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Tech Titans Prepare to Battle Over Next DVD Format
securitas writes "The New York Times Technology has an excellent feature by Ken Belson about the coming battle over the next-generation DVD format that consumer electronics and technology giants are already preparing for. The article covers the (high-definition) HD DVD group, led by Toshiba and NEC, and the Blu-ray Group, led by Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic/JVC). Mass production is expected to begin in 2005, but both sides are expected to show prototypes and aggresively pursue partners at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week. Add to the mix a nine-company Chinese faction that says it will develop its own DVD format because - fearing their technology could be used by Chinese rivals - the Japanese manufacturers haven't shared much information, even within the DVD Forum. Finally, Disney, Microsoft, IBM and Intel have yet to weigh in. The worst thing that could happen would be another Betamax/VHS-type war. In that case, 'Everyone is a loser, particularly Hollywood studios, the retailer community and, most importantly, the consumer,' says Warren N. Lieberfarb, developer of the original DVD format."
It costs next to nothing to stamp out a DVD. If they remove region encoding from these formats, there's actually less different dvd's to press.
I must admit I'm rooting for the Chinese faction. I want a digital standard that's NOT written by the content owners. If they can make a next-gen DVD that's cheap and recordable, and it gets into enough homes, then maybe it will be to the studios' advantage to release content for it, even if they can't have complete control over it.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
I hear the Blu-Ray group is appearing at the Bellagio next year!
In that case, 'Everyone is a loser, particularly Hollywood studios, the retailer community and, most importantly, the consumer. Umm, so ... Everyone is a loser. Particularly...everyone. This guy must run the department of redundancy department.
I still think they should go back to Beta, myself...
If the new DVD formats being recommended aren't as 'open', and do not present a sizeable improvement over the current resolution of existing DVDs, I don't think that one conglomerate will be able to 'force' the market place into accepting a new tech.
Lucas and Speilberg weren't able to make their DVD alternative fly, and given their back catalogue of movies held in reserve, they had strong leverage over the marketplace.
Given that DVDs have an indefinite shelf life (okay, greater than 20 years) and better than broadcast resolution , I don't think people will see a compelling reason to upgrade. Maybe when HDTV becomes ubiquitous, but even then a really good DVD rig comes close to the HD broadcasts I've seen.
Let the industry duke it out...I won't need to worry for ~ 10 years.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Whatever format I buy, it will turn out to be the betamax format.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
For those unfamiliar with the techs, the spec set forth by Toshiba/Nec is backward compatible with the now current tech. The blu-ray is not backwards compatible.
I would like see the next-gen players be able to play both disks, I have ALOT! I also happen to favor Toshiba they make one of the better players out there for picture/sound.
Instead of choosing a format for the discs, we all agree on a common method of storing the data instead of the medium so I can plug my XYZ Toilet Paper Tube Reader into my computer and read off the 10 gigs of data it holds with the same codec as I use for that latest game release on the 'Finger in the Nose' reader?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Believe it or not, you can draw attention to something by mentioning it first _or_ last. Language can be subtle that way.
Isn't this why organizations with a commercial interest shouldn't be involved in deciding upon standards? Because they will obviously want to get what they want, and there's usually more than one will involved. It isn't a constructive battle for a format either, and the best format isn't necessarily victorious.
:-P
I wonder what the purpose of the DVD Forum was again?
1. To establish a single format for each DVD application product, including revisions, improvements and enhancements for the benefit of consumers and users
2. To promote broad acceptance of DVD products on a worldwide basis, including the entertainment, consumer electronics and IT industries as well as the general public.
Ooh, I see...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'd heard about Fluorescent Multilayer Discs years ago, but what's happened to them since? They were supposed to hold almost 20 times as much data as a 4.7GB DVD. So, where are they?
Not that I really want a new format or anything. I just think FMDs are cool. DVDs are a-ok for me, and I just bought a DVD burner (which supports all the damned various formats), so why are they making something new, again. Can we just have some media technology that lasts for more than 10 years?
Gabriel Ricard
"Your[e] OLD player will still work." [Flames deleted]
My first thought was similar to this, but I quickly thought better of it.
1) Maybe he could sell his old player on ebay and reduce his investment if only the new player is compatible.
2) Not everyone has the room to keep two players in service.
3) The old player will crap out at some point. The point is that he will have to maintain two players in service.
