Since their introduction, Blu-ray discs have slowly gained in popularity. The Blu-ray format was developed to enable playing High Definition (HD) video, along with providing larger storage capacities when compared to CD and DVD media. In fact, the format has quite a number of benefits over the more traditional DVD format.
Blu-ray is the new-generation optical disc format that is replacing the DVD. It provides recording and playing of the newer format HD video, as well as storing, reading and rewriting of large amounts of data. The Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group consisting of giants from the consumer electronics industry, personal computer manufacturers and media companies from all over the world. Blu-ray disc offers a number of significant differences and advantages over DVD, that set it apart:
* Blu-ray uses a 405nm blue laser as opposed to a 650nm red laser for DVD, allowing it to achieve a much larger numerical aperture (0.85 as opposed to 0.60). This in turn allows the Blu-ray format to fit more data on a disc than DVD, even though both use the same size disc.
* Both Blu-ray and DVD use a 120mm diameter disc, however a single-layer Blu-ray disc has a capacity of 25 GB as opposed to 4.7GB for DVD. A single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold a little over two hours of HD and some 13 hours of SD video.
* A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold up to 50GB of data, more than 20 hours of SD video and four and half hours of HD video.
* Blu-ray also has a higher audio and video transfer rate than DVD (54.0 Mbps versus 10.08 Mbps). The higher storage capacity and greater data transfer rate are what allow HD movies (1920x1080) to be stored on and played from Blu-ray discs.
* All the major movie studios, including Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment and many others, now release their films in the Blu-ray format.
* The hardware support for Blu-ray media is broad. Leading media manufacturers like Philips, Samsung, Dell, HP, Apple, LG, Sony, to name a few, support Blu-ray. Additionally, many video game consoles also use the format.
Thanks to the higher video resolution, better video and audio codecs, along with larger capacity, Blu-ray offers an incredible media viewing experience. Blu-ray is the new-age digital disc that can record and play audio and HD video files, as well as store large amounts of data on a single disc. In fact, its ability to hold large amounts of data is a major reason why this disc is in high demand in the market.
DVDs are manufactured using an injection molding process to create two 0.6-mm discs, which are then bonded together. In contrast, Blu-ray discs also use an injection molding process but only need to create a single 1.1-mm disc, which helps keep production costs down. Blu-ray also uses a protective hard coating to protect the surface from scratches.
Blu-ray supports video codecs such as MPEG-2 (for enhanced HD and DVD recordings), MPEG-4 AVC (an MPEG-4 standard known as H.264) and SMPTE VC-1 (a standard for Microsoft's Windows Media Video technology).
Despite all the benefits over DVDs, Blu-ray discs run out cheaper per gigabyte of storage than DVD discs. Blank
Blu-ray media can be conveniently purchased online. Always remember to buy media from a reliable website to ensure quality.
