Blu-Ray Capacity Increase Developed By Sony & Panasonic

Two of the world’s largest Blu-Ray members, SONY & Panasonic, have developed a way in which to upgrade the capacity of each layer on a Blu-Ray disc with nothing more than a simple firmware update for existing Blu-Ray players, and yes, that includes the PS3.

A standard, single-layered Blu-Ray disc presently allows for up to 25GB of information to be stored, but, with the new technology, this could increase to 33.4GB. This in turn means that dual-layered Blu-Ray discs, which currently have a capacity of 50GB, could potentially increase to 66.8GB.

“But how have Sony & Panasonic achieved this?” I hear you cry. According to Blu-Ray.com it’s all about disc evaluation.

…disc evaluation is accomplished by analyzing disc jitter, but at higher capacity, that technique becomes unreliable.

Enter i-MLSE, or Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation for those with a penchant for over-elaborate names, the technology that has been developed to evaluate disc jitter at higher capacities. Apparently there has been no word from the Blu-Ray Association (who was aware there was a Blu-Ray Association?) as to whether or not this will be adopted into the Blu-Ray spec.

Obviously, if this does become the standard for Blu-Ray in the future, this means even more space for game developers to play with. SONY have voiced their interest for 3D gaming this year, too…it’s good they now have more room to play with.

Source: Blu-Ray.com