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Gizmodo Declares Blu-Ray Winner
13.7BillionYears writes "Gizmodo has a special feature covering the many details of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle based on the technical, financial, and commercial merits of the two contenders. They conclude that Blu-Ray is the clear winner on all three fronts. Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Gizmodo probably has it right, with respect to Blu-Ray, but their article is so incredibly biased that it is difficult to lend it any credibility. It's not an objective article at all. They follow a high-school writing class "compare and contrast" format. However, for each feature that they discuss, they trash it for HD-DVD and then argue valiantly and gushingly for Blu-Ray. I would rather read an article written by a dispassionate science writer. They should stick to regurgitating press releases rather than trying to take on serious analysis. I like Gizmodo as a great place to make one stop to learn about new gadgets but I don't go there for any sort of analysis or good editorial content.
http://www.busyweather.com/
I like having my optical media encased in some sort of protective barrier. it saves me from myself.
As an American Slob(tm), I have a really slack attitude towards my optical media. Mostly due to how I can get away with it with everything else.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Hopefully it turns out just like the VHS vs. Beta war of the late 70's/early 80's. Beta is better quality and deserves the title it so successfully....WAIT A MINUTE!!
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
Who are these people and why should I care what they think? At first glance Gizmodo seems like a geek hanging out in EB down at the local mall expounding on why the PS2 is better then the xbox to anyone foolish enough to enter his rant field.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You're new to this business aren't you?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
I get to ditch all my DVDs and the machines that can read them! W00T!
This is F'in stupid...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
How feasable would it be to have devices support both formats, the same way most DVD-writers now are +/- R. Are blu-ray and hd dvd too different or could we end up seeing the same kind of thing where both formats are supported by most devices.
The masses will ultimately decicde who wins But then again, the masses could easily be persuaded and influenced. Most of the time, there will be a winner by default, not necessarily by it's own merrit or quality, etc. I can only hope that the better system wins. Be it Blu-Ray or HD-DVD Then again, I'm leaning against any camps that blindly adopts technology, such as Microsft's. notice the word "blindly" didn't see it? well blindness might be a factor.
Might I suggest that those with modpoints read the second paragraph of the "technical" section in the parent post?
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
It seems that the more data that you throw onto a 5" disc the less resilience to scratches there are. I understand that a lot of these discs will use redundancy to counteract the increased sensitivity to scratches. I would assume that would cut into the amount of data that can be stored on the disc. Am I wrong in assuming that being that the discs are 72x the capacity of a CD ROM that the information density is 72X more. If the discs have 72x the amount of information in a given area, wouldn't the disc be 72x more susceptible to scratches. I've noticed this when comparing CD to DVD's.
So why dump the cartridges?
Seriously, isn't there a bit of a credibility gap? I love Gizmodo and all, but are they really the end-all-be-all of format reviewers? Let's see Tom's or Anandtech's opinions.
gizmodo.com and fleshbot.com are run by the same people, and written in the same style, it's no surprise that these guys vote for whatever gives them an erection.
The way I would like to see that it's either there will be some kind of convergence between two proposed standards, or one proposed standard crushed the other completely.
Honestly, I still am not over the DVD+R/W vs DVD-R/W
Why can't these companies get along?
I'll wait until the dust starting to settle before I fully adopt any of the proposed standards.
Will it be the new h.264 or something else?
And does anyone with a preview release of Tiger have any information on how fast it codecs a file?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Did you read the bit where he said HD-DVD has NO web page yet?
And resistant to consumer damage - What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING? It comes down to hardware/media price and avialiablity.
If 33%+ of the movie libaries are availiable in Blu-Ray, and NONE are availiable in HD-DVD - which would you image might be a more attractive purcahse? Even if HD-DVD discs can be run over by a truck and the Blu-Ray discs have to be kept in nitrogen cannisters between playing, the format that will get consumer marketshare is blindingly obvious.
Finally, I would say that he did give a numbre of details for technical advantages of the HD-DVD format - which have then been met and worked around by the Blu-Ray companies.
