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Apple Backs Blu-ray
zaxios writes "The New York Times is reporting that Apple has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association, and will use Blu-ray in upcoming versions of iMovie and Final Cut. The move puts Apple among Sony, Matsushita, Dell, HP and Walt Disney in supporting Blu-ray; companies including Toshiba, NEC, Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema, Universal and Paramount are pledged to adopt the competing HD-DVD format. Apple's support confirms Blu-ray's future dominance on the desktop, but the division in Hollywood and notebook manufacturers between the two HD videodiscs will ensure the bona fide format war we were all secretly pining for."
Now if IBM could jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon we'd be set!! We (the OSS croud, linux personally) would see a lot more support with HP, Apple plus IBM's support...
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Forget about Sony, HP, Matsushita, Apple, Dell, and Disney...
The porn industry, which releases 11,000 titles a year, will likely silently decide which format "wins" (previous slashdot coverage).
And some of the bigger porn houses are coming down on the side of Blu-ray because of its capacity advantage over HD-DVD. That the porn industry would have such an influence comes as no surprise to those who know just how big the industry really is.
When you consider that DL DVD drives have been out for some time (reasonably priced), yet the media still costs about 10 bucks a pop, can you imagine what the Blu-Ray (or HD) discs will go for? At the risk of dating myself (not like anyone else would, HA), I was an early adopter for the *new* high-density 3.5" floppies at about $80 for a box of 10.
Realistically, once the next-generation drives and discs are out, it will lower the price of DL media into something more affordable.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
When do we get Blu-Ray Burners in G5 Powermacs? 50GB Superdrive Baby!
No.
As with DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W). Prices will be similar, devices will have either singular-support, or very sketchy dual-support.
Current / Older home DVD-Players and DVD-ROM drives will either be incompatible, or very, very picky.
Prices will be in fact pretty high for a good time because take up will be slow until the 2nd gen of the technology comes through (reasonably solid dual-format writers, common and solid dual-format players).
Meanwhile, someone will have produced DivX++, that can re-encode the content of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD, allowing it to be written to a standard DVD, in a quality that is acceptable for the drop in price. It is these files that will be popular, downloaded from the net.
After a while of that, people will start to use HD-DVD or Blu Ray DVD to backup their multiple DivX++ images onto one big-ass disc.
At which point the tech companies will reveal their plans for SDD-DVD (super-duper-density DVD), and the competing standard Puce-Ray DVD. Which will be sony's concept. These discs will be the future because they hold such better-qualtiy movies, and the capacity makes piracy impractical...
And the big circle-jerk will begin again!
> Apple has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association
Blue-ray will fail because the disks won't play in the current installed base of DVD players. People
now have DVD players in their living rooms, SUVs, cars, laptops, desktops, bedrooms, kitchens, vacation homes-- do you
really want to explain to your kid that the new Spiderman3 Blue-ray disk they bought won't play in the minivan?
HD-DVD multilayer disks can be made completely backwards compatible- HD on new layers for the home theater in the basement, conventional resolution on other layers for the car. Stores will only have to stock one disk. This will decide it.
That was funny. One of the more interesting things I've seen in my life was a German version of Penthouse with the same layout as an American one someone had lying around. I thought something looked odd about the model. When I compared the two, I saw that the German layout hadn't airbrushed the panty marks and other minor skin blemishes from the model.
Heck, she was still good looking, but somehow wasn't quite as "perfect" as the airbrushed version and I found myself definately prefering that "perfection".
Call me a pig if you want, and I do love looking at "real" women with all of their imperfections, but the parent is absolutely right. Do we really want to see High Def tit-job scars? How about stretch marks?
High def can have the tendency to look real. Unfortuneatly, the reason we buy porn isn't reality, it's fantasy.
TW
The Playstation is exactly the thing that's gonna help this format survive. Because every PS3 sold will turn someone into an instant blu-ray drive owner. (let's not forget how the ps2 turned a lot of people into dvd drive owners)
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
You have two competing formats... All other things being equal, one supports significantly more storage space than the other. Just based on that Blu-Ray wins hands down. Unfortunately, what I think could happen is that movies will be released on the two formats with identical quality, only the Blu-Ray version will be stuffed with more advertisements. And for PC archival purposes, I can't imagine anyone supporting hddvd. Blu-Ray will finally give us an optical media format with nearly as much capacity as a DLT tape. -BT
And with something like this, it could become causation - Apple builds up a good track record of picking winners, other companies notice this, and when Apple makes their pick other companies start to mirror them based on their past performance, thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Blu-ray has several things going for it. . .
Playstation 3 inclusion of Blu-ray would prove to be a massive boost for the standard as it automatically gives an instant installed base in the tens of millions. As initial players will likely be relatively pricey, it's usually difficult to start the momentum to get enough installed base on the market so that studios would want to produce content for it, and more content usually then convinces more people to buy into the standard. However, by PS3 being Blu-ray compatible automatically creates a massive installed that studios can produce content for to start the ball rolling.
Secondly, Blu-ray seems to be more scalable then HD-DVD with comapanies planning 4-layer 100GB and 8-layer 200GB multilayered disks. Also, Blu-ray seems to be getting more hardware on the market then HD-DVD, especially since Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic, Technic, Fisher, etc) are backing it. Sony has just annouced Blu-ray drive for the PC that can write to write-once 50GB disks or rewritable-50GB disks.
BLu-ray drive for PC
It's certainly why I got an mp3 player. And a mobile phone. And a games console.
Oh no...wait...
Especially since Windows had lousy support for "Useless Bus" until about... well, XP still can't find my mouse if I unplug and replug it hot ;)
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Word Processor - Word
Internet Browser - Internet Explorer
Windowing System - Windows
Media Player for Windows - Windows Media Player
SQL Database Server - SQL Server
etc...
It really does piss me off, since too many people assume that I'm talking about MS SQL Server when I talk about SQL database servers for example.
I love dvds for many reason, but I hate their unreliability. They degrade far less gracefully than cds, grinding to a halt instead of skipping. I've had even the newest dvd players, and current computers, crash when encountering minor dvd scratches.
So is it a good idea to increase the dvd's capacity? Are the Blu-ray or HD-DVD consortia doing anything to improve digital degrading?
Or is digital storage the wrong form for physical distribution of entertainment? Should we be pushing for refinements in analog instead? After all, my lps may be scratchy, but they all still play, as opposed to kill bill 1 which just crashed last month on my dvd player...