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Red vs. Blue Lasers Complicate DVD's Future
bnavarro writes: "The EE Times is reporting that the DVD Forum's Steering Committee voted this week to approve the use of low-bit-rate compression for high-definition DVD. The DVD Forum's decision, made at a meeting Tuesday (Feb. 26) in Tokyo, to stick with a red-laser-based scheme but switch to low-bit-rate compression, came only a week after nine of the world's biggest electronics companies agreed to promote a blue-laser-based format for next-generation video and computer optical disks."
Actually, people are buying HDTV for DVD players now. Progressive scanning DVD players, that is. 480p is technically a DTV standard and you can only watch 480p on a DTV or HDTV. Most people who buy HDTV (and I sell a lot of HDTV) buy a progressive scanning DVD players. (you can get one for like $170 now)
Also, the 16x9 formats usually have an enhanced mode for widescreen DVDs. So there's a lot of reason to have an HDTV now and use existing DVD technology. 480p is still pretty sharp compared to the crap we watch over cable.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
I cannot believe these industry "expert" groups. They claim that the main reason for using red lasers is cost. However, they seem to "forget" that using a low-bit rate technology as opposed to a blue laser actually will INCREASE costs since supporting MPEG-4 will require higher processing power, and thus more powerful and more expensive silicon.
BUT most important to consumers is the fact that MPEG-4 compression is just NOT SUITABLE for high-definition content which is meant to be seen on a decently large screen (29 inches and above). MPEG-4 simply produces too many artifacts (even today with low-bit-rate MPEG-2 you can see on cable how dark images in motion seen to leave a "ghost" behind).
So now the REAL REASON why they (the content providers) still want to pursue red-laser: They get to give consumers a low-quality version of the video image!!! By doing this they feel they are protecting their investment, while in reality they are simply giving consumers a low-quality solution.
If and once they provide this stupid red laser approach for high resolution video, what they effectively will have done is invite third parties to come with competing high-quality products (which sadly will probably will never be supported with popular content since there is a monopoly among the content providers and media player producers), OR some hackers will come up with a scheme to rip high-quality video out of HD broadcast (for TV or movie theatres) and distribute it in a competing format themselves over the Internet. In other words, Napster all over again because for the same reason as before: they industry is NOT thinking about what consumers want, and what consumers want is a high-quality display system to match their new TV.