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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."
I agree. Even though I am on the Blu-Ray side I'll just be happy to have one standard. It does seem that there are many technical reasons to use Blu-Ray, though.
As usual, the pron industry will decide which format wins.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
That seems kind of odd. What would it have instead... S-Video and HMDI?
Birds of a feather, or in this case movie studios in this chummy chummy business, flock together. Since Sony is one of theirs, well you get the picture [pun alert].
In short, this is hardly surprising. Especially considering how many households will quickly enough have one player in the kid's must-have PS3. Might have been different if XBox 360 was shipping with HD-DVD, but that's clearly not the case.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My concern isn't really with which one will win out, we've seen DVD+R and DVD-R co-exist side by side for the last few years without too many problems, even DVD-RAM still gets a look in on many drives.
So, however this pans out, will it really matter to the consumer?
The pits on HD are 6-times the length of those on Blu-ray. So shouldn't there be less degradation, meaning a longer lifespan for the disk? (One would think that marks only 1/6 the size would deteriorate faster, no?)
I suggest you read Slashdot
Saying we are in the 3rd millenium (2001-3000) is the same thing as saying we're in the 21st century (2001-2100), or that you're in your 25th year.... it simply implies that we're no longer in the 2nd millenium (1001-2000) or 20th century (1901-2000).
Millenium 1: 0-999
Millenium 2: 1000-1999
Millenium 3: 2000-2999
It doesn't have to last a thousand years... it only has to last 10-15 for us to be "well into the 3rd millenium"
OK, so 90 percent support Blu-Ray, but what percentage support HD-DVD? It won't be 10 % because some companies (eg. Apple) support both formats, and others probably don't support either of them.
Its intresting how the Blue Ray go to such great lenghts to hide the imbedded DRM all player and disks will have.
For me until I heard about the Massive amounts of DRM being stuffed into Blue Ray I was in the Blue Ray camp, after I got a look at Blue Ray's DRM I changed my mind very quickly.
Its the consumer that will ultimitly decied.
I think this is going to be the view of a lot of people including myself. I just don't know how successful a new movie disk format will be given the time for general adoption by the masses vs speed of Internet connections. About the time it hits it's stride in the mass market, faster Internet connections and better on-demand video services will be available.
It took DVDs years to be accepted by the market. They'll have to offer much more with the movies to get the public to want to buy new copies of what they have. With DVD, it was all the extras and the supposedly non-degrading format. Since the consumer already has that with DVD, Blu-ray can't push that so they'll have to push the higher resolution but the general public doesn't really understand that much so it's something really abstract to them. Are they going to sell their soul (DRM) and empty their pocket book to replace their current movies? I doubt it.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
It has seemed pretty clear to me that Blue-ray will win, because thanks to the PS3, it defeats the chicken-and-egg problem of any new media, which is that no one will spend hundreds of dollars on a player for a new format when there are no movies, and no studio will produce movies if no players exist. Because the PS3 will put millions of blueray players in homes, compared with the meagre amount of early-adopters who will have hddvd players, studios will by neccessity go with blueray.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Sending the video out over analog (component) or unencrypted digital is forbidden.
The DVD CCA won't even let you send out uprezzed DVDs over analog or unencrypted digital (if the Macrovision flag is set).
It's completely ridiculous.
DVI w/HDCP is electrically identical to HDMI I guess, so that's probably permissible.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
They tried region coding, and people over here in the UK just got players chipped and hacked. Everyone I know has a multiregion player so that they can watch unavailable US movies or cheaper far east versions.
Start telling people that they can't lend a movie to a mate, and they'll either boycott, or work out a way around.
what a waste of time.
if i have the discplayer, it obviously has output channels to a tv and to a sound system.
so obviously i can rip it off from these same outputs. they can have all the drm they want, a bit divx encoding in there which loses their mighty "identification" spots that have been under discussion here somewhere, and the movies will again be out on the torrent sites. sure it will lose some quality, but i don't really think that downloaders will mind the drop of quality in such tiny amounts. (now camrips and ts's are loss of quality, a clean cablerip is as good as it can be on your tv). if you have a tv/video card with tv-in port, you're the man and the drm people are wasted.
if you really think that drm works, show me a drm that can't be just cableripped or that hasn't been cracked by software already (oh that dvd region joke never expires i guess...).
