How can a huge game like Skyrim fit on a CD and be played on a console, while only a few episodes of a TV show can fit on a DVD?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.