Blu-ray vs DVD

January 1, 2011

Tags: Blu-ray authoring | Blu-ray duplication | DVD authoring | DVD duplication

The fight between Standard Definition DVD and High Definition Blu-ray has become the major digital format war since the first few years of the new millennium. Except for the short lived battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray (I think we know who the winner was there) most of the “Format Wars” have been between Analogue and Digital media, with Digital coming out on top. This battle is different. It’s Digital v Digital. Disc v Disc. Which will win? Only time will see, but for now, both formats are a viable. DVD duplication and Blu-ray duplication are both options for your job. The hard part is weighing up the pros & cons of each and hopefully this article helps a little bit.

What’s the difference between DVD and Blu-ray image quality

Click for full-size image

As you can tell from the comparison above, picture quality is the most obvious difference. Blu-ray video is up to six-times the resolution of DVD video.

Any digital signal has a measurable bit rate, which is basically the speed that data is being transmitted. The clarity of Blu-ray comes from its high bit rates. DVDs can provide up to 8 Megabits per second (Mbps) which includes the video, audio and subtitles. Your SkyHD box delivers at 19Mbps. Blu-ray discs have a maximum data through-put of 54Mbps! Saying that, most assets aren’t encoded at such a high rate because the newer algorithms used to encode High Definition video and audio are much more efficient. On average, we encode video anywhere from 17 to 38Mbps, leaving plenty of room for multi-channel, lossless audio tracks and animated menu items, also exclusively available on Blu-ray.

These higher bit rates, better picture and audio quality are due entirely to the storage size of a Blu-ray disc. There are two varieties, a 25GB single-layer disc and a dual-layer, 50GB. The laser used to read/duplicate Blu-ray discs is much finer and can focus much more precisely than the laser in CD and DVD players (See below).

This makes high data output and large storage capacities possible. Blu-ray duplication allows approximately four times  the amount of storage space of DVD duplication. A full Blu-ray disc holds same amount of data as seventeen and a half duplicated CDs!

A Blu-ray laser occupies the same frequency space of blue light, hence its name.