← Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
CDs, DVDs, and Blu Ray
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Learn more about optical media
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In 1982, the Philips and Sony corporations jointly released the compact audio disc to the world. The technology involved was originally just used to play digital audio, but it actually had much more potential. Over the last 40 years, basic optical disc technology used in CDs has expanded to store digital video and every type of digital data. Yet despite the ubiquity of the Internet and the ability to access digital files from anywhere in the world, there's still a demand for this technology. Learn more about optical discs, CDs, DVDs and Blu Ray discs on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Butcherbox. You've probably heard me talk about how ButcherBox only sells 100% grass fed grass finished beef, but what exactly is that and why does it matter? This type of beef comes from cattle that have grazed on grass for their entire lives as opposed to being finished on a diet of grains and other feed at a feedlot. Basically, cattle eat what cattle are designed to eat. Grass fed beef tends to have higher levels of omega 3 fatty acids and grass fed beef often contains more antioxidants such as vitamin E. Beyond personal health benefits, choosing grass fed grass finished beef can also improve soil health through natural fertilization and aeration promote greater biodiversity on grazing lands. Consuming grass fed grass finish beef not only contributes to better health, but also supports more sustainable farming practices. Sign up@butcherbox.com daily and get a special deal. New users who sign up for Butcherbox will receive 2 pounds of grass fed ground beef in every box for the lifetime of their subscription, plus $20 off your first box when you use code daily at checkout. This episode is sponsored by Masterclass. If you're listening to this podcast, then you are someone who is curious about the world and loves to learn. And if you want to give the gift of learning and knowledge this Christmas, you can't do better than Masterclass. Masterclass offers online classes from some of the most successful instructors in the world in their fields. You can learn cooking from Gordon ramsay, conservation from Dr. Jane Goodall, disruptive entrepreneurship from Sir Richard Branson, mathematical thinking from Fields Medal winner Terence Tao, and diplomacy from former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice. You can access over 200 classes across 11 different categories. Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to masterclass.com everywhere for the current offer. That's up to 50% off@masterclass.com everywhere. Once again, that's masterclass.com everywhere. I have to confess, despite the access we have to streaming movies and music. I have a soft spot for physical media. I personally have an extensive film collection that I started over 20 years ago. I've upgraded and expanded it over the years and it now includes a little under thousand films. In a previous episode, I covered the history of digital audio and how it works. In this episode, I want to focus on optical disc technology and how it's expanded beyond music and how it's still used today. The story actually begins with the invention of the laser, which I also covered in a previous episode. After years of work through the 1950s, the first working laser was developed in 1960 at Hughes Laboratories in a research group led by Theodore Maimon. Laser, which is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, was a revolutionary invention. Lasers allow for an extremely focused, narrow beam of light where all the photons are aligned. At the time, researchers weren't even aware of what they could do with this revolutionary new tool. One person who thought about its practical application was James Russell. In 1965, he conceptualized and then patented an idea for a digital optical storage system that encoded information in microscopic pits on a disk and used a laser beam to read the data without physical contact. He received two patents for his ideas in 1966 and 1969 and had a prototype working by 1973. He pitched his idea to over 100 companies and it was reported in scientific magazines as early as 1972. Two of the companies he presented to were Sony and Philips. In 1978, Philips, along with MCA and Pioneer, commercially released the LaserDisc. The LaserDisc was an optical storage format, but it wasn't digital. The LaserDisc was much larger than a CD. At a full 30 centimeters or 12 inches in diameter, it looked like a CD, but it was the size of a vinyl album. The pits and lands on a laserdisc surface encoded analog video and audio. Video is stored as an FM or frequency modulated analog signal, similar to the way video signals are transmitted in television broadcasting. A red laser beam shines on the surface of a laserdisc. As it spins, the laser reflects off the pits and lands, converting the reflected light into an electronic analog signal. The signal is processed and sent to a television for video playback and speakers for audio playback. LaserDisc offered superior video and audio quality compared to VHS tapes because it didn't degrade with repeated use. It also supported additional features such as chapter selection, freeze frames, and slow motion playback. Despite being a superior technology to VHS tape, the cost of players and discs ensured that it remained A niche market. Today, there's still a very small, enthusiastic group of laserdisc users. However, the holy grail was to create a digital optical storage system, not an analog1. After LaserDisc struggled, Philips began working on digital storage. In 1979, they partnered with Sony, who had been working on their own system. Philips brought to the table their knowledge of optical storage, which they developed via the creation of LaserDisc. And Sony contributed its know how in digital audio processing. The partnership led to the creation of the redbook standard in 1980 which defined the technical specifications for compact digital audio discs. The format specified that the disc be 120 millimeters in diameter and have a capacity of 74 minutes of audio. According to legend, this was based on the wife of the Sony CEO who wanted to have a complete recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a single disc. The audio was to have a sampling rate of 44.1kHz with a bit depth of 16 bit audio. A low power laser beam was used to read the data encoded as microscopic pits and lands on the disc. Advanced coding methods ensured data integrity even if the disc was slightly scratched or dirty. A standard CD has four layers. A polycarbonate layer, which is the base of the cd, is made of clear plastic. This layer provides structural support and contains the microscopic grooves. A reflective layer, which is a thin aluminum or gold layer, lies above the polycarbonate. It reflects the laser beam used to read the disks. Next is the protective layer, which is a lacquer coating that protects the reflective layer from scratches and damage. And finally the label layer, the topmost layer where information about the CT is printed. The first commercial CD was released on October 1, 1982 in Japan and the first album released on audio CD was 52nd street by Billy Joel. Philips