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The list of ready content is growing. http://www.blu-ray.com/4k/

You might want to tell the movies that were scanned to 8k from film (search for 8K) that they don't exist, as well as this mainstream movie that's being filmed in 8K. Or this company that the videos they record on their cameras don't exist. Hell, Youtube has an 8K video already.

8K video availability is very limited, but not no-existant. 8K displays have been shown at CES since 2012. 8K broadcasts were tested during the 2012 Olympics. But even without commonly available video for mortals, 8K video isn't the only thing that you can display with a video card that can display 8K. You can drive four 4K displays, which is an amazing coincidence that these cards have 4 ports for output!

I've got a rather large media collection myself, I won't pretend it's as big as theirs, but it's large, I tend to buy bargain bin movies at Big Lots and other places, and I also buy new releases I actually want to see.

I've run into lots of bit-rot, especially on Warner Brothers releases - I've emailed them about it and they won't even give me the courtesy of a "go fuck yourself" reply.

Take this Blu-Ray of A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas" for instance. It is unique in my collection as a single disk has both the Blu-Ray extended version and the DVD Theatrical release. It's well cared for, not a scratch on it - I'm a stickler about my disk. As my friends tend to have that sort of sense of humor this movies been watched a few times.

When I first got it I watched the extended uncut Blu-Ray side. That side of the disk doesn't work anymore. I can hold it up to the light and see the deterioration through the disk - the DVD side places perfectly - not a scratch on either side of the disk anywhere.

Again - that Horrible Superman Returns movie - DVD - rotted.
Natural Born Killer - DVD - rotted.
The Green Mile - DVD - rotted
Samurai Jack Season 3 - one little spot of rot, one of the episodes is now unwatchable, I had it ripped it a couple of years prior at low-res for use on a netbook and PSP. I re-ripped the whole disk save that one episode where I kept the old low-res version of the one.
The Greatest American Hero - straight into ripping off-the-shelf, never watched off the disk, like Samurai Jack, one episode.

I bought the twin pack of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The old one - AKA the good one rotted. The newer tree-hugger edition works fine. Those were both DVD and scratchless - I actually went out and bought the BluRay of the older one.

Granted some of these disks were really old and had literally underwater in a Hurricane - most of them - especially the BluRay - cannot.

Oddly I don't think any of the bit-rotted movies were out of the bargain bin, those seem to have held up despite the scratches on the used ones. It's the ones I've bought new, off-the-shelf and removed the cellophane myself that have rotted.

I would say I have 1 out of 150 rot? Maybe a bit more. To say the least I feel justified ripping and compressing my movies to put on my media server at this point.

In defense of Netflix, they support playing videos over HTML5 (with DRM extenstions of course). So if Blackberry would update their browser to support HTML5 with DRM, then blackberry users could watch Netflix on their devices.

You talk like Firefox could implement it, which they can't. They need keys, those keys need to stay secret and the content needs to stay protected until you can hand it over to the OS/graphics driver and probably all sorts of other nasty liabilities and penalties if you don't. The music industry had to abandon DRM, but the movie industry is still going full steam with HDCP 2.2 for 4K and when they finally make 4K BluRay this year it'll be choking full of AACS 2.0, BD+ 2.0, Cinavia 2.0 and whatever else they can throw at it.

I think they know this is their really last chance, BluRay looks pretty damn good (1080p, uncompressed sound) and 4K BluRay adds all the last bells and whistles like resolution on par with DCI 4K, high frame rate, 10 bit color, extremely wide color space Rec.2020, bigger dynamic range ,>HDTV 3D even if you only get half per eye, HEVC encoding... if you can rip one of those discs the source is likely to be better than anything you can play it with, so far there's not even a reference monitor at any price that can deliver 100% Rec.2020 coverage.

Meh, you act as if your view is gospel and anything else is just stupid.

Think about that for a minute...

Is 28 years more or less reasonable than 18, or 38?

Then we have to address revisions to works. My example, I believe, was quite reasonable for VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray.

Gone With The Wind was expensive to restore and redo for Blu-Ray:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/...

If you are being honest, you'll take 5 minutes and read that, the work that was done to make the modern copy look so good was not cheap.

How about this one:

http://miamiherald.typepad.com...

Ben Hur cost $1 million dollars to restore.

You think that should be free? You think that would even be available if they couldn't sell it or prevent you from making copies?

Perhaps a 20 to 30 year copyright on a specific version of each work, so that old VHS copies could be handed out, but the Blu-Ray could not be, at least not for awhile.

In 20 years, they would have to release the codes to unlock the encryption on the disks, but by that time perhaps something new will be out, so you can watch the old 1080p copy, but the new 8k 4D super duper version would still be protected.

Just tossing out ideas...

