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Toshiba To Offer Laptops With HD-DVD in 2005
LBArrettAnderson writes "Toshiba will release laptops with HD-DVD under its high-end Qosmio brand and plans to ship one million units in the first year to Europe, the U.S. and China, as well as Japan. The company claims the slimline HD-DVD format is more suitable to laptop PCs than the rival Blu-ray Disc format."
No, they're going the HD-DVD path instead of Blu-Ray, but they're trying to push it to market first in the computer sector. Sony, Pioneer, Fox, and JVC are signed on for Blu-Ray, and want to make that the universal standard. They've already announced Blu-Ray camcorders, and the next PlayStation as using Blu-Ray technology.
Just sounds like another marketing punch to sway people to their side. No real technical reason.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
HD-DVD is supposed to be directly backwardly compatible with current DVD technology, whereas Blu-Ray is not unless the player is built with red laser capability.
You will need a new player to play HD-DVDs. However, you will be able to play old DVDs on these new players.
The DRM will indeed be stronger. The "AACS" system is being considered for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Over at AVS Forum we've been talking about these formats a lot, with input an industry rep on the Blu-Ray side. The DRM will not prevent good old-fashoned "insert and hit play", but it will prevent uncontrolled ripping and copying. It remains to be seen if they will support media servers and other applications but AACS does provide that capability.
The differences are greater than between DVD+/-RW. HD-DVD is easier for manufacturers, because the production process is simular to DVD.
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Blue-ray on the other hand has larger capacities. This is important as some experts think that fitting a HD (1080i or 720p) movie onto HD-DVD will be a tight squeeze so there will be no room for special features, and higher compression than desired may be required
Building players that can handle DVD will be equally easy for both formats. I don't know about a single player that could do both HD-DVD and Blue-ray.
Take a look at the Blu-Ray website. I think the only company that's missing in the industry partner list is Toshiba. Plus after reading some documentation internal to my company regarding manufacturing costs of Blu-Ray discs they are cheaper to make than HD-DVD's in both cost per disc and cost per gigabyte.
In the past we've seen products like the Beta format for example that have a small industry following just go by the wayside. It seems such that HD-DVD is progressing along the same path. Time will tell I guess.
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
The format Toshiba supports is actually called AOD (Advanced Optical Disk) and HD-DVD can refer equally to AOD or Blu-Ray.
You're probably using Xcdroast, yes? That requires dvdrecord-pro, a binary only product from the same guy who makes the GPL cdrecord. dvdrecord is free for personal use, but requires a special key to run in free mode. A couple of Google look ups and you'll be burning in no time.
Unless you're opposed to it's nature as binary only. In which case you can use Nautilus's built in DVD recording abilities, which use growisofs, which is GPL.
As some have stated, Blu-Ray discs will indeed have greater storage capacities in terms of raw bytes. However, they have chosen to only support MPEG-2 compression whereas HD-DVD will support several MPEG-4 variations (including H.264). What this means is that even though HD-DVD's have a significantly smaller storage space they will in fact be capable of storing more video at equal quality.
FACTS:
HD-DVD
Dual Layer Storage: 30 GB
Max HiDef Video: 4.5 hours
Blu-Ray
Dual Layer Storage: 50GB
Max HiDef Video: 4 hours