Dutch company Philips Electronics says it has developed a new technology with Japan's Mitsubishi Kagaku Media that nearly doubles the storage capacity of data on recordable DVD discs.

Philips, Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics and lighting, said Friday that its new dual-layer technology raised the capacity of recordable DVDs (DVD+R) to 8.5GB from 4.7GB for single-layer DVD discs.

Read more: CNet News.

That's great! Currently, its hard to copy (hmm.. I mean "backup"!) a lot of DVDs, because they are over 7GB and recordable DVDs only go up to 4.7GB. You need to strip some of the data away, etc. Now, you can just do a straight disk to disk copy.

This is likely to stir up a reaction from MPAA. They aren't going to like this one bit, which makes me like it even more. I just love it when the likes of RIAA and MPAA get their feathers all ruffled over advances in technology that they see as another way for us evil consumers to rip them off.

Hehehe maybe there will be a program where you just place a DVD movie in your DVD-ROM and a blank DVD in your DVD-RW drive, and hit copy and it does everything in one go, strips away CSS encryption, region, etc, and then burns it direct to DVD disk.

Hey guys, that's nothing. Look at this at Customize.org. How much could you copy, er, backup, on one of these babies. Now that you have read that, see what you think about this.

Thats crazy! 10 Terabytes? Even with the high price... could you imagine having every piece of data you have from movies to personal work all backed up onto one disc! Ridiculous.

1 scratch....

Baah! 10 Terabytes will be the size of the games that come out in ten years, no problem.

That would be so crazy phant. And i cant wait for the day that games are 10 Terabytes and on 1 single disc. That would be off the hook.

hmmmm...maybe it is finally time for me to get a dvd-burner.

I cant see that happining phant

I seem to remember people making doubtful remarks like that not long ago when people speculated that an average game would soon be over 1GB. Just a few short years later, many games now take up over 1GB. 10 years ago, you would have been laughed out of Silicon Valley for suggesting that a game(or anything else) would take up 1GB+ of space in less than 10 yrs time.

Phant's remark is not far fetched at all.