Superbit is just a marketing trick telling you that they normally crap out on DVD's, but are making an exception for you. It's not something to charge for - it's exactly what they should be doing all along. If you get a dual-layer release of a movie and they didn't even bother to try to fill most of it with the film at the highest possible bitrate, they have failed you. Same for buying a double-feature on DVD - you know where the compromise is.

Not only did Sony make an improved version of The 5th Element on Blu-Ray, they offered free upgrade discs to those affected by the quality problems.
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/...

Early adopters have problems. That is nothing to do with the quality of one early-format release of a movie. Just look at Ben Hur or the LOTR extended editions on Blu-Ray (directorial color changes on the latter excepted). Two discs just to contain the main movie. Certainly blows "superbit" out of the water.

100GB Blu-Ray discs would be a start. But I own plenty of discs that are 1080p and have AVC @ 30MBps+ and use up most of the disc space. A lot of movies have several audio tracks because audio is small, but any 3 hour movies I own are on two discs. Ben-Hur is one example that used two Blu-Rays to avoid compression artifacts:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Ben-Hur-Blu-ray/756/

There's no reason to throw away the picture quality we've achieved now to call something at the same bitrate "4K."

At 4x the resolution, you want close to 4x the disc space. That means getting Blu-Ray up to 200GB, or a little less since audio is more or less perfect and doesn't need any extra space.

The switch to digital might make drive-ins MORE VIABLE, rather than less. Movie theatres save money because they can have one or two projectionists managing dozens of screens, dealing with all the broken films and whatnot. Drive-ins can't even have half a dozen screens due to size constraints and limited demand, so one projectionist getting paid for one or two screens is expensive.

But with digital, you don't need to know how to splice film, or change reels quickly. The idiot who scoops the popcorn can hit the button to start playing the movie, and drive-ins might suddenly be cheap enough to become viable again.

And the march of technology is making it cheap and easy for even an amateur to set-up their own theatre. DLP projections are cheap and bright, and Blu-ray discs are 1920x1080, higher resolution than worn-out old films... And with some good old public domain films coming to Blu-ray, the disc costs a couple bucks to pay for a highdef film transfer, and you don't need any license for public performances: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=161511
Hell, it wouldn't even be illegal for you to download a TORRENT of a Blu-ray rip of these public domain movies.

I have no doubt the expense of Hollywood's blessed projectors with DRM up the wazoo is quite expensive, but a lower-cost drive-in with older films, you can practically start your own on an absolute shoestring budget.

BluRay 1x speeds are 36mbps; however, most drives run at 2x or faster to provide the necessary 54Mbps data transfer rate for BDRom movies. The upper limit of the drive (which has been pretty standard for all optical drives, including CD-ROM and DVD, so I don't expect that to change) - is around 10,000 RPM - which comes out to approximately 12x the "base" transfer rate of BluRay, or just over 400Mbps.

So... assuming these new drives run at max speed all the time and it can magically maintain that rate for the entire copy, that gives us a perfect transfer rate of 54MBps (432Mbps). That means it would take a little over 1.5 hours to read all the data off one of these new 300GB discs. More likely, the drives will release (assuming it ever makes to market) with a far lower rate (2x-4x BluRay speeds is my guess) to prevent excessive noise, heat and wear, and transfer speeds are never perfect so a full-disk copy will require about 10 hours. And that doesn't even get into the time needed for /write-speeds/. And that's just for /one/ disc; you would need 7 discs to match the capacity of an average 2TB hard-drive.

So, yeah, the bandwidth problem is a bit of a concern for me too. I'm sure there may be some specialized needs for equipment like this, but - given the competition from TODAY's hard-drives it's hard to see these making any sort of headway on the general market. And by the time these discs were available (assuming they ever are) hard-drives will probably have ten times more capacity and tripled their speed, making this technology look even more ineffective.

I based my comment on the following observations:

(1) One can buy originsl PS3 games from the Sony store, so it is conceivable that the store should also carry original Blu-ray/DVD.

(2) It would be a real stretch to say that at this day and age, one cannot find an original copy of DVD in Malaysia. Here is a link to get you started (it's a forum on blu-ray). Good luck.

Stop using ads and start doing stuff like being an Amazon merchant. Link your reviews and stuff to your Amazon merchant account - when a user clicks through to buy something, they get revenue. There are several Blu-Ray review sites that do just that. Stop bombarding us with flash ads and stuff - give us your story, and a link to where we can buy the game. Happy users, and a solution to your issues.

Here is some links to sites that do just this:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/ (notice the ads are off to the side of the page, its not distracting, and relates to the site)

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/7388/santa_martians.html (provides Amazon link to buy the product. Side bar has some ads relating to the site)

http://www.blu-ray.com/ (Links at the top of the page take you to their articles, with a link in their article to buy the product on Amazon)

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Life-of-Pi-3D-Blu-ray/60865/#Review (example of an article, with links to the Amazon store)

Both of these sites are very clean and well designed, do not bombard the users with ads, with the exception of links to buy movies, which is exactly why the users are at the site to begin with. The sites make enough from click-throughs to stay in business (unless movie companies are paying them to write reviews, which is possible). In any case, the sites are able to stay in business, pay operating costs and pay staff, and are able to keep from bombarding users with ads.