Sometimes an underdog is really, well, just a dog.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After John finished with me, ... A perfect end to a perfect evening--almost as perfect as when a troll like this gets modded up on Slashdot.
Mmmm.... Interesting article from Gizmodo.
Nice troll. Do we have a jargon term for these yet?
Ok, I know this sounds naive, but get this: If we all decide right now that Blu-Ray is the winner, and we cling to that idea in spite of any future arguments then it will be the winner. The masses have spoken. We don't have to go through another period of format instability. It's a wonder of the Internet, a snap decision by millions.
The only people who won't like this are the people who are supporting the other standard, you know DVD-whats_its_name, you know- the losers.
which standard has the less patents attached? I would chose that.
Article Text Trolls. It's in the Wikipedia.
e nomena#Article_text_alteration_trolls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_ph
...just a random thought, but I would suspect that the one whose copy protection is the easiest to break may end up "winning" as that is the one many people would find to have the most "freedom" to use how they wish without all the tacked on restrictions (warranted or otherwise).
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
In the USofA, VHS is widely adopted by the consumers, but Beta (or Beta2) is widely used by the news media. I recall that TV networks are utilizing Beta2 cameras. One of the cameraman cited that the quality of Beta2 surpasses VHS.
I don't see any Beta/Beta2 tapes being sold @ the neighboorhood electronic stores.
Another Professional use VS Consumer use
Because "HD DVD" is too hard to say. Blu-Ray is easy and quick to say. 2 syllables: Blu, Ray. It's even easier to say that DVD, which is 3. Blu-Ray is a pronounciation dream. HD DVD is an acronym nightmare. Nobody wants to deal with that mess.
Since most people will recognize HD-DVD must be somehow better than DVD while Blu-Ray could be anything from enhanced color laundry detergent to insecticide. Without a ton of marketing and consumer education Blu-Ray will simple lose when the average couch potato goes to buy a new player from the local electronics megabarn.
While this has little to do with why BetaMax (nor why every other Sony proprietary standard has failed), Blu-Ray has some serious marketing problems to over come.
Can they all get together and give me a rainbow compatible one for this chrismas ....
Obviosuly either side is going to make discs that won't die when you sneeze.
But in fact a funny point sis that durability could be a major strike AGAINST HD-DVD. Did you read the part about Blu-Ray discs printed on paper? That could mean a lot more opportunity for throw-away discs in magazines or cerial boxes or wheverer. That is a huge draw to media types, to be able to push media through more channels.
So again, I would say the duribility of the format has nothing to do with sucess. Ease of use, yes - to some extent (which is why they aren't giving any cart-based players to the masses). The primary factor will be the one with a majority of media companies getting behind it and making things people want to buy. If there were a split between some media supporting one format, and some another, then there might be more of a fight - but it looks to be an absolute domination the part of Blu-Ray, as they said from any standpoint you care to look that would indicate future sales potential.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think whichever standard the porn industry decides to use will be the winner.
50GB of Jenna Jameson...WOW!!
I too have a disc format:
It can store 1 Petabyte of data (unfortunately due to quantum mechanics: some bits can be both 1 and 0)
DRM'ed to the core
Will go on sale in the next 2 to 40 years
Should come down in price around 2050
- There is always a focus on new media technologies and some can already predict the sucess of a a very volatile market. (Remember when BETAs and 8-track where 'in')
All your Sybase are belong to us.
article on H.264e /
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/news/062804appl
According to a few articles, Microsoft is endorsing HD-DVD for the adoption of WMV9 codec
here
here
here
here
then again, Paul Thurrot is to Microsoft as Rush Limbaugh to The Republicans
YIKES!!!!
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If Gizmodo is so biased, how did they get the pretty Excel graphs to prove their point??
Just find out which format Sony is backing, and pick the other one.
Have you read my blog lately?
Hate to say that it won't be decided on technical merit, but businesses have a history of choosing an inferior standard if it benefits their bottom line. (Think VHS vs. Beta.)