I think we're already in a Betamax/VHS type war with DVD-R and DVD+R, adding another playback format with HD-DVD is just asking for trouble, especially now that DVD has pretty much supplanted VHS.
:)
Personally I think it's foolish of these companies to try to create their own proprietory formats to make more money as it's usually always the case that the cheapest most open format wins. e.g. VHS, x86 etc. And you have consumers upset that their purchase has become obsolete who won't necessarily have the cash to buy the "victorious" format.
And what about people who have 50+ DVDs in their collection? Are they supposed to replace all their Lord of the Rings DVDs with HD-DVDs? I remember people bitching about replacing all their VHS with DVDs, I don't think having to do it again so soon will help the introduction of a new format.
I reckon whatever method ends up being used should have a) smaller discs and b) protective casing.
Although there good in the way they hold lots and lots of quite quick to access information, I think CD's and DVD's are some of the crappiest pieces of technology about. There clunky, just to big to hold easily in your hand (escpecially if your female) and get scratched so, so easy its pathetic. What percentage of your games/music CD's from say 6 years ago isn't scratched?
The best format for holding such data I have seen was on that Sylvester Stallone movie "Demolition Man", at some point on that you see Sandra Bullock use something which is like 4 minidisc's stacked on top of each other.
Will we see that kind of cooperation again? Probably not. There's too much incentive to play dirty, after the massive success of DVD.
FWIW the book also contains far, far more tech background on the DVD format, MPEG-4, visual theory, etc. than anybody except Slashdotters will ever want to absorb.
Everyone is a loser, particularly Hollywood studios, the retailer community and, most importantly, the consumer,
The consumer has already lost when he's called a consumer instead of a citizen. This mindset speaks volumes.
The compatibility mostly works into the pressing plant's advantage. Players can have an extra reader laser, which I suppose would cost a bit more.
I really don't buy the compatibility argument. VCD isn't necessarily compatible with DVD, but most players have it. CD-R/RW isn't compatible with DVD lasers, but most DVD players can read them now because the makers put in an extra laser of the right wavelength. I highly doubt any next-generation hardware player would drop DVD.
I know there's more to DVDs than movies, but face it, the #1 use of DVDs are for movies.
First of all, make DTS-ES a standard. The only reason why movies that include DTS soundtracks also include Dolby Digital sountrack is because DTS is not standard. DTS is better than DD, so let's make it standard and forget about DD for movies. (audio commentaries should still be in DD though)
Second, make sure there's a lot of storage, cause every movie has to be encoded at least in 1080P (no, not 1080i) and mpeg4. Make sure the standard has room to grow and accept higher-resolution, while making sure players can keep up with every resolutions. The stream also has to include 4:3 fullscreen cropping coordinates so we can stop having fullscreen editions DVDs for folks that watch their DVDs on 4:3 telivisions.
Lastly, forget about the Internet-enabled DVDs and players. I want my content ON THE DISC, not on some remote server.
It's inevitable that this will lead to a standardized format, but there will be losers on all sides, most notably the consumers. I'm not thinking of CSS-cracking, dvd-ripping type stuff but the draconian measures that are already in place with the current technology. (Actually, I'm not at allconcerned with "backing up" my DVDs and I'm not interested in starting that argument here, fair use or not. I'm sure someone else will be more than willing to pick up that gauntlet).
There are a couple of things here that concern me. First, no doubt the manufacturers have learned quite a few lessons since the introduction of the DVD format years ago. Region coding makes money but only if you can prevent regionless players, copy protection makes money but only if you can prevent its circumvention, and adverts make money but only if you can prevent the consumer from circumventing them. I have every bit of confidence that, whatever the prevailing format, there will be some convoluted region and encryption scheme and the remote controls for the players won't have a fast-forward button. However, not all will be lost. I'm sure that they will leave the Rewind button intact so that you can watch the adverts over and over again.
On second thought, I have to disagree with the parent poster. I hope that this doesn't lead to a standardized format. Instead, here's hoping that it drags these morons and their cyclical attempts to introduce a new technology platform every 10 years so as to force us to continue replacing our copies of movies with the latest and greatest versions right into the firey abyss from whence they originated. Is anyone actually buying DVD-A or SCD?
The thing that concerns me the most, tho, is the possibilitiy that the movie companies will force the adoption of the newer formats by refusing to release newer or higher-profile titles. And to stave off the inevitable VHS-to-DVD analogies, DVD was a quantum leap over VHS in terms of quality and content. What is being proposed here is merely an evolution, and a small one at that.
