechanical abrasion
. In contrast, DVD media are not required to be scratch-resistant, but since development of the technology, some companies, such as Verbatim, implemented hard-coating for more expensive lineups of recordable DVDs.
and MiniCD. Recordable (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) versions of Mini Blu-ray Disc have been developed specifically for compact camcorders and other compact recording devices.
formats that can be recorded with an optical disc recorder
. BD-Rs can be written to once, whereas BD-REs can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. The current practical maximum speed for Blu-ray Discs is about 12×. Higher speeds of rotation (10,000+ rpm) cause too much wobble for the discs to be read properly, as with the 20× and 52× maximum speeds, respectively, of standard DVD
s and CDs
.
Since September 2007, BD-RE is also available in the smaller 8 cm Mini Blu-ray Disc size.
On September 18, 2007, Pioneer
and Mitsubishi
codeveloped BD-R LTH ("Low to High" in groove recording), which features an organic
dye recording layer that can be manufactured by modifying existing CD-R and DVD-R production equipment, significantly reducing manufacturing costs. In February 2008, Taiyo Yuden
, Mitsubishi, and Maxell
released the first BD-R LTH Discs, and in March 2008, Sony's PlayStation 3 gained official support for BD-R LTH Discs with the 2.20 firmware update. In May 2009 Verbatim/Mitsubishi announced the industry's first 6X BD-R LTH media, which allows recording a 25 GB disc in about 16 minutes.
Unlike the previous releases of 120 mm optical disc
s (i.e., CDs and standard DVD
s), Blu-ray recorders hit the market almost simultaneously with Blu-ray's debut.
Usage of BD9 for releasing content on "pressed" discs has never caught on. After the end of the format war, major producers ramped up the production of Blu-ray Discs and lowered their prices to the level of DVDs. On the other hand, the idea of using inexpensive DVD media became popular among individual users. A lower-capacity version of this format that uses single-layer 4.7 GB DVDs has been unofficially called BD5. Both formats are being used by individuals for recording high definition content in Blu-ray format onto recordable DVD media.
Despite the fact that the BD9 format has been adopted as part of the BD-ROM basic format, none of the existing Blu-ray player models support it explicitly. As such, the discs recorded in BD9 and BD5 formats are not guaranteed to play on standard Blu-ray Disc players.
AVCHD
and AVCREC
also use inexpensive media like DVDs, but unlike BD9 and BD5 these formats have limited interactivity, codec types, and data rates.
BD-R 3.0 Format Specification (BDXL) defined a multi-layered disc recordable in BDAV format with the speed of 2X and 4X, capable of 100/128GB and usage of UDF2.5/2.6.
BD-RE 4.0 Format Specification (BDXL) defined a multi-layered disc rewritable in BDAV with the speed of 2X and 4X, capable of 100GB and usage of UDF2.5 as file system.
BDXL discs are not compatible with existing BD drives.
(UDF) 2.50 as a convergent friendly format for both PC and consumer electronics environments. It is used in latest specifications of BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R.
In the first BD-RE specification (defined in 2002), the BDFS (Blu-ray Disc File System) was used. The BD-RE 1.0 specification was defined mainly for the digital recording
of High Definition Television (HDTV) broadcast television. The BDFS was replaced by UDF 2.50 in the second BD-RE specification in 2005, in order to enable interoperability among consumer electronics Blu-ray recorders and personal computer
systems. These optical disc recording technologies
enabled PC recording and playback of BD-RE. BD-R can use UDF 2.50/2.60.
The Blu-ray Disc application (BDAV application) for recording of digital broadcasting
has been developed as System Description Blu-ray Rewritable Disc Format part 3 Audio Visual Basic Specifications. The requirements related with computer file
system have been specified in System Description Blu-ray Rewritable Disc Format part 2 File System Specifications version 1.0 (BDFS).
Initially, the BD-RE version 1.0 (BDFS) was specifically developed for recording of digital broadcasting using the Blu-ray Disc
application (BDAV application). To support UDF, these requirements are superseded by the Blu-ray Rewritable Disc File System Specifications version 2.0 (UDF) (a.k.a. RE 2.0) and Blu-ray Recordable Disc File System Specifications version 1.0 (UDF) (a.k.a. R 1.0). Additionally, a new application format, BDMV (System Description Blu-ray Disc Prerecorded Format part 3 Audio Visual Basic Specifications) for High Definition Content Distribution was developed for BD-ROM. The only file system developed for BDMV is the System Description Blu-ray Read-Only Disc Format part 2 File System Specifications version 1.0 (UDF) which defines the requirements for UDF 2.50.
. Blu-ray Disc titles authored with menu support are in the BDMV (Blu-ray Disc Movie) format and contain audio, video, and other streams in BDAV container. There is also the BDAV (Blu-ray Disc Audio/Visual) format, the consumer oriented alternative to the BDMV format used for movie releases. The BDAV format is used on BD-REs and BD-Rs for audio/video recording. BDMV format was later defined also for BD-RE and BD-R (in September 2006, in the third revision of BD-RE specification and second revision of BD-R specification). Blu-ray Disc employs the MPEG transport stream recording method. That enables transport streams of digital broadcasts to be recorded as they are without altering the format. It also enables flexible editing of a digital broadcast that is recorded as is and where the data can be edited just by rewriting the playback stream. Although it is quite natural, a function for high-speed and easy-to use retrieval is built in. Blu-ray Disc Video use MPEG transport streams, compared to DVD's MPEG program streams. This allows multiple video programs to be stored in the same file so they can be played back simultaneously (e.g., with "Picture in picture" effect).
High-definition video may be stored on BD-ROMs with up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at up to 59.94 fields
per second, if interlaced. Alternatively, progressive scan can go up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at 24 frames per second, or up to 1280x720 at up to 59.94 frames per second:
a All frame rates are properly listed in frames per second. Some manufacturers will list field rate for interlaced material, but this is incorrect industry practice. To avoid confusion, only FRAME rates should ever be listed.
b MPEG-2 at 1440x1080 was previously not supported in a draft version of the specification from March 2005.
For video, all players are required to support MPEG-2 Part 2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
, and SMPTE VC-1
. MPEG-2 is the compression standard used on regular DVD
s, which allows backwards compatibility. MPEG-4 AVC was developed by MPEG, Sony
, and VCEG. VC-1 is a compression standard that was mainly developed by Microsoft
. BD-ROM titles with video must store video using one of the three mandatory formats; multiple formats on a single title are allowed.
The choice of formats affects the producer's licensing/royalty costs as well as the title's maximum run time, due to differences in compression efficiency. Discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer (25 GB) BD-ROM. The more-advanced video formats (VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC) typically achieve a video run time twice that of MPEG-2, with comparable quality.
MPEG-2 was used by many studios (including Paramount Pictures
, which initially used the VC-1
format for HD DVD
releases) for the first series of Blu-ray Discs, which were launched throughout 2006. Modern releases are now often encoded in either MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1, allowing film studios to place all content on one disc, reducing costs and improving ease of use. Using these formats also frees a lot of space for storage of bonus content in HD (1080i
/p
), as opposed to the SD (480i
/p
) typically used for most titles. Some studios, such as Warner Bros.
, have released bonus content on discs encoded in a different format than the main feature title. For example, the Blu-ray Disc release of Superman Returns
uses VC-1 for the feature film and MPEG-2 for some of its bonus content. Today, Warner and other studios typically provide bonus content in the video format that matches the feature.
For audio, BD-ROM players are required to support Dolby Digital
(AC-3), DTS, and linear PCM. Players may optionally support Dolby Digital Plus
and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio as well as lossless formats Dolby TrueHD
and DTS-HD Master Audio
. BD-ROM titles must use one of the mandatory schemes for the primary soundtrack. A secondary audiotrack, if present, may use any of the mandatory or optional codecs.
programming, the recordable Blu-ray Disc standard's initial data rate of 36 Mbit/s is more than adequate to record high-definition broadcasts from any source (IPTV
, cable/satellite, or terrestrial). BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mbit/s (for both audio and video data), and a maximum video bit rate of 40 Mbit/s. This compares to HD DVD movies, which have a maximum data transfer rate of 36 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 30.24 Mbit/s, and a maximum video bitrate of 29.4 Mbit/s.
trade show, it was announced that Sun Microsystems
' Java cross-platform software environment would be included in all Blu-ray Disc players as a mandatory part of the standard. Java is used to implement interactive menus on Blu-ray Discs, as opposed to the method used on DVD
-video discs. DVDs use pre-rendered MPEG segments and selectable subtitle pictures, which are considerably more primitive and rarely seamless. At the conference, Java creator James Gosling
suggested that the inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine
, as well as network connectivity in some BD devices, will allow updates to Blu-ray Discs via the Internet, adding content such as additional subtitle languages and promotional features not included on the disc at pressing time. This Java Version is called BD-J
and is a subset of the Globally Executable MHP
(GEM) standard; GEM is the worldwide version of the Multimedia Home Platform
standard.
. All three of the video-based player profiles (BD-Video) are required to have a full implementation of BD-J
, with varying levels of hardware support.
a This is used for storing audio/video and title updates. It can either be built-in memory or removable media, such as a memory card or USB flash memory.
b A secondary audio decoder is typically used for interactive audio and commentary.
c Profile 3.0 is a separate audio-only player profile. The first Blu-ray Disc album to be released was Divertimenti, by record label Lindberg Lyd, and it has been confirmed to work on the PS3.
d Also known as Initial Standard profile.
e Also known as Final Standard profile.
On November 2, 2007, the Grace Period Profile was superseded by Bonus View as the minimum profile for new BD-Video players released to the market. When Blu-ray Disc software not authored with interactive features dependent on Bonus View or BD-Live hardware capabilities is played on Profile 1.0 players, it is able to play the main feature of the disc, but some extra features may not be available or will have limited capability.
With the exception of the latest players and the PlayStation 3
, Profile 1.0 players cannot be upgraded to be Bonus View or BD-Live compliant.