any measure they make with 3 years will be hacked with 3 months. any big secret about drm that you trust into taiwan hardware makers (hdtv producers for example) will be out soon enough & counter measured to make the whole investment in drm a total waste. and the saddest thing is that taiwan&china produce massive amount of everyday electronics already and the advanced countries can't afford to cut these out of the production system.
don't the movie/soundmakers really understand that the only bloody way to fight piracy is to lower the prices and make the content affordable ? this is the only thing that will ever decrease the piracy.
fight the bloody problem and not the results it creates.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Well, current DVDs already have invasive DRM. Mandatory ads, hard to copy, etc. I guess you refuse to watch them?
Whatever the new standard will be, they're all DRMed out the wazoo. That's just not a choice, seen from the industry.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I have to agree on this one.
Furthermore, as i see it, the only possible benefict that moving to a new format can give to the porn industry is "high definition content". This might be a real benefict for the part of the industry that concentrates on showing naked physically perfect women - aka softcore - (or maybe not if they rely on the technology to disguise the imperfections) but what value does it add to the part of the industry that concentrates on the action - aka hardcore. After all, most hardcore movies are hardly known for the grandeur of the scenarios (or the depth of the stories, or the quality of the acting of their casting)
If you think back to the change from videotapes to DVDs, you can see clear beneficts to the industry:
As i see it, none of these new technologies seems to bring any comparable beneficts for a business model such as the one from the porn industry.
Obvious beneficts for the traditional film industry, such as getting their customers to (again) buy their personal film library in another format, are hardly applicable to the porn industry - there is hardly a hot market for a new edition of "Debbie Does Dalas"
Think about it. Joe Consumer sees the Blu_ray at "The Wiz" or "Best Buy", and drools "Wow, what a sharp picture!!!". He buys the unit, takes it home, pops in a standard DVD on his standard TV set, and then wonders where all the extra resolution is.
You think I'm kidding but I'm not. I deal with people who hook their DVD into the VHS machine and then wonder why they can't see the DVD's play -- because the VHS machine is still set to "tuner", when it needs to be changed to "Aux" or "line in".
Believe me. People will return these things like mad when they don't get the same quality of image they saw in the store. They are not being told that they have to buy new DVDs and New TVs as well as the new player. It's like saying "This new stereo requires that you throw away your old speakers and buy new speakers too, plus, you can't play your old CD's in it either!"
I predict phantom warehouses of returned merchandise to keep it off the books so the stocks don't tumble.
Trust me on this. People are stupid.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Theoretical capacity or capacity-in-a-laboratory is completely irrelevant and is comparable to this press release that claims Blu-ray is what consumers want, even though you can't buy any movies in either format yet. The fact remains that HD movies only require twice the space that a regular movie does, so the first cheap player for cheap discs @ 20GB should be the winner.
Hmmm, let's see... Panasonic's Blu-ray player costs $2780 with $69 for the mythical 50GB disc or $32 for the real-world 25GB disc. Nope, not there yet. Not there in 2006 at all, I think.
Personally, I think consumers are going to be hard to push from good-enough DVDs to over-hyped hi-def anyway. Add to that a ridiculous DRM that requires new TVs and monitors and prohibits copies of media that's likely to be less durable than DVD (especially Blu-ray), then I know I'm going to save a fortune by not buying any of it. Non-DRM dual-layer DVD will be my solution of choice until they offer me something truly better.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Not at first anyway. Sony dropped a bombshell on it's partners when they stated that the 50gb discs wont be available at launch, and probably not for a while. So content producers will have to make do with the 25gb discs. Sony also said that they're sticking with Mpeg2 to encode. This isn't good, because using Mpeg2 at a high bitrate most of the disc is taken up by the movie and it doesn't leave much space for the extras. And all that extra space was a big reason companies choose BluRay over HD-DVD and most already planned on filling up the discs. Looks like Sony pulled a bait and switch on a lot of big companies.
HD-DVD will use VC1 or Mpeg4 which will give the same quality picture and using a lot less space. So even though on paper, BluRay has better specs, in real life HD-DVD will allow more stuff on a disc.
