Blu-ray Disc Next generation optical storage has arrived

This year, the first Blu-ray player and Blu-ray Disc movies go on sale. Thanks to the invention of the blue laser, this new high-definition optical disc format has been developed to provide high-capacity storage, combined with advanced interactivity and connectivity. CHRIS BUMA, Programme Manager, A/V Disc Recording, Philips Consumer Electronics explains.

Enabling superior picture quality, BD players will be a driving force in the transition from current standard definition to high-definition TV (HDTV). Supported by a host of electronics, computer, games and media manufacturing companies, as well as seven of the eight major Hollywood studios, the Blu-ray Disc is set to be a huge success.

Almost every week, Philips receives a request for an interview with the inventor of the CD. There isn’t one. It was created by a large team of experts, which is how many successful advanced innovations are made these days. Now comes another one – a radical innovation rooted in cooperation – the Blu-ray Disc (BD).

With the capability to store more than nine hours of high-definition (HD) video on a single 50 GB disc, the BD is the most significant development in optical storage for the past 10 years. And while digital music drove CD development, and digital video was behind the DVD, it is the ultimate (High Definition) picture quality that will be a key driver for the popularity of the BD. Furthermore, the PC and games industries see the need for Blu-ray drives in order to offer removable storage for ever-growing quantities of personal content, and to play highly sophisticated, high-resolution 3D games.

Building on the DVD’s success, the Blu-ray Disc brings much more than a leap in storage capacity and picture quality. There’s an even bigger leap forward in features with BD-Java, enabling fast and truly advanced interactivity. This will enable completely new user experiences – studios can add compelling features to interact with movies, music and games.

Moreover, consumers will be able to pull in online content or interact with friends via broadband connections. Blu-ray’s momentum is built on the support of almost all Hollywood studios as well as the leading CE, personal computer and games console manufacturers. And all this is in addition to the HD movie content.

How does it work?

At the heart of the Blu-ray Disc system is the technology innovation of the violet-blue laser, which reads and writes the disc data with even greater precision than that of the CD and DVD. The size of the minute laser spot is determined by the wavelength of the laser light and the numerical aperture (NA) of the lens. The smaller wavelength and higher NA reduce the laser spot size, enabling more data to be packed onto a disc.

With a 405-nm wavelength blue laser and a lens with a numerical aperture of 0.85, instead of the DVD’s 650-nm red laser and 0.60 numerical aperture lens, the pits of data in a BD are just 0.15mm long (much shorter than a DVD) and the track pitch is smaller too: down from 0.74 mm to 0.32 mm. Together, this enables 25 GB on a single- and 50GB on a dual-layer disc.

HDTV and Blu-ray – key drivers of each other

As a TV manufacturer, Philips now sells 90% of its flat TV sets as “HDTV ready” – a European quality standard for TV sets offering the functionality and interconnects for HDTV. Regarding consumers, over 15 million HDTV-ready flat TV sets have been sold already, and it is expected that penetration will rise to 12% of all European homes by 2008. In the USA, analysts now predict about 25% of US homes will have HDTV sets by the end of 2006.

Looking at European broadcasters, many are making programmes in HDTV – all 64 matches of the FIFA 2006 World Cup, for example, will be recorded and broadcast in HDTV this year. In short, HDTV is taking off with manufacturers, consumers and programme makers. Moreover, in Europe many set-top boxes are rented so we’re likely to see service providers competing to promote and provide HDTV.

So what does this all mean in the short term? Broadcast content will create consumer awareness of HDTV, but there will not be enough to satisfy HDTV consumers. This will create a market pull for packaged HD content (like pre-recorded movies). Enter the Blu-ray Disc: meeting the need for more HD content, offering the very best quality source of HD content, providing interactivity and connectivity as an essential part of the value proposition

More than just packaged HD content

While the picture quality improvement from standard to high- definition TV is outstanding, especially when seen on today’s larger screens, BD offers a lot more than DVD and broadcast HDTV to create mass market appeal. Storing a 135-minute movie, with a pristine quality video bit-rate of 15 Mbps and three audio tracks, a BD can still offer over half its capacity for special features. That’s more than 25 GB free space. Compared with DVD, here are some of the things that this allows:

Multi-channel HD video with multi-channel lossless audio tracks
Extra bonus materials and many more new and compelling interactive features
Bundled prequels
Bundled video games
New sources of revenue unlocked by web transactions.
For example: web content and applications.

The Blu-ray disc provides one common system for HDTV, games and next-generation storage. For consumer electronics players, recorders and home cinema, for game consoles, for HDTV camcorders, pre-packaged HD movies or blank media, and for PC storage and entertainment, the key BD formats are set and ready to create a new mass market.