It's not that foreign of a concept. If I go to a review site, don't bombard me with a flash ad for Pepsi or some reverse-home-mortgage, or something. Just give me a link to where I can buy the product you are talking about.

Stop using ads and start doing stuff like being an Amazon merchant. Link your reviews and stuff to your Amazon merchant account - when a user clicks through to buy something, they get revenue. There are several Blu-Ray review sites that do just that. Stop bombarding us with flash ads and stuff - give us your story, and a link to where we can buy the game. Happy users, and a solution to your issues.

Here is some links to sites that do just this:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/ (notice the ads are off to the side of the page, its not distracting, and relates to the site)

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/7388/santa_martians.html (provides Amazon link to buy the product. Side bar has some ads relating to the site)

http://www.blu-ray.com/ (Links at the top of the page take you to their articles, with a link in their article to buy the product on Amazon)

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Life-of-Pi-3D-Blu-ray/60865/#Review (example of an article, with links to the Amazon store)

Both of these sites are very clean and well designed, do not bombard the users with ads, with the exception of links to buy movies, which is exactly why the users are at the site to begin with. The sites make enough from click-throughs to stay in business (unless movie companies are paying them to write reviews, which is possible). In any case, the sites are able to stay in business, pay operating costs and pay staff, and are able to keep from bombarding users with ads.

It's not that foreign of a concept. If I go to a review site, don't bombard me with a flash ad for Pepsi or some reverse-home-mortgage, or something. Just give me a link to where I can buy the product you are talking about.

My HTPC stores the original HD transport stream straight from the antenna. 500GB holds as much as I really need. It's not like I keep a show after I watch it. Or are you talking about Blu-Ray rips??? OP was talking about recordings.

Classic movies are perfectly suited for Blu-Ray. Early digital TV shows are the only thing that doesn't look better on Blu-Ray. 35mm film scans at 2K-4K or higher, so 1080p is a downsize from that. If you saw Citizen Kane or Ben-Hur on Blu-Ray, you'd know that classic movies on Blu-Ray can really be spectacular. The original Blu-Ray of The Fifth Element looks terrible. Sony re-scanned and re-released the movie later at a better quality.

If you can't see compression artifacts on a 96" you must be pretty far back or going blind. At 8 feet, I'd be seeing PIXELS on top of just artifacts.

They tried "tweaked DVD". It was called HD-DVD, and there was even a scheme to distribute it on DVD-9s.

The problem is that a lot of films were recorded on grainy film, which is difficult to compress. Sure, you can remove the grain, and then compress it more tightly but if the grain removal is too harsh, you can end up with a wax museum.

1080p video is far from 0.05 Gbps.

I was guessing based on the maximum bit rate of Blu-ray Disc video.

1080p/60

Feature films on BD are 1080p/24. As I understand it, feature-length motion pictures aren't produced in high motion because theaters aren't set up to show high motion. Pretty much the only thing that needs high motion is sports and perhaps overcranked effect shots that will be slowed down before playback.

3.96 Gbps

You have a point about uncompressed video, as might be used in video production. But how big would the RAID 10 array for saturating a 10 Gbps link need to be?

However, an hour of 720p or 1080i HD content, even compressed to hell using H.264, is somewhere around 1 GB. I know I sure spend a lot of time twiddling my thumbs slinging those files over either gigabit ethernet or USB 2.0 as I have to do presently.

Wouldn't a two-hour movie compressed to 2 GB (16 Gbit; 2.2 Mbps) take under twenty seconds to copy over a 1 Gbps link? Even assuming a slightly more generous 6 GB and 6.6 Mbps, it's still one minute to copy something that will take two hours to watch.

Sounds worthwhile to me, if I have, say 100 or 1000 hours of 1080p to transfer.

Apart from professional video production, where would one get these hundreds of hours of 1080p video?

It's beating DVD's adoption rate when it was new, and current sales as well...and doing so with Netflix competing, during a recession.

http://n4g.com/news/255491/blu-rays-first-two-years-outpaces-dvds

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118029765

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=6399

Blu-ray was released globally in June 2006; by December 2010, even with PS3s counted, it had a consumer penetration of 10.7%, according to NPD. This is the slowest adoption of a non-fringe video technology in history.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4554

For scale, DVD was released in Japan in Nov 96, in the US in March 1997 and in Europe in Oct 1998. Even though it took them two years to get to three continents, it passed the 12% penetration mark in under four months (I can't find a number between 8 and 12%, it penetrated so fast.)