As with the implementation of region codes for DVDs, Blu-ray Disc players sold in a specific geographical region are designed to play only discs authorized by the content provider for that region. This is intended to permit content providers (motion picture studios, etc.) the ability to support product differences in content, price, release date, etc., by region. According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, "all Blu-ray Disc players...(and) Blu-ray Disc-equipped computer systems are required to support regional coding." However, "Use of region playback codes is optional for content providers..." Some current estimates suggest 70% of available [movie] Blu-ray Discs from the major studios are region-code-free and can therefore be played on any Blu-ray Disc player, in any region.
Movie studios have different region coding policies. Among major U.S. studios, Paramount Pictures
and Universal Studios
have released all of their titles region-free. Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.
have released most of their titles region-free. Lionsgate and Walt Disney Pictures
have released a mix of region-free and region-coded titles. 20th Century Fox
and MGM have released most of their titles region-coded.
The Blu-ray Disc region coding scheme divides the world into 3 regions, labeled A, B, and C.
In circumvention of region coding restrictions, stand-alone Blu-ray Disc players are sometimes modified by third parties to allow for playback of Blu-ray Discs (and DVDs) with any region code. Instructions ('hacks') describing how to reset the Blu-ray region counter of computer player applications to make them multi-region indefinitely are also regularly posted to video enthusiast websites and forums. Unlike DVD region codes, Blu-ray region codes are verified only by the player software, not by the optical drive's firmware
.
(DRM). This has led to extensive criticism of the format by organizations opposed to DRM, such as the Free Software Foundation
.
in the media stream called the Image Constraint Token
, a Blu-ray Disc can enforce its reproduction in a lower resolution whenever a full HDCP-compliant link is not used. In order to ease the transition to high definition formats, the adoption of this protection method has been postponed until 2011.
The Advanced Access Content System
(AACS) is a standard for content distribution and digital rights management
. It was developed by AS Licensing Administrator, LLC (AACS LA), a consortium
that includes Disney
, Intel, Microsoft
, Panasonic, Warner Bros.
, IBM
, Toshiba
, and Sony
.
Since appearing in devices in 2006, several successful attacks have been made on the format. The first known attack relied on the trusted client
problem. In addition, decryption keys have been extracted from a weakly protected player (WinDVD
). Since keys can be revoked in newer releases, this is only a temporary attack, and new keys must continually be discovered in order to decrypt the latest discs. This cat-and-mouse game
has gone through several cycles.
was developed by Cryptography Research Inc.
and is based on their concept of Self-Protecting Digital Content
. BD+, effectively a small virtual machine
embedded in authorized players, allows content providers to include executable programs on Blu-ray Discs. Such programs can:
If a playback device manufacturer finds that its devices have been hacked, it can potentially release BD+ code that detects and circumvents the vulnerability. These programs can then be included in all new content releases.
The specifications of the BD+ virtual machine are available only to licensed device manufacturers. A list of licensed commercial adopters is available from the BD+ website.
The first titles using BD+ were released in October 2007. Since November 2007, versions of BD+ protection have been circumvented by various versions of the AnyDVD
HD program. Other programs known to be capable of circumventing BD+ protection are DumpHD (versions 0.6 and above, along with some supporting software), MakeMKV, and two applications from DVDFab (Passkey and HD Decrypter).
is a small amount of cryptographic data that is stored separately from normal Blu-ray Disc data, aiming to prevent illegal replication of the discs. The cryptographic data is needed to decrypt the copyrighted disc content protected by AACS. A specially licensed piece of hardware is required to insert the ROM-Mark into the media during replication. In consequence, sector-by-sector copies of a disc made with a regular recorder will lack the ROM-Mark data, and will be unreadable on standard players.
. A few early Blu-ray Disc players released in 2006 could play DVDs but not CDs.
Although the Blu-ray Disc specification has been finalized, engineers continue to work on advancing the technology. Quad-layer (100 GB) discs have been demonstrated on a drive with modified optics and standard unaltered optics.
Hitachi stated that such a disc could be used to store 7 hours of 32 Mbit/s video (HDTV) or 3 hours and 30 minutes of 64 Mbit/s video (Cinema 4K
). In August 2006, TDK
announced that they have created a working experimental Blu-ray Disc capable of holding 200 GB of data on a single side, using six 33 GB data layers.
Also, behind closed doors at CES
2007, Ritek revealed that they had successfully developed a High Definition optical disc process that extends the disc capacity to ten layers, which increases the capacity of the discs to 250 GB. However, they noted that the major obstacle is that current read/write technology does not support the additional layers.
JVC
has developed a three-layer technology that allows putting both standard-definition DVD data and HD data on a BD/(standard) DVD combination. If successfully commercialized, this would enable the consumer to purchase a disc that can be played on DVD players and can also reveal its HD version when played on a BD player. Japanese optical disc manufacturer Infinity announced the first "hybrid" Blu-ray Disc/(standard) DVD combo, to be released February 18, 2009. This disc set of the TV series "Code Blue" featured four hybrid discs containing a single Blu-ray Disc layer (25 GB) and two DVD layers (9 GB) on the same side of the disc.
In January 2007, Hitachi
showcased a 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, consisting of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK
and Panasonic
's 100 GB discs, they claim this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray Disc drives that are currently in circulation, and it is believed that a firmware update is the only requirement to make it readable to current players and drives.
In December 2008, Pioneer Corporation
unveiled a 400 GB Blu-ray Disc (containing 16 data layers, 25 GB each) that will be compatible with current players after a firmware update. Its planned launch is in the 2009–10 time frame for ROM and 2010–13 for rewritable discs. Ongoing development is under way to create a 1 TB
Blu-ray Disc as soon as 2013.
At CES 2009, Panasonic unveiled the DMP-B15, the first portable Blu-ray Disc player, and Sharp introduced the LC-BD60U and LC-BD80U series, the first LCD HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc players. Sharp has also announced that they will sell HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc recorders in the United States by the end of 2009. Set-top box recorders are not being sold in the U.S. due to fears of piracy. However, personal computers with Blu-ray recorder drives are available.
On January 1, 2010, Sony, in association with Panasonic, announced plans to increase the storage capacity on their Blu-ray Discs from 25GB to 33.4 GB via a technology called i-MLSE (Maximum likelihood
Sequence Estimation). The higher-capacity discs, according to Sony, will be readable on current Blu-ray Disc players with a firmware upgrade. No date has been set to include the increased space, but according to Blu-ray.com "it will likely happen sometime later this year."
On July 20, 2010, the research team of Sony and Japanese Tohoku University announced the joint development of a blue-violet laser, which will help in creating Blu-ray discs with a capacity of 1 TB (dual layer).
and 3-D television content on a Blu-ray Disc. On Dec. 17, 2009 the BDA officially announced 3D specs for Blu-ray Disc, allowing backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray players. The BDA has said, "The Blu-ray 3D specification calls for encoding 3D video using the "Stereo High" profile defined by Multiview Video Coding
(MVC), an extension to the ITU-T H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec currently supported by all Blu-ray Disc players. MPEG4-MVC compresses both left and right eye views with a typical 50% overhead compared to equivalent 2D content, and can provide full 1080p resolution backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray Disc players." This means the MVC (3D) stream is backward compatible with H.264/AVC (2D) stream, allowing older 2D devices and software to decode stereoscopic video streams, ignoring additional information for the second view.
Sony has released a firmware upgrade for PlayStation 3 consoles that enables 3D Blu-ray Disc playback. They previously released support for 3D gaming on April 21, 2010 (followed by the availability of 3D movies). Since the version 3.70 software update in August 9, 2011, the PlayStation 3 can support DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio while playing 3D Blu-ray. Dolby TrueHD is used on a small minority of Blu-ray 3D releases, and is currently unsupported by the PS3. It can play 3D Blu-ray content at full 1080p.
camcorder
s. Derived from the Blu-ray Disc specification, AVCHD shares a similar random access
directory structure, but is restricted to lower audio and video bitrates, simpler interactivity, and the use of AVC-video and Dolby AC-3 (or linear PCM) audio.
Being primarily an acquisition format, AVCHD playback is not universally supported by all devices that support Blu-Ray Disc playback. Nevertheless, many such devices are capable of playing AVCHD recordings from removable media, such as DVDs, SD
/SDHC memory cards, "Memory Stick
" cards, and hard disk drives.
broadcast standard and is not marketed outside of Japan. AVCREC is used primarily in set-top digital video recorder
s and in this regard is comparable to HD REC.
Optical disc
In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces...
storage
Data storage device
thumb|200px|right|A reel-to-reel tape recorder .The magnetic tape is a data storage medium. The recorder is data storage equipment using a portable medium to store the data....
medium designed to supersede the DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB
Gigabyte
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...
(23.31 GiB
Gibibyte
The gibibyte is a standards-based binary multiple of the byte, a unit of digital information storage. The gibibyte unit symbol is GiB....
) per layer, with dual layer discs (50 GB) being the norm for feature-length video discs. Triple layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple layers (128 GB) are available for BD-XL Blu-ray re-writer drives. Currently movie production companies have not utilized the triple or quadruple layer discs; most consumer owned Blu-ray players will not be able to read the additional layers, while newer Blu-ray players may require a firmware
Firmware
In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...
update to play the triple and quadruple sized discs.
The first Blu-ray Disc prototypes were unveiled in October 2000, and the first prototype player was released in April 2003 in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. Afterwards, it continued to be developed until its official release in June 2006.
The name Blu-ray Disc refers to the blue laser
Blue laser
A so-called blue laser is a laser that emits electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of between 360 and 480 nanometres, which the human eye sees as blue or violet. Diode lasers which emit light at 445 nm are becoming popular as handheld lasers. Light of a shorter wavelength than 400 nm is...
used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s.
Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association
Blu-ray Disc Association
The Blu-ray Disc Association is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology and is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc...
, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, computer hardware, and motion pictures. , more than 2,500 Blu-ray Disc titles were available in Australia and the United Kingdom, with 3,500 in the United States and Canada. In Japan, , more than 3,300 titles have been released.
During the high definition optical disc format war
High definition optical disc format war
A format war took place between the Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD optical disc standards for storing high definition video and audio.These standards emerged between 2000 and 2002 and attracted both the mutual and exclusive support of major consumer electronics manufacturers, personal computer...
, Blu-ray Disc competed with the HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
format. Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
, the main company that supported HD DVD, conceded in February 2008, releasing their own Blu-ray Disc player in late 2009.
