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HD DVD Coverage at CES 2004
Anonymous Coward writes "It appears manufacturers such as Toshiba will soon be rolling out HD DVD players. The HD DVD format, as opposed to the Blu-Ray standard, involves minimal changes to the manufacturing plants that currently produce DVDs. This should allow for a smoother transition for consumers to adopt this new format. This article DVD vs HD-DVD summarizes the differences of the two formats and benefits of the latter."
Blu-Ray
and it seems that HP and Dell support Blu-Ray for what its worth
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Keep on pushing your support for Single format DVD because we won the war in the beginning and shouldn't give up now!
You should also stand up and watch out for DVI/HDCP and SDI inputs. Make sure you retain rights to the media and don't let publishers enforce encryption on everything or else 99% of the sets sold today compatible of HDTV will become useless.
With this DVD format becoming "standard" don't let them throw us off with some off the wall copyprotection and drm stuff!!!
You can find my info at:
DVDsite.org
as well as my sig below
Well current DVD players only display up to 480 resolution. That is without the TV trying to upconvert it. With the advent of these new players, it may be possible to get a FULL 1080 resolutionas seen with HDTV reception.
Hmmm.
Same is going to be said about BR-DVD here soon...
HD-DVD = Backwards compatable with current DVD's
BR-DVD = NOT backwards compatable with ANYTHING! (now that Sony's made money getting a DVD player in almost every home in the world, now they go with ANOTHER format that you'll need to go out and buy a NEW DVD Player that reads BR-DVD)
You may remember this topic from a while back.
YMMV
For an alternate view of the format war, checkout the coverage on The Digital Bits.
-- Brooks
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
[HD-DVD] is mostly an excuse to introduce a new CSS system since the old one is cracked..
I disagree. The big CE companies are all vying for marketshare in the forthcoming HDTV space. This includes the entire signal chain, of which DVDs are just a part. The old DVD format doesn't support HDTV resolutions, so it had to go eventually. With CSS having been 0wn3ed, of course it'll be replaced. Even if only to refresh the associated patents.
Moreover, despite DeCSS, I believe that CSS has been a big success for the DVD Copy Control Association. The cracking of CSS has had little effect on real-world products or markets. Has there been an explosion of mass market DeCSS-based region-free DVD players? Nope. Has DeCSS done _anything_ measurable to reduce the ability of the DVD Copy Control Association (and its supporting industries) to write global trade laws (re: region coding) into firmware? Not that I can discern. CSS is certainly a perceived threat, but that's a forward-looking concern that worries about the coming of a video P2P phenomenon like the music industry has witnessed.
For made-for-TV movies, you're probably right, unless they've been made in the last few years.
But for real movies, you're completely off. Movies are generally filmed on film. They make DVDs by scanning the film. They make HDTV versions of the movies (for HBO, HD-DVDs, or whatever) by the same process, only they scan at a higher resolution.
HDTV is still lower resolution than normal movie film. (It's higher resolution than some of the digital projectors being used in theaters, though, which is why you'll notice compression artifacts in digital theaters.)
So a properly-made HD-DVD of any movie that was shown in the theaters should be vastly superior to the traditional DVD.
When doing DVD transfers, pretty much all the studios have been doing the film transfer to digital at HD resolution, then downsampling to DVD resolution (720x480) afterwards for the DVD release.
By doing this, they already have the HD transfer in the bag; when it comes time to release the movie in HD they just grab those bits, compress them into whatever whiz-bang format HD-DVD will use, and there you have it, millions of dollars made with almost no additional investment.
Frankly, any studio doing a film transfer today that doesn't do it at HD resolution is definitely not thinking ahead.
The problem is we likely won't see HD releases of our favorite films for a long time. Look how long it's taking to get the Star Wars trilogy (due end of this year), and how long it took for various Disney animated features to come out. Fans of those movies will probably have to wait another 10 years to own HD-DVD versions.
I don't mean to be rude, but I think you should RTFA. HD-DVD disks hold 30 GB on one side (dual layer). Let's look at th numbers, shall we?
A 1080i HDTV broadcast requires the largest bandwidth of all the HDTV standards. A standard 1080i broadcast is 18.8 Mbps (here is one source). This equates to 2.35 MB/s or 0.00235 GB/s (roughly).
An HD-DVD disc holds 30 GB. That means that an HD-DVD disc can hold (30 / 0.00325) seconds of 1080i video.
That turns out to be about 212 minutes. Skim off some overhead for menus and stuff and we're still talking about over 3 hours. Most movies will easily fit on an HD-DVD, and that's at the highest possible datarate. If they are stored on the disc as 720p (which would make sense since movies are progressive), then you get almost 4 hours. (720p is 16.9 Mbps)
Long live the small mom-and-pop business. Animeigo, a US anime company, does things like this. They allowed people to trade in their laserdiscs of an anime series called "Kimagure Orange Road" for DVD sets. They still had to pay money, but it was a nice gesture to recoup some trade-in value.
Of course, they now seem to be selling used LD sets on their website... :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Huh? Since when does a HDTV cost $10k? You can get them now for $1000. Welcome to 2004.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
If (like myself) you are in Australia, then the answer to this question is yes.
Brand name DVD players are the only ones sold with regions enabled, and the normal procedure is to ask the salesperson how to turn it off when you buy it. Buy a cheap and cheerful, and expect it to be region free out of the box.
Thank god for the ACCC.