According to this, you are mistaken. It took three years for DVD to reach an appreciable footprint, same as Blu-Ray, and the BD chunk is larger than the DVD chunk after the same time. You also have to take into account that BD had direct competition from HD-DVD, whereas original DVD did not.

http://www.screendigest.com/www/reports/2010629b/10_07_evolution_of_home_entertainment_chart.gif

And compared to VHS, DVD looked just as abyssmal.

So. Global release takes almost three and a half years to reach ten percent, whereas Japan-only release passes the 12% mark in under one financial quarter.

Even LaserDisc, the famously failed standard, hit 10% in under two years.

What is your metric for "catching on just fine?" Is it "I own two of them?"

Nice try, but your trolling skills are rusty.

No, it won't, for the same reason that the much more plausible minidisc format failed: it is ridiculously unweildly, slow, expensive-per-byte, fragile and so on. A blu-ray burner starts around $85, and a writable 5-gig disc is in the neighborhood of $3.50 in bulk.

By comparison, the tiny, fast, durable, reliable MicroSD format will give you a reader/writer that pushes ten times the data rate of blu-ray *and* a cartridge five times the maximum size of a blu-ray disc for seven dollars.

<ad-hominem>Are you on crack?!</ad-hominem>

I can get a 50-pack of BD-R DL for $500. That's $10/disc for 50GB of storage, or $0.20/GB. By comparison, the best price I found for 64GB SDXC was about $140, and $60 for 32GB microSD, roughly $2/GB. The BD media price per GB is BETTER by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE.

Oh, and its stability isn't on the order of single digit year counts.

Again, you are sorely mistaken and providing misinformation (with no evidence or proof whatsoever, mind you) to make your snarky comments look intelligent and well-considered. They aren't.

http://www.techmount.com/index.php/20060905/blu-ray-lifespan/

Blu-Ray disks will last 100-150 years. DVD's start at 10 years. Again, as much as an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better. SD card life expectancy is similar to that of DVD's; even an SD card specifically designed for long-term, write-once archival storage will only last 100 years, making it comparable AT BEST to Blu-Ray: https://www.pcworld.com/article/199672/sandisks_sd_card_can_store_data_for_100_years.html

Why would anyone *ever* turn to blu-ray for storage? It's flash or tape, guy.

It is absolutely amazing to me that you're attempting to justify hardware choices in terms of the hardware being replaced, while ignoring the alternatives available. That's the kind of thinking one expects from a politician, not from someone with a five digit slashdot id.

How are you on an HPC group at LBNL if you think things like blu-ray will succeed as a storage medium? Do you make clusters of 386es?

Q.E.D.

Blu-Ray is catching on just fine.

Blu-ray was released globally in June 2006; by December 2010, even with PS3s counted, it had a consumer penetration of 10.7%, according to NPD. This is the slowest adoption of a non-fringe video technology in history.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4554

For scale, DVD was released in Japan in Nov 96, in the US in March 1997 and in Europe in Oct 1998. Even though it took them two years to get to three continents, it passed the 12% penetration mark in under four months (I can't find a number between 8 and 12%, it penetrated so fast.)

So. Global release takes almost three and a half years to reach ten percent, whereas Japan-only release passes the 12% mark in under one financial quarter.

Even LaserDisc, the famously failed standard, hit 10% in under two years.

What is your metric for "catching on just fine?" Is it "I own two of them?"

Even if Blu-Ray doesn't succeed as a movie medium, it will succeed as a data medium

No, it won't, for the same reason that the much more plausible minidisc format failed: it is ridiculously unweildly, slow, expensive-per-byte, fragile and so on. A blu-ray burner starts around $85, and a writable 5-gig disc is in the neighborhood of $3.50 in bulk.

By comparison, the tiny, fast, durable, reliable MicroSD format will give you a reader/writer that pushes ten times the data rate of blu-ray *and* a cartridge five times the maximum size of a blu-ray disc for seven dollars.

Oh, and its stability isn't on the order of single digit year counts.

Why would anyone *ever* turn to blu-ray for storage? It's flash or tape, guy.

It is absolutely amazing to me that you're attempting to justify hardware choices in terms of the hardware being replaced, while ignoring the alternatives available. That's the kind of thinking one expects from a politician, not from someone with a five digit slashdot id.

How are you on an HPC group at LBNL if you think things like blu-ray will succeed as a storage medium? Do you make clusters of 386es?

You are wrong. A Blu-Ray disc is specced to hold 9 hours of HD content, or 23 hours of SD. With the 50% additional space to go to 3D, you can put a 6 hour movie in HD and 3D on a Blu-Ray disk.

Source: http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_developers

You are a little overconfident.

Sales are up over 68% year over year, marketshare has nearly doubled year over year (2009 to 1020)....

How many stones did it cost to buy a Blu-Ray player in 1020? Did you adjust for inflation, too?

