Have you ever thought of burning 27 movies onto one DVD? Seems impossible? With Blu-ray technology it is now possible to store huge amounts of data on one Blu-ray disc. A rewritable, single-sided, single-layered, Blu-ray disc can store up to 25GB of data. Blu-ray discs are way ahead of the traditional DVD which can only store 4.7GB.
Introduction
In these articles, we are going to talk about Blu-ray technology in general and also explain how you can build a media center with Blu-ray technology. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of information on the web about building your own Blu-ray capable media center, so we hope to fill that void.
Blu-ray Disc Logo
Blu-ray technology
Blu-ray uses a blue laser beam of very short wavelength (405 nanometers) to read and write Blu-ray discs. This shorter wavelength results in an increase in the disc’s data capacity.
Blu-ray Disc
High Density DVD (or as it is popularly called – the HD DVD) and Blu-ray discs are the successors of the traditional DVD. You may think that HD DVD has capabilities similar to that of Blu-ray but because of its format and higher capacity, most electronic and media companies now prefer Blu-ray. This fact has made HD DVD all but dead. This is a recent development (early-mid 2008) and it explains, in part, why Blu-ray has not become mainstream yet – people were still waiting to find out which standard they should buy, plus, players have been quite expensive up until recently. You wouldn’t want to spend $700 on a Blu-ray player only to find that HD DVD ends up winning the HD format wars – that worry is now over.
A sony BD-ROM drive and its accessories
You can buy a Blu-ray drive for US$200 or less. By having your Blu-ray player as part of a media center instead of just a stand-alone electronic device, you can use it to store high-definition videos, to play games that require high-definition graphics and LCD TVs, browse photos or play MP3s. The file format used to record HD movie files on a Sony HD handycam can also be burned to Blu-ray disc in HD format. And you can also use the Blu-ray burner to back up large amounts of data (although it should be noted that at the moment, burners are still quite costly).
BD-ROM with BD discs
Blu-ray drives plug into a standard SATA connection on a motherboard. In a Blu-ray media center, the choice of video card is very important. Not all video cards support Blu-ray playback. They need a Blu-ray decoder in the drivers and players also need to support the video card. BD ROM drives often come with a player and sometimes video cards do as well.
There is a lot more to read in this series of articles, including information on hardware choices and software options such as Windows Vista and players used to play Blu-ray discs. We will discuss the pros and cons and cost effectiveness of building a system with Blu-ray capabilities. We’ll also show you how to physically build the system.
Where can you go from here? You can start choosing components for a Blu-ray Home Theatre PC.
… or watch this article in video format here.