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Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
Michael S writes
sent in a good story which sumarizes the current status of the
battle between Blu-Ray & HD-DVD. There still isn't really a clear victor... or is there? I for one can't wait for this crap to get settled out so we can just enjoy having huge discs.
oh wait
From the article:
And, as peculiar it may sound, both competitors are holding their breath to see what the pornographic industry will decide.
That pretty much sums up the whole situation, now doesn't it?
I already enjoy having a huge disc.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
Blu-Ray just sounds more futuristic.
I am totally going for the format thatg
has the better sounding name
Huge discs are all fine and good... but wont they get scratched/ruined easily? I wait for someone to come out with an innovative new CD/DVD case design, perhaps something like combining a booklet and cases. (if that exists already, then its certainly not sold in any store ive been to)
i honestly cant see either side giving ground. its going to be vcr vs betamax, or dvd-r vs dvd+r all over again.
corporations rarely care about " whats best " , rather " what will make them the most money ".
One side giving up for the common good, loses them money and so they wont do it.
kinda like how DVD+ and DVD- got 'settled'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Can't we all be along? It's much more profitable that way.
DVD burners took so long to catch on because of all the + - RAM type confusion. The whole industry needs a single strong standards to keeping everything working. Joe Sixpack doesn't burn DVDs right now because of this silliness.
To quote the American public, "ooh! Shiny!"
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"Although at the beginning of the decade, the DVD seemed like a major discovery..."
we discovered the dvd? where?
atlantis? europa? the city of the dead?
and all this time i thought we invented it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Um...
Oops, sorry, MPAA won't release that information. I guess we'll never know...
Have you read my blog lately?
So it's probably this, but on the other hand it's most likely something else? My faith in anything the article might say was lost.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Go, Lisa!
"But the main problem remains the poor security. DeCSS and DivX came as major surprises."
All I can say is, what were they thinking?
Edgar Allen Poe got it right in 1863. In _The Gold-Bug_, the narrator says: "Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
The movie industry can look forward to many more such "surprises."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
but wont they get scratched/ruined easily? ... as reported previously on slashdot
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
I wouldn't underestimate the influence of the PS3 on the format wars. The fact Sony is (obviously) using their own Blu-Ray format for their next generation console could mean an early victory for their format.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Think I'm gonna wait for my BluRay HD-DVD+-RW CDRW drive
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It's just sad, really.
Spec-wise, Blu-Ray wins. Blu-Ray also has the support of Sony (and therefore will be in the PS3), has Apple supporting it (and therefore will be in future Macs by default...and Macs are used in the media content industry), and it supports all the codecs and specs that HD-DVD supports. In addition, it has larger storage space. Even Dell and Disney are supporting it.
HD-DVD's only benefit is that there won't be a need to alter today's manufacturing processes as much as Blu-Ray will require.
I predict (and hope) Blu-Ray will win. I know people love to cite Betamax in these articles, but just because Betamax died out doesn't mean the better format will die out in this case either. There's a lot of important backing for Blu-Ray.
Apple officially is part of the Blu-Ray spec. That means the PC Manufacturers will support HD-DVD. Just like the DVD-R DVD+R wars.
I'm really in no rush for all of this to shake out. The longer it takes the better. The fact that DVD got blown wide open with DeCSS was a good thing. The main driving force behind the new standard is not better resolution or more storage - it's just to get a second chance to re-DRM the crap out of the new standard and kill off DVD.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
What was wrong with betamax?
or else!
Well, next to the tablet I'm typing this in on, I have a Mac SE that I'm setting up for my school's PreK. It's sitting on top of it's external CD-Drive, which is of course caddy-based. Everybody thought it was so much more convenient to not need caddys, but we still have cases. Why not just make cases that function AS caddy(s).
Just a thought.
If you rely on a floppy, you can't have much of a hard drive.
"didn't express its support to neither format."
Ats rite, cause I ain't done got no reason to decide now whachur tatties get burned to anywise!
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
Oh, hell... "The protecting layer for CDs and DVDs (cover layer) is 0.6 mm. in thickness, while Blu-Ray's cover layer is only 0.1 mm. thick, which, roughly, means a better access to the recording area."
And better access to scratches, ball point pens, ink chemistry, label adhesive chemistry.
And the infuriating nuisance of buying marking supplies specifically labelled for use with the media and vice versa, and finding out three years later that everybody who used them is experiencing data loss.