History
Origins
The information density of the DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
format was limited by the wavelength of the laser diodes used. Following protracted development, blue
Blue laser
A so-called blue laser is a laser that emits electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of between 360 and 480 nanometres, which the human eye sees as blue or violet. Diode lasers which emit light at 445 nm are becoming popular as handheld lasers. Light of a shorter wavelength than 400 nm is...
laser diodes operating around 400 nanometers became available on a production basis.
Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
started two projects in collaboration with Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
applying the new diodes: UDO
Ultra Density Optical
Ultra Density Optical is an optical disc format designed for high-density storage of high-definition video and data.- Overview :...
(Ultra Density Optical), and DVR Blue (together with Pioneer
Pioneer Corporation
is a multinational corporation that specializes in digital entertainment products, based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. The company was founded in 1938 in Tokyo as a radio and speaker repair shop...
), a format of rewritable discs that would eventually become Blu-ray Disc (more specifically, BD-RE). The core technologies of the formats are similar.
The first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled at the CEATEC
CEATEC
Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies is an annual trade show in Japan. It is regarded as the Japanese equivalent of Consumer Electronics Show...
exhibition in October 2000 by Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
. A trademark for the "Blue Disc" logo was filed February 9, 2001. On February 19, 2002, the project was officially announced as Blu-ray Disc, and Blu-ray Disc Founders
Blu-ray Disc Founders
The Blu-ray Disc Founders group was a collection of technology firms working together to develop and support the Blu-ray Disc. The Blu-ray Disc Founders was launched on May 20, 2002. As Blu-ray support grew progressively; announcements in 2004 included Hewlett Packard and Dell, which declared...
was founded by the nine initial members.
The first consumer device arrived in stores on April 10, 2003: the Sony BDZ-S77, a $3,800(US) BD-RE recorder that was made available only in Japan. But there was no standard for prerecorded video, and no movies were released for this player.
Hollywood studios insisted that players be equipped with Digital Rights Management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
before they would release movies for the new format, and they wanted a new DRM system that would be more secure than the failed Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System is a Digital Rights Management and encryption system employed on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm...
(CSS) used on DVDs.
On October 4, 2004, the name "Blu-ray Disc Founders" was officially changed to the Blu-ray Disc Association
Blu-ray Disc Association
The Blu-ray Disc Association is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology and is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc...
(BDA), and 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
joined the BDA's Board of Directors.
The Blu-ray Disc physical specifications were completed in 2004.
In January 2005, TDK
TDK
, formerly , is a Japanese company which manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media, and markets them globally. Their motto is "Contribute to culture and industry through creativity"...
announced that they had developed a hard coating polymer for Blu-ray Discs. Cartridges, originally used for scratch protection, were no longer necessary and were scrapped.
The BD-ROM specifications were finalized in early 2006.
AACS LA, a consortium founded in 2004, had been developing the DRM platform that could be used to securely distribute movies to consumers. However, the final AACS standard was delayed, and then delayed again when an important member of the Blu-ray Disc group voiced concerns. At the request of the initial hardware manufacturers, including Toshiba, Pioneer, and Samsung, an interim standard was published that did not include some features, such as managed copy.
Launch and sales developments
The first BD-ROM players (e.g. Sony BDP-S1Sony BDP-S1
The Sony BDP-S1 is a first generation Blu-ray Disc Player. It was first released in North America. It was originally scheduled for release in the United States on August 18, 2006 with a MSRP of $999.95. Sony had postponed the release date of this player several times and it was released on...
) were shipped in mid-June 2006, though HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
players beat them to market by a few months.
The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006: 50 First Dates
50 First Dates
50 First Dates is a 2004 American romantic comedy film directed by Peter Segal and written by George Wing. The film stars Adam Sandler as a woman-chasing veterinarian and Drew Barrymore as an amnesiac, along with Rob Schneider, Sean Astin, Lusia Strus, Blake Clark, and Dan Aykroyd.Most of the film...
, The Fifth Element
The Fifth Element
The Fifth Element is a 1997 French science fiction film directed, co-written, and based on a story by Luc Besson, starring Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, and Milla Jovovich...
, Hitch
Hitch (film)
Hitch is a 2005 romantic comedy film directed by Andy Tennant and starring Will Smith. The film, which was written by Kevin Bisch, co-stars Eva Mendes, Kevin James, and Amber Valletta. Smith plays a professional matchmaker who makes a living teaching men how to woo women...
, House of Flying Daggers
House of Flying Daggers
House of Flying Daggers is a 2004 wuxia film directed by Zhang Yimou. It differs from other wuxia films in that it is more of a love story than a straight martial arts film....
, Underworld: Evolution
Underworld: Evolution
Underworld: Evolution is the second installment in the Underworld series, following Underworld in 2003...
, xXx
XXX
XXX may refer to:* The number 30 in Roman numerals* The year 30 AD* Games of the XXX Olympiad, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, England* Super Bowl XXX, held on January 28, 1996* A mark indicating "extra strong"* Alcoholic beverages...
(all Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
), and MGM's The Terminator
The Terminator
The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron, co-written by Cameron and William Wisher Jr., and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. The film was produced by Hemdale Film Corporation and distributed by Orion Pictures, and filmed in Los...
. The earliest releases used MPEG-2
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...
video compression, the same method used on standard DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s. The first releases using the newer VC-1
VC-1
VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...
and AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
formats were introduced in September 2006. The first movies using 50 GB dual-layer discs were introduced in October 2006. The first audio-only albums were released in May 2008.
The first mass-market Blu-ray Disc rewritable drive for the PC was the BWU-100A, released by Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
on July 18, 2006. It recorded both single and dual-layer BD-Rs as well as BD-REs and had a suggested retail price of US $699.
Competition from HD DVD
The DVD ForumDVD Forum
The DVD Forum is an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and content companies that use and develop the DVD and formerly HD DVD formats...
, chaired by Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
, was split over whether to develop the more expensive blue laser technology. In March 2002, the forum approved a proposal endorsed by Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
and other motion picture studios that involved compressing HD content onto dual-layer standard DVD-9 discs. In spite of this decision, however, the DVD Forum's Steering Committee announced in April that it was pursuing its own blue-laser high-definition video
High-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
solution. In August, Toshiba and NEC announced their competing standard, Advanced Optical Disc. It was finally adopted by the DVD Forum and renamed HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
the next year, after being voted down twice by DVD Forum members who were also Blu-ray Disc Association members—a situation that drew preliminary investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice.
HD DVD had a head start in the high-definition video market, as Blu-ray Disc sales were slow to gain market share. The first Blu-ray Disc player was perceived as expensive and buggy, and there were few titles available.
The appearance of the Sony PlayStation 3
PlayStation 3
The is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
, which contained a Blu-ray Disc player for primary storage, helped turn the tide. Sony also ran a more thorough and influential marketing campaign for the format. 2006 also saw the launch of AVCHD
AVCHD
AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video....
camcorders, whose recordings can be played back on many Blu-ray Disc players without re-encoding, but not on HD DVD players.
By January 2007, Blu-ray Discs had outsold HD DVDs, and during the first three quarters of 2007, BD outsold HD DVDs by about two to one. At CES 2007
Consumer Electronics Show
The International Consumer Electronics Show is a major technology-related trade show held each January in the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. Not open to the public, the Consumer Electronics Association-sponsored show typically hosts previews of products and new...
, Warner proposed Total Hi Def
Total Hi Def
Total Hi Def Disc, also called Total HD or THD, was a planned optical disc format that included both of the rival high-definition optical disc formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. It was officially announced January 8, 2007 at the Warner Bros. press conference held at CES 2007...
—a hybrid disc containing Blu-ray on one side and HD DVD on the other, but it was never released.
In a June 28, 2007 press release, Twentieth Century Fox cited Blu-ray Disc's adoption of the BD+ anticopying system as key to their decision to support the Blu-ray Disc format.
On January 4, 2008, a day before CES
Consumer Electronics Show
The International Consumer Electronics Show is a major technology-related trade show held each January in the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. Not open to the public, the Consumer Electronics Association-sponsored show typically hosts previews of products and new...
2008, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
(the only major studio still releasing movies in both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc format) announced that it would release only in Blu-ray Disc after May 2008. This effectively included other studios that came under the Warner umbrella, such as New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema, often simply referred to as New Line, is an American film studio. It was founded in 1967 by Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne as a film distributor, later becoming an independent film studio. It became a subsidiary of Time Warner in 1996 and was merged with larger sister studio Warner...
and HBO—though in Europe, HBO distribution partner, the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, announced it would, while keeping an eye on market forces, continue to release product on both formats. This led to a chain reaction in the industry, with major U.S. retailers such as Best Buy
Best Buy
Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American specialty retailer of consumer electronics in the United States, accounting for 19% of the market. It also operates in Mexico, Canada & China. The company's subsidiaries include Geek Squad, CinemaNow, Magnolia Audio Video, Pacific Sales, and, in Canada operates...
, Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. , branded as Walmart since 2008 and Wal-Mart before then, is an American public multinational corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world's 18th largest public corporation, according to the Forbes Global 2000...
, and Circuit City and Canadian chains such as Future Shop
Future Shop
Future Shop is Canada's largest consumer electronics retailer. Future Shop currently operates a total of 146 stores across all of Canada's provinces as of December 2008....
dropping HD DVD in their stores. A then major European retailer, Woolworths
Woolworths Group
Woolworths Group plc was a listed British company that owned the high-street retail chain, Woolworths, as well as other brands such as the entertainment distributor Entertainment UK and book and resource distributor Bertram Books...
, dropped HD DVD from its inventory. Netflix
Netflix
Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California...
and Blockbuster—major DVD rental companies—said they would no longer carry HD DVDs.
Following these new developments, on February 19, 2008, Toshiba announced it would end production of HD DVD devices, allowing Blu-ray Disc to become the industry standard for high-density optical discs. Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
, the sole major movie studio to back HD DVD since its inception, said shortly after Toshiba's announcement, "While Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray Disc." Paramount Studios, which started releasing movies only in HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
format during late 2007, also said it would start releasing in Blu-ray Disc. Both studios announced initial Blu-ray lineups in May 2008. With this, all major Hollywood studios supported Blu-ray.