The sales figures for blu-ray seem to indicate otherwise. Sales are up over 68% year over year, marketshare has nearly doubled year over year (2009 to 1020).

Of course there are dynamics at work outside of the straight consumer choice angle. There is the control afforded the media companies via downloadable media to consider as well. That may be what these guys are relying on for their opinion. The question then is whether the sheep are willing to follow where they are being led.

To be a bit more serious: the current bluray of 2001 is regarded as one of the finest vintage releases.

Fine detail sets a new bar for high definition catalog releases. Facial imperfections are a cinch to spot, hair is crisply defined, and the star fields are flawless. I paused on several occasions to note actors' naturally splotchy skin and chipped fingernails. There are even scenes in this transfer that I completely re-watched just to have another chance to explore the intricacies of the sets and props. For the first time, I was able to read all of the small text Kubrick strategically placed across the film. Call me obsessed, but I found myself completely fascinated by these minor details that I'd previously been unable to enjoy. Pay close attention to the barren wilderness in the opening scenes, the space station electronics, and the slightest etchings on the ships floating above Earth. My apologies for sounding like Captain Adjective, but this transfer is just that beautiful.

source

The opening "Dawn of Man" sequence seems to have been shot entirely at magic hour. The resulting shots are beautiful and really show off this discs flawless handing of color. Just about every scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey looks as though it could have been filmed yesterday. The print is flawless and the images are truly spectacular. This is a must own title on Blu-ray and is the very definition of reference grade.

source

How do you watch the slow, ponderous, two and half hour cut? Running at the gym? Out the corner of your eye while hacking? In five minute increments? Or do you sit down in a darkened room before a good sized high resolution screen and soak it up?

So it has DRM. So did DVD. Big deal. The practical reality is you pop in the bluray, press play, and watch the movie. There's one "FBI warning". That's all. And then it's on to the overture, and the men in furry suits.

If you truly enjoy vintage films, there are quite a few releases that look less like video, and more like film. There are others that are plagued by sharpening masks and other digital artifacts, but DVD releases had those too. Read the reviews.

Avatar as a film is ... a better movie to show off your home theater. The Blu-Ray looks and sounds amazing on a good TV/sound system.

The Fountain is also an amazing movie to show off your home theater.

Add Dragon Hunters to your list.

Well sony is going to disable HD on component out for ALL bluray players in a year or so anyways.

No encrypted content will go out of a Bluray player if it is not protected from the scumbag consumer by the precious HDCP.

It's why I wont be buying a newer Bluray player and my current is for sale on ebay. I'll just rip the disks and bypass all their BS. Bluray -> mpeg4 and played on a XBMC dedicated box looks wonderful and you dont have any of the crap. ripbot264 + anyDVDHD so far has ripped any Bluray I have bought without problems.

Done believe me? http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=2849

Both BR and HDDVD support TrueHD audio, so I'm not sure where your misinformation on audio comes from. You should also note that almost all movies are in 5.1 audio, not the 7.1 that's supported.

Dolby Digital, DTS-HD High Resolution and DTS-HD MA all are higher bit rates. Wikipedia contains the same "misinformation" - optical disc comparison

Now as to capacity, most BR disks use the less than optimal MPEG2 encoding which is a space hog

I scanned about 30 recent titles here and couldn't find one that was MPEG2. They were all equally split between MPEG4 and VC-1. The only MPEG2 titles I did find was stuff released in 2006, so it's pretty clear they're not using it any more for new releases.

http://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-news/discovery-communications-sony-and-imax-announce-pl/

Yep - a 24/7 fully dedicated 3D network in the US.

I think 3D is an epic fail right out of the gate. Autostereoscopy has been on the market already, so the whole add glasses thing is idiotic.

Samsung showed it at this year's CES, but it didn't get the big exposure... but still, it's out there:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1379458976&play=1

Autostereoscopic info here (one example) - meaning, 3D without glasses:

http://www.xyz3d.tv/

In addition - 3D headsets with 1.44 megapixel/eye glasses have been out for some time. All it would take would be a few minor upgrades, and for about a grand, you'd have the equivalent of a 3D 70" set at 13'. See, for example:

http://www.i-glassesstore.com/ig-hrvpro.html

Oh - and wait for it - the Blu-ray kiddies have decided that the correct term is now 3-D, not 3D, unless it is.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=3924

A note on spelling

Earlier this year, the blu-ray.com team unanimously decided to use the spelling "3-D", with a hyphen, for everything related to stereoscopic images, and "3D", without a hyphen, for three-dimensional graphics and animation. We shall continue to do so, except when citing the name of the "Blu-ray 3D" specification, which doesn't use the hyphen.

OBTW - Did we all notice that the proposed tech is going to eat an additional 50% of bandwidth? For those suffering from compression/decompression artifacting - read: for everyone with digital cable or satellite HD - it's going to get worse as the 3D premiums are added. Woot!

