High Definition DVD

Vinnie_333 writes "Looks like the specs for HD-DVD are currently being discussed by Hollywood big wigs, with an optimistic product release date of Xmas of 2003. Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm. Come on, more storage is always a good thing. Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."

Comments

Great

[ArchieBunker]

Now we have to throw away all the current players and TV's to take advantage of this. People are just now getting used to DVD's and they want to switch formats so soon? Bad move.

By the time this comes out

[jandrese]

That kind of size won't be so scary. Remember when CD media first started coming out and the record industry smugly thought that it was unpiratable because 650M was just so ungodly huge. Even DVD movies, oversized as they are for net piracy, can be recompressed down to a file that can be transferred over a broadband connection with little trouble.

The moral of the story is: size is a poor piracy prevention tool. Technology will eventually catch up no matter how big you make something.

Two stages

[benwaggoner]

Except that Blu-ray couldn't possibly be mass market by Christmas 2003. The nice thing about a red laser system is that the physical medium of the disc doesn't have the change, which means the hardware in existing DVD players can be mostly the same, with just a different decoder chip. Fast computers will just need a software update. And, of course, replication and duplication facilities won't need to chance, so it'll cost well less than $1 to make an HD disc, which means we could start seeing mass market prices very quickly.

This is really good from the Hollywood perspective. They'll get us all to buy 1280x720 red laser HD discs from 2003-2006, and then come out with 1920x1080 Blu-ray as a mass market technology around Christmas 2006-2008, when they get all the kinks worked out. Same way we've already bought DVD and laserdisc versions of the same movie.

The article claims that the compression technology will be from Microsoft, but my contacts tell me it is much more likely to be MPEG-4, in order to have a technology not tied to any one vendor. Of course, Windows Media derived codecs would offer better compression efficiency. We shall see.

Re:a discrepancy (IMHO)

[ergo98]

I bet that HD-DVD and this blue laser DVD are going to flop for putting a single movie on because the human eye isn't that presise

The human eye isn't that precise? You sound like Atari ST fanatics (I was an ST fanatic, but I always disagreed with this ludicrous claim) back in the day versus the Amiga users : You see the ST fanatics claimed that the 512 colours was more than adequate because the, err, human eye, yeah that's it, can't see more. You see, the 4096 colours of the Amiga was mere waste. Of course we've long since proven this to be absolutely absurd. About 99% of the time that someone claims that something is "as good as it can be", it's proven to be completely ignorant in the future.

Whenever someone sits in front of an HDTV screen (with an HDTV source), they are blown away by the image because their eyes, contrary to your claim, are that precise. This is especially the case as we move to larger screens, and with lightweight screen technologies such as plasma or LCD panel you can expect screen sizes to edge ever upwards. As such, the need for higher resolutions are going to be increased. DVD started its life as insufficient for HDTV (HDTV has 1080 lines, versus the 500 or so for DVD), so already HDTV users notice a difference switching between an HDTV source, and the significantly lower quality DVD. DVD needs to be resolution enhanced, and the reality is that even HDTV is pretty subpar when it's on 50"+ TVs.

But consumers were screwed in the first place...

[Brat Food]

Consmers have been screwed by hollywood already, ill break it down:

HDTV, as a potential standard, has been around for a LONG time, but the bug media players keep stonewalling, and pusing back the date the FCC would have them force adoption by, among other things, throwing a million different standards out there and not agreeing on one. I seem to remember the FCC deadline being 2002..... And now, i have to wait another year to get what will more then likely be a defective standard. The reason, is they need to FINALLY invest in an infrastruture change after forcing consumers to stuick with the relativly low bandwidth and quality TV we still have after all these years. This then creates a catch-22, as it has for years... BigMedia doesnt want to invest in something where there is no market, tv makers cant drop prices and make a "standard" box because BigMedia wont decide on a standard and wont/cant release content, and then consumers may want but have no content or way to view it.

The end result of this will be: consumers get screwed out of a GOOD standard that provides (potentially) excellent quality, and i fear it will end up with inferior quality and useability.

On to DVD: People have know for YEARS that DVD does not provide the bandwidth to do full HDTV content. Issue one, 9gb is too small, issue 2, home readrs cant get to the datarate needed to even read off a datastream at that resolution. So, once again,insted of taking an oportunity to think ahead for once, we will end up with a standard that is 2 years dead when it comes out. And consumers STILL need to buy a new player. Most just wont know they are buying obsolete technology as they have been for years.

Im completly frustrated about all this, and the FCC needs to apoint an OUTSIDE firm with no intrest in bigmedia to hammer out standards that are good for the consumer, are timely, and have potential of more then 2 years ago. I dont know why what is happening is acceptable to anyone.