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
What makes you think the movie industry will see logic? They haven't been too hot on it before...
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Anyone have a link to an article that objectively compares Blu-Ray and HD-DVD?
if you RTFA, they say there's actually no official HD-DVD website! what persay are they supposed to link to?
Might I suggest that those with modpoints mod down the parent, because he's whoring?
Thank you for the links.
However, since both WMV9 and AVC (h.264) are included into specs, does that mean that each hardware DVD player will have to have both decoders?
And would each movie have to be encoded in either of the two?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
We hear a lot about speed and capacity, but what about errors? I've stayed away from DVD+-/?!@#RW because of the chance of not having a player read a disc (or worse perhaps it reading it wrong).
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
SACD uses single-bit encoding, and DVDA multiple-bit--even though both can go multichannel. They are truly interesting as separate recordings.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
Now for the Jello wrestling.
I bet someone here can answer this question for me. Why are all these optical discs (aside from the venerable Laserdisc) manufactured with the same dimensions as the Compact Disc?
Soon we'll have three or four 120mm discs. Why not make the Blu-Rays a little wider, so there's no chance of them being inserted into a non-Blu-Ray device? (and the side benefit of a few more tracks == more space) Backward compatibility would be maintained, of course.
Is it just because it's cheaper to reuse some of the manufacturing equipment from the CD assembly lines?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
...VHD-DVD (Very High Def. DVD), or maybe I'll even wait for UHD-DVD (ULTRA-HIgh DEF DVD!!!) baby!!! YEAH!!!!
Who declared Gizmodo the authority.
I dont think that they have won the Gizmodo vs. Engadget debate.
I do like them both.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
However, since both WMV9 and AVC (h.264) are included into specs, does that mean that each hardware DVD player will have to have both decoders?
Yes. They also have to include MPEG-2.
And would each movie have to be encoded in either of the two?
Yes.
"Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Why?
Look what happened with DVDs. Computer DVDs were pushed back for a long time while we waited for the movie industry to work out their copyright stuff. What if the computer industry and movie industry chose different standards this time? Wouldn't that allow the computer industry to move ahead with new technologies instead of waiting for the movie industry to catch up?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I think they have agreed HD-DVD discs can be in any of 3 codecs. h.263, some windows media format, and 1 other one that I don't recall. So every HD-DVD player would have to support all 3 codecs to be able to have the HD-DVD logo.
There's a whole bunch of physical holders, wallets and jewel cases and the like. But would be a good idea anyway.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
But we'll see. Maybe they should name it MP3V for instant recognition. As another post said, we may be acronym tired so it could go the other way.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
Here is a good intro: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/blu-ray.htm/
Battle Over Next DVD Format
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
By KEN BELSON
Published: December 29, 2003
TOKYO, Dec. 28 - When Hisashi Yamada pulls back his bow, he thinks of only one thing: Hitting the bull's-eye 92 feet away.
"When I concentrate on the target," said Mr. Yamada, a champion archer who demonstrates his skill dressed in the traditional blue-and-white hakama, "I forget about everything else."
In his regular job, Mr. Yamada, a 60-year-old electrical engineer, is putting that same single-minded focus to work for the Toshiba Corporation, which is battling like a Japanese samurai warrior of old in a fight to the finish over whose format will be used in the next generation of DVD's.
The discs, which have been under development for several years, will hold four to five times more digital video and audio data than those now on the market. They are needed because broadcasters and movie studios are planning to take advantage of the spread of high-definition television screens to produce more digital programming with multitrack sound and much better resolution.
The new discs and their players will not be widely available until at least 2005, but already the world's largest electronics, computer and entertainment companies are embroiled in a multibillion-dollar fight over whose technology will become an industry standard.
The arguments are in many ways reminiscent of the Betamax-VHS showdown in the 1970's and the clashes over digital audiotape, compact discs and the original digital videodiscs released in 1997. As in those battles, technology is just the starting point for debates filled with emotion and industry politics.