I loved David Pogue's view (amusing as always) on 3D TV in his Truth Serum video.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1386497920&play=1

Let's not forget - the Avatar craze was with circularly polarized PASSIVE GLASSES - not Bluetooth'd active shutters!

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/164200,3d-tv-buzz-at-ces-2010-just-another-gimmick-or-should-you-hang-onto-those-avatar-glasses.aspx

I think this is a simple case of **I AM** ready for 3D-D ... ready to wait until it dies or makes sense!

BTW - Let's not forget Johnny Lee's head-tracking system (if you watch nothing else - watch this!!) - at least that was cool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

But that $55 player will suck badly.

Funny, the end-user reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Why do you say it will suck? Is it because you've seen one and it was bad, or because you simply don't believe a $55 blu-ray player can be any good? Oh, and it also does up to 1080p upscaling of DVDs.

http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=123984

Well yeah, there is that too.

What I think is odd is that (as far as I know) neither Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or HDTV have a 3D mode. With a bit of foresight they could have made 3D one of the killer features to get people to buy those.

Disney made Ghosts of the Abyss in 2003, and Blu-Ray wasn't finalized until 2004. At that point there were quite a few 3D films in production and cinemas were being fitted with the gear to show them.

You'd think someone would have put a 3D mode into Blu-Ray. I think it would be possible to get polarization based 3D into high end LCD screens. LCDs are based on polarization after all.

Then pricey home cinema systems would show films in 3D if they were 3D at the cinema. From what I've read take up on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD was a bit disappointing because most people couldn't see the difference between a DVD and the new formats. Adding 3D would might have helped.

That being said, it seems like there is a plan to get 3D into Blu-Ray retroactively.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=1303

For my purposes, on a 42" 1080p screen viewed from 12' away, 2.5Mbps average (with peaks up to 7Mbps) is what I feel is "adequate". In a side by side with higher data rates you can notice the difference, but without the sharper reference, I'm not missing what's not there. Of course, I'm not enough of an audiophile to have more than 2 speakers (though they are pretty decent 6.5" units driven by an adequate amp), so I'm probably not on the picky end about the video, either. On the other end of the argument, BluRay discs are capable of delivering 72Mbps and more, and there will always be the high-end crowd that demands more fidelity than their eyes, ears and brains could possibly perceive.

Back on the issue of "the pipe" - those 6+Mbps peaks are just enough to oversaturate my 802.11g network - not all the time, but enough to be super-annoying, so I ran a cable. Let's not get into the question of why the file fetcher can't pre-fetch enough data to get past the challenging spots, I've been pissed at Sony engineers since 1991 when I bought their top of the line car CD changer and it only had 1/2 second of pre-buffering. They're still pinching the pre-buffer penny, even now that RAM is what, $10 a GB?

So, then, yes, bandwidth to the home has improved, no doubt, but it's still delivered from the node to the house over those ancient wires that have issues when it rains, etc. We're located 2 miles from our cable office, not sure if there's an intermediate node or not. The cable company could give single homes more bandwidth, but there's still a lot of sharing going on in the co-ax wires, and if every subscriber wanted 50Mbps right now they'd have to do something to improve the infrastructure. I think our service is a nominal 10Mbps now, but reality varies widely, 10 is more the cap, 6 to 8 is the average, and of course there are the occasional virtual outages.

As long as (most) people are happy with the quality from Hulu and Fox TV, they can be serviced by 2-3Mbps pipes. Higher bandwidth to the home (like 50Mbps) will probably remain at a significant premium due to the infrastructure demands - and, thus, it may be cheaper to continue to ship discs via USPS for quite a while.

Besides, people are creatures of habit. They stick with what they know, and if the new thing can't give them 100% of what they're used to for the same or lower cost, they'll be very slow to change.

If Best Buy's display were all one had to go on, one might be inclined to wonder aloud about what the big deal is with this newfangled high def that everyone's talking about.

When my wife and I went looking for an HDTV we checked out a few of the local "chain" stores and ended up getting it from J&R in NYC.

They have a great selection, a good showroom devoted to TVs, and they seemed to have knowledgeable reps (they are paid on commission so they try real hard). You can even haggle a bit on price which made them competitive with on-line for the same model (especially including shipping). The nice part about getting it local is you can be more careful getting it home. A lot of time when things getting broken in transit, its the "last mile" where it happens.

The truly mind-boggling thing about the surreal experience, however, was that all of the televisions were universally badly configured and fed. There wasn't a single "this is the one we're trying to push" model on any shelf in any price-range.

Maybe this is why Sony decided to pay them to have a Blu-Ray setup in stores, not so much to push BD, but to make sure at least ONE of their sets is hooked up to a real HD source.

Depending on the model, a lot of the adjustments aren't even exposed through the menu system, and the test pattern generators I've seen for HD are stupidly expensive. (stupid, because with HDMI, every player should be able to push a perfect test pattern off a cheap mass-produced BD).