So much for using these things for backup.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The degree to which you enjoy having "truly huge discs" will depend on which standard gets adopted. The formats aren't equivalent and have substantial differences in price and excellence. This is nothing like the DVD+/DVD- R/RW wars; the formats are too dissimilar.
The preference of one format over the other could have ramifications similar to those of Betamax/VHS. Personally, I'm not excited bout HD-DVD's 2.5 hour limit on high-def video. Blu-ray has a 4.5 hour limit? Now we're talking. Even LOTR:ROTK will fit on that.
I'm sick of standards that just *barely* satisfy the need for new formats. HD-DVD is an evolutionary upgrade of DVDs to allow a majority of films to fit in high-def. Blu-ray is a revolutionary change which may cost more initially, but provides much more headroom and has plans for even larger disc capacity. It also will provide an immediate benefit for long films or extensive data storage over HD-DVD.
I can't wait for this crap to get settled...in favor of Blu-ray. I'm sure not going to be excited about it when I am sticking in the second HD-DVD for a > 2.5 hour hdef film because "HD-DVD" sounds more like "DVD" than "Blu-ray". So, world, take your time if you must; just choose the right format it the end.
Bottom line: if you have to do a major upgrade of media and players, do it right! Don't upgrade the minimum amount required, but plan for the future.
I'll be almost as happy if dual-format drives take over like DVD+/-, but it would still probably mean most movies came out on HD-DVD.
-Dan
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny.. Seriously though I'd be happy if some of this new space went to more redundancy if it meant the discs would be more reliable than DVD/CD media is. I'd sacrifice some space for better chances to read it later. If part of whatever standard wins allowed for the data to be stored twice on the media, readers could check the other track if one was damaged.
Well, considering that Sony, Apple & the Porn Industry are all behind Blu-Ray, I'd say we have a pretty good idea of who is going to win this one...
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
I think not.
bettamax and VHS? nah! I think these will be going the way of Minidisks, 8Tracks and Zip drives.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Doing that will not encourage any manufacturers to stick with one type (DVD + or - all over again). We should go with the Blue ray stadard because it holds more meaning blue ray disks you buy in the future will become outdated after HD-dvd because they are larger (meaning updating the video colletion less). The only donwside to the new standards is that they are not using lossless audio.
More bandwith to the masses! Then we could just download our movies. I seriously see a hard drive based movie device with built in wimax, a fancy remote, and an onscreen moviestore as a much better alternative to new media every for or five years. That way we don't have to have a war! We have all the technology we need to do it already. (besides wimax)
will be if Sony officially decides to make the PS3 use the format. With the market penetration of consoles, especially the PlayStation consoles, well, you do the math. I know plenty of people that were excited that their PS2s played DVDs, because then they didn't have to buy a standalone player. So, I have a feeling that the same will happen if they use a Blu-Ray drive in their next console.
ART on dA
discworld of course, heh heh
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Come on, let's not get bogged down by simplistic logic. My point wasn't that it was because Sony was behind the format, it's that it is the format of the Playstation 3. The products you mentioned were not nearly as successful as the Playstation 2. It's fully expected by many that Sony will probably get a huge share of the console market in the next generation of consoles also. By extention, these people will automatically own Blu-Ray disc players. It's an immediate and huge market penetration.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Michael S writes sent in a good story
Ouch.
Inphase in January introduced their prototype.
Where is the news on this ?
This can only be good for us, the consumers. I also expect that disc player manufacturers will figure out how to have dual format players (and if you count in current gen tech, 3..8 formats).
antipaucity
Am I the only one infuriated by the shitty writing in this article? I love lines like:
"The future of DVD is still unclear, but what is certain is that a replacement is already needed and looked upon."
"Although at the beginning of the decade, the DVD seemed like a major discovery, it shortly proved itself unable to solve some of the most important problems that lead to its very creation."
"In brief, the movies offered on such a support...."
"The big award for the winning format has so many zeros as even the companies used to astronomic figures would get dizzy with the taste of unlimited success."
It's off just enough to annoy, and as you get through a few paragraphs, the annoyance builds and builds until you want to forcibly lead the author back to a book on English usage. I feel like I'm reading the back of a Japanese shampoo bottle.