released the first CD player, the CD P101 in 1982, which was initially expensive and only aimed at audiophiles. CD eventually took over vinyl sales by 1988 and became the dominant form of music. However, audio was just the beginning. If audio could be digitally encoded, then anything Digital could. In 1983, Philips and Sony released the Yellow Book standard which set forth the standards for compact disk read only memory or CD ROM. CD ROMs were quite popular for a while as they stored much more data than floppy disks. CD ROMs became the standard for software distribution. In the 1990s, however, there was even more that could be done. In 1990, the Orange Book was released which set the standards for both CDR and CD RW CDR was also known as CD write. Once you could write something to a disc and it was there permanently. CD RW was also called CD Read Write. It was a disc that could repeatedly be written and read just like a regular floppy disk. Instead of a permanent metallic reflective layer, a CDR had a dye layer. The laser in the CD writer would heat the dye layer, creating permanent marks that mimic the pits of a normal cd. CD rewrite discs contain a special phase change material in the place of a dye layer. When exposed to different laser intensities, the material can switch between crystalline and reflective as well as amorphous and non reflective states. A standard read write cd could be written about 1000 times. In order to grow the market, it was necessary to increase the capacity of discs. I remember versions of Microsoft word in the 1990s that came on multiple CDs because it was just so large. Moreover, the video business was a huge potential market that could be replaced just like CDs replaced vinyl. And this led to the development of the digital versatile disc or dvd. And yes, the V in DVD actually stands for versatile, not video. DVDs were developed as a collaboration among major technology companies including Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic and Philips. The goal was to create a format for high capacity storage suitable for video and data. The DVD was officially introduced in 1995 and released to the market in 1996. Movies had been released on CD in a format known as CD video. But the discs weren't big enough to contain an entire full length movie. DVDs could store significantly more data than CDs. They could hold 4.7 gigabytes on a single layer disc versus just 700 MB for a CD. Furthermore, a DVD could have different layers and be double sided, increasing the total capacity to 17 gigabytes. This was done by creating smaller pits on the surface and reading them with a shorter wavelength laser. DVD uses a red laser with a shorter 650 nanometer wavelength. Instead of a CD laser which is infrared with a 780 nanometer wavelength. DVDs introduced features like menus, chapters and bonus content which became a hallmark of home entertainment. The first movies ever released on DVD in Japan on December 20, 1996. The assassin, Blade Runner, Eraser and the Fugitive. It took a few years, but DVDs finally started to hit their stride in the early 2000s when the cost of DVD players finally came down. However, soon after DVDs started to become popular, the shift to high definition video began. High definition videos took up considerably more data. A frame of standard definition video is 720 by 480 pixels, or 345,600 total pixels. A frame of high definition 1080p video is 1920 x 1080 pixels, or 2,073,600 pixels. To put it more succinctly, a frame of high definition video has six times more data. You need smaller pits and a laser with an even shorter wavelength to store that much data. From 2000 to 2006, Blu Ray discs were developed by the Blu Ray Disc association, which included Sony, Panasonic, Philips and others. The name refers to the blue violet laser used to read and write data, which has a shorter wavelength than the red laser used in DVDs, allowing for higher precision and capacity. A Blu Ray laser has a wavelength of 405 nanometers. Single layer Blu Ray discs can store 25 GB and dual layer discs can store 50 gigabytes. The first Blu Ray discs were released to the market in 2006. The Blu Ray format was launched in competition with a competing format known as HD DVD, a format developed by Toshiba. However, by 2008, Bluff Blu Ray had won the format war, becoming the standard for high definition video. High definition video was pretty good, but even that was improved with the deployment of 4K ultra high definition video. 4K videos have a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels, giving it a picture with four times more resolution than a high definition video. A 4K UHD disc uses the same type of Blu Ray laser. The difference primarily has to do with the video encoding. The Blu Ray Disc association released the standards for 4K Blu Ray in 2015 at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. A 4K Blu Ray disc can hold up to 100 GB of data, and the video formats support high dynamic range video and advanced audio such as Dolby Atmos. 4K Blu Ray hasn't had the widespread adoption of other optical disc formats, and there are a few reasons for this. First, you have to have both a 4K Blu Ray player and a 4K television set to play a disc. Second is that while the jump from standard definition DVD to Blu Ray was dramatic, the difference between blu ray and 4k is much smaller to the naked eye. Finally, streaming services have mostly eliminated the demand for physical media. Despite that, there is still a small and loyal group of enthusiasts such as myself who still buy blu ray and 4k movies. There are many good reasons for this. For starters, most movies, in fact the vast majority of them, are not available on streaming services, and the ones that are available are often only available for a limited amount of time before they're removed. The other reason is quality. Even if a video on, say, Netflix says it's in 4k, the bitrate is much lower and the compression on the video is much higher. A 4K streaming video doesn't look bad, but there is a marked obvious difference between it and watching it on a 4K Blu Ray disc. I'll end this episode with something that many of you might have noticed if you've gone into an electronics store recently. They're now selling 8K televisions which have an even higher resolution picture than 4K. Does that mean that we're going to have 8K Blu Ray discs on the market soon? The answer to that is almost certainly no. For almost any television that could fit into a regular residential home, there will be no discernible difference in video quality between 4 and 8K. Our eyes simply can't distinguish the difference at that resolution. That's why there is zero demand for 8K disks at the moment, and there probably never will be. Given the drop in demand for physical media due to streaming, manufacturers especially don't see the point in investing in a brand new format that very few people can even watch. Physical media for both music and video is not what it used to be. The Internet has largely supplanted physical media for most people, but that being said, physical media still does have its place in the 21st century. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Keever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day and also Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to Everything are in the show notes.