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v1.0 of HD-DVD Physical Specs Approved
Repran writes "The DVD Forum this week approved HD-DVD 1.0, a specification that will compete with Blu-Ray which is not yet approved for the future of the DVD disc format. This effectively gives manufacturers a green light to begin producing devices.
In related news Microsoft's VC-9 codec has been included in the official HD-DVD specs."
I hope these new players are backwards compatible with everything - DVD's, CD's, VCD's, etc. Otherwise I'm not buying it. The thing is, I like movies on DVD pretty much the way they are now - The Quality is great on my TV, and I can play movies on my laptop. I don't see myself playing these new formats on my powerbook any time soon - Unless they have a DVD layer on the disc too - now that would be cool.
Not that this has anything to do with the MPAA yet, this is the way things should be done. Once there is a decent standard in place, and there is a widespread enough install base of players that can paly these discs, the film industry will begin phasing over to this format for DVD releases, eventually phasing out the older format (or perhaps making it backwards compatible). Provided that pirates could (and eventually will) figure out how to rip these, would you really sit on kazaa waiting for a 30+GB movie download, just to avoid buying the DVD? Even with a great connection, it's just not worth the time / HDD space. I for one, would rather just buy the DVD.
New technology. It's sux but it's great.
The current story should read:
Repran writes "Extremetech reports that the DVD Forum this week approved HD-DVD 1.0, [...] In related news, an arstechnica story reports that Microsoft's VC-9 codec has been included in the official HD-DVD specs."
I think it's important to keep story sources in the headline. It's a matter of politeness, and gives the reader a immediate idea on who is saying what. For stories with a zillion links, I think it's generally OK to leave the names of the sources out if it would lead to excessive clutter.
Even more annoying is this story:
An anchor tag on "The University of Tokyo" should go to the University of Tokyo's website. The link should be anchored to "illusion of invisibility" or perhaps "Optical Camouflage."
I never liked the tendency to anchor irrelevant things to stories, but it's done often enough that it's confusing when it gets mixed up. Also, the submitter's diatribe should be left out, but that's another matter.
Or maybe I'm just getting old and crusty.
HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. It's time for another format war. Consumers don't want this -- especially when regular DVD is "good enough" for most of them, and from their perspective, DVD is only a few years old. VHS got a couple decades of use before DVD showed up on the market, and when it did, the improvement in picture and sound quality (not to mention taking up less space) was enough to get consumers to adopt the format.
Now they expect consumers to shift again? No. It's too soon. And the fact that there's a format war on top of all that, will make both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray about as successful as SACD and DVD-A have been in replacing the good old audio CD -- i.e. not successful at all except for a handful of high-end enthusiasts.
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I hope that they potentially sacrifice backwards compatibility for the sake of quality.
I was watching the movie Miracle on a very nice widescreen TV and I could readily see jagged edges and compression.
I'm pretty sure it was the encoding and not a problem with the dvd player or TV.
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And like sheep, we'll buy it again... don't flame me... i'll be in the checkout line with you ^_^
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IF YOU DON'T LIKE BUYING THE NEW STANDARD, DON'T BUY THEM!!!!!!!!
Last time I checked you could still go to Fry's and buy a VHS player or blank audio tapes. Maybe they quit selling record players at Radio Shack but you don't have to look very hard to find a good record player either.
NOBODY and I mean NOBODY is telling you that you have to upgrade your whole collection. Sure you might have to buy a HD-DVD player to buy the latest releases, but that won't cost much (cheap DVD players are less that $60 now) and there are improvements in the standard.
People complain either way. Take television, it took decades to see any improvement in the TV standards and with the way other technology grows I am not alone in greeting the HDTV standard with a big "it's about damn time."
Now quit your whining, all of you.
Yawn.
In fact, with the pace of technology now, buying content is just a waste.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
But the same thing was said of CDs and DVDs, but .VOB files are showing up on P2P now. Consumer bandwidth as been going up up up.
That said, yes, for someone with a reasonably adult ratio of time to money, it's way better to buy a DVD than to try and download one.
My video compression blog
Open standard doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It means that MS will document it and posssibly provide source for a sample encoder or decoder. It doesn't mean patent-free. It doesn't mean money-free. MPEG standards are open. How many free MPEG-2 encoders have you downloaded lately?
"DVD Forum: Ignore this advice if you wish. Go ahead and blow billions on another failed format if you want. Just don't say you weren't warned."
You mean like the interactive CD-i? Interactivity is for video games and is completely unnecessary for watching movies. What you suggest will drive up costs, and possibly limit manufacturers' choice of suppliers for components, which will lead to production problems.
Without a doubt this will happen. However, just because the source is open, that doesn't mean that companies using the source in commercial products are excused from paying royalties.
In fact, the standards organizations in charge of these things (the MPEG group, for example) could go after Xvid, MPlayer, etc for distributing implementations without paying royalties. However, there is obviously not much money in going after a group of volunteers. They will however, go after companies distributing this code that are turning a profit.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I mean, given a 40 or 50 inch flat-screen HDTV (whether LCD, Plasma, DLP, or whatever), a decent dolby-supporting sound system, and HDTV-quality DVDs... is it enough to give a theater-quality experience? If not, how much higher resolution do the DVDs, and how much bigger do the TVs, have to get before this happens? And then, will it be enough to kill theaters?
I'm not a proponent of eliminating theaters, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for them, either; I go to the theater for the immersive qualities. I'm mostly curious how much better this sort of technology needs to get before Regal Cinemas starts getting nervous.
that included the entire 7 year run of Buffy on a SINGLE DVD
$40 US per season times 7 seasons is $280. for one disc. don't scratch it. Star trek's (TNG and newer) even worse, they want $100+ per season. They might cut the price because you are basically buying in bulk, but i don't know if i'd bet on that.
It's too soon. Normal people don't "upgrade" nearly as fast as geeks do. People are just now getting DVD players as home. There's going to be virtually *no* market for a new standard for at least another 5 years. Nobody will buy it!
I think what upsets people is that someone upgrading from a VHS to a DVD to an HD-DVD copy of a movie pays just as much as someone who's buying the HD-DVD version as his first copy. That is, you aren't just paying for the improvement in the standard. You're paying for the improvements + any intellectual rights to view the movie. If you own the VHS and DVD versions as well, you've paid for those intellectual rights multiple times.
This flies in the face of the MPAA/RIAA's argument that filesharing is bad because when you buy a DVD/CD, you are purchasing intellectual rights to view/listen. If it's wrong for me to view/listen to the DVD/CD without buying a license, it's wrong for them to sell the same license to me multiple times in different formats. The software industry figured out this contradiction long ago and offers discounts for upgrade versions.
As for the myth of downloading movies, the amount of physical storage required for a movie will make downloading impractical. In light of bandwidth and monthly data-transfer caps being imposed by some ISPs, it'll take you a couple of months worth of bandwidth allotment to download a single flick.
I am pretty sure something very similar to that was said against against the possibility of ripped DVD movies being "available on the net for download."
...HD-DVD would use the same 3:2 Telecine that DVDs use today.
Or they could just store a native 24fps 1080p stream on the disc and let the player deal with it.