I saw them yesterday at Bestbuy, were talking full length movies and the small device you play them on I think they can even work in a standard dvd player.....Could this take the place of the larger dvd's in the near future......
I really think the next thing that is going to take over are HD-DVDs. Apparently they are going to roll out in Japan over the within the next year and should appear in the US not too long after. I guess there are two competing formats, but that seems to be where most of the money for R&D in that area is going to. Plus, with all the new HDTV sets being sold, I'd imagine there is going to be quite a demand for it.
It's a shame that companies are pushing HD when Blue Ray is so much better. I believe the reason for that is that HD DVDs are cheaper to make and existing production plants can be upgraded to make the HD DVDs while Blue Ray requires new technology. Somebody correct me if I am wrong.
Attention!!!! Not supported by MOST computer manufacturers with SLOT loading DVD drives!!! (I used to get that call all the time with G4 Cubes.)
I imagine you'll need a new player for those mini DVDs. Definately new players for the HD or Blue Ray DVDs. Fortunately, the new HD and Blue Ray players are supposed to be able to play regular DVDs so that you don't have to scrap your collection. The thing about these new discs is how much space they have on them. HDs are supposed to hold about 30 gigs whille Blue Ray can hold 50. With the Blue Rays, the layer is so thin, you can have multiple layers of info on there, and there is already supposed to be a super Blue Ray DVD that can hold like 200 gigs. I'm pretty sure that means you can have Superbit quality movies without getting rid of the special features, no need for 2 disc sets for one movie. For console games, this means the graphics and overall quality of the game can improve many times over. You won't need multiple discs to install computer games either.
****...Is my DVD collection(Not as big as some, but I'm sort of proud of it) about to become obsolete?
The constant compression of media is absolutely amazing. I cannot wait until the day we can get the entire run of a TV or movie series on one disc.
I'm pretty excited about the transfer speeds personally. It would still take ~4x BR-ROM in the PS3 to transfer faster than 16x DVD though. However, I did read that another advantage to the larger amount of space in BR (and I guess HD-DVD as well) is that devs could "use the remaining room to store redundant blocks of data to swap data quicker into memory," basically making things go faster. Some games do this already on DVD, but considering the power of next-gen games, it would be doubtful that there will be any extra space in a DVD to allow for this. One interesting feature of both formats is that they can put a DVD layer and a BR or HD-DVD layer(s) on one disc, as well as CD too IIRC. That would be pretty cool way to keep buying DVD's until you get you HD disc player. Of course, whether the movie studios would make any conveniences for us is a whole other story. I can't remember the specifics on all of it though. I just remember the Blu-ray version was better than how HD-DVD did it. I think BR offered two BR layers plus the DVD layer, while HD-DVD just did one of each. I also want to say that the HD-DVD version may have had to be compressed a little more in order to fit. I forgot most of the specifics between the two formats. It seemed like BR was superior in every one of them, so I just quit bothering.
