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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."
...its not Microsoft backing Blu Ray or we'd have to turn against HD DVD.
Apple's support confirms Blu-ray's future dominance on the desktop
Against the MS behemoth supporting HDDVD? Why exactly?
And mow for something completely different, who pays this site's bills?
-mkb
I really think the HD-DVD will win simply becuase of the name.
Consumer: You mean this is a H D DVD. Wow I have been hearing so much about how good HD is so I want one.
Dont laugh VHS rolled of tounge better than Beta Max. One has to wonder what marketing genus wanted to call their product beta anyway
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.
Well, now that Sony's on board we know it's a real standard. This is good news, as I can finally archive my collection of Betamax tapes.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I remember reading specs and what it seemed to me was Blu-ray was simply better from the users point of view. I think it took more work on the manufacturers side and forced them to do a lot of extra work for it to be able to read traditional DVDs, but that shouldn't be as important.
Am I on the ball here or is there really not a complete performance domination by Blu-ray?
Just look at the history!
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Apple among Sony, Matsushita, Dell, HP and Walt Disney
For those of you that don't recognize the name "Matsushita", they're probably known to you as Panasonic.
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.
Its not so much that their two diffrent formats (As there will be at some point a combo drive, it always happens)...
its the fact that there are going to be two _competing_ formats which means...
lower prices!
-ND
I think they planned to annouce this at the MacWorld Keynote, but sometihng kept them from doing it. Why else would they have gotten the CEO of Sony to be there? They could have gotten anybody from Sony to demo their HDV camera, CEO appearances are saved for special occasions. As far as the HDV camera goes, Sony isn't the only manufacturer with an HDV prosumer camera.
I might remind you that the iMac was the first PC to come with USB, and not only that, but they used a USB keyboard and mouse. It came with firewire of course, but that is because Apple, 10-some years ago realised something that you have yet to realise: Firewire and USB have different purposes. It's like saying the Parallel port had failed because hardly any modems that worked on it were made.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
look how well Sony got that to take off in the USA
i type this as someone who has a few pieces of MD hardware and actually likes it.... though i think most people that use(d) minidiscs liked them. i never bought pre-recorded music but used it to replace cassettes.
Whichever one I buy will be the one that loses. *kicks beta max*
Now there will be TWO other ways for them to release about a billion old movies and tv shows...I own about 5 copies of the Star Wars Trilogy as it is.
Apple has only ever supported DVD-R for recording.
Now that DVD+/-R recorders have been out for 2 year, Apple is still pushing just the -R.
I know, I just bought an iMac G5 last month, and annoyingly, you have to buy blank -R's, not the more common and popular +R's.
I seem to remember USB already being established in the PC universe when the iMac first came out. As I recall, Jobs incorporated USB because he wanted all the same cool devices available for the PC to also be usable on the Mac (with the suitable application of proper drivers, which cost little to produce).
Apple was not the first to incorporate USB ports on their computers, that much is correct. However, until Apple introduced the iMac and essentially forced USB on their users, there were very very very few actual USB devices available. It was only after the iMac came out that you could begin finding USB devices in your typical computer store.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The iMac was the first PC that shipped where you had to use USB because there was no other way to connect a mouse and keyboard.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
You mean Microsoft's tiny market share...in the professional editing industry.
What good is it to have a format, Mr. Anderson, if you have no software to edit it with?
If I had a dollar for every windows box at Pixar and Lucasfilm, plus 50 cents for every windows box at professional editing houses in NY and LA, I'd have about $4.50.
Film and TV professionals like Apple, trust Apple, and they use Apple.
Oh, and Sony has this little thing called a Playstation, which means (shazam) 50 million blu-ray boxes in homes overnight. Once you have it, might as well buy some movies for it, right?
The only people I see so far supporting HD-DVD are content providers who don't sell hardware or do their own manufacturing. The hardware guys all seem to want Blu-ray.
