Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
========
77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.