Blu-ray disks are about to get a whole lot bigger. The Blu-ray Disc Association has announced two super-sized new specs for the already capacious disks, letting them squeeze up to 128GB onto a single silver platter. How is this done? The boring, old-fashioned way: layers.
There are two new specifications, both with jaw-crunching names: BDXL (High Capacity Recordable and Rewritable disks) and IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid disks). The first is designed for high capacity, and fuses up to four layers to make an archiving format for people with a lot of data ("broadcasting, medical and document imaging enterprises" are the suggested markets).
The second new format, IH-BD, is a melding of a read-only layer and a re-writeable layer, able to contain 25GB each. The explanation is that a producer could ship a disk containing both non-erasable, "critical" data and "related user data". We can't think of any good reason for that right now, but we're certain it'll be handy for someone.
Neither of these new formats will work in your current Blu-ray player, nor should they. It's pretty clear these generously-sized disks are for storage rather than publishing, although the new machines required to use them will be backward-compatible with existing disks. Still, imagine the movie-extras you could fit on this thing.
Blu-ray Disc Association Announces Additional Format Enhancements [Business Wire]