What benefit will the next generation of DVD offer to consumers? HDTV? Please, this is another farce being shoved down the collective throats of Americans (and other countries?). The very idea that a society is going to be mandated to replace their televisions is absolutely insane. Again, what benefit does this offer to the consumer by making it mandatory? Now, compare that benefit to how it benefits the entertainment industry. What does the consumer gain by the introduction of the "copy bit"?
I've probably gone horribly off-track with this post so I'll sum it up with this: the parent post is not a troll.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Hollywood is pushing both technical groups to come up with new security measures to protect their movies. Neither group has developed a prototype that satisfies the movie industry - a major impediment to a commercial launch.
*sigh* Here we go again, for another round of macrovision, region coding and suchlike rubbish. I confidently predict(1) that the new measures will not make any difference to large-scale pirates or warez d00ds, but will make everyone else's life difficult.
1): What do I know about it? not much.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Gawd, yes. It pisses me off no end that I have to wait 30-60 seconds after loading a DVD just to get to the main menu - which is usually also locked so I have to watch a stupid video sequence before I can finally select 'Play'.
Is it so unreasonable to want to load a DVD and watch the damn movie? Seriously, if there was a DVD player out there that advertised on the box "No function lockouts", I'd pay an extra $50 just for that.
Let me modify that for you. I hope this leads, in the end, to a *good* standardized format.
Unfortunately, not all standardized formats are the best -- just look at VHS vs Betamax in the old days. Not a single person who knows the formats will tell you differently: Betamax was the better format. Yet VHS won; it set the standard.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
On my POS mintek player, you can hit the "1" button on the remote control. That'll get you to the first chapter and you can then press the menu button to go to either the main menu or chapter selection screen.
A pr0n I was bought had one of those ads telling you how small your wiener was everytime you started it up. Nothing like questioning the size of your manhood everytime had it in hand.
It's like SACD, I' sure you can tell the differnce if you really try (on better speakers than most people have), but the advantge is so negligable that it's not worth buying for the 80%+ of people who aren't shopping on the uber high end area.
Makes me miss Laserdisc; it had near DVD quality, there was no menu/preview crap on most of them, no copyguard/region code/player restriction crap.DVD is good quality, but we've lost so much control due to the "unprecidented (sp?) co-operation" between the studios and the engineers.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Will be something like this:
- A more technologically advanced format (and more expensive). I deem this to be Blu-Ray since the discs need casing and it needs a dual head assembly for compatability.
Versus
- A less technologically advanced standard (but less expensive). This would probably be HD-DVD.
You've seen this movie before haven't you? I know I have. Guess who usually wins? I would bet on HD-DVD at this point. Blu-Ray might find a niche in data backups and the like however.
At any rate, you Slashdotters out there, for one reason or another, will probably champion one of these formats. It's kind of like that +R/-R DVD argument (tastes great/less filling), except that there are far less differences between those formats than these new HD DVDs.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This Zenith from Circuit City is what I have, and it has an "Autoplay" option, which will automatically start the main movie when the disc is put in, skipping menus and such. Quite handy.
On another note, a similar idea is the BIOS level CD/DVD players some media PCs shiped with earlier this year...great idea to let consumers watch movies and music, but keep it "seperate" from the actual PC! And very Linux friendly for both sides!
DVDs were designed to be generic RO media for storing various data, not just for use in set-top video players. Thus the choice for what IS an entirely PC-friendly format. (UDF layout, MPEG2 video, ATAPI-friendly data rates)
Something has to do the decoding. Cost-wise, it makes sense for the PC's hardware to do that work. No one would buy $200 worth of extra equipment to use a PC monitor to watch a movie. They want to use the fancy hardware they already bought.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The consumers didn't lose out in the Betamax/VHS wars. They didn't lose out in the DVD/Divx wars. They didn't lose out in the DVD +/- wars. And they won't lose out in the new DVD format wars.
Betamax sold some 30,000 units total. Today, DVD player sales easily exceed that number per month. Did the consumer lose in the DVD/Divx wars? Not at all. Have they lost in the +/- wars? Nope. Why? Simple. By the time the *average* consumer gets around to buying the product, market forces have already decided a winner.
In the case of Divx vs DVD, half the "prosumers", the early adopters, lost out when they chose Divx. The other half made what turned out to be the right decision. For the average consumer, the bulk of the market, the decision need not be made, it's already been decided for them.