Future prospects and market trends
According to Adams Media Research, high-definition software sales in the US were slower in the first two years than DVD software sales. 16.3 million DVD software units were sold in the first two years (1997–98) compared to 8.3 million high-definition software units (2006–07). One reason given for this difference was the smaller marketplace (26.5 million HDTVs in 2007 compared to 100 million SDTVs in 1998). Former HD DVD supporter MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
has stated that they are not planning to make a Blu-ray Disc drive for the Xbox 360
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
.
Blu-ray Disc began making serious strides as soon as the format war ended. Nielsen VideoScan sales numbers showed that with some titles, such as 20th Century Fox's Hitman, up to 14% of total disc sales were from Blu-ray, although the average for the first half of the year was around 5%. Shortly after the format war ended, a study by The NPD Group found that awareness of Blu-ray Disc had reached 60% of U.S. households. In December 2008, the Blu-ray Disc of The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight (film)
The Dark Knight is a 2008 superhero film directed, produced and co-written by Christopher Nolan. Based on the DC Comics character Batman, the film is part of Nolan's Batman film series and a sequel to 2005's Batman Begins...
sold 600,000 copies on the first day of its launch in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A week after launch, The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight (film)
The Dark Knight is a 2008 superhero film directed, produced and co-written by Christopher Nolan. Based on the DC Comics character Batman, the film is part of Nolan's Batman film series and a sequel to 2005's Batman Begins...
BD had sold over 1.7 million copies worldwide, making it the first Blu-ray Disc title to sell over a million copies in the first week of release.
| Year | Cumulative sales (millions) |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 1.2 |
| 2007 | 19.2 |
| 2008 | 82.4 |
| 2009 | 177.2 |
| 2010 | 350 |
According to Singulus Technologies
Singulus Technologies
Singulus Technologies AG is a German manufacturer of optical disc production lines. With the acquisition of STANGL AG, it diversified into the field of solar energy. It was a TecDAX constituent between 2004 and 2009, and regained its position in the index in March 2010....
AG, Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD format was at a similar period in its development. This conclusion was based on the fact that Singulus Technologies has received orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines during the first quarter of 2008, while 17 DVD machines of this type were made in the same period in 1997. According to GfK Retail and Technology, in the first week of November 2008, sales of Blu-ray recorders surpassed DVD recorders in Japan. According to the Digital Entertainment Group, the total number of Blu-ray Disc playback devices (both set-top box and game console) sold in the U.S. had reached 28.5 millions by the end of 2010.
Blu-ray faces competition from video on demand
Video on demand
Video on Demand or Audio and Video On Demand are systems which allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content on demand...
and from new technologies that allow access to movies on any format or device, such as Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem
Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem is a consortium of major Hollywood studios, consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers, network hardware vendors, systems integrators and Digital Rights Management vendors...
or Disney's Keychest
Keychest
Keychest is a video-on-demand service currently under development by The Walt Disney Company, with a goal of providing digital media to customers through any internet-enabled device...
. Some commentators have suggested that renting Blu-ray will play a vital part in keeping the technology affordable while allowing it to move forward. In an effort to increase sales, studios are releasing movies in combo packs with Blu-ray Discs and DVDs as well as Digital copies
Digital copy
Digital Copy provides consumers who purchase a film on DVD or Blu-ray Disc with an additional, digital copy of the movie for devices capable of operating with a file in contrast to a DVD.-Features:...
that can be played on computers and iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
s. Some are released on "flipper" discs with Blu-ray on one side and DVD on the other. Other strategies are to release movies with the special features only on Blu-ray Discs and none on DVDs.
As of 2011, Windows Media Player cannot play Blu-ray disks even on a machine that is equipped with the suitable hardware, and third party players may offer this feature only as a paid additional option.
Physical media
| Type | Diameter (cm) |
Layers | Capacity | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bytes Byte The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer... |
GB Gigabyte The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is... |
GiB Gibibyte The gibibyte is a standards-based binary multiple of the byte, a unit of digital information storage. The gibibyte unit symbol is GiB.... |
|||
| Standard disc size, single layer | 12 | 1 | 25,025,314,816 | 25.0 | 23.3 |
| Standard disc size, dual layer | 12 | 2 | 50,050,629,632 | 50.1 | 46.6 |
| Mini disc size, single layer | 8 | 1 | 7,791,181,824 | 7.8 | 7.3 |
| Mini disc size, dual layer | 8 | 2 | 15,582,363,648 | 15.6 | 14.5 |
Laser and optics
While a DVD uses a 650 nmNanometre
A nanometre is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one billionth of a metre. The name combines the SI prefix nano- with the parent unit name metre .The nanometre is often used to express dimensions on the atomic scale: the diameter...
red laser, Blu-ray Disc uses a 405 nm "blue
Blue laser
A so-called blue laser is a laser that emits electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of between 360 and 480 nanometres, which the human eye sees as blue or violet. Diode lasers which emit light at 445 nm are becoming popular as handheld lasers. Light of a shorter wavelength than 400 nm is...
" laser diode
Laser diode
The laser diode is a laser where the active medium is a semiconductor similar to that found in a light-emitting diode. The most common type of laser diode is formed from a p-n junction and powered by injected electric current...
. Note that even though the laser is called "blue", its color is actually in the violet
Violet (color)
As the name of a color, violet is synonymous with a bluish purple, when the word "purple" is used in the common English language sense of any color between blue and red, not including either blue or red...
range. The smaller beam focuses more precisely, thus enabling it to read information recorded in pits that are less than half the size of those on a DVD, and can consequently be spaced more closely, resulting in a shorter track pitch, enabling a Blu-ray Disc to hold about five times the amount of information that can be stored on a DVD.
The lasers are GaN (gallium nitride) laser diodes that produce 405 nm light directly, that is, without frequency doubling or other nonlinear optical
Nonlinear optics
Nonlinear optics is the branch of optics that describes the behavior of light in nonlinear media, that is, media in which the dielectric polarization P responds nonlinearly to the electric field E of the light...
mechanisms. Conventional DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s use 650 nm red lasers, and CD
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
s use 780 nm near-infrared lasers.
The minimum "spot size" on which a laser can be focused is limited by diffraction
Diffraction
Diffraction refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle. Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi coined the word "diffraction" and was the first to record accurate observations of the phenomenon in 1665...
, and depends on the wavelength of the light and the numerical aperture of the lens
Lens (optics)
A lens is an optical device with perfect or approximate axial symmetry which transmits and refracts light, converging or diverging the beam. A simple lens consists of a single optical element...
used to focus it. By decreasing the wavelength, increasing the numerical aperture from 0.60 to 0.85, and making the cover layer thinner to avoid unwanted optical effects, the laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot, which effectively allows more information to be stored in the same area. For Blu-ray Disc, the spot size is 580 nm. This allows a reduction of the pit size from 400 nm for DVD to 150 nm for Blu-ray Disc, and of the track pitch from 740 nm to 320 nm. See Compact Disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
for information on optical discs' physical structure.
In addition to the optical improvements, Blu-ray Discs feature improvements in data encoding that further increase the amount of content that can be stored.
Hard-coating technology
Since the Blu-ray Disc data layer is closer to the surface of the disc compared to the DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
standard, it was at first more vulnerable to scratches. The first discs were housed in cartridges
Caddy (hardware)
In computer hardware, a caddy refers to a sheath used to hold some media.If the medium is a hard disk drive, the caddy is also referred to as a disk enclosure, which is discussed there...
for protection, resembling Professional Discs introduced by Sony in 2003.
Using a cartridge would increase the price of an already expensive medium, so hard-coating of the pickup surface was chosen instead. TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch-protection coating for Blu-ray Discs. It was named Durabis
Durabis
Durabis is a brand name for a clear polymer coating developed by the TDK Corporation. The need for a protective polymer arose because the data layer on Blu-ray Discs is much closer to the surface of the disc than in other disc formats, such as HD DVD. One of its principal applications at first was...
. In addition, both Sony and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are spin-coated, using a scratch-resistant and antistatic coating. Verbatim's
Verbatim Corporation
Verbatim Americas, LLC is a US company that markets storage media and flash memory products. It is a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation of Japan and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.-History:...
recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs use their own proprietary hard-coat technology, called ScratchGuard.
The Blu-ray Disc specification requires the testing of resistance to scratches by mechanical abrasion
Abrasion (mechanical)
Abrasion is the process of scuffing, scratching, wearing down, marring, or rubbing away. It can be intentionally imposed in a controlled process using an abrasive...
. In contrast, DVD media are not required to be scratch-resistant, but since development of the technology, some companies, such as Verbatim, implemented hard-coating for more expensive lineups of recordable DVDs.
Recording speed
| Drive speed | Data rate | Theoretical Write time for Blu-ray Disc (minutes) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mbit/s | MB/s | Single-Layer | Dual-Layer | |
| 1× | 36 | 4.5 | 90 | 180 |
| 2× | 72 | 9 | 45 | 90 |
| 4× | 144 | 18 | 22.5 | 45 |
| 6× | 216 | 27 | 15 | 30 |
| 8× | 288 | 36 | 11.25 | 22.5 |
| 10× | 360 | 45 | 9 | 18 |
| 12× | 432 | 54 | 7.5 | 15 |
Mini Blu-ray Disc
The "Mini Blu-ray Disc" (also, "Mini-BD" and "Mini Blu-ray") is a compact 8 cm (~3 in)-diameter variant of the Blu-ray Disc that can store approximately 7.5 GB of data. It is similar in concept to the MiniDVDMiniDVD
MiniDVD is a DVD disc having 8 cm in diameter.The 8 cm optical disc format was originally used for music CD singles, hence the commonly used names CD single and miniCD...
and MiniCD. Recordable (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) versions of Mini Blu-ray Disc have been developed specifically for compact camcorders and other compact recording devices.
Blu-ray Disc recordable
"Blu-ray Disc recordable" refers to two optical discOptical disc
In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces...
formats that can be recorded with an optical disc recorder
Optical disc recorder
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disk drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves near the light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from discs, but recent drives are commonly both readers and recorders,...
