Blu-ray Disc Authoring Buyer's Guide

Charles Fulton
September 2008

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The high-definition juggernaut has started gaining momentum with the world of videography since the original JVC GR-HD1 shipped back in 2003 - before the HDV format even had a formal name or trade group surrounding it. AVCHD came along in 2006, utilizing the more-advanced H.264 codec. 2006 also saw the introduction of both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Blu-ray Disc is the format that has emerged triumphant in the recent format war, effectively stomping out the HD DVD format.

How ever the war ended, at least it did end. And just in time: there was a serious need for another high-definition distribution format - and quick. Blu-ray Disc represents a particularly user-friendly way to distribute high-definition video. Sure, if your audience is computer-literate, there are litanies of codecs that can handle HD. And you could share raw HD footage, but that's considerably more tricky, what with the significant differences in acquisition formats between manufacturers. But Blu-ray is pretty easy to author and even easier to enjoy on an HDTV. While there is a fairly major price premium to get started, prices will almost certainly drop with time.

To celebrate the victory, we present a buyer's guide of all things Blu-ray Disc.

What's the big deal about Blu-ray Disc, anyway? A quick look at any spec sheet you'll come across will nail it for you: a single-layer BD-R can hold 25GB of data, compared to a single-layer DVD-R's 4.7GB or a regular CD-R's 700MB.

There are two primary types of Blu-ray Discs: BD-R is the standard write-once flavor, while BD-RE is a rewriteable version of the format. Both single-layer (25GB) and dual-layer (50GB) blanks exist for both BD-R and BD-RE variants. Just as with DVDs, there are price premiums for both dual-layer media and rewriteable media, so the baseline media is the single-layer BD-R.

DVD-Rs, purchased in quantity, can deliver storage for prices starting at about five cents per gigabyte (considering you can get a spindle of 100 blank DVDs for $22). A single 25GB Blu-ray Disc, on the other hand, now goes for around $15, or sixty cents per gigabyte. We expect to see the price of media eventually drop a bit, but we'd be a bit surprised to see the cost of media drop as quickly as costs have dropped for blank DVDs.

The price of burners has dropped quite a bit already, but prices will almost certainly drop further. One of our favorite places to buy computer hardware has a Blu-ray Disc burner for $350. (The same place has DVD burners for a paltry $25.)

It's a matter of time before prices start sliding, but Blu-ray Disc burners are not yet at the commodity level of DVD burners. Whether Blu-ray media burners do become a commodity is a question of microeconomics - specifically, of how rapidly and widely adopted the format will be over time. From our observations, consumers are not adopting Blu-ray Disc as quickly as they adopted DVD, and the reason for that is probably the format war that manufacturers should have avoided.

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