Beyond the technical details like tracking speed and tilt is a serious tussle over how to divide - and protect - the billions of dollars in royalties from the licensing of this technology and the content sold on the discs. Also at stake is an effort by electronics makers to prevent emerging Chinese rivals and well-established Silicon Valley computer makers from making significant inroads into the home entertainment business.
"This is a very intense conflict over intellectual property," said Warren N. Lieberfarb, a driving force behind the development of the original DVD format. It has the added overlay, he said, "of the Japanese, Korean and European consumer electronics industries fearing China's aggressively emerging consumer electronics industry as well as the PC industry."
At the technological level, the combatants are divided roughly into two camps. Under Mr. Yamada's leadership, NEC and Toshiba have formed a group that has developed the HD (high definition) DVD, a disc that is 0.6 millimeter thick and made with machinery similar to that used for today's DVD's. On the other side is the 10-company Blu-ray Group, led by Sony and Matsushita, whose best-known brands are Panasonic and JVC. That group has developed a disc only 0.1 millimeter thick that can hold more data but needs additional investment to be produced. Information on the discs can be overwritten after it is recorded, something that is not possible with the HD DVD's now.
At 12 centimeters in diameter, both discs are similar to today's offerings, though Sony's discs are protected from fingerprints, dust and scratches by square plastic cartridges when not in use. The HD DVD group has developed a single lens that emits red and blue rays to read both current and next-generation discs. The Blu-ray machines require two separate lenses.
While the discs are still at least a year away from mass production, both sides are expected to be out in full body armor trying to win new allies at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 8 through 11, where they are planning to show prototypes of their devices.
There are many battles left to fight, though, before these new DVD's hit the shelves, and it is entirely possible that the camps will never reach a consensus, forcing consumers, retailers, movie studios and others to adapt, at least ini
The movie industry beleives people won't buy their discs if "DVD" isn't in the name. That's why. Quality is irrelevant in this case.. ;)
If it's in the Wikipedia, it must be true.
And if it isn't, then I can add it or edit it. Then it will be true.
Certainly hardware, media pricing, and availability are key items in determining *economic* success, but just because something is widespread and inexpensive doesn't make it "better" than something else, just likely to be adopted by cheapskates.
The original question is not trying to determine soley which standard was least likey to break when I step on it. I thought we were trying to decide if the claim of Blu-Ray being the dominant choice for DVD successor is valid.
I thought the whole point was to note that there is a standard with a clear path to ecenomic success - which kind of renders the whole point or durability moot.
Since Blu-Ray has such a clear path to dominence the question of media durability is merely an interesting technical aspect of the format, not a detail that matters in the seelction of the eventual format winner.
I also would maintain that you can assume a basic level of media durability from either standard due to them likley using a similar form factor and material components to exisitng DVD's - what major format is going to be stupid enough to put something in a form that is easily broken? That's why I consider the issue of durability to not be an item of interest in this whole discussion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
VHS was able to unseat the BETA early adopters only because:
1. The Tapes where 6 hr vs 4.5 (3 on early BETA) in EP mode.
2. VHS players were priced about 100 dollars cheaper than BETA players when low-end players cost 500-600 dollars.
BETA still managed to hang on for over a 2 decades because 1. It was slightly higher quality (very slight) and had HI-FI Stereo about 2-3 years earlier.
In this case no huge player cost difference I predict. Picture Quality will be identical (same codecs). Blu-Ray way ahead on storage (recording length).
You could name this format SHIT-DISC and it would still beat HD-DVD
Letter To Iran
Media sellers love format wars. Sure, there's a retooling cost when they lose one, but they get another chance to sell you another copy of the content in the winning medium when they come around to it. They ain't giving you any money back for betting on the wrong horse. All those "wasted" dollars sunk into obsolete media objects went right to their bottom line. The only way for consumers to win the format wars is to do what they do: use the discs (or whatever's next) as merely a transfer medium, and keep the digital masters in a transportable format. Play the content off your hard drive, with backups and "burn" (or whatever's next) a copy to relocate it, or stream it across a network where available.