. BD-Rs can be written to once, whereas BD-REs can be erased and re-recorded multiple times. The current practical maximum speed for Blu-ray Discs is about 12×. Higher speeds of rotation (10,000+ rpm) cause too much wobble for the discs to be read properly, as with the 20× and 52× maximum speeds, respectively, of standard DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s and CDs
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
.
Since September 2007, BD-RE is also available in the smaller 8 cm Mini Blu-ray Disc size.
On September 18, 2007, Pioneer
Pioneer Corporation
is a multinational corporation that specializes in digital entertainment products, based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. The company was founded in 1938 in Tokyo as a radio and speaker repair shop...
and Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi
The Mitsubishi Group , Mitsubishi Group of Companies, or Mitsubishi Companies is a Japanese multinational conglomerate company that consists of a range of autonomous businesses which share the Mitsubishi brand, trademark and legacy...
codeveloped BD-R LTH ("Low to High" in groove recording), which features an organic
Organic compound
An organic compound is any member of a large class of gaseous, liquid, or solid chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon. For historical reasons discussed below, a few types of carbon-containing compounds such as carbides, carbonates, simple oxides of carbon, and cyanides, as well as the...
dye recording layer that can be manufactured by modifying existing CD-R and DVD-R production equipment, significantly reducing manufacturing costs. In February 2008, Taiyo Yuden
Taiyo Yuden
is a Japanese materials and electronics company, situated in Ueno, Taito, Tokyo, that helped pioneer recordable CD technology along with Sony and Philips in 1988. Founded 60 years ago, Taiyo Yuden currently operates factories in Japan, Singapore, Korea, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia,...
, Mitsubishi, and Maxell
Maxell
, commonly known as Maxell, is a Japanese company which manufactures consumer electronics. The company's notable products are batteries -- the company's name is a contraction of "maximum capacity dry cell" -- and recording media, including audio cassettes and blank VHS tapes, and recordable optical...
released the first BD-R LTH Discs, and in March 2008, Sony's PlayStation 3 gained official support for BD-R LTH Discs with the 2.20 firmware update. In May 2009 Verbatim/Mitsubishi announced the industry's first 6X BD-R LTH media, which allows recording a 25 GB disc in about 16 minutes.
Unlike the previous releases of 120 mm optical disc
Optical disc
In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc which encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces...
s (i.e., CDs and standard DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s), Blu-ray recorders hit the market almost simultaneously with Blu-ray's debut.
BD9 and BD5
The BD9 format was proposed to the Blu-ray Disc Association by Warner Home Video as a cost-effective alternative to the 25/50 GB BD-ROM discs. The format was supposed to use the same codecs and program structure as Blu-ray Disc video, but recorded onto less expensive 8.5 GB dual-layer DVD. This red-laser media could be manufactured on existing DVD production lines with lower costs of production than the 25/50 GB Blu-ray media.Usage of BD9 for releasing content on "pressed" discs has never caught on. After the end of the format war, major producers ramped up the production of Blu-ray Discs and lowered their prices to the level of DVDs. On the other hand, the idea of using inexpensive DVD media became popular among individual users. A lower-capacity version of this format that uses single-layer 4.7 GB DVDs has been unofficially called BD5. Both formats are being used by individuals for recording high definition content in Blu-ray format onto recordable DVD media.
Despite the fact that the BD9 format has been adopted as part of the BD-ROM basic format, none of the existing Blu-ray player models support it explicitly. As such, the discs recorded in BD9 and BD5 formats are not guaranteed to play on standard Blu-ray Disc players.
AVCHD
AVCHD
AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video....
and AVCREC
AVCREC
AVCREC is a format for recording and playback of high definition video in BDAV format using conventional DVD recordable discs as recording media...
also use inexpensive media like DVDs, but unlike BD9 and BD5 these formats have limited interactivity, codec types, and data rates.
BDXL
The BDXL format supports 100GB and 128GB write-once discs and 100GB rewritable discs for commercial applications. It was defined in June 2010.BD-R 3.0 Format Specification (BDXL) defined a multi-layered disc recordable in BDAV format with the speed of 2X and 4X, capable of 100/128GB and usage of UDF2.5/2.6.
BD-RE 4.0 Format Specification (BDXL) defined a multi-layered disc rewritable in BDAV with the speed of 2X and 4X, capable of 100GB and usage of UDF2.5 as file system.
BDXL discs are not compatible with existing BD drives.
IH-BD
The IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid Blu-ray) format includes a 25GB write-once layer (BD-R) and a 25GB read-only layer (BD-ROM), designed to work with existing Blu-ray Discs.Filesystem
Blu-ray Disc specifies the use of Universal Disk FormatUniversal Disk Format
Universal Disk Format is an implementation of the specification known as ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167 and is an open vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660...
(UDF) 2.50 as a convergent friendly format for both PC and consumer electronics environments. It is used in latest specifications of BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R.
In the first BD-RE specification (defined in 2002), the BDFS (Blu-ray Disc File System) was used. The BD-RE 1.0 specification was defined mainly for the digital recording
Digital recording
In digital recording, digital audio and digital video is directly recorded to a storage device as a stream of discrete numbers, representing the changes in air pressure for audio and chroma and luminance values for video through time, thus making an abstract template for the original sound or...
of High Definition Television (HDTV) broadcast television. The BDFS was replaced by UDF 2.50 in the second BD-RE specification in 2005, in order to enable interoperability among consumer electronics Blu-ray recorders and personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
systems. These optical disc recording technologies
Optical disc recording technologies
Optical disc authoring requires a number of different optical disc recorder technologies working in tandem, from the optical disc media to the firmware to the control electronics of the optical disc drive...
enabled PC recording and playback of BD-RE. BD-R can use UDF 2.50/2.60.
The Blu-ray Disc application (BDAV application) for recording of digital broadcasting
Digital broadcasting
Digital broadcasting is the practice of using digital data rather than analogue waveforms to carry broadcasts over television channels or assigned radio frequency bands...
has been developed as System Description Blu-ray Rewritable Disc Format part 3 Audio Visual Basic Specifications. The requirements related with computer file
Computer file
A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished...
system have been specified in System Description Blu-ray Rewritable Disc Format part 2 File System Specifications version 1.0 (BDFS).
Initially, the BD-RE version 1.0 (BDFS) was specifically developed for recording of digital broadcasting using the Blu-ray Disc
application (BDAV application). To support UDF, these requirements are superseded by the Blu-ray Rewritable Disc File System Specifications version 2.0 (UDF) (a.k.a. RE 2.0) and Blu-ray Recordable Disc File System Specifications version 1.0 (UDF) (a.k.a. R 1.0). Additionally, a new application format, BDMV (System Description Blu-ray Disc Prerecorded Format part 3 Audio Visual Basic Specifications) for High Definition Content Distribution was developed for BD-ROM. The only file system developed for BDMV is the System Description Blu-ray Read-Only Disc Format part 2 File System Specifications version 1.0 (UDF) which defines the requirements for UDF 2.50.
Directory and file structure
All BD-ROM application files are stored under a “BDMV” directory.- BDMV directory: contains the PLAYLIST, CLIPINF, STREAM, AUXDATA and BACKUP directories.
- PLAYLIST directory: contains the Database files for Movie PlayLists.
- xxxxx.mpls files: store information corresponding to Movie PlayLists. One file is created for each Movie PlayList. The filenames of these files are in the form “xxxxx.mpls”, where “xxxxx” is a 5-digit number corresponding to the Movie PlayList.
- CLIPINF directory: contains the Database files for Clips.
- zzzzz.clpi files: store Clip information associated with a Clip AV stream file. The filenames of these files are in the form “zzzzz.clpi”, where “zzzzz” is a 5-digit number corresponding to the Clip.
- STREAM directory: contains AV stream files.
- zzzzz.m2ts file: contains a BDAV MPEG-2 transport stream. The names of these files are in the form “zzzzz.m2ts”, where “zzzzz” is a 5-digit number corresponding to the Clip. The same 5-digit number “zzzzz” is used for an AV stream file and its associated Clip information file.
- SSIF directory: If used, Stereoscopic Interleaved files shall be placed under this directory.
- zzzzz.ssif file: is a Stereoscopic Interleaved file that is composed from two BDAV MPEG-2 transport streams. Both of the streams include an MPEG-4 MVC view video stream for left eye or right eye respectively. This file is used only when 3D video is played back. The 5-digit number “zzzzz” is the same as the number used for the AV stream file “zzzzz.m2ts” that includes the MPEG-4 MVC Base view video stream.
- AUXDATA directory: contains Sound data files and Font files.
- sound.bdmv file: stores data relating to one or more sounds associated with HDMV Interactive Graphic streams applications. This file may or may not exist under the AUXDATA directory. If it exists, there shall be only one sound.bdmv file.
- aaaaa.otf file: stores the font information associated with Text subtitle applications. The names of these files are in the form “aaaaa.otf”, where “aaaaa” is a 5-digit number corresponding to the Font.
- BACKUP directory: contains copies of the "index.bdmv” file, the “MovieObject.bdmv” file, all the files in the PLAYLIST directory and all files in the CLIPINF directory.
- index.bdmv file: stores information describing the contents of the BDMV directory. There is only one index.bdmv file under the BDMV directory.
- MovieObject.bdmv file: stores information for one or more Movie Objects. There is only one MovieObject.bdmv under the BDMV directory.
- PLAYLIST directory: contains the Database files for Movie PlayLists.
Container format
Audio, video and other streams are multiplexed and stored on Blu-ray Discs in a container format based on the MPEG transport stream. It is also known as BDAV MPEG-2 transport stream and can use filename extension .m2ts.m2ts
M2TS is a filename extension used for the Blu-ray Disc Audio-Video MPEG-2 Transport Stream container file format. It is used for multiplexing audio, video and other streams. It is based on the MPEG-2 transport stream container...
