It looks as though DVD’s are about to be superseded by these Blue ray high definition data discs. However, I’m not convinced that they are the bees knees.
Recently we’ve had a few DVDs from our local rental shop which have been, very annoyingly, stopping half way through our chosen films. We do clean the things before popping them in the player, but the scratches these things seem to accumulate just seem too much for our player to handle. This may be because the player is not that new, or this could be down to the overall fragility of these plastic discs as media. I suspect Blue ray discs will be just as fragile, possibly more so seeing as they contain even more data than DVDs. I know that error correction mechanisms are built into the players, but only thorough use will establish how effective this correction is going to be at overcoming the scratches and scrapes these discs seem to pick up through quite normal handling.
Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
Now, what I would like to see is a solid state chunk of memory that is large enough to hold all my music and films, but that can be read on just about any player. Such memory would be light, robust, and small. Oh, and it would need a quite enormous capacity and would need to be able to be rewritten to many times, unlike flash memory which stops working after too many re-writes, from what I understand. A nice small reader would be good too, something that could double up as a portable music player or that could transfer music to an iPod thingummy as and when required. When you wanted to buy, or rent a film, or music, you would just take the memory block to a shop pop it into a reader, pay and have the film etc. downloaded to the memory. Such an operation could also be done wirelessly or via the www.
The only slight problem would be that of back-ups, although I’m sure an enterprising company would allow you to up-load your index and then re-charge a new memory block in the event that the old one was destroyed by a fire or a three year old.
Just an idea.
