Sony, in conjunction with Panasonic, have announced that Blu-Ray discs are about to get a bit larger in capacity.
A recent report from Nikkei states that until now, a more dense Blu-Ray single layer disc with a capacity of 33.4 GB would not be reliably read frequently enough by today’s technology. Apparently, Sony and Panasonic solved this problem:
Sony and Panasonic Corp. resolved this by developing the i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index. Details of i-MLSE were announced at International Symposium on Optical Memory 2009 (ISOM ’09), held in October 2009.
The article goes a bit more in-depth, but the bottom line is that we will soon see 33.4 GB single-layer and 66.8 GB dual-layer Blu-Ray discs in the near future. Additionally, any device that can receive a firmware upgrade will be able to read the new format with a simple update. This is great news for Blu-Ray multimedia enthusiasts (gamers especially) everywhere!
