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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."
The challenge for both the HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray efforts is getting studio support. For PVRs (such as the first Blu-Ray devices), this isn't a big deal. If you want a pristine 1080i/720p movie, however, it'll have to come on prepackaged media. The main challenges that neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD solves: -- Security. Hollywood is much more concerned about HD-quality content because it's the best they've got. The traditional "trust us" or "magic encryption fairy dust" proposals won't cut it here. Like it or not, neither format can succeed without effective, renewable anti-piracy features. -- Replication costs are a challenge. This is one place where HD-DVD may have a small edge, though that's debatable. -- User interactivity & network support. DVD's menus are awfully limited -- something much more flexible is needed, but there isn't yet any agreement what this will be. Cost isn't such a big deal yet (anybody willing to spend $10K for a plasma screen will shell out another $1K for a player to take advantage of it), but eventually this has to be price-competitive with DVD.
- is that is mostly an excuse to introduce a new CSS system since the old one is cracked..
Oh great, another standards war. That always works well for us users.
Is that a misprint? Surely the manufactured disks cannot be smaller than the rewritable disks - otherwise what is the point in using the read-only version at all?
K
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
You know, if the media industry wants us to take their copyright claims seriously, then they need to start giving us some sort of discount as they re-release the same material on new formats. If I've got a license to view/hear it, then that should carry over, and I should only have to pay a small fee to upgrade.
No where in the article does it say anything about the video quality, only how much data can be stored on the disks. Is this really going to be HDTV resolution (1080i or 720p or ...?) or something else? Will it look better on standard TVs too, or must one have an HDTV to see a benefit?
--- What?
For who? Why do I care what happens at the factory. What it *does* mean is that the product can be scaled up for large production quicker, which should hopefully mean lower prices sooner. However, it means *nothing* as far as my transition... I won't know what the next generation DVD is like to transition to until I see how well companies handle backwards compatibility. If it fails to run *any* DVD collection, I will consider it a failure, because all the factory efficiency in the world won't make me toss my existing DVD collections.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Next time i go to buy a burner il be asking for a CD-ROM,CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD+R DVD+RW DVD-R DVD-RW HDDVD-ROM, HDDVD-R, HDDVD-RW, BluRay-ROM, BluRay-R, BluRay-RW Drive....
i guess that would be a 52x52x24x16x8x4x8x4x1x1x1x1 Drve...
Im not really sure how to look at DVD in general. I have one, and dont get me wrong, the concept of ever renting another VHS tape sends chills down my back. Ditto for at work... MSDN on DVD is about 5 times nicer then on CD, there is no doubt that it is such a marked improvement over CD.
Thing is, with every new format, you need to have a certain element of buy in. DVD is just now getting there, IMHO... if you go to rent a new release at blockbuster there will most likely be more DVD's then VHS tapes. Ditto for if you go to buy a new computer... i would say 90% of all new systems ship with a DVD player standard... half of those most likely are burners.
But I wonder, with new developments, such as HD DVD on the horizon, how many people are going to hold of purchasing a DVD or DVD burner now... when something is going to obsolete it a short while into the future. Is technology on the horizon bad for the technology that exists today?
DVD adoption still isnt as complete as it should be... for instance
How much software do you buy on DVD's these days? I wish it was alot more, but CD's still rule the day in shrinkwraped software, especially games. With games like Neverwinter nights spanning multiple CD's, your either stuck dedicating a wack of your HD to playing it... or your back in the Apple ii days of disk swapping.
What about audio dvd's? A recent trip to HMV showed that there was perhaps a hundred available for purchase at retail... not to mention that cars dont have dvd players... you arent seeing portable dvd discmen...
I guess all Im wondering is... Are these companies sorta shooting themselves in the foot by constantly bringing out new versions? Should storage media follow a more console like approach to release schedules to acheive better market penetration. I mean, how many people would have bought a DVD player ( or plasma tv, or flat panel monitor ) etc... if it didnt constantly feel like there was something better around the corner... and in the case of dvd's, that your investment could almost instantly become obsoleted?
As an asside... I think DVD's have already done a pretty big mess of things. Ive recently shopped for a DVD burner to replace my CD player, and I was aghast to find out how many formats already exists... DVDR DVD +R DVD+RW DVD-R DVD-RW?!??! Wow...
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 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.
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.
I don't see how making it easier for manufacturers to change their product will make it easier for consumers to switch over?
Is that another one of those 1 + ? = profit jokes?
...you'll come home, realize it doesn't play DVD-RAM, and go to have it replaced, right?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
A lot of people using "average" televisions in the 20-to-27-inch range can't tell the difference between VCRs and DVDs when it comes to quality.
No way. Do a back to back comparison some time. I can easily tell the different on a 19 inch tv.
but I highly doubt that Joe Sixpack (who finally got a DVD player for Christmas) with a 25" screen will care.
Huh? Do you live in an old folks home? Over 50 million households now own a DVD player. 50 million! Joe sixpack bought his two years ago.
What's holding people back? The shipping costs on a $44 DVD player?
Best Buy is selling HD-ready TV's for $500. They're selling 50" widescreens for just over $1000.
Like it or not, this stuff is totally mainstream at this point. People aren't throwing their current TV's into the trash, but the emphasis has clearly shifted to DVDs and all the stores are trying to sell HDTV stuff.
Go to a Best Buy and look at how many rear projection TV's the sell that AREN'T widescreen. Last time I was there it was about 2... two models for the entire store.
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)
I would have hoped by now that we had moved past the obsession with "oooh shiny disk" and come to realize that even though a caddy adds bulk, protecting the disk is damn important. As data density goes up, scratches become more and more detrimental
With CDs, It was understandable. The tech was new, and caddies were an additional cost on top of that newness. Plus, the "shiny disk" was a novelty. -Scratches were not that much of a problem, the music would hiccup, but rarely skip badly unless the scratch was bad.
We should have learned our lesson with DVDs. "shiny disks" were no longer so novel, and a minor scratch can send the movie wildly skipping. This is made worse by the fact that movies are singular entities, not broken up in to songs like on a CD, so restarting where you left of is more annoying. Renting DVDs is hell because one goober can fuxxor the disk.
- We ship/sell DVDs in cases anyhow, why the hell didn't we make the case the caddy?
Now we want to up the density even more, and still leave the data surface exposed?? Now will a fingerprint cause a skip? Will a scratch render a whole min. or more unviewable by obscuring the data? This is un-freaking acceptable. I treat all my disks with extreem care, but It seems these would need clean rooms and machine loading to avoid any scratches.
Screw HD-DVD, Blu-Ray has a caddy (IIRC) to protect my investment in a HD movie. I'll go with it, even if it costs more, because loosing a $25 movie to one scratch is more expensive in the long run by far, and not having to treat the disk like a fabrege(sp?) egg to keep it playing well is worth the extra cost.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender