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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."
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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 $1 to make an HD disc, which means we could start seeing mass market prices very quickly.
This is really good from the Hollywood perspective. They'll get us all to buy 1280x720 red laser HD discs from 2003-2006, and then come out with 1920x1080 Blu-ray as a mass market technology around Christmas 2006-2008, when they get all the kinks worked out. Same way we've already bought DVD and laserdisc versions of the same movie.
The article claims that the compression technology will be from Microsoft, but my contacts tell me it is much more likely to be MPEG-4, in order to have a technology not tied to any one vendor. Of course, Windows Media derived codecs would offer better compression efficiency. We shall see.
My video compression blog
That's all we need. Star Wars: Episode III HD-DVD, now with 12 hours of behind-the-scenes footage, 2 hours of additional footage, and Episode II, just for kicks. All for the low price of 179.99$.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
... Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie.
Piracy is a close second.
- Moritz's DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux
howto
- Linux SVCD guide, written in French
- My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.
The purpose of region encoding was to allow them to sell the same movie at different prices in different markets and also to control their "marketing strategy". They'd want to do this for a number of reasons:
1. Different economies: The ideal price of a DVD (that at which the makers make the most money i.e. where price x #sold is maximized) is very different in France than in Japan. In order to maximize their revenues, the producers want to price them differently. Now, they don't want people buying the DVDs at the cheaper markets and selling them at the other markets because that negates the whole thing.
2. Distribution rights: Typically distribution rights to a movie are sold to a local distributor who then makes all the money off of it. If people are able to buy the same movie in Region A and import it in to Region B (they'd want to do this because of cost and availability), the distributor for Region A loses to the benefit of the distributor in Region B. They wanted to prevent that happening.
3. Marketing: Movies are (used to be more in the past) released at different times in different markets for various reasons (translations, legal, lazy asses, etc.). This is accompanied with advertising campaigns, star appearances, etc. They didn't want to undercut that by making DVDs from other regions available via import and mainly because they liked being in full control of distribution.
For all those reasons, region encoding seemed like a great idea to them.
Personally, I think it was a dumb idea and they should just have relied on the fact that in most situations it would just not be practical or cost-effective to import DVDs en masse just like book distributors do when they sell books at different prices in different parts of the world.
Mmmm.. Donuts
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.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
I have reservations about both the Blu-Ray and the proposed HD-DVD being standardized in the near future.
First, as many have stated, using a new compression algorithm with the exisitng stoage of DVDs can be both good and bad. It is definitely good studios, who already have the standard DVD mastering equipment, and for DVD player manufacturers, who have already developed the red-laser hardware. It is good for the consumer in that the new players would probably be pretty cheap. I think cheapness is key for the acceptance of HDTV technology. Currently the sets are very expensive, and with the limited number of HD broadcasts, there is little incentive to buy one. Of course supply and demand is at work here--if more people bought them, the price would go down. Therefore, affordable HD-DVD players would go a long way in making HDTV's more attractive and useful, which would make their price drop and increase their market presence. Hopefully we would then see more HD broadcasts.
The problem with using exisiting DVD storage for HD-DVD is that is probably going to be obsolete sooner... bad for the consumer. Plus, I question how good the new compression algorithms really are. HDTV will tend to make compression artifacts and defects all the more obvious... again bad for the consumer.
Blu-Ray has many benefits in that has a much higher capacity (100GB if I remember correctly), so it will probably have a longer lifetime in the consumer marketplace. And, the picture quality would undoubtedly be of higher quality because the compression ratios would be lower. However, I fear that it is too costly of a technology to be a standard today or the next year. It would be great 5 years down the road, but not now. My reasoning? Blue lasers are really not ready for prime time... They are difficult to manufacture and are still extremely expensive. DVD player manufacturers still probably have much work to do to develop a consumer-grade blue laser disc playing system. Furthermore, the disc manufacturers would have to completely retool. I can see the discs and players being very expensive for a long time. This could further delay HDTV's acceptance in the mass market.
If I had to pick a technology today, it would have to be Hollywood's HD-DVD format, because I think it is important to give consumers incentive to buy HDTV's. Unless the Blu-Ray format can be substantially cheapened in one year (unlikely), I say wait a few more years for Blu-Ray.
Hollywood's biggest fear is not piracy... It's that someone will be able to create and distribute a popular feature film outside the studio system. That would be the beginning of the end of their monopoly on popular film and hence culture.
Like DVD, expect it to be extremely difficult to author a properly formatted and encrypted HD DVD (not ripped from an existing one)...