"Mr Sparkle is very disrespectful to dirt"
While duplicate tracks is an idea, one thing to note with the differences in this media is the prodective coating. The thinner protective layer of Blue-Laser makes them less scratch-resistant.
As a parent, I can't begin to count the number of kids' movies I've lost due to damage. Blue-Laser sounds amazing technologically, but when it comes to the standard DVD user (that is to say, everyone), I'll take the extra scratch protection any day.
Why force a hardware standard to place redundant data, when the same effect could be achieved in software?
Basically treat the disk as if it had multiple partitions, each physically scattered across its surface. Then do simple redundant copying or a RAID-style redundant striping scheme.
No need for that to be a hardware standard; just software. If done right, such a scheme might even be transparent to normal reading software. Software that didn't know about the redundant data simply wouldn't even see it, or it might appear in separate subfolders.
in a tiiiiiiiny living space!
But seriously, with the specs that Blu-Ray has for the physical aspects of the disc this format would force drive makers to reinstitute the disc-caddy system to keep your fragile Blu-Ray discs from getting scratched or otherwise hosed up by the environment. Just imagie what hell it is going to be to rent Blu-Ray's if there are no caddys!
No matter how much error correction you put in at the block layer on a disc of this level of info density stuff like a ball-point pen or medium to fair sized scratches are going to present a HUGE problem for maintaining media readability and reliability! Not to mention old tricks like polishing scratches out with Turtle Wax just aren't going to work when the protective layer of the Blu-Ray disc is 1/6th as thick as a DVDs!
Plus, why does everyone here think that Blu-Ray or HD-DVD is a wanted thing?
I already own a sizeable collection of movies in DVD format and some older ones in Laserdisc format. I'm not about to buy the same movie again in Blu-Ray just because its higher resolution. Especially since I don't own a HDTV set and I still fail to see the compelling reason to shell out the extra cash for a set. HDTV still costs too much and is still too confusing for the average consumer not to mention you can hardly get dick-all worth watching on it unless your in a major metropoloitan area or have a cable provider that has dedicated a significant amount of their coax bandwidth to delviering premium HDTV channels.
For starters the fact that people think there is this huge pent up demand for 1080i res movies is flat out ricockulous! Hello people, didn't anyone here see that VOOM just went tits up? You want to know how many subscribers they had?
46,000!
If you assume the VOOM subscribes are the same customers with sufficent money and HDTV equipment at home to want HDTV res movies on some format then I think its safe to say what format will win is moot at this point because there is hardly a sustainable market for this format for the movie industry at the current rate of HDTV adoption.
Sure it would be nice to have a higher capacity format but I for one am sick and tired of formats that get mired up in Hollywood dick-swinging.
Why can't the computer industry come up with their own format for optical data storage that is intended for JUST data and as such wont get hijacked by a bunch of egotistical profit grubbing movie studios who will just want to fsck with it to make it "Secure" for their precious movies.
...if you really want a "huge disc" that can store video data, why not just pick up a LaserDisc - the "hugest" video disc if ever I saw one...
RTFA
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Will I need to buy the "White Album" again?
Sony backs it and the PS3 is a major influencer of such. I heard somewhere that the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry. Hmmm...
Apple backs it. The same people that dump money into R&D. The same people that pretty much made Ethernet, USB, and FireWire standard issue on all computers nowadays. The same people that got WiFi to the masses (instead of just us geeks) with AirPort.
Dell backs it. C'mon, they're the big player in the PC industry.
HP (they're innovators now, trying to find a new face to the company that was once a PC company), Hitachi, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Samsung are behind it. This, along with Sony, pretty much covers the consumer market.
Now we move onto the financial aspects. That's a lot of money in R&D pushing it, plus Blu-Ray (having $450 billion vs HD-DVD's meager $221 billion) has a little more "oomph".
I'd say the war is over unless some huge unexpected upheavel happens.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
If you don't own or haven't yet experienced HD, then your comment would seem to make sense. However, having taken the plunge, I can assure you that normal DVD quality, while a huge improvement over VHS,etc. is a step backward in picture quality from HD. It's not just an issue of increased storage capacity. Hard drives are cheap enough that isn't really an issue to me. But it's not ALL about PC's. The future of the home entertainment, electronics and entertainment industry rests on the quick adoption of a HD capable DVD. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
The transfer rate for blu-ray is, accoriding to their FAQ, 36 Mb/s, not 36MB/s. Which means that 1x blu-ray (4.5MB/s) is considerably slower than today's 16x DVD drives, which are ~21MB/s.