Well, Sony provides HD Calibration tests as an "easter egg" on all of their Blu-Ray disks.
Check http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=32738 for more information on accessing the tests (as well as information on a few other low cost alternatives) and http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=47055&postcount=207 for advice on how to use them to calibrate your TV.

If Best Buy's display were all one had to go on, one might be inclined to wonder aloud about what the big deal is with this newfangled high def that everyone's talking about.

When my wife and I went looking for an HDTV we checked out a few of the local "chain" stores and ended up getting it from J&R in NYC.

They have a great selection, a good showroom devoted to TVs, and they seemed to have knowledgeable reps (they are paid on commission so they try real hard). You can even haggle a bit on price which made them competitive with on-line for the same model (especially including shipping). The nice part about getting it local is you can be more careful getting it home. A lot of time when things getting broken in transit, its the "last mile" where it happens.

The truly mind-boggling thing about the surreal experience, however, was that all of the televisions were universally badly configured and fed. There wasn't a single "this is the one we're trying to push" model on any shelf in any price-range.

Maybe this is why Sony decided to pay them to have a Blu-Ray setup in stores, not so much to push BD, but to make sure at least ONE of their sets is hooked up to a real HD source.

Depending on the model, a lot of the adjustments aren't even exposed through the menu system, and the test pattern generators I've seen for HD are stupidly expensive. (stupid, because with HDMI, every player should be able to push a perfect test pattern off a cheap mass-produced BD).

Well, Sony provides HD Calibration tests as an "easter egg" on all of their Blu-Ray disks.
Check http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=32738 for more information on accessing the tests (as well as information on a few other low cost alternatives) and http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=47055&postcount=207 for advice on how to use them to calibrate your TV.

I agree, Blu-Ray is not really necessary for a gaming machine (are any PC games Blu-Ray yet?) And to have two BD burners...(going from first post - article is slashdotted)...this seems less like a gaming rig and more like a video production machine.

Also, Blu-Ray is abbreviated to BD, for Blu-Ray Disc. All of the abbreviations for the format use BD, not BR, such as BD-J, BD+, BD-ROM, BD-R.

"Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA)"
Taken from http://www.blu-ray.com/info/

The part where you have 19 MegaBYTES per second of bandwidth...(full 1080p stream from disc)

No.

Besides the fact that a stream's bandwidth is *never* defined in bytes per second (because 'byte' in the context of a stream isn't well-defined - ie. does it include error correction bits, transmission overhead, etc.), the bluray association itself says that BD-ROM video streams are 54Mbps.

Holy crap. Talk about clueless. A Bluray uses 50 megabit/s.

No, it doesn't.

The 15 megabit/s I quoted for NBC's high-definition broadcast of Heroes is VERY compressed

AFAIK, HD OTA broadcasts in the US use MPEG-2. I don't think that qualifies as "VERY compressed".

Considering that Pioneer released news of their 20 layer, 500GB BluRay discs a couple of months ago, what makes this news special ?
I would have thought that Pioneer would be the first to market as they are manufacturers of the hardware anyway.

It's not just size but also data transfer speed. Blu-ray has much better transfer speed at just 2x than flash drive in general have. And since you are expecting it to be as cheap as a blu-ray disc than that would mean using cheap flash memory. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/data-transfer-run,1037-10.html http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed

I wouldn't worry just yet. It looks like the discs may actually be 400 GB Bluray discs that will be compatible with existing players.

Yes, the Blu-ray standard supports 1080p. Finding a movie encoded at 1080p and a player capable of 1080p output is the harder part. HD-DVD and Blu-ray supports flung so much misinformation at each other, it's hard to know what is truth and what is fiction these days. Suffice to say, both standards are more alike than they are different.

Okay, I seriously call you on FUD now.

The only people who had it easier migrating to HD-DVD were the production houses stamping out discs. Dual-format HD-DVDs were available, but dual-format BD discs were also demonstrated (and there's no point to making either, I might add, as has been discussed elsewhere), so that's FUD.

BD has no trouble -- so trouble free is FUD.

At 48Mbit/s vs 30Mbit/s, there's a substantial difference in transfer rates, and I've seen movies with bitrates that hit 30Mbit/s myself. See this forum posting if you don't believe me. 40Mbit/s is the maximum video transfer rate for Blu-Ray Discs and with several movies on that list hitting 30Mbit/s for video alone, using AVC no less, that leaves no room for audio on an HD-DVD transfer. Also FUD.

With the BD-J Java implementation, Blu-Ray movies actually have the capacity for much more involved and powerful menu systems and interactive segments or games.

Oh and your best piece of sophistry yet was the ending, "Let's hope uploads will provide us with the promise of HD, because Blu-ray sure as hell will not" after claiming the quality between the two formats was equal. Blu-ray delivers just fine, and you admitted as much.