. Blu-ray Disc titles authored with menu support are in the BDMV (Blu-ray Disc Movie) format and contain audio, video, and other streams in BDAV container. There is also the BDAV (Blu-ray Disc Audio/Visual) format, the consumer oriented alternative to the BDMV format used for movie releases. The BDAV format is used on BD-REs and BD-Rs for audio/video recording. BDMV format was later defined also for BD-RE and BD-R (in September 2006, in the third revision of BD-RE specification and second revision of BD-R specification). Blu-ray Disc employs the MPEG transport stream recording method. That enables transport streams of digital broadcasts to be recorded as they are without altering the format. It also enables flexible editing of a digital broadcast that is recorded as is and where the data can be edited just by rewriting the playback stream. Although it is quite natural, a function for high-speed and easy-to use retrieval is built in. Blu-ray Disc Video use MPEG transport streams, compared to DVD's MPEG program streams. This allows multiple video programs to be stored in the same file so they can be played back simultaneously (e.g., with "Picture in picture" effect).
Codecs
The BD-ROM specification mandates certain codec compatibilities for both hardware decoders (players) and movie software (content).Video
High-definition video may be stored on BD-ROMs with up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at up to 59.94 fields
Field (video)
In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame...
per second, if interlaced. Alternatively, progressive scan can go up to 1920×1080 pixel resolution at 24 frames per second, or up to 1280x720 at up to 59.94 frames per second:
| Resolution | Aspect ratio | |
|---|---|---|
| 1920×1080 | 29.97-i | 16:9 |
| 1920×1080 | 25-i | 16:9 |
| 1920×1080 | 24-p | 16:9 |
| 1920×1080 | 23.976-p | 16:9 |
| 1440×1080 | 29.97-i | 16:9 (anamorphic Anamorphic widescreen Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen... ) |
| 1440×1080 | 25-i | 16:9 (anamorphic) |
| 1440×1080 | 24-p | 16:9 (anamorphic) |
| 1440×1080 | 23.976-p | 16:9 (anamorphic) |
| 1280×720 | 59.94-p | 16:9 |
| 1280×720 | 50-p | 16:9 |
| 1280×720 | 24-p | 16:9 |
| 1280×720 | 23.976-p | 16:9 |
| 720×480 | 29.97-i | 4:3/16:9 (anamorphic) |
| 720×576 | 25-i | 4:3/16:9 (anamorphic) |
a All frame rates are properly listed in frames per second. Some manufacturers will list field rate for interlaced material, but this is incorrect industry practice. To avoid confusion, only FRAME rates should ever be listed.
b MPEG-2 at 1440x1080 was previously not supported in a draft version of the specification from March 2005.
For video, all players are required to support MPEG-2 Part 2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
, and SMPTE VC-1
VC-1
VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...
. MPEG-2 is the compression standard used on regular DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s, which allows backwards compatibility. MPEG-4 AVC was developed by MPEG, Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
, and VCEG. VC-1 is a compression standard that was mainly developed by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. BD-ROM titles with video must store video using one of the three mandatory formats; multiple formats on a single title are allowed.
The choice of formats affects the producer's licensing/royalty costs as well as the title's maximum run time, due to differences in compression efficiency. Discs encoded in MPEG-2 video typically limit content producers to around two hours of high-definition content on a single-layer (25 GB) BD-ROM. The more-advanced video formats (VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC) typically achieve a video run time twice that of MPEG-2, with comparable quality.
MPEG-2 was used by many studios (including Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
, which initially used the VC-1
VC-1
VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...
format for HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
releases) for the first series of Blu-ray Discs, which were launched throughout 2006. Modern releases are now often encoded in either MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1, allowing film studios to place all content on one disc, reducing costs and improving ease of use. Using these formats also frees a lot of space for storage of bonus content in HD (1080i
1080i
1080i is the shorthand name for a high-definition television mode. The i means interlaced video; 1080i differs from 1080p, in which the p stands for progressive scan. The term 1080i assumes a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9, implying a frame size of 1920×1080 pixels...
/p
1080p
1080p is the shorthand identification for a set of HDTV high-definition video modes that are characterized by 1080 horizontal lines of resolution and progressive scan, meaning the image is not interlaced as is the case with the 1080i display standard....
), as opposed to the SD (480i
480i
480i is the shorthand name for a video mode, namely the US NTSC television system or digital television systems with the same characteristics. The i, which is sometimes uppercase, stands for interlaced, the 480 for a vertical frame resolution of 480 lines containing picture information; while NTSC...
/p
480p
480p is the shorthand name for a video display resolution. The p stands for progressive scan, i.e. non-interlaced. The 480 denotes a vertical resolution of 480 pixel high vertically scanning lines, usually with a horizontal resolution of 640 pixels and 4:3 aspect ratio or a horizontal resolution of...
) typically used for most titles. Some studios, such as Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
, have released bonus content on discs encoded in a different format than the main feature title. For example, the Blu-ray Disc release of Superman Returns
Superman Returns
Superman Returns is a 2006 superhero film directed by Bryan Singer. It is the fifth and final installment in the original Superman film series and serves as a alternate sequel to Superman and Superman II by ignoring the events of Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace .The film stars...
uses VC-1 for the feature film and MPEG-2 for some of its bonus content. Today, Warner and other studios typically provide bonus content in the video format that matches the feature.
Audio
For audio, BD-ROM players are required to support Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...
(AC-3), DTS, and linear PCM. Players may optionally support Dolby Digital Plus
Dolby Digital Plus
Dolby Digital Plus is a digital audio compression scheme. It is an incompatible development of the technologies used in the earlier Dolby Digital system. E-AC-3 has a number of improvements aimed at increasing quality at a given bitrate compared with legacy Dolby Digital...
and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio as well as lossless formats Dolby TrueHD
Dolby TrueHD
Dolby TrueHD is an advanced lossless multi-channel audio codec developed by Dolby Laboratories which is intended primarily for high-definition home-entertainment equipment such as Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. It is the successor to the AC-3 Dolby Digital surround sound codec which was used as the...
and DTS-HD Master Audio
DTS-HD Master Audio
DTS-HD Master Audio is a lossless audio codec created by Digital Theater System. It was previously known as DTS++. It is an extension of DTS which, when played back on devices which do not support the Master Audio or High Resolution extension, degrades to a "core" track which is lossy. DTS-HD...
. BD-ROM titles must use one of the mandatory schemes for the primary soundtrack. A secondary audiotrack, if present, may use any of the mandatory or optional codecs.
| Specification of BD-ROM Primary audio streams: | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LPCM | Dolby Digital Dolby Digital Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints... | Dolby Digital Plus Dolby Digital Plus Dolby Digital Plus is a digital audio compression scheme. It is an incompatible development of the technologies used in the earlier Dolby Digital system. E-AC-3 has a number of improvements aimed at increasing quality at a given bitrate compared with legacy Dolby Digital... | Dolby TrueHD Dolby TrueHD Dolby TrueHD is an advanced lossless multi-channel audio codec developed by Dolby Laboratories which is intended primarily for high-definition home-entertainment equipment such as Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. It is the successor to the AC-3 Dolby Digital surround sound codec which was used as the... (Lossless) | DTS Digital Surround | DTS-HD Master Audio DTS-HD Master Audio DTS-HD Master Audio is a lossless audio codec created by Digital Theater System. It was previously known as DTS++. It is an extension of DTS which, when played back on devices which do not support the Master Audio or High Resolution extension, degrades to a "core" track which is lossy. DTS-HD... (Lossless) | DRA Dynamic Resolution Adaptation Dynamic Resolution Adaptation is an audio encoding specification developed by DigiRise Technology. It has been selected as the Chinese national audio coding standard.It is one of the standard formats for Blu-Ray audio, introduced with Blu-Ray 2.3... | DRA Extension | |
| Max. Bitrate | 27.648 Mbit/s | 640 kbit/s | 4.736 Mbit/s | 18.64 Mbit/s | 1.524 Mbit/s | 24.5 Mbit/s | 1.5 Mbit/s | 3.0 Mbit/s |
| Max. Channel | 8 (48 kHz, 96 kHz), 6 (192 kHz) | 5.1 | 7.1 | 8 (48 kHz, 96 kHz), 6 (192 kHz) | 5.1 | 8 (48 kHz, 96 kHz), 6 (192 kHz) | 5.1 | 7.1 |
| Bits/sample | 16, 20, 24 | 16, 24 | 16, 24 | 16, 24 | 16, 20, 24 | 16, 24 | 16 | 16 |
| Sample frequency | 48 kHz, 96 kHz, 192 kHz | 48 kHz | 48 kHz | 48 kHz, 96 kHz, 192 kHz | 48 kHz | 48 kHz, 96 kHz, 192 kHz | 48 kHz | 48 kHz, 96 kHz |
Bit rate
For users recording digital televisionDigital television
Digital television is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV...
programming, the recordable Blu-ray Disc standard's initial data rate of 36 Mbit/s is more than adequate to record high-definition broadcasts from any source (IPTV
IPTV
Internet Protocol television is a system through which television services are delivered using the Internet protocol suite over a packet-switched network such as the Internet, instead of being delivered through traditional terrestrial, satellite signal, and cable television formats.IPTV services...
, cable/satellite, or terrestrial). BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mbit/s (for both audio and video data), and a maximum video bit rate of 40 Mbit/s. This compares to HD DVD movies, which have a maximum data transfer rate of 36 Mbit/s, a maximum AV bitrate of 30.24 Mbit/s, and a maximum video bitrate of 29.4 Mbit/s.
Application format
- BDAV or BD-AV (Blu-ray Disc Audio/Visual) – a consumer-oriented Blu-ray video format used for audio/video recording (defined in 2002)
- BDMV or BD-MV (Blu-ray Disc Movie) – a Blu-ray video format with menu support commonly used for movie releases
- BDMV Recording specification – (defined in September 2006 for BD-RE and BD-R).
- RREF – (Realtime Recording and Editing Format) – a subset of BDMV designed for realtime recording and editing applications
- BDMV Recording specification – (defined in September 2006 for BD-RE and BD-R).
Java software support
At the 2005 JavaOneJavaOne
JavaOne is an annual conference inaugurated in 1996 by Sun Microsystems to discuss Java technologies, primarily among Java developers. JavaOne is held in San Francisco, California typically running from Monday to Thursday. Technical sessions on a variety of topics are held during the day. In the...
trade show, it was announced that Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
' Java cross-platform software environment would be included in all Blu-ray Disc players as a mandatory part of the standard. Java is used to implement interactive menus on Blu-ray Discs, as opposed to the method used on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
-video discs. DVDs use pre-rendered MPEG segments and selectable subtitle pictures, which are considerably more primitive and rarely seamless. At the conference, Java creator James Gosling
James Gosling
James A. Gosling, OC is a computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.-Education and career:In 1977, Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary...
suggested that the inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine
Java Virtual Machine
A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...