From the above linked article:
So your objection would seem to be overruled.
It's because of this coating that Blu-Ray will not require a caddy.
It's also worth noting that this same coating can be used on regular DVDs, and, one presumes, on HD-DVDs as well. Plenty more info can be found by googling DURABIS.
From the last story posted on the Blu-Ray vs. HDDVD battle, a step up was that laser assemlies that would enable blu-ray players to play both old DVD's as well as new HD DVD's was no more expensive than HD-DVD assemblies.
In other words, any Blu-Ray player is going to be able to play old DVD's. Just not HD-DVD's.
Personally I think Blu-Ray will win out, between the backing of Apple on the computer front and Sony/Disney on the media front. People will want greater storage densities for backing up hard drives (as it stands even Blu-Ray is not really sufficient) and as they noted you can hardly have good quality HD vido on an HDDVD and still have room for extras - that people have shown they really like and most movies provide.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As reported elsewhere in the thread, Blu-Ray discs are made a material far more resistant to scratches than most DVD's today. So in fact they should be better off as far as renting goes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just like HDDVD does not hold as much as Blu-Ray.
Do not be confused by company names into thinking this is the same battle with the same players on the same sides.
Instead, Sony has learned from history and gone over.
Other media companies apparently yearn for the experience of being burned by a bad format choice. Perhaps they also skipped the chance to offer DiVX movies in the Circuit City fiasco and this is thier big opportunity for a "Character-Building" company move.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Allsop released a CD case many years ago that is darned near indestructible in normal use (and then some). I bought some for some of my favorite CDs and they're still completely intact. You can pound on these things and they don't so much as crack. If I recall correctly, the marketing info for them showed cars running over them and not causing them to crack. They were not very sucessful in the marketplace, though. Here's a link:
Allsop Strongbox
I don't mind what gets chosen.
But if I want to watch the Japanese or French version of the movie, that's darned well what I want to watch, with German subtitling if that's what I like.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
RAR archives can also do this, in any percentage you'd like. Just adds in parity data and fixes it as needed.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The problem with DVDs is they are already totally cramped. Turns out a lot of the "extras" weren't so extra after all. That's why you have brits buying American region 1 disks, because the EU region 2 disks skimped on the quality so they could include a dozen different language tracks.
A disk should allow for the regular HD-content, all the bonus materials, every language and dubbing tracks, previews, etc., all with room to spare. Alternatively, it should also allow for at least seven hours of normal-quality content. That way you can get a whole TV season on only 1-4 disks. Because there's a lot of non-HD content out there.
Here's what I hope they change with the next format, besides the obvious:
1) No regions. The ones they have never made any sense anyway - why on earth are Japan and Europe in the same group but Australia by itself? Language regions I could have understood. I understand the economics behind regions, but really. One world, one price.
2) Sophisticated sprite, text, and video control options. Did you know that DVD subtitles are limited to four colors to save space? Talk about a bad solution. And there's no way to control the sequence in video. There should be total control over what goes on screen, equivalent to what you could do with burnt-in material, but not burnt in. The ability to overlay sprites or auxilliary video to overlay signs or add censorship bars. Bleeping or replacing bad words. Skipping naughty bits. Or rehashing what you have into a director's cut. Actual text subtitles with PDF-style rendering to allow embedded fonts, and standard UTF options.
3) Built in, fully functional scripting language - python or perhaps a real-time language. Would allow for far greater interactivity. Also games, interactive data browsing, simple programs, and so forth. Also, if used intelligently would make controlling the many options much easier. For instance, to switch between english dub and native language+english subtitles, I wouldn't have to navigate menus to select the correct audio and subtitle options, guessing which was which because they only say "english 1" and so forth - I would press a button to toggle through the logical options.
4) The ability for outside files to wrap and modify DVD content. Particularly with the enhancements above, this would allow anyone to enhance a DVD for others. Specifically, by subtitling it in a language no one bothered to translate it into. Or editing it to suit parent's demands for kid-friendliness. Or, most attractively to the distributors, the ability to go back and fix errors AFTER the disks have shipped. A sane directory structure and system on the disk would make this a lot easier. As would a secondary region for writing in extra or per-disk data after they've been pressed.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Apple also supported DVD-RAM, and look where that is now.