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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?
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)
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.
"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.
"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!
It does, and sure beats the names I proposed to replace DVD-R and DVD+R. I was going to go with DVD*R and DVD/R.
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.
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.
What was wrong with betamax?
or else!
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!
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
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.
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"
The plastic layer to the label side is something like 1mm thick, the laser side is 0.1mm thick. So the label side is safer.
Scratches on the laser side, on the other hand, are a different matter. The Blu-Ray group is requiring the use of a particular anti-scratch material that supposedly won't scratch with steel wool. It was used on the PSP face plate and some journalists reported the only way to scratch it was to take a knife and dig into it.
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.
10 bucks says this special coating causes cancer somehow. That's always the case with these types of things.