Some may have been wondering why I have not been writing as much in 2010 and part of the reason is that I have been working on a film project.

The film was made in conjunction with the San Francisco based film makers community called Scary Cow (if you live in the Bay Area and are interested in making films you should check out the website or ask me in comments) and was shot on a fairly good consumer AVCHD camera.

I decided that I would author a Blu-ray Disc in addition to the DVD and as it turns out the film was the first (and so far only) Scary Cow movie to screen in HiDef at the Scary Cow Screening.

The disc was authored using one of the few editing packages out there that comes with Blu-ray authoring - though I believe that this aspect is actually handled by the Sonic Solutions authoring package.

While authoring the disc was very simple (just as easy as a DVD) I found that limitations like no lossless audio (not even LPCM) would make this solution firmly one for ‘amateurs’.

If folks are interested I can post more articles in the future covering Blu-ray authoring and burning - please show interest in the comments.

Lastly, if you want to check out the film I made, you can see it at YouTube or embedded below… feel free to link to it, digg it or make it a favourite to help spread the word…!

So today I got to spend some time on the show floor and saw a couple of things I think worth commenting on.

A couple of Taiwanese companies Ritek and Optodisc were showing their writable discs.

Optodisc are fairly new to BD-R and were showcasing a BD-R and BD-RE in the 25GB capacity. There are no plans for mass production currently - they are waiting for the market to grow.

Ritek had a whole range of discs including printable 4x media (hub printable coming soon), 50GB media in both BD-R and BD-RE and a 6x BD-R disc. Expect 8x to hit shortly.

Panasonic was demonstrating their new range of Blu-ray players with VieraCast YouTube technology, though I thought the coolest product was the portable DMP-B15 with a built in screen that is beautiful and sharp - ideal for taking your movies on the road.

The player also won a CNET Best of CES Award.

You can see pictures of these new items now in the Gallery.

I see surprising news over at Engadget HD today.

Apparently Pioneer has been showing off their 400GB Blu-ray disc and are claiming that it is read compatible with current drives.

If this turns out to be the case, it is really starting to look good for higher capacity discs.

It sounds like it will take up to a couple of years before the disc hits the store shelves, even longer for a rewritable version … and it is to be followed by a 1TB version in 2013!

For now I am mostly focused on the 25 and 50 GB discs - which are getting cheaper all the time and hopefully will get to prices where it makes sense to back up you HD home movies on Blu-ray Discs rather than AVCHD formated DVDRs.

Perhaps aiming mostly at the ‘bag of hurt’ Apple market, OWC is introducing a 4x Blu-ray writer with both FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, as well as eSATA and USB 2.0.

The drive works with both Macs and PCs and is manufactured by Panasonic.

There is also an LG ‘read only’ drive available. You can check out the OWC Blu-ray offerings here.

Whether it is to archive your TiVo HD Tivo To Go recordings or footage from your HDV or AVCHD video camera, the price of blank Blu-ray media has been somewhat of a barrier to using the format for mass archiving.

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I see over at TWICE that Imation/TDK has announced their 6x recording speed Blu-ray Discs.

The release plan includes both single and double-layer (BD-R DL) discs with 6x recording speed.

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Reading around recently I have discovered that there is certainly some movement in the writable Blu-ray Disc sector.

Engadget is reporting that NEC is planning silicon to support BD-R recording at 8x speed. The recording speed of BD-R was initially only 2x, so this represents a nice saving in record time. 8x speed should be 36 MBps, which may actually tax some slower hard drives!

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Reading over at Engadget today I see that Pioneer has been busy in the R & D laboratory.

First up there is the 400 GB Blu-ray Disc with 16 layers of 25 GB each - quite a few more than the commercially available dual layer discs.

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TWICE is reporting that LG is releasing a new line of Blu-ray PC drives that record and play Blu-ray media at 6x speed.

The drives feature DVD and CD media compatibility as well as SecureDisc for content protection on written media and Lightscribe.

The GBC-H20L and the GBW-H20L carry suggested retails of $199 and $279, respectively. Both models are 6x BD-R/2x BD-RE read compatible, while the GBW-H20L is even said to be dual layer BD-R 50 capable and features 6x BD-R/2x BD-RE read and write compatibility.

Nice to see the price point of these drives coming down, though the features of these units is essentially the same as the ‘Super Drive‘ (pictured) with the HD DVD capability removed.

Primera has been a long standing player in the automated media writing and replication business. This year they are back at NAB presenting their duplication systems, including systems capable of writing and printing Blu-ray Discs.

I have been following the writing capability for Blu-ray Disc since the inception - it was one reason I preferred Blu-ray over HD DVD, who never really got the disc writing side of it to work very well. The aspect of BD-R that has been a long time coming is surface printable discs. Every CES and NAB I seem to get the message that the printable discs are coming but they never seem to actually appear. As discussion with Verbatim at CES indicated that there are indeed special difficulties associated with printable media for Blu-ray.

While I wouldn’t say they are out in force, Primera is listing media to go with your Bravo SE Blu duplicator. A spindle of 10 printable discs will set you back $240 while a spindle of 25 is listed at $465. The presenters at the Primera booth said that the media was Imation and Taiyo Yuden.

Still a tad expensive but at least they are apparently available. I look forward to the price of media coming down as more people seek the possibility of watching their own content on their Blu-ray player.