, as well as network connectivity in some BD devices, will allow updates to Blu-ray Discs via the Internet, adding content such as additional subtitle languages and promotional features not included on the disc at pressing time. This Java Version is called BD-J
BD-J
BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is a specification supporting Java ME Xlets for advanced content on Blu-ray Disc and the Packaged Media profile of Globally Executable MHP .BD-J allows bonus content on Blu-ray Disc titles to be far more sophisticated than bonus content provided by standard DVD,...
and is a subset of the Globally Executable MHP
Globally Executable MHP
Globally Executable MHP is a DVB specification of a Java based middleware for TV broadcast receivers, IPTV terminals and Blu-ray players. GEM is an ETSI standard and an ITU "Recommendation...
(GEM) standard; GEM is the worldwide version of the Multimedia Home Platform
Multimedia Home Platform
Multimedia Home Platform is an open middleware system standard designed by the DVB project for interactive digital television. The MHP enables the reception and execution of interactive, Java-based applications on a TV-set. Interactive TV applications can be delivered over the broadcast channel,...
standard.
Player profiles
The BD-ROM specification defines four Blu-ray Disc player profiles, including an audio-only player profile (BD-Audio) that does not require video decoding or BD-JBD-J
BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is a specification supporting Java ME Xlets for advanced content on Blu-ray Disc and the Packaged Media profile of Globally Executable MHP .BD-J allows bonus content on Blu-ray Disc titles to be far more sophisticated than bonus content provided by standard DVD,...
. All three of the video-based player profiles (BD-Video) are required to have a full implementation of BD-J
BD-J
BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is a specification supporting Java ME Xlets for advanced content on Blu-ray Disc and the Packaged Media profile of Globally Executable MHP .BD-J allows bonus content on Blu-ray Disc titles to be far more sophisticated than bonus content provided by standard DVD,...
, with varying levels of hardware support.
| Feature | BD-Audio | BD-Video | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grace Period | Bonus View | BD-Live | Blu-ray 3D | ||
| Profile 3.0 | Profile 1.0 | Profile 1.1 | Profile 2.0 | Profile 5.0 | |
| Built-in persistent memory | No | 64 KB | 64 KB | 64 KB | 64 KB? |
| Local storage capability | No | Optional | 256 MB | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| Secondary video decoder (PiP Picture-in-picture Picture in Picture is a feature of some television receivers and similar devices. One program is displayed on the full TV screen at the same time as one or more other programs are displayed in inset windows. Sound is usually from the main program only.Picture in Picture requires two independent... ) |
No | Optional | Mandatory | Mandatory | Mandatory |
| Secondary audio decoder | No | Optional | Mandatory | Mandatory | Mandatory |
| Virtual file system Virtual file system A virtual file system or virtual filesystem switch is an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way... |
No | Optional | Mandatory | Mandatory | Mandatory |
| Internet connection capability | No | No | No | Mandatory | Mandatory |
a This is used for storing audio/video and title updates. It can either be built-in memory or removable media, such as a memory card or USB flash memory.
b A secondary audio decoder is typically used for interactive audio and commentary.
c Profile 3.0 is a separate audio-only player profile. The first Blu-ray Disc album to be released was Divertimenti, by record label Lindberg Lyd, and it has been confirmed to work on the PS3.
d Also known as Initial Standard profile.
e Also known as Final Standard profile.
On November 2, 2007, the Grace Period Profile was superseded by Bonus View as the minimum profile for new BD-Video players released to the market. When Blu-ray Disc software not authored with interactive features dependent on Bonus View or BD-Live hardware capabilities is played on Profile 1.0 players, it is able to play the main feature of the disc, but some extra features may not be available or will have limited capability.
BD-Live
The biggest difference between Bonus View and BD-Live is that BD-Live requires the Blu-ray Disc player to have an Internet connection to access Internet-based content. BD-Live features have included Internet chats, scheduled chats with the director, Internet games, downloadable featurettes, downloadable quizzes, and downloadable movie trailers. Note that while some Bonus View players may have an Ethernet port, these are used for firmware updates and are not used for Internet-based content. In addition, Profile 2.0 also requires more local storage in order to handle this content.With the exception of the latest players and the PlayStation 3
PlayStation 3
The is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
, Profile 1.0 players cannot be upgraded to be Bonus View or BD-Live compliant.
Region codes
Movie studios have different region coding policies. Among major U.S. studios, Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
and Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
have released all of their titles region-free. Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
have released most of their titles region-free. Lionsgate and Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
have released a mix of region-free and region-coded titles. 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
and MGM have released most of their titles region-coded.
The Blu-ray Disc region coding scheme divides the world into 3 regions, labeled A, B, and C.
- Region A includes most North, Central and South American and Southeast Asian countries plus the Republic of China (Taiwan), Japan, Hong Kong, Macau and Korea.
- Region B includes most European, African and southwest Asian countries plus Australia and New Zealand.
- Region C contains the remaining central and south Asian countries, as well as the People's Republic of China and Russia.
In circumvention of region coding restrictions, stand-alone Blu-ray Disc players are sometimes modified by third parties to allow for playback of Blu-ray Discs (and DVDs) with any region code. Instructions ('hacks') describing how to reset the Blu-ray region counter of computer player applications to make them multi-region indefinitely are also regularly posted to video enthusiast websites and forums. Unlike DVD region codes, Blu-ray region codes are verified only by the player software, not by the optical drive's firmware
Regional Playback Control
RPC-1 and RPC-2 are designations applied to firmware for DVD drives. Older DVD drives use RPC-1 firmware, which allows DVDs from any region to play. Newer drives use RPC-2 firmware, which enforces DVD region coding at the hardware level...
.
Digital rights management
The Blu-ray Disc format employs several layers of digital rights managementDigital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
(DRM). This has led to extensive criticism of the format by organizations opposed to DRM, such as the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
.
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
Blu-ray equipment is encouraged to implement the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) system to encrypt the data sent by players to rendering devices through physical connections. This is aimed at preventing the copy of copyrighted content as it travels across cables. Through a protocol flagFlag (computing)
In computer programming, flag can refer to one or more bits that are used to store a binary value or code that has an assigned meaning, but can refer to uses of other data types...
in the media stream called the Image Constraint Token
Image Constraint Token
The Image Constraint Token is a protocol flag that can cause downsampling of high-definition video content on Blu-ray and HD DVD to slightly-better-than-DVD quality video...
, a Blu-ray Disc can enforce its reproduction in a lower resolution whenever a full HDCP-compliant link is not used. In order to ease the transition to high definition formats, the adoption of this protection method has been postponed until 2011.
Advanced Access Content System
Advanced Access Content System
The Advanced Access Content System is a standard for content distribution and digital rights management, intended to restrict access to and copying of the "next generation" of optical discs and DVDs. The specification was publicly released in April 2005 and the standard has been adopted as the...
(AACS) is a standard for content distribution and digital rights management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
. It was developed by AS Licensing Administrator, LLC (AACS LA), a consortium
Consortium
A consortium is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal....
that includes Disney
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...
, Intel, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, Panasonic, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
, and Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
.
Since appearing in devices in 2006, several successful attacks have been made on the format. The first known attack relied on the trusted client
Trusted client
In computing, a trusted client is a device or program controlled by the user of a service, but with restrictions designed to prevent its use in ways not authorised by the provider of the service. That is, the client is a device that vendors trust and then sell to the consumers, whom they do not trust...
problem. In addition, decryption keys have been extracted from a weakly protected player (WinDVD
WinDVD
WinDVD is a commercial video player and music player software for Microsoft Windows. It enables the viewing of DVD-Video movies on the user's PC. DVD-Video backups stored on hard disk can also be played...
). Since keys can be revoked in newer releases, this is only a temporary attack, and new keys must continually be discovered in order to decrypt the latest discs. This cat-and-mouse game
Cat and mouse
Cat and mouse, often expressed as cat-and-mouse game, is an English-language idiom dating back to 1675 that means "a contrived action involving constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes." The "cat" is unable to secure a definitive victory over the "mouse", who despite not being able to...
has gone through several cycles.
BD+
BD+BD+
BD+ is a component of the Blu-ray Disc Digital Rights Management system. It was developed by Cryptography Research Inc. and is based on their Self-Protecting Digital Content concept...
was developed by Cryptography Research Inc.
Cryptography Research
Cryptography Research, Inc.. is a San Francisco based cryptography company specializing in applied cryptographic engineering, including technologies for building tamper-resistant semiconductors. It was purchased on June 6, 2011 by Rambus for more than $250M in cash and stock. The company licenses...
and is based on their concept of Self-Protecting Digital Content
Self-Protecting Digital Content
Self Protecting Digital Content , is a copy protection architecture which allows restriction of access to, and copying of, the next generation of optical discs and streaming/downloadable content.- Overview :...
. BD+, effectively a small virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
embedded in authorized players, allows content providers to include executable programs on Blu-ray Discs. Such programs can:
- examine the host environment to see if the player has been tampered with. Every licensed playback device manufacturer must provide the BD+ licensing authority with memory footprints that identify their devices.
- verify that the player's keys have not been changed.
- execute native code, possibly to patch an otherwise insecure system.
- transform the audio and video output. Parts of the content will not be viewable without letting the BD+ program unscramble it.
If a playback device manufacturer finds that its devices have been hacked, it can potentially release BD+ code that detects and circumvents the vulnerability. These programs can then be included in all new content releases.
The specifications of the BD+ virtual machine are available only to licensed device manufacturers. A list of licensed commercial adopters is available from the BD+ website.
The first titles using BD+ were released in October 2007. Since November 2007, versions of BD+ protection have been circumvented by various versions of the AnyDVD
AnyDVD
AnyDVD is a Microsoft Windows driver allowing decryption of DVDs on-the-fly, as well as targeted removal of copy preventions and user operation prohibitions . With an upgrade, it will also do the same for HD DVD and Blu-ray. The AnyDVD program runs in the background, making discs unrestricted and...
