My kids will be ripping thousands of Blu-ray videos

The developers of the ever popular h.264 codec used in everything from video surveillance to YouTube are working on an open source codec called x.264 that enables blu-ray content to be stored on a single or dual layer recordable DVD with a “very reasonable level of quality”, according to Pocket-lint. It’s great for those that want to make their own Blu-ray DVDs which has been limited to large production houses and publishing studios becuase of cost.

Should x.264 take off and video with Blu-ray like quality become possible for the everyday home publisher, what will that do for storage?

According to Pocket-lint, “The x.264 team has created a Blu-ray disc image, encoded with x.264, and compressed to a mere 2GB (able to easily fit onto a single-layer DVD-R). It features two Open Movie Project films, Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream, some Microsoft HD video and a sound sample, all available under a Creative Commons license. “

2GB! That’s nothing, but as the adoption for Blu-ray gathers more steam, the demand for home authoring tools will grow, and thus will storage. Sure you can cram maybe 4 to 5 of 2GB files on a DVD-R, but how many could you cram onto a 2.0TB hard drive? Try 1,000.

It’s not always about large files that drive storage demand. It comes down to the ability for the users to have the freedom to create that drives storage. You may think there’s no way I am going to create 1000 videos in my lifetime, but our kids just might do it by the time they’re 18.

I say bring on the compression, and see the storage demand grow.

What say you?

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