Ready for take-off – BD in all its flavours

Like the CD, all the “format books” are now available for BD-ROM, BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable). Those are the individual books for the physical, file system and (where applicable) video formats. In addition, the BD-Hybrid format is now also available, comprising BD-ROM + DVD-ROM and BD-ROM + CD-ROM.

BD-Hybrid allows standard and high-definition TV content to be included on the same disc. This is manufactured with a 25 GB Blu-ray layer and a DVD-9 layer both on the same side of one single-sided disc. Consequently, manufacturers can offer DVD-9 content – playable on legacy DVD players – along with HDTV BD content. And to avoid confusion for consumers, the disc plays on the same side for both formats, allowing a printed label on the non-playing side.

Advanced features

With Blu-ray, content providers can offer Picture-in-Picture (PiP), showing two video streams simultaneously. This allows new features such as a visually creative commentary by the director, or video previews during the closing credits of the main movie, for example.

Another new possibility is multi-channel game sounds. Interactive audio mixing allows up to eight sounds to be presented dynamically, greatly improving options in games and other applications. But without doubt, one of the key features of this new generation of optical storage is the advanced interactivity. This is a major evolution from DVD and to what we’re all used to.

All BD-ROM players will support two advanced interactivity modes, offering a choice of new and extended features for content providers:

HDMV (High Definition MoVie mode) adds interactive functionality, yet provides production continuity with the existing pre-packaged format. The authoring process is then in line with DVD-Video creation to streamline the production of both. Improvements include better navigation, animation, menus, graphics, subtitling support and new features such as browsing slideshows.

BD-J (Blu-ray Disc – Java mode) is built on proven Java (Java 2 Micro Edition) and MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) technology to provide a fully programmable application environment. Thanks to the Java runtime environment, it offers unrivalled flexibility and features, extensive and advanced interactive applications, and Internet connectivity. By design, BD-J offers the content provider unlimited functionality when creating interactive titles, and programmers will quickly be familiar with the environment. Every BD player will be able to run discs authored in BD-J mode.

Durable media types now available

Blu-ray authoring, formatting, mastering, replication and inspection companies and facilities are well established. BD-RE (single- and dual layer) has been in mass production since 2003. BD-ROM replication lines from multiple vendors are operational around the world, and equipment for every process step is available from multiple, well-known vendors.

Blu-ray media has a considerable durability advantage compared with other optical media. Hard-coat technologies make BD most durable and much more “family-friendly” than today’s CDs and DVDs, with a hard-coat technology to protect against finger prints, marks and scratches (even from steel wool!), and dust.

Industry support – gathering momentum

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is responsible for promoting and developing business opportunities for BDs. Currently, the BDA has more than 170 members, reading like a Who’s Who of famous and leading companies. Some 90% of the CE industry and most of the IT industry supports Blu-ray technology. Seven out of the eight major movie studios have announced movie titles for the Blu-ray launch: Disney, Fox, Paramount, Warner, Sony, MGM and Lions Gate.

The driving force of the BDA is its Board of Directors – Apple; Dell Inc.; Hewlett Packard Company; Hitachi, Ltd.; LG Electronics Inc.; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Panasonic (Matsushita Electric); Pioneer Corporation; Royal Philips Electronics; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sharp Corporation; Sony Corporation; TDK Corporation; Thomson; Twentieth Century Fox; Walt Disney Pictures and Television; Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Compatibility and rival formats

The Blu-ray Disc has the same physical characteristics as the DVD and CD, making it fairly easy to create backward-compatible products, allowing for a seamless transition to the new technology. We expect Blu-ray products to be able to play and maybe even record all three generations of optical-storage device – CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray. With the single-sided BD-Hybrid format, new discs can also play in legacy DVD players.

Compared with the DVD, the BD offers up to 10x the capacity and many more features. Compared with the new HD DVD format, Blu-ray has a lot of advantages, chiefly: capacity (67% greater; 150% for BD-R), affordability (economies of scale), coating, costs, convenience, connectivity, copy protection, proven Java interactivity, menus and navigation, transfer rates and, last but not least, support.

Conclusion

With the same physical size but up to 10 times the capacity of DVD, the Blu-ray disc can support the very highest quality HD video available in the industry. That means 1920 x 1080 pixels at 40 Mbit/sec with uncompressed sound (192 kHz/24-bit audio), while leaving room to spare. So, for HDTV, its large capacity and capability is unrivalled. The upshot is the Blu-ray disc is about to take off.

Competition between so many supporting manufacturers will ensure fair equipment prices. Hollywood, broadcasters and the Internet will allow the combination of absolutely superior video quality with a host of rich, new audio-visual interactive features. Add to that compelling online content and powerful recording capabilities for data, photos and home HD video, and you can see that 21st century optical storage has arrived....

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