What is Blu-ray Disc?
Blu-ray Disc also known as Blu-ray, BD for short, is the name of a new optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format.
BD-logo
The major application of Blu-ray Disc is as a medium for video material such as feature films and developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The Blu-ray offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. Besides the hardware specifications, Blu-ray Disc is associated with a set of multimedia formats. Generally these formats allow for the video and audio to be stored with greater definition than on DVD. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.
Blu-ray Movie and Extra Storage Capacity
Blu-ray Movies feature high definition video and audio as well as advanced interactive features. Blu-ray movies can be encoded with different codecs, which codec that will be used for a specific movie is up to the movie studio that has made that movie. Some studios might prefer one codec and other studios another, but the specific movie also affects the codec of choice. The Blu-ray movies support these video formats such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, and SMPTE VC-1. Blu-ray movies also support HD audio formats and lossless audio including LPCM, Dolby Digital (DD), Dolby Digital Plus (DD+), Dolby TrueHD, DTS Digital Surround, and DTS-HD. As with the video codecs, it’s up to the movie studios to decide which audio format they use for their releases.
In addition to the outstanding video and audio quality, the extra storage capacity also means there will be plenty of room for additional content and special features. This combined with the new BD-J interactivity layer adopted by Blu-ray will bring the menus, graphics and special features to a whole new level. For example, you will be able to bring up the menu system as an overlay without stopping the movie, and you could have the director of the movie on the screen explaining the shooting of a scene while the scene is playing in the background.
Digital rights management
The Blu-ray Disc employs several layers of digital rights management (DRM) which restrict the usage of the disks including AACS, BD+, and BD ROM Mark. The Advanced Access Content System (AACS) is a standard for content distribution and digital rights management. BD+, effectively a small virtual machine embedded in authorized players, allows content providers to include executable programs on Blu-ray Discs. ROM Mark is a small amount of cryptographic data that is stored separately from normal Blu-ray Disc data, aiming to prevent illegal replication of the discs.
How to identify the fake Blu-ray Disc?
Recently there’s a fake or pirated Blu-ray disc came out in the market. There’re few sellers selling pirated Blu-ray at very cheap price and few buyers bought them without knowing that it’s fake. Now we summarize several methods to distinguish the fake Blu-ray:
1. Check the price: If the Blu-ray disc is too cheap, it could be fake. The normal Blu-ray disc cost around $17-20. A few sellers sell them for $6-9 for brand new Blu-ray. This is totally impossible.
2. Check the box: mainly to check the “Blue ray” logo, it is much too rough of the silver print of the fake Blu-ray disc.
3. Check the print: Check the word of back cover, there appears double in the words if the Blu-ray disc is fake.
4. Check the tape base: Blu-ray disc is between the blue and royal purple, the DVD disc is silvery white or golden.
5. Check the capacity of the disc: The computer can identify the capacity of the CD-ROM with VISTA (Windows XP need to install the UDF 2.5 format tool), 8.6GB following must be a DVD, the minimum capacity of Blu-ray is 25GB.
6. At the moment, fake Blu-ray will play on normal DVD player, if your Blu-ray disc plays on normal DVD player then it’s fake.
Market trends
Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD was at a similar period in its development. The Blu-ray format has received broad support from the major movie studios as a successor to today’s DVD format. In fact, seven of the eight major movie studios (Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) have released titles in the Blu-ray format.