BDXL supersizes Blu-ray your discs; IH-BD gives flexibility.
Blu-ray as a disc standard has been around for a couple of years now, remaining relatively stable since the demise of HDDVD and slowly eating into DVD market share, but the organisation behind the standard has finally decided it's time for an upgrade.
Dubbed BDXL, the new standard boosts the total storage capacity from 50GB to either 100GB re-writable or 128GB for a one-use disc, packing more than twice the data onto a single physical disc.
This is a far cry from the huge storage capacities that holographic storage boasts (which offers up to a terabyte in a single disc), though the new Blu-ray format should be cheaper to manufacture.
Unfortunately for early adopters, the new specification won't be compatible with existing hardware; if you're after the new BDXL format for archiving or other uses you'll have to pick up new hardware that has support.
The organisation behind Blu-ray has also announced IH-BD, a half/half format that gives a single layer of ROM and another layer of RW, potentially useful for movie releases that add in BD Live content - which could possibly be saved onto the rewritable layer for later rewatching.
Hardware for BDXL and IH-BD is coming eventually, though there is no release date given. Head to bit-tech for more.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012