--
make install -not war
"Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Yeah right!!!! Like the record industry support technological advancements like Super Audio CD.
1. Blu-Ray are mammals.
2. Blu-Ray fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the Blu-Ray is to flip out and kill people.
I appreciate the humor of what you are saying, but I really see these paper DVD's being in more temporary things like magazines or cerial boxes or in mailings (imagine all AOL CD's on paper instead of what they do now!!!).
So for that reason I think it's pretty exciting and is a good reason to support it. I'm assuming the paper discs are relativley biodegradble though I have nothing to back that up with beyond the word "paper" and implications from that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In my various netflix mailings, I have seen some DVD's that looked like utah seen from space - but they still played. I think if you
re seeing those kinds of issues it would more likley be the player having problems.
I still find player oddnesses from time to time that I think are fringe implemntation differences of the DVD menu sysetm. U2's "elevation" is the worst in this regard, I've had problems with portions of it on a number of DVD players. I was kind of hoping with a new standard like Blu-Ray they had a better defined menu spec to go with it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everyone keeps asking questions like which one is cheaper to produce and which one has more patents not to mention what's easier to say and we can't forget who has what backers
The reality is, the general public is stupid, and will simply follow whichever has a better ad during insert crappy "reality" TV show's name here that's on Fox anyways.
The thing is, if that chart is right and there really is no media in anything but BluRay - what would compell you to buy an HD-DVD player even if it were offered? Consumers actually I think are very savvy in that regard and figure out pretty quickly when they are being screwed or have made a bad choice - the people that pay for consumer confusion are retail outlets in terms of returns. Like a number of XBoxes and PS2's I've seen returned in the past while I was standing in return lines because people could not route them through a VCR to play DVD's. They don't know about Macrovision, they just know it doesn't work and doesn't do what they want.
As for Blu-Ray not being recognized - I think Sony and various media partners will make VERY sure you know all about Blu-Ray shortly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's an honest question. If you've noticed, laptops these days have become thin enough to the point where they're already as wide as these carts that the Blu-Ray discs sit in .. I cant imagine a format that requires the disc to sit in a cart to be used these days when everything depends on size.
Talking about Blu-Ray & HD-DVD, didn't Steve Jobs say that Tiger (OS 10.4) is going to have QT with H.264 which is compatible with HD-DVD and how you can resize the window without any loss of resolution and other cool features. Now I donot know much about H.264 but if they can do that and cannot do with Blu-Ray than Blu-Ray has a disadvantage there.
And another thing, nice to see another fight between MS & Apple with BR & HD-DVD.
Wow, pitiful counter-spin mr HD-DVD member company president.
Blu Ray Wins (cause we already said so)
No, they said they wanted to outline why on three important criteria Blu-Ray did better, and use that conclusion to pick Blu-Ray as a winner. If Blu-Ray were really far ahead in all areas, do you not think that would be a good conclusion?
Technical
Blu Ray has larger capacity
Blu Ray doesn't have backwards compatability, but thats a feature not a weakness!
Blu Ray may have a lower production cost, we don't know for sure, but thats still a plus for Blu Ray
Neither Blu Ray or the other one (we try not to mention the losers name) are going to use catridges. Point for Blu Ray
You don't think twice the potential capacity is a little more important? One reason VHS won out was that it was a little longer, for example. And fitting a whole movie on a DVD was certainly nicer than the laserdisc flipping - even autoswitching.
How did they say backwards compat was a feature? Instead, if you read the article again you'll find instead that they said pretty much all Blu-Ray players and various part makers were making stuff that supported both standards, making the issue moot. How it that saying non-compat is a feature? Instead they are saying it's been worked around.
The rest is just kind of silly on your part since you seem to interpret a natural bias toward blue-ray even in the periods at the end of sentences.
Financial
Blu Ray group has 70 members, the HD DVD forum has 220 members, but we saw this poster somewhere that only had 47 companies in support of HD DVD. So Blu Ray wins!