Ditto with the DVD +/- market. The prosumers jumped on the first available DVD writers, and half of them may end up with useless writers. The vast majority of consumers will start buying DVD writers sometime this year (if ever), when technology has made the arguement moot with dual format writers.
It happens in almost every market, with every technology. Yes, the prosumers sometimes lose, but that's the price they pay for buying into the cutting edge of technology. The average consumers don't lose, by the time they're ready to accept the technology it's all been sorted out for them.
So new DVD format wars won't make any difference to consumers. If the format that wins the prosumer market isn't backwards compatible, by the time it reaches the consumer market, manufacturers will produce multi-format devices that are.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I can absolutely agree that DVDs are far superior to VHS, and certainly superior to Laserdiscs as well (our movie library was heavily based on the LD format in the past before DVD), and yeah, I know that its already been argued that it's a bunch of crap to force consumers to convert their entire movie collections yet again... but my complaint lies with our current format of DVD and how disappointed I have been with it. Here's my list...
(1) Why do we still have so many different display-formatted DVDs out there (full-screen and wide-screen)? How difficult would it have been to simply make every DVD the same, and to supply a set of panning instructions to the DVD player itself to specify what visual portion of the movie will be displayed in full-screen mode?
(2) Going off the same idea as #1, why couldn't these DVDs have been set up to be HDTV compatible in the first place? I realize that HDTV has a higher resolution and whatnot, but... how hard would it have been to force DVDs to meet the HDTV standard and simply resize the visuals for non-HDTV televisions? Hell, it might even encourage people to go and buy a HDTV if they knew they could further increase the visual quality of their current (and already paid for) collection...
(3) You think this new format of DVD is going to be a pain in the ass to consumers, forcing them to switch over yet again to adopt the newest of the new? DVDs have made this jump once already... when dual-layer discs hit the market. No, the single-layer DVDs I had weren't worthless at all, but let me tell you... I wasn't too happy to know that I'd have to go buy a brand-new $300 player just to play dual-layer DVDs.
(4) Also, why aren't all DVDs compatible with all the different DVD players out there? If DVD is a standardized format and all, why am I still finding a movie every once in a while that works in one player but not the other? I never had disc compatibility issues back with my VHS and LD players.
(5) Now... this last one is just kinda nit-picky, but... regarding at least half of the DVDs I own, I absolutely hate their menus. Half the time I can't even tell what I'm selecting on the screen, or even know what all my options are. I know being unique is good and all, but why should a DVD that I purchased with my own money feel so alienated to me? Why must I solve puzzles to go through everything contained on my DVD?
As far as I'm concerned, the DVD was something that had very great potential but didn't quite live up to what I wanted. Will this new HDTV DVD do well, or like the format before it will it end up wastefully in a landfill along the side of "useless" cell phones and computers?
As an owner of a HDTV set with a HD digital cable box, I can say that once you go to watching HDTV, you never want to go back to anything less.
If the new HD players were backwards compatible with current DVDs, I would be happy to go out and buy a new player. The HD experience really is worth the upgrade. The only concern I'd have is if studios would have to do a standard DVD and also a HD DVD for new releases. Maybe there would be a way to compromise to save money.
Progressive-scan DVDs look good, but I think that once people see what they're missing with the new format, they'd be willing to upgrade.
The "cost of exit" still remains virtually nil. It costs very little to maintain your generic player.
But needs will be met.
Consider
An executive who has found a company willing to pay him a million dollars a year plus perks in exchange for his leadership skills. He specifies yet another format and has it accepted. His needs were met. His salary is paid. His guidance is followed.
A consumer who wants a copy of some movie he liked. He sees this weird format thing on the shelves, but it won't play in his player. He leaves it on the shelf, and eventually one of his friends offer him a DIVX copy. The seeker now has his movie and his needs are met.
People will see stuff they can't play in their machine, so they leave it on the shelf and look around for the generic bootleg which anything can play. This really encourages the production of bootlegs. Think you can control it with lawyers?
Review "prohibition" in the US when they tried to outlaw whiskey. It ruined a lot of otherwise productive citizens, and made a lot of gangsters rich. Just as our marijuana laws do now.
Geez, didn't they learn their lesson with this "region" fiasco? People have money but cannot legally buy what they want, but the bootleg is free for the taking!
People generally want to be honest, but geez, what are these MBA's thinking these days?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]