Blu-ray support information

Where did the name Blu-ray come from?

The name Blu-ray came from the underlying technology, which uses a blue-violet laser to read/write data. The name is a combination of "Blue" (blue-violet laser) and "Ray" (optical ray). According to the Blu-ray Disc Association the spelling of "Blu-ray" is not a mistake, the character "e" was intentionally left out so the term could be registered as a trademark. The correct full name is Blu-ray Disc, not Blu-ray Disk. The correct shortened name is Blu-ray, not Blu-Ray or Blue-ray The correct abbreviation is BD, not BR or BRD.

What formats will there be featured in Blu-ray?

As with conventional CDs and DVDs, Blu-ray plans to provide a wide range of formats including ROM/R/RW. The following formats are part of the Blu-ray Disc specification:

BD-ROM - read-only format for distribution of HD movies, games, software, etc.
BD-R - recordable format for HD video recording and PC data storage.
BD-RE - rewritable format for HD video recording and PC data storage.

There are also plans for a BD/DVD hybrid format, which combines Blu-ray and DVD on the same disc so that it can be played in both Blu-ray players and DVD players.

How much data will you be able to fit on a Blu-ray disk?

A single-layer disc can hold upto 25GB.
A dual-layer disc can hold upto 50GB.

To ensure that the Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

How fast can you read/write data onto a Blu-ray disk?

According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc. The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware. If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.