Blu Ray Discs

What is Blu Ray?

Blu Ray is the next step in optical media formats from CD and DVD. Initialy developed for the HD (high definition) video that is now availble for recording, rewriting and playback as well as the storage of large amounts of data. A Blue Ray disc offers a capacity 5 times greater than a traditional DVD at 25GB.

Blu Ray is currently supported by over 200 of the worlds consumer electronics, computing, recording, computer game and music companies. All the Hollywood studios back this format as well as countless numbers of smaller studios.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD rely on a red laser beam to write and read data to the disc, the blu ray format uses a blue-violet laser instead (hence the name Blue Ray) the blue-violet light has a shorter wavelength to that of the red light, which makes it possible to focus the laser more precisely. This allows the data to be stored more tightly together on the disc's surface, whilst being the same size as a traditional CD or DVD. This is what allows the disc to contain the larger capacity of 25GB.

A Blu Ray disc can hold:

Over 9 hours of HD (high-definition video on a 50GB disc.
About 23 hours of SD (standard-definition) video on a 50GB disc

Additional Blu Ray features

Additional Blu Ray features:

Blu Ray discs are highly interactive having an optional java mode built in, they also allow for internet connectivity, which means they have a multitude of possibilities. Copy protection through AACS is a standard feature of all blu ray discs.

Improved navigation is now possible with Blu Ray discs, with animated buttons and accompanied by different sounds and colours. Another feature of Blu Ray navigation is the abillity to have menus come up over the still playing video, rather than just going to the root menu screen like a tradional DVD menu would. Also while the film is playing picture and picture is possible allowing for bonus material to be accessed while the feature is ongoing.

Blu Ray players have the abillity to connect to the internet through a broadband connection. This opens the door to endless possibillities of bonus content and material. Intereactives games can be incorperated in to the Blu Ray with downloadable content. Blu Ray players have also built in HDD (hard drives) that allow storage of additional content and bonus material from the internet.