The economic size of the Blu Ray members is bigger. Except for Microsoft. But you know. Microsoft may change its mind and support Blu Ray. Blu Ray wins this one as well! Wow go Blu Ray!
Hey, I'll take three pro basketball players and put them up against ten of your friends! I'm sure superior numbers alone are all that matter!
Microsoft support - yeah, they sure have whooped Sony!! Apart from taht whole PS2 market being an order of magnitude larger and all. And the point there was the Microsoft could ALSO support Blu-Ray in the OS. Do you think it unlikely to do so? Id so, why?
Commerical
Blu Ray has 30% of the commerical resellers market! HD DVD has 0%! It is quite obvious that the 70% currently undecided will chose Blu Ray, because we said it won already!
Hey, ever hear of momentum? If more players sign into the market, what do you think is the probabilty of ALL of them being HD-DVD at this point?
Furthermore compounded by the media industry being like a group of scared pigeons. They tend to flock. So if 30% of the industry is going one way, and you are a flightly brainless media exec trying to decide which format to go to, you choose.... ?
Compounded even FURTHER by media companies being burned by DIVX. Do you think many companies are going to go through THAT again? Not that HD-DVD is all that similar to the DIVX situation, just that it adds to their anxiety about making bad choices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DVD is good enough for most of us, just as CDs are. To watch High Definition TV, we'll need new TVs as well as players just to watch a handful of films. Few are going to invest $2k in this technology until we're broadcasting in HDTV.
Then these things might replace VHS / Tivo.
Until then, the market is tiny.
I just spent a few minutes trawling unsuccessfully on the Wal-Mart site to locate them, but they do exist. Basically, a stretchy piece of clear plastic sized to fit snugly on a CD and remain in place until removed. (My searches are coming up blank on the site kk.org/cooltools, too, and I'm sure I saw a review there. If not, maybe I'll buy some today and write one ;).
However, I swear they're real, I just can't swear that they work (because I've only seen them). A set of 5 costs $5, I think -- which sounds like a fair amount, since blanks are quite cheap, but if it's a disk you'd rather hang onto, a buck isn't that much.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Blu-ray supports H.264 as well.
I found it hard to continue reading after the storage space part. "Blue-Ray has more storage space, so that makes it better," completely ignoring that HD-DVD uses MPEG4 while Blue-Ray uses MPEG2, meaning HD-DVD doesn't need as much space because the compressed data takes up less of the disc anyway.
There's always more to it. This isn't a meaningful article. Personally, HD-DVD looks like it has more backing from the DVD forum and others like Microsoft (VC-9 is an accepted codec for it among others), while Blu-Ray is largely a Sony-pushed thing.
Is that you don't think the best place to figure out how well a future consumer technology will do is to ask someone more exposed to consumer technology than most?
Similarily while perhaps those dudes hanging around EB might be a little biased towards the PS2, aren't they probably going to be good people to ask about what games might be good, or at least what games to stay away from?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Both formats have announced mandatory player support for:
MPEG-2
MPEG-4 AVC/H.264
VC-1 (aka Windows Media Video Advanced Profile)
So, a content creator can make a disc in either, and all players will support all three. Not a win for either format here.
As for encoder speed, one implementation, especially one in alpha, doesn't mean much. Since an encoder simply needs to make a legal bitstream, different encoders can vary hugely in speed. I certainly have MPEG-2 encoders that are more than 20x faster than other ones, or 10x faster than themselves when comparing slow, high quality mode and fast draft mode.
The really important thing is how fast it can decode the worst-case legal bitstream, since that determines how fast a computer or DSP is required for reliable playback.
My video compression blog
I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but TFA claims that eight-layer Blu-Ray discs will store 200GB. Even dual-layer discs are reasonably close to your figure at 50GB.
I wouldn't mind if they left off the region codes while they were at it.
The studios can't always just leave off the region codes. The writers and publishers of the novels on which many screenplays are based often demand that the studios region-code the video releases and categorically decline any contract that doesn't include such a provision.
