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Blu-Ray Disc – How much better than DVD ?

November 14th, 2005 by eDeveloper in Digital Video

You have probably heard of the two competing High Definition Disk standards – Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. It appears that both are going to co-exist at least for some time, with different movie studios opting to support one of them, or in some cases, both standards. Rather than discuss on which one of the above is better, this article explores how the new HD disk standards are better than the existing DVD (standard video) standard. For the sake of simplicity, I will explain how the Blu-Ray disc offers much more than a DVD, and most of it might apply to HD-DVD as well. [Update : Blu-Ray has already won the war with HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray is now the standard for High Definition Disks]

The name Blu-ray comes from the technology used, which uses a blue-violet laser to read/write data from the disc. A single layer Blu-ray disc can fit 25 GB of data compared to 4.7GB for a regular DVD, and a double layer can accommodate double of that. Multi layer discs are also planned in the future to increase the storage capacity.

Panasonic Blue Ray Player

DVDs has now become ubiquitous and DVD players are cheap. DVDs also play pretty well on the big screen high definition TVs, even though DVDs offer a resolution of only 480p (720×480 progressive). This means that HD disks has to offer more than just increased resolution to really appeal to consumers. So HD disks are designed to offer a lot more than a normal DVD, in terms of video resolution, graphics, and interactivity:

Increased video Resolution : The Blu-Ray disk offers 480p, 720p and 1080i resolutions.

Better video codec support : MPEG-4 AVC High Profile and VC-1 will be supported, in additional to the MPEG-2 format used by current DVDs.

Enhanced graphics : More than one graphics plane – one plane could be used to display closed captioning, while the other can still show a user menu.

Simultaneous video and graphics : In a DVD, if you select the root menu while playing video, the video stops to show the menu. The Blu-Ray disk can continue to play the video while you browse through the menu options.

Interactivity : With Java included in the Blu-Ray player, interactive applications and content (such as games) may be played from the disk.

Network connectivity: This may be used to get disk content related additional material from the web, directly from the player. For instance, the disk can link to updated material on the network after the disk is released. This gives a richer user experience while watching a movie, for downloading movie extras, reviews and games.

In summary, Blu-ray offers a much richer viewer experience and convenience, in addition to just incresed raw read/write speed and storage capacity. Most Blu-Ray players are expected to be backward compatible with DVDs and CDs, so migrating into the new player would not be hard.

15 Responses to ' Blu-Ray Disc – How much better than DVD ? '

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  1. blu ray disc player said,
    on August 14th, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    Very in-depth post. I think that as far as the menu is concerned, there are a few movies that still take you back to the root menu and stop playing the movie. At least, this has been my experience with a few movies, though maybe thats just something I haven’t setup properly…

  2. Mike said,
    on December 22nd, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    Pony Canyon Company in Japan will release DVD/Blu-ray media sooon.

    :grin:

  3. HD Fanatic said,
    on January 7th, 2009 at 9:51 am

    :neutral: aren’t blu-rays capable of 1080 p now?

  4. Brian said,
    on January 21st, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    I own a Blu-Ray player and a DVD player and honestly I havn’t seen much of a difference. I own a 52″ HD TV and Blu-Ray looks the same as DVD’s on it. I wouldn’t recomend buying the BD player.

  5. Danielle said,
    on April 3rd, 2009 at 7:31 am

    I just wanted to say that I love this site

  6. Carlos said,
    on August 30th, 2009 at 6:48 am

    :shock: Brian ??? You don’t see the diffrence between a DVD player and a Blu Ray plater?? You most likely have not set up the Blu ray properly. I have a new BD and I LOVE IT BIG difference and I will only buy Blue Ray discs from now on.

  7. admin said,
    on August 31st, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    Brian,
    On a 52″ TV BD should have made a difference compared to DVDs.
    Just a possibility – Have you used HDMI to connect between your BD player and TV, and selected that HDMI port as the “Input” in your TV settings?

  8. Is Blu-ray REALLY better than DVD? - DTV USA Forum said,
    on September 10th, 2009 at 12:27 am

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  9. Paul said,
    on January 1st, 2010 at 10:33 am

    :smile: Great post, thanks for the info, going to get some blu ray movies for the new PS3!

  10. Michael said,
    on January 16th, 2010 at 5:57 am

    :shock: Brian, how for god’s sake can you not see the difference between blu ray and dvd ??? Blu ray offers perfection and extremely nice graphics while dvd has less space on the disk and you can’t add the good graphics on the disc due too less space , maybe you baught a dvd player with a blu ray sticker on it ? :razz:

  11. bob said,
    on January 31st, 2010 at 1:18 pm

    :sad: :mrgreen::neutral::twisted::shock::smile::???::cool::evil::grin::oops::razz::roll::wink::cry::eek::lol::mad:

  12. logan said,
    on February 19th, 2010 at 11:52 pm

    price needs to drop a little on some of them some are like around $30 a little ridiculous for me but overall excellent quality i give blu ray a 9.3 on a scale to 10 and recommend buying one if you have a hdtv

  13. Bill Jenkins said,
    on March 28th, 2010 at 7:57 pm

    Great post. I’ve been looking for this exact info for a while now. I’ll bookmark it in the public bookmarking sites to get you more views.

  14. scott said,
    on April 23rd, 2010 at 8:03 am

    I took the plunge on a blu-ray player and I cant see what Brian is on about. Picture quality Stonking, but I think the big difference is the sound quality that you get. I have not got the theatre surround sound system yet but if the quality of sound so far is anything to go by then I might give it a whirl. :mrgreen:

  15. james said,
    on May 16th, 2010 at 4:59 pm

    comparing laserdisc, dvd, and bluray is hard.
    i connected them all to my tv with hdmi and there is an obvious difference.
    dvd actually looks worse than laserdisc. :???:
    laserdisc, though better than dvd is really inconvinient, but it does have good box art.
    dvd is my personal best because their are the most movies available.
    blu ray is good for hi def, but most of the time, it isn’t cheap.
    i like all formats, but truely superior has the most movies.

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