HD program. Other programs known to be capable of circumventing BD+ protection are DumpHD (versions 0.6 and above, along with some supporting software), MakeMKV, and two applications from DVDFab (Passkey and HD Decrypter).
BD-ROM Mark
BD-ROM MarkROM-Mark
In computing, ROM Mark or BD-ROM Mark is a serialization technology designed to guard against mass production piracy or the mass duplication and sale of unauthorized copies of pre-recorded Blu-ray Discs...
is a small amount of cryptographic data that is stored separately from normal Blu-ray Disc data, aiming to prevent illegal replication of the discs. The cryptographic data is needed to decrypt the copyrighted disc content protected by AACS. A specially licensed piece of hardware is required to insert the ROM-Mark into the media during replication. In consequence, sector-by-sector copies of a disc made with a regular recorder will lack the ROM-Mark data, and will be unreadable on standard players.
Backward compatibility
Though not compulsory, the Blu-ray Disc Association recommends that Blu-ray Disc drives be capable of reading standard DVDs and CDs, for backward compatibilityBackward compatibility
In the context of telecommunications and computing, a device or technology is said to be backward or downward compatible if it can work with input generated by an older device...
. A few early Blu-ray Disc players released in 2006 could play DVDs but not CDs.
Ongoing development
Hitachi stated that such a disc could be used to store 7 hours of 32 Mbit/s video (HDTV) or 3 hours and 30 minutes of 64 Mbit/s video (Cinema 4K
4K resolution
4K is an emerging standard for resolution in digital film and computer graphics. The name comes from its approximately 4,000 pixels of horizontal resolution. The fact that it describes the horizontal resolution is contrary to the standard resolutions 720p and 1080p, which represent the number of...
). In August 2006, TDK
TDK
, formerly , is a Japanese company which manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media, and markets them globally. Their motto is "Contribute to culture and industry through creativity"...
announced that they have created a working experimental Blu-ray Disc capable of holding 200 GB of data on a single side, using six 33 GB data layers.
Also, behind closed doors at CES
Consumer Electronics Show
The International Consumer Electronics Show is a major technology-related trade show held each January in the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. Not open to the public, the Consumer Electronics Association-sponsored show typically hosts previews of products and new...
2007, Ritek revealed that they had successfully developed a High Definition optical disc process that extends the disc capacity to ten layers, which increases the capacity of the discs to 250 GB. However, they noted that the major obstacle is that current read/write technology does not support the additional layers.
JVC
JVC
, usually referred to as JVC, is a Japanese international consumer and professional electronics corporation based in Yokohama, Japan which was founded in 1927...
has developed a three-layer technology that allows putting both standard-definition DVD data and HD data on a BD/(standard) DVD combination. If successfully commercialized, this would enable the consumer to purchase a disc that can be played on DVD players and can also reveal its HD version when played on a BD player. Japanese optical disc manufacturer Infinity announced the first "hybrid" Blu-ray Disc/(standard) DVD combo, to be released February 18, 2009. This disc set of the TV series "Code Blue" featured four hybrid discs containing a single Blu-ray Disc layer (25 GB) and two DVD layers (9 GB) on the same side of the disc.
In January 2007, Hitachi
Hitachi, Ltd.
is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Marunouchi 1-chome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The company is the parent of the Hitachi Group as part of the larger DKB Group companies...
showcased a 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, consisting of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK
TDK
, formerly , is a Japanese company which manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media, and markets them globally. Their motto is "Contribute to culture and industry through creativity"...
and Panasonic
Panasonic
Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation, which was formerly known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd...
's 100 GB discs, they claim this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray Disc drives that are currently in circulation, and it is believed that a firmware update is the only requirement to make it readable to current players and drives.
In December 2008, Pioneer Corporation
Pioneer Corporation
is a multinational corporation that specializes in digital entertainment products, based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. The company was founded in 1938 in Tokyo as a radio and speaker repair shop...
unveiled a 400 GB Blu-ray Disc (containing 16 data layers, 25 GB each) that will be compatible with current players after a firmware update. Its planned launch is in the 2009–10 time frame for ROM and 2010–13 for rewritable discs. Ongoing development is under way to create a 1 TB
Terabyte
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
Blu-ray Disc as soon as 2013.
At CES 2009, Panasonic unveiled the DMP-B15, the first portable Blu-ray Disc player, and Sharp introduced the LC-BD60U and LC-BD80U series, the first LCD HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc players. Sharp has also announced that they will sell HDTVs with integrated Blu-ray Disc recorders in the United States by the end of 2009. Set-top box recorders are not being sold in the U.S. due to fears of piracy. However, personal computers with Blu-ray recorder drives are available.
On January 1, 2010, Sony, in association with Panasonic, announced plans to increase the storage capacity on their Blu-ray Discs from 25GB to 33.4 GB via a technology called i-MLSE (Maximum likelihood
Maximum likelihood
In statistics, maximum-likelihood estimation is a method of estimating the parameters of a statistical model. When applied to a data set and given a statistical model, maximum-likelihood estimation provides estimates for the model's parameters....
Sequence Estimation). The higher-capacity discs, according to Sony, will be readable on current Blu-ray Disc players with a firmware upgrade. No date has been set to include the increased space, but according to Blu-ray.com "it will likely happen sometime later this year."
On July 20, 2010, the research team of Sony and Japanese Tohoku University announced the joint development of a blue-violet laser, which will help in creating Blu-ray discs with a capacity of 1 TB (dual layer).
Blu-ray 3D
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) created a task force made up of executives from the film industry and the consumer electronics and IT sectors to help define standards for putting 3-D film3-D film
A 3-D film or S3D film is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception...
and 3-D television content on a Blu-ray Disc. On Dec. 17, 2009 the BDA officially announced 3D specs for Blu-ray Disc, allowing backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray players. The BDA has said, "The Blu-ray 3D specification calls for encoding 3D video using the "Stereo High" profile defined by Multiview Video Coding
Multiview Video Coding
Multiview Video Coding is an amendment to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard developed with joint efforts by MPEG/VCEG that enables efficient encoding of sequences captured simultaneously from multiple cameras using a single video stream....
(MVC), an extension to the ITU-T H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec currently supported by all Blu-ray Disc players. MPEG4-MVC compresses both left and right eye views with a typical 50% overhead compared to equivalent 2D content, and can provide full 1080p resolution backward compatibility with current 2D Blu-ray Disc players." This means the MVC (3D) stream is backward compatible with H.264/AVC (2D) stream, allowing older 2D devices and software to decode stereoscopic video streams, ignoring additional information for the second view.
Sony has released a firmware upgrade for PlayStation 3 consoles that enables 3D Blu-ray Disc playback. They previously released support for 3D gaming on April 21, 2010 (followed by the availability of 3D movies). Since the version 3.70 software update in August 9, 2011, the PlayStation 3 can support DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio while playing 3D Blu-ray. Dolby TrueHD is used on a small minority of Blu-ray 3D releases, and is currently unsupported by the PS3. It can play 3D Blu-ray content at full 1080p.
AVCHD
AVCHD was originally developed as a high definition format for consumer tapelessTapeless
In the professional broadcast world, an end-to-end workflow is called tapeless when part, or all of it, is made without any tape; video and audio sources being ingested, recorded, edited and played out on digital systems....
camcorder
Camcorder
A camcorder is an electronic device that combines a video camera and a video recorder into one unit. Equipment manufacturers do not seem to have strict guidelines for the term usage...
s. Derived from the Blu-ray Disc specification, AVCHD shares a similar random access
Random access
In computer science, random access is the ability to access an element at an arbitrary position in a sequence in equal time, independent of sequence size. The position is arbitrary in the sense that it is unpredictable, thus the use of the term "random" in "random access"...
directory structure, but is restricted to lower audio and video bitrates, simpler interactivity, and the use of AVC-video and Dolby AC-3 (or linear PCM) audio.
Being primarily an acquisition format, AVCHD playback is not universally supported by all devices that support Blu-Ray Disc playback. Nevertheless, many such devices are capable of playing AVCHD recordings from removable media, such as DVDs, SD
Secure Digital card
Secure Digital is a non-volatile memory card format developed by the SD Card Association for use in portable devices. The SD technology is used by more than 400 brands across dozens of product categories and more than 8,000 models, and is considered the de-facto industry standard.Secure Digital...
/SDHC memory cards, "Memory Stick
Memory Stick
Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, launched by Sony in October 1998, and is also used in general to describe the whole family of Memory Sticks...
" cards, and hard disk drives.
AVCREC
AVCREC uses a BDAV container to record high definition content on conventional DVDs. Presently AVCREC is tightly integrated with the Japanese ISDBISDB
Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting is a Japanese standard for digital television and digital radio used by the country's radio and television stations. ISDB replaced the previously used MUSE "Hi-vision" analogue HDTV system...
broadcast standard and is not marketed outside of Japan. AVCREC is used primarily in set-top digital video recorder
Digital video recorder
A digital video recorder , sometimes referred to by the merchandising term personal video recorder , is a consumer electronics device or application software that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card or other local or networked mass storage device...
s and in this regard is comparable to HD REC.
See also
- Blu-ray Disc authoring
- Blu-ray Disc recordableBlu-ray Disc recordableBlu-ray Disc recordable refers to two direct to disc optical disc recording technologies that can be recorded on to an optical disc with an optical disc recorder. BD-R discs can be written to once, whereas BD-RE can be erased and re-recorded multiple times...
- Comparison of high definition optical disc formatsComparison of high definition optical disc formatsThis article compares the technical specifications of multiple high definition formats, including HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc; two mutually incompatible, high definition optical disc formats that, beginning in 2006, attempted to improve upon and eventually replace the DVD standard...
- Disk drive performance characteristics
- HD DVDHD DVDHD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
- HDTV
- Digital 3DDigital 3DDigital 3D is a non-specific 3D standard in which films, television shows, and video games are presented and shot in digital 3D technology or later processed in digital post-production to add a 3D effect....
and 3D television3D televisionA 3D television is a television set that employs techniques of 3D presentation, such as stereoscopic capture, multi-view capture, or 2D-plus-depth, and a 3D display – a special viewing device to project a television program into a realistic three-dimensional field.- History :In the late-1890's,... - List of Blu-ray 3D releases
- List of Blu-ray manufacturers