If today's 50GB Blu-ray discs aren't roomy enough for your needs, the Blu-ray Disc Association might have something right up your alley. The organization has announced two new media specifications, BDXL (High Capacity Recordable and Rewritable discs) and IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid discs), and the former offers up to 128GB of storage by incorporating three to four recordable layers.
BDXL is mostly aimed at commercial sectors, such as broadcasting or medical and document imaging enterprises that need high-capacity discs for archiving purposes. It provide 100GB or 128GB write-once options, while rewritable solutions peak at 100GB. A mainstream version of BDXL is also in the pipeline for regions with high BD recorder consumption.
IH-BD discs aren't quite as capacious as BDXL, but they're an interesting development nonetheless. The discs implement a single BD-ROM layer and a single BD-RE layer to protect users from overwriting critical data, while still remaining flexible. All of that's fine and dandy, but there is some bad news: you'll need new hardware to play back or record BDXL or IH-BD media.
