I know that there are two different machines used to read the disks, but does that make a difference in how much a single disk can hold?
Is the difference in the way the disks are read or the type of data they hold?
In: Technology
These are completely different things. The game is a program, and the program can calculate a complex scene from a few parameters. The TV show is a stream of data. There is no algorithm for calculating the next frame based on the last frame. Every frame can be optimized, for the part that doesn’t change, but it’s hugely data intensive.
If you have HD, that’s 1024×1980 pixels at maybe as few as 8 bits of 3 colors. Let’s round it to 5Mbytes per frame at 30 frames per second. It eats up storage space, even with 20:1 compression.
Video games use text based code which is relatively small that references 3D models, textures, music and sounds that can be repeated thousands of times in the span of a game but only exist in one instance on the disc. A DVD uses about 30 individual pictures for every second of video and the sounds file is one giant movie-long piece of data. Nothing is repeated or reused.
A movie is like a cake and the DVD player is a fork you can eat it with.
A game is like the ingredients and a recipe, and the computer is the tools you make the cake with and eat.
The Skyrim files contain everything the game can show you (the textures, the models, the sounds, the voices) and has a lot of “script” to direct what goes where and what does what, but your computer (in this, a console is a computer) will do the work of reading the script and arranging everything according to it.
Another analogy would be a record of a theater play and the play’s text + costume descriptions. The recording is static, consumes a lot of place, but text is very small and costume descriptions even with pictures won’t take a lot of space either.
But then if you want to see the play, you have to manufacture the costumes and employ people to play the roles, which is what your console is there for.
Skyrim came on a DVD, not a CD. So in both cases it’s the same amount of storage.
A game like Skyrim is made up of lots of repeated data. There are loads of dungeons in it but if you look around the dungeons are mostly made up of the same models and textures repeated lots of times. So it doesn’t need unique copies of that data for every single place it appears in the game (although it may be duplicated a few times for performance reasons).
You can’t do that with video. Video is compressed in various ways, including only storing the changes from one frame to the next instead of the whole thing. So In a way it can also reuse data to some extent.
But if one episode of a show reuses a set from a previous episode there’s no way to reuse the same bit of data for both episodes. We can easily tell it’s the same scenery, but as far as the DVD player is concerned it’s completely separate. It has no knowledge of what’s in the scene, it’s just looking at pixel values.
For the TV shows on DVD it’s about the compression. That level of compression is over 20 years old and quite inefficient (compared to today’s compression). Video will always use a huge amount of data.
A lot of the time, the game itself is not entirely stored on the disk (or maybe not even at all). When you first put the disk into your console, it goes to the internet and downloads a lot of the game’s content from a server somewhere and installs it on your console’s hard drive.
This disk is mostly just a physical representation of the license that you purchased for the game; it is not the game itself. Most modern games can be played without a disk or purchased 100% digitally.
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