The only REAL advantage HD-DVD ever had was having the features from BD Profile 2 available from day 1. And since the vast majority of movie watchers don't have either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in their homes yet, the early adopter Profile 1.0 woes don't actually affect that many people (and won't affect PS3 owners).

...and looking at their store, 50 gold DVD-Rs will set you back $152 US. That's around 215 GB of storage, which works out to about 70c per gig. Granted that's a better PPG than current Blu-Ray discs (~ $25 au for a 25GB disc) but it's still on the expensive side. Then there's the speed. At the moment BD is still painfully slow though, and it seems they always will be: according to their FAQ, 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). So in the future they'll be almost as fast as a slow hard drive.

Meanwhile, you can pick LTO 4 Ultrium cartridges for about $150 au, and write 800 GB of data to them (about US 17.5c / GB) at up to 120 MB/sec - today! Sure, they won't last 100+ years, but I seriously doubt BD readers will be available in 100 years. You should get 20+ years out of a tape cartridge though, and by then it'd be well and truly time to upgrade to newer media anyway.

I guess I can see expensive long-life optical media working for people with very small sets of data, where a spindle of 50 discs will last at least a couple of months. I'm just not sure who these people are... which might go some way toward explaining why the discs cost so much.

I'm sorry but why should I be impressed with 33Mb video when Blu-Ray's max bitrate is higher? Blu-Ray's max is 40Mb. http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/

"A lot of people won't be happy about it, but I've gotta admit I'm impressed with how Sony marketing pulled this off. I definitely didn't see it ending this way."

Are you for real?

Sony marketing 'pulled this off'?

This is the long fought victory of BDA - BluRay Disc Association. A very large and wide ranging group of hardware companies all backing the BluRay standard:

http://www.blu-ray.com/info/

HD-DVD never had any plausible chance of viability in the market. It would have died much sooner if Microsoft hadn't stepped in and used it in a failed attempt to sabotage HD movie formats in order to try to lead consumers towards their own unsuccessful movie download service.

Uh, no. HD-DVD mandates Managed Copy, completely cutting your argument to shreds.

So, if Blu-Ray supported Managed Copy, then your arguments would be completely cut to shreds? Note, Sony currently uses Managed Copy to distribute Blu-Ray movies from the PS3 to the PSP (or at least, that was the way I understood it).

Why we are having this discussion I am a little bit unsure of though. Toshiba has tried for two years to release a consumer or prosumer level burner, and have so far failed. You simply can't buy an HD DVD burner today, and I am willing to bet that you never will. This one is their latest attempt, and it simply didn't work according to testers.

A more positive way to view it is that Microsoft lost! :)

How do you figure that? WMV VC-1 is part of the Blu-Ray spec, too.

lookie

It's strange that you say they have no intent on producing combo disks, when their own site had annouced the invention of suck blu-ray combo disks way back in december of 2004. http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=35 It's just it never seemed to make it to market.

another positive is that now we can hope for new, standardized high density optical disks for computers. With makers such as TDK offering 100 gigabyte write-once disks and many others starting at 25 gigs, we finally have a backup medium that is up to the task of modern needs. I, like many other power users, have two internal 500G hard disks and an external 500G USB drive, and a 4G DVD-R just doesn't cut it anymore. My family pictures and video clips alone come to about 40G. More to the point, businesses will benefit from faster and cheaper backups of their database/web servers.

As Forbes points out, Sony still has its work cut out for it, but it sounds like Toshiba's format has lost the battle. I'm very relieved (even though I don't plan to buy a whole lot of high def movies in the near future). The big news here is that we can now standardize on a new level of storage density, and watching sharper movies is just a nice extra.

OK, I'll correct you. It's actually spelled Blu-ray and it's not a fad. Stupid yes, but not a fad.

Since Blu-ray consistenly outsells HD DVD by about 2:1 I'd say it's pretty much decided.

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending December 16th

WE: BD-61% HDD-39% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-62% HDD-38%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending December 9th

WE: BD-76% HDD-24% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-62% HDD-38%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending December 2nd

WE: BD-58% HDD-42% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-62% HDD-38%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 25th

WE: BD-72% HDD-28% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-62% HDD-38%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 18th

WE: BD-66% HDD-34% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 11th

WE: BD-65% HDD-35% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 4th

WE: BD-71% HDD-29% YTD: BD-64% HDD-36% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending October 28th

WE: BD-55% HDD-45% YTD: BD-64% HDD-36% SI: BD-60% HDD-40%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending October 21th

WE: BD-51% HDD-49% YTD: BD-65% HDD-35% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending October 14th

WE: BD-71% HDD-29% YTD: BD-66% HDD-34% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending October 7th

WE: BD-68% HDD-32% YTD: BD-66% HDD-34% SI: BD-61% HDD-39%

Source: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=8608