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Blu-ray Coming Out On Top?
wh0pper writes "Some interesting information came out at at the latest Blu-ray Disc Association meeting at Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Apparently, 90 percent of the CE industry and seven movie studios now back Blu-ray Disc. And most of the IT industry (except Microsoft) also supports Blu-ray Disc. This has prompted Mr. Parsons, Senior VP of Advanced Products Development for Pioneer Electronics, to say "There's no format war looming because it's not Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. It's simply Blu-ray versus standard definition DVD... Currently, DVD has 50,000 titles presently available, and both formats will co-exist for several years to come with new BD players supporting both formats. BD players make the perfect complement to new HDTVs that are being purchased by consumers." Mr. Parsons then announced that the upcoming CES would be used to launch Blu-ray Disc."
Everything you ever wanted to know about Blue Ray... http://www.blu-ray.com/
I'm not fat, just big boned...
I thought it was just one technical reason: the capacity of the disc. That's really all there was to it, right?
The point HD-DVD had going for it was that the discs and players would have been cheaper to make.
Hands in my pocket
There's plenty of technical reasons to use blu-ray.
There is very invasive DRM measures in blu-ray that make divx look like it would make Richard Stallman proud. You need to get permission every time you play a disc, and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
The studios love it but the consumers will be totally screwed over by it.
>There is very invasive DRM measures in blu-ray that make divx look like it would make Richard Stallman proud. You need to get permission every time you play a disc, and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
What discs??? I certainly won't be buying any such disks.
invasive DRM?
www.slysoft.com AnyDVD.
Bye Bye DRM/ads/etc.
and the real questions is: can u trust DRM by Sony? I know I won't.
I'll wait for slysoft (or the like) to make a good bypass software like they have for DVDs.
This would require a mandatory, permanent Internet connection for your BD player and I doubt we'll see stuff like that in consumer electronics in the next 10 years.
and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
I assume you refer to Sony's patent for such a mechanism. That patent was issued in 1999. They didn't put it in the PS2, they didn't put it in the PSP, now a few months ago it resurfaced and suddenly everyone assumes they'll use it for the PS3. IMHO Sony's too afraid of losing to MS to try something harebrained like that
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
You are totally missing the point.
The point of Blu-Ray is High Definition. So your analog video and audio outputs are not going to get you HD. You are not going to plug your HDTV to your DVD player using analog if you want HiDef.
The purpose of the DRM in Blu Ray is to block you from ripping the decrypted, compressed bitsream. If all you can do with BluRay is capture the analog, then we can already do better with regular DVD, so it would be a huge success for BluRay DRMs.
And if you know about what kind of DRM they are talking about, you would realize that its not going to be simple to permanently hack, even a software implementation.
Even if you are able to get the uncompressed HD image by hijacking your display device, watermark detection will make sure that your BluRay player keys will be revoked and wont be able to play new content.
The design of BluRay's DRMs has really been though out, and covers a lot of scenarios. Off course the implementations will have problems, bugs and exploits, but what it really comes down to is how well BluRay will keep track of compromised players, and how bad they are willing to perform key revocation.
Each player is supposed to have an unique ID, but I can see it from here: some manufacturer (cheap chinese for example) will mess up and produce 1000s of player with the same ID. When one of this player his compromised, 1000s of players will stop working with new releases if the studios revoke this key. 1000s of people will complain.
In the best case the manufacturer (contractually at fault for producing clones) will change the players.
In the worst case there will be lawsuits flying around between Studios, BluRay authorities, OEM, silicon vendors and consumers.
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high. There will be the need to put in place "secure" production lines , making sure that keys are not leaked and that no clone are produced. The huge liabilities that the OEM will face if they screw up will be enough to give Pioneer, Sony etc.. time to make a buck on BluRay.
In the wikipedea article you link to it clearly refutes your statement...
Year 0001 corresponds to AD 1. The year before that is 0000, which corresponds to 1 BC
It further links to an article on the 20th Century where it states...
The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar. Common usage sometimes regards it as lasting from 1900 to 1999, but this is incorrect since counting of calendar years begun in the year 1.
The FCC isn't forcing broadcasters to transmit in HD only(yet). They're forcing them to transimit in digital only which is very different.
I bought my first DVD player back in 1998 and it was a Creative Labs DXR2 multi-zone with S-video out. It was an awesome and affordable option back then, allowing me to be an early adopter of DVD tech. In all this years I remember the folowwing "Format wars": Circuit city's DIVX vs DVD Remember that one? Disney and Universal fully backed DIVX, that it required you to log on using a dial up modem to watch the movie in a 48hs term, then the movie expired. A lot of lazy joe's liked the format because it didn't required a ride back to the store to return the movie or pay late fees, but hardcore DVD fans hated it, and so it collapsed. DD vs DTS Back in the early days people actually discused which audio format was better, they posted comparisons and discussed which one will be the survivor in the format wars. Now (almost) every dvd player and HT supports both formats and still most people can't tell or won't care about the difference between them. DVD-R VS DVD+R More of the same, only 3 years away. the problem was solved offering dvd players that could read both formats. Most people don't give a damn about it and they buy the cheapest DVD recordable bulk they see @ Wal-mart or Compusa. Blu-Ray VS HD-DVD It will be more of the same. Corporations like Samsung said that they will offer a player that will play both formats if there is enought demand, and most cheap chinesse manufacters like X-view/JWIN/Admiral/Apex/you name it will sure follow this path. Don't bring me the "It's not posible to combine both techonogies because...", They said same thing about Divx/MPEG4 and now they are present in most decent players. Also DVD-AUDIO. Granted, price may be high at first, but remember that dvd-players cost $1k back in the late ninety's. Sony, on the other hand, will stick to "blu-ray" only players just like they do with Memory stick and other shit, so you will have a player that only plays half the HD content in the market, so will the PS3. Conclusion: Wait one or two years, buy a dual format player and that's it.
RTFA. It said that NO disk would require a connection to the internet. That is part of the standard, so how are they going to lock you playing it to one player? The (stated) reason that MS went with HD-DVD over Blu-ray is that Blu-ray doesn't have a spec for managed copy access. That was also one of the things they addressed in the article, but I guess it would be too much bother for you to read it.
Just because the Blu-Ray spec allows discs to be DRM'ed out the ass doesn't mean that every disc released is going to use those features.
I doubt that the content industry has forgotten about the failure of DIVX already -- they lost money on that, right along with Circuit City, for every movie on DIVX disc that sold for $2 on clearance after the product bombed.
Expect the full set of restrictions to be enabled only for Oscar screeners and things of that nature.