Burning

I just got done burning a Blu-ray disc about an hour ago. The disc contains about 3 hours worth of 720p HD video (3 episodes of Lost). I record Lost from channel 231 (WXYZ-HD) using my Mac Pro's EyeTV tuner, and then I convert it into an MP4 file. From there I use a program called Toast to burn the Blu-Ray disc in my Blu-Ray drive. From there I waited....and waited during the burning process. During this time I recalled the early days of CD/DVD burning:

My family bought our first CD burner in 2000. One of the main reasons behind buying the CD burner was to back up all of our digital pictures. However, I quickly learned how to burn all of my MP3s and listen to them on my CD player. This thing was a godsend, because previously I used floppy discs to share songs with my friends. Pretty much all my MP3s came from Napster. Ah, the days of Dial-up Internet. I used to download so many songs, and it would tie up the phone line for hours. Anyway, I loved my CD burner. I was one of the first people at my school (a Catholic school in Mt. Clemens) to own one. I would get several lists from my friends with songs to download and burn to CD. Downloading these songs from Napster took forever, and burning them seemed to take just as long. Napster eventually went away (thanks a lot Metallica), and was replaced by programs like Morpheus and Kaaza. However, these even faded away with the advent of the MP3 player. I still burned CDs to listen to my music up until 2003. I ended up getting an iPod that year to replace my portable CD player. I also used the CD burner to burn data/files to CD, but it was mostly dominated by audio CDs.

Next was the DVD burner. My friend Max was the first person in my group of friends to get one. He got it with his family's new computer in 2002. One of the first things we burned with it was a DVD of some Anime shows we downloaded off of Morpheus. I got my own DVD burner in 2005 when I built one of my computers. I burned many DVDs, but the majority of them were my video projects for Telecommunications class. 2005 was the year I moved from Windows Movie Maker to Avid for editing video. So, the DVD burner was a great investment.

My next step in optical drive burning was the Blu-ray burner. I bought it this past fall when I sold my iMac for upgrades to my new Mac Pro. So far I have used my Blu-ray burner for burning HD video projects, and also HD recordings of Lost. Having the Blu-ray burner is amazing. I am able to now shoot HD content, edit HD content, distribute HD content online (via Youtube/Vimeo), and finally burn HD content to Blu-ray to watch on my HD TV.

I don't believe there is a future for discs beyond Blu-ray. I am pretty positive that the next technological step will be digital downloads. I also think that something similar to a micro SD card will be used for movies if the physical medium continues. However, I will enjoy Blu-ray for now.