Sure, we wouldn't have any of the format wars were it not for Sony's competing formats. However, we wouldn't have the recognized right to use many of the recordable formats you mentioned were it not for Sony, which defeated Universal's copyright infringement claims in the Supreme Court in 1984.
Save Betamax
'BLUE' HAS AN 'E' IN IT!!!
Thank you. I feel better now.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
If it turns out that one of the codecs (WMV9 or H.264) sucks for a given type of scene such as fast motion or relative darkness, can blu-ray movies switch codecs during playback?
> I'd love to post a comment on Slashdot,
:D sorta :)
> but you know. It's friday. I'm ramming
> my cock inside of my girlfriends pussy
> instead! Why don't you get a life too???
Ummm... Maybe because all the nice girls have already been taken by dickheads like you?
Hey that rhymed
Just find out which format Sony is backing, and pick the other one.
Did you pick against Philips Compact Disc as well, which Sony co-developed?
If it's in the Wikipedia, it must be true. And if it isn't, then I can add it or edit it.
And if what a crank writes isn't true, and it's in a widely-read topic, it'll eventually be edited out .
That said, I have read first-hand the work of Slashdot trolls who hide porn in an article text mirror.
Who wants to buy a "beta" product. Tell me when its done and gone gold, then i'll consider it.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
anything about laptops? Unless Bluray's CD casing is much thinner than the previous pictures I have seen it is not going to take off.
Laptops and small form factor PCs are all the rage...
Nice comment you posted about not posting a comment... And with one hand no less! Keep living the dream!
In earlier news betamax was declared the superior to the technically inferior VHS format.
In geek terms Blue-Ray may have won, but the market will determine the winner in a world where acronyms rule
Just your two cents?? I wanted a dollar!
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
parent poster isn't flamebait, the "more density on a disc means worse damage resistance!" knee-jerk argument has comes up whenever /. posts about a 120mm high-space medium (even since DVDs) which always gets modded up and has always been WRONG. this should be common sense to anyone who knows anything about error correction or parity.
I'd think Apple would have incentive to at least support, if not endorse, Blu-Ray going forward, since Blu-Ray not only supports Apple's preferred codec (H.264) - it also has much more potential for recording data on computers than HD-DVD because of the increased capacity (even if we ignore the fact that Blu-Ray discs can have more layers than HD-DVDs - yet another Blu-Ray advantage). That doesn't necessarily mean Apple should ignore HD-DVD - if it ends up the clear winner, Apple should support it too. It supports H.264 at least - something Apple wants to see.
That would be HD-DVD. It uses the same production process as current DVDs and CDs, with a 0.1mm data layer depth from the surface. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, requires a 0.5mm depth, and so all the manufacturers would have to reinvest in all new equipment to produce them, whereas HD-DVD manufacturers could simply re-tool their current equipment and switch over to HD-DVD very rapidly. It's obvious that from a production standpoint, HD-DVD has a significant advantage that Blu-Ray will have a tough time overcoming, even with its head start. My money is definitely on HD-DVD.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Sorry, I made some factual errors (just some info I had incorrectly remembered from a long time ago), but the overall argument remains intact. Actually, the numbers I quoted are reversed. Blue-Ray has a 0.1mm cover layer (depth of data layer from transparent surface), while HD-DVD has a 0.6mm cover layer, which is the same as DVDs and CDs, and can therefore be manufactured using existing equipment. More info here.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
http://www.reed-electronics.com/ednmag/article/CA3 13055g /article/CA3 13062
and
http://www.reed-electronics.com/ednma
Feedback welcomed
Remove the space after 'CA3' to get the valid link....
They should update the standard to require it.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Nice to see you're back to modding yourself up with other accounts. Good job.
I thought by now you would have started your fourth troll account. I suppose you'll reveal it in due time...
Guess no-one minds hauling giant blu ray cartridges on airplanes. Guess hauling around bulky cartridges is worth having the latest thing, even if you can fit 5 DVD's in the space occupied by one blu ray cartridge.