Originally posted by: Tiptup
While Blu-ray's superiority as a format doesn't translate to the general viewing of HDTV video, that sure as hell doesn't mean that its higher bit rate and a greater storage space is "meaningless." Perhaps people might like to work with content of even higher complexity and, if so, Blu-ray would be capable of that. For a simple example, additional "special features" for a movie release are possible on a BD. When you move away from movies and start talking about general data management, there are all sorts of reasons why we'd want Blu-ray to be the dominant format in the market.
While Blu-ray's superiority as a format doesn't translate to the general viewing of HDTV video, that sure as hell doesn't mean that its higher bit rate and a greater storage space is "meaningless." Perhaps people might like to work with content of even higher complexity and, if so, Blu-ray would be capable of that. For a simple example, additional "special features" for a movie release are possible on a BD. When you move away from movies and start talking about general data management, there are all sorts of reasons why we'd want Blu-ray to be the dominant format in the market.
Since the studios seem to be content with just giving us higher bit rate mpeg2 video, as seen here http://www.blu-raystats.com/index.php, I'd say it is pretty meaningless. They have so much more space to work with, yet instead of getting movies in the superior VC-1 or AVC codec, we're getting the same old mpeg2. They only seem to use AVC or VC-1 when they're space constrained, like with HD-DVD.
As for data management, I don't know anyone that's even using regular DVDs for anything more than offsite archival purposes. They certainly aren't using it for regular backups and they most certainly wouldn't be using Blu-Ray for regular backups either. 50 GB still isn't enough for anything other than moving a large database across sites that aren't linked by a network. But since USB hard drives are much cheaper than BD burners and media, that's used instead. For general backups, we're sticking with tapes. For "live" backups, we're mirroring onto external hard drives. Blu-Ray wouldn't even come into the equation, much like DVDs don't either.
I dread the day when software comes on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc. I can't imagine how long that software will take to install (Adobe Dreamweaver and Illustrator CS3 already take 30 mins each, and they're on DVD).