The Minidisc As A Universal Format

[Guest kamil]

Whats stopping Sony from making MD a badass format? I mean, old blanks hold 300mb, new ones 1gb per disc. MD started with 60min, then 74, and now 80. Im sure sony is planning on 1.5gb or 2gb discs! Wouldnt that be nice?

Thats a lot of space. Imagine the possibilities:

-Digital Video Camera that uses MDs as storage

-MD portables that read MP3s and Atrac

-Digital Cameras which use the MD format (id reccomend this for ONLY dSLR cameras, as the disc is somewhat large for a consumer camera)

-Mini-DVD <------DAMN! 1gb DVD players for recording purposes, even on the mac or PC to record movies, i mean, 1GB is a lot of room to pack a movie at a decent resolution!

I think sony would dominate if they pushed the MD format to newer unheard of levels.

[dex Otaku]

The main issue is that MD and HiMD are magneto-optical formats.

MO discs are fairly slow to read, and even slower to write.

As density increases, potential R/W speeds increase accordingly, but there are physical limits to how far this can go.

If you look through the HiMD FAQ on http://www.minidisc.org it lists the R/W speeds of MD and HiMD media. To give you an idea, though, the peak speeds for HiMD [which is faster than MD] are still well below USB 1.1 speeds, hence the lack of USB 2.0 support - it's not needed.

Sony actually demo'd a video camera that used modified MD hardware with 650MB discs. There was little interest, and it fell by the wayside.

Using a digital camera with either would be painful at best, taking up to or even greater than 30 seconds to write a single high-res image.

HiMD does not meet the data rate requirements of DVD video.

Just a few notes for you.

[Fat Tires]

I'd also like to see Sony push MD into other areas if it would benefit the format. I doubt that it would. Minidisc as an audio format is here to stay, but the only other viable option I see would be using the media for data storage. Hi-MD = zip disk.

Higher capacity media and support for more CODECS is where Sony ought to throw their concentration on.

[Guest kamil]

I'd also like to see Sony push MD into other areas if it would benefit the format. I doubt that it would. Minidisc as an audio format is here to stay, but the only other viable option I see would be using the media for data storage. Hi-MD = zip disk.

Higher capacity media and support for more CODECS is where Sony ought to throw their concentration on.

←

Higher Capacity?

Heres a thought:

Double Sided Blanks! WHOA! 1+1gb (and maybe even 2+2gb in the future!)

Now, THAT would be KILLER!

[dex Otaku]

I'd also like to see Sony push MD into other areas if it would benefit the format. I doubt that it would. Minidisc as an audio format is here to stay, but the only other viable option I see would be using the media for data storage. Hi-MD = zip disk.

Zip is far faster than HiMD.

HiMD is not terribly practical for use as removal storage in day-to-day applications. It's simply too slow.

If you don't believe me, try taking a HiMD unit and copying 950MB of files averaging 6-10MB each [like MP3s]. Nominally, on the fastest computer you can find, this will take between 40 and 120 minutes to do.

After that, you have to read them back, which will take another 25 to 90 minutes.

In that time, I could walk down the street, buy a pack of CDRWs, come home, write 2 of them, and read all the data off onto another computer - likely before the data has finished being written to the HiMD, let alone read from it.

Heres a thought:

Double Sided Blanks! WHOA! 1+1gb (and maybe even 2+2gb in the future!)

←

Double-sided blanks are an impossibility with MO media. One side of the disc is used by the optical head; the other side by the magnetic head.

[Fat Tires]

Well, I'm fine with MD/Hi-MD for audio only anyway. Higher capacity media would be nice though, and is supposedly possible. I guess we'll see what Sony has in store for us.