Blu-ray Disc(BD)

What is Blu-ray Disc(BD)?

Blu-ray Disc (BD) is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. The name Blu-ray Disc refers to the blue laser used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVDs. There are a few formats of Blu-ray Discs available or in the works including BD-ROM, BD-R and BD-RE.

Disc Types

Conventional (pre-BD-XL) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs. Triple layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple layers (128 GB) are available for BD-XL re-writer drives.

Video Codec

Videos will be stored on either MPEG-2 (enhanced for new HD), MPEG-4/AVC (High Profile standard) or on the best of all three, VC-1 (HD standard based on Microsoft's Windows Media Video (WMV) technology.)

Audio Codec

BD support many types of audio codecs as well with up to 8 channels of uncompressed audio. The codecs supported are: Linear PCM (LPCM), Dolby Digital (DD), Dolby Digital Plus (DD+), Dolby TrueHD, DTS Digital Surround, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio.