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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..
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)