Blu-ray is a name for a optical disc standard which uses blue-violet laser instead of red laser used in CDs and in DVDs. This allows manufacturers to store more data using the same amount of disc surface.

One Blu-Ray disc will hold appx. 27GB of data (compared to 4.36GB on regular DVD) on one side/layer of the disc.

Video will be stored using either MPEG-2 technology or newer MPEG-4/AVC in much higher bitrate than what a regular DVD-Video disc uses. Blu-ray supports video resulutions up to 1080p.

For more information, see the glossary definitions for:

DVD-Video, HD DVD