No doubt the cost of blank media for BD will continue to fall. I paid 6 bucks apiece for blank DVDs not too many years ago (and most of them are no longer playable due to dye contrast reduction / bleaching).

Steve's experience at Frys is the lowest I have heard of so far, and is very encouraging. I will eventually move to BD-R but not until it makes better sense economically, particularly since virtually all of my disks are 4 GB or less of content anyway.

Given the tiny spot size and 5 times as many bits per square inch of dye, I also have very legitimate concerns about BD-R longevity as well.

I have no good technical reason to believe that a surface which can't retain 4.7GB of data in an optical dye for many years will do any better or even as well when 25 GB of data is written on the same surface area.

But who knows........

Larry

How about a variation on the theme, AVCHD and Menus on USB flash drives? It works on the PS3.

Why would you want to? How about VC1 video? HD Audio? Subtitles? 24p?

I would point out that the PS3 will not send 24hz output to a supporting TV except in the Blu-ray mode, which means your files can't playback native 24hz from the internal hard drive or flash media, except that now there is another hack.

I've tried it with the PS3 using its latest firmware 2.60. If you don't care about menus, you can follow the steps in this link.

If you want menus, you have to combine the above hack with this guide .

Let's assume you wanted to play back a 16Gb 1080/p24 project with 24hz output on the PS3. You could always just burn an expensive Blu-ray disk, or a rewritable at 2x speed if you have the patience.

Or you could use TSmuxer and AVCHDme to copy the folders to a USB flash drive and be previewing your collaboration in just minutes.