Places like Paramount want the cheapest option because they have to subcontract manufacturing DVDs. What they sell is intellectual property, they don't really care what format it is on. They do care if the needed price point is more then what their customers want to pay (most casual DVD buyers would balk at a $60 Blu-ray disc, but would probably pay $5 to $10 more for HD-DVD).
Hardware manufacturers like Sony want Blu-ray because they need a killer hook to get you to upgrade (like more storage space). Sony is weird, because they are BOTH kinds of company at once, but they still think of themselves as hardware-oriented. They care a lot about format because they want control over sales, they want licensing fees (if applicable), and, most importantly, they manufacture the players. People JUST bought DVD players 3 or 4 years ago. The only people clamoring for a new format are Movie Professionals and Home Theatre Geeks, who tend to favor Blu-ray for technical advantages. They are willing to drop the $$$$$ on a new player, which means boffo profits for Sony. Paramount sees jack shit from player sales. They want to move as many DVDs as possible, they don't care if you use them as coasters. Sony would rather sell you a new player and 7.1 sound system so you can watch (Paramount movie) Top Gun on it.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They want to sell more editing suites and copies of FinalCut Pro. More lines on the screen is not going to be an easy sell with the people who buy their stuff. A big storage jump is.
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
"So why, exactly, should I be pining for a format war?"
The poster was being sarcastic since clearly, no one wants a format war if it can avoided.
Error correction/scratch protection. There may be some (or even many) of you out there who loathed CD-Caddy drives in the early days, but I MISS THEM. One thing the caddy did was protect the disc and prevent scratches. You could stick a caddied disk in your pocket and walk arround with it all day, pull it out, pop it in, and away you go. If you do that with a bare CD, by the end of the day you'll be lucky if it'll still read. Insertion and removal from a case is a pain, and I never met a jewel case as strong as even flimsy caddies. Sure, the prevelence and price reduction of media means if you ruin a disk you just burn another and don't care...
The problem is (and was/still is with DVD) that high data density makes the media far more succeptable to surface imperfections, be they scratches or dirt. Who hasn't sighed in irritation at rental DVD's that skip or blurt? And if you think DVD's are bad, just think for a minute about an optical media with 10 times the data density! Until synthetic diamond becomes cheap enough to coat consumer level optical discs with, I look forward to the return of our Caddy-Carrying Overloards.
Either that or there needs to be some SERIOUS error correction implemented. The average consumer just isn't going to want to handle a movie like it was a precious peice of china. Without some solution to this problem neither media will catch on with me. Maybe "they" are just planing on selling you a new copy of the disc every six months, but archivers and folks who use the media for data storage are not gonna like that.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Firewire never gained more of the market share over USB, and that is why all DVDs use MPEG4.
sigh...
Firewire is to multimedia as USB is to keyboards.
Seriously, Different purposes and it is the same reason that Firewire is part of every camcorder shipped today and USB is part of just about every keyboard or mouse shipped today. You could say that the floppy drive is one of the most successful devices in history because it shipped unchanged for so long, but that doesn't mean that you can use it instead of a hard-drive.
All DVDs use MPEG4? WRONG. MPEG2 is the standard DVD codec. While many newer DVD Players may support new formats such as MPEG4 or DiVX, studio productions are rarely encoded in these since they need the disk to play everywhere. Don't believe me about MPEG2... Look here. That is the first link I found to it, but it technically is the DVD FAQ that every site backs.
MPEG2 is used across the country for any real video work because it is basically uncompressed
What are you talking about? MPEG-2 video is usually compressed somewhere between 8:1 and 30:1. And nobody uses it for (serious) editing. Video is often distributed in MPEG-2 just because there is a very good quality to compression ratio. It's portable, and fits on DVDs because it's compressed.
No it will be PiXXXar, a wholly-owned subsdidiary. :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Sony also pioneered Memory Stick media, which has found a range of uses - all the way from digital cameras manufactured by Sony, to digital camcorders manufactured by Sony! They hold a wide range of advantages over other, cheaper media - such as their stick shape!