D
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"The content industry is going to see a serious backlash if they try this. They tried region coding, and people over here in the UK just got players chipped and hacked." The 'hackers will always find a way' argument is often made to make one's self feel better, but regardless of whether it has merit if people choose to believe it it will always diminish any possibility of a real victory. This is because it takes people and attention away from real arguments about the *principle* of giving consumers certain rights at the source irregardless of practical workarounds--a principle that, if accepted, can remain in effect no matter what technological means to cripple content exist and will not require faith in unknown hackers hacking unknown technology. So...If a modding 'backlash' is the equivalent of conceding the war to win the skirmish, I guess they can expect a backlash alright.
> You need to get permission every time you play a disc,
No you just made that up. Permission from who? Will the players have a cell phone built in and call up?
> your discs are permanently mated to your player.
Err, no! Obviously not. Otherwise when you upgrade your player, your entire collection would be written off.
> if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection
*Obviously* not or they would never sell a single player. Please stop saying whatever stupid little thing pops into your head.
Someone please mod the parent's propaganda post below zero before it confuses anymore gullable people.
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.
You think a 1920x1080p transcode will look worse than a 720x480 original encode? Hint: It won't. Try looking at some of the HDTV -> Xvid/WMV rips out there. Since they are still sticking with MPEG2, reencodes would be the norm rather than the exception anyway. Certainly, getting the originally compressed file would be superior to that again, but it is not a huge loss to quality, only to ease of ripping.
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.
Hint: Take two displays. Or three, or five. Compare them. This is SDMI all over again, which died on the drawing board because it doesn't work!
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.
More likely, if they are able to. Besides, there's little problem for pirates to keep a player away from all newer releases until they've ripped all the old ones. If you can rip the entire back catalog every time a player is broken, your DRM is still pretty screwed. Once you have decrypted the symmetric key, you can use this and share it with others. That makes everyone able to rip discs that have been broken once.
I think those who will really profit from this is not movie, tv or music producers, I think it is software companies. As long as the whole value of your product is essentially recordable, you have no chance to win. Screenshots of Windows/MS Office are rather useless though. Those are the ones that will cash in big from reduced piracy, and I think Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank when they think about it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People here might be forced to buy new TVs when the FCC forces broadcasters to transmit in high definition only (Thanks FCC. I had some money saved up, and I was feeling guilty about it.) - but I don't see people buying the players until they're easily affordable with comparably priced media.
As for archival storage, why anticipate investing in an upgrade unless it's an order of magnitude greater than what you have now? I haven't bought every storage option that came down the pike (e.g. I never owned a Zip drive). 30-50GB is a rather pitiful increase for the next generation. Think about it. A 9GB DVD is more than 10 CDs. A CD is more than 200 floppies! These new discs are 3-5 DVDs? Wake me when, and if, Blu-ray hits 200GB - and it better be fast, because holographic storage is likely to have 1.6TB discs by the end of next year.
Make no mistake. Blu-ray/HD-DVD is about entertainment media, not computer storage.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
So what's so great about Blu-Ray? Let's review the "Features"...
Somewhat higher capacity but not as much as initially promised
New and Improved Onerous DRM
Ancient encoding schema
Macrovision
Region encoding
Prohibited user operations
Language & subtitle choices which are limited to region
Can someone remind me why we want this?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The one that comes out on top is the one where you go to a Best Buy or Circuit City and buy or go to Blockbuster and rent a movie, and don't care what media its on. It will also be the one that costs $15 per movie, not sold for some $40 premium price tag.
It will also be the first player to hit the sub $100 range. Anyone releasing a next-gen DVD player for more then $500 will fail to capture the market. Why should next-gen DVD players, with mostly the same components as a $50 DVD player cost 10 times more?
In any regard, I will wait a few years before rushing out and getting any next-gen DVD player, perhaps by then they will open up Digital Cable standards and build HDTV tuners into every television (rotflol!).
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
People here might be forced to buy new TVs when the FCC forces broadcasters to transmit in high definition only (Thanks FCC. I had some money saved up, and I was feeling guilty about it.)
That's a definite possiblity, but I've been having some interesting conversations about the whole 'forced conversion' to digital. It will be nearly impossible to make millions of people go out and purchase a new TV overnight just because the FCC says everything has to be digital. I know I'll go without TV if that's the case. And maybe millions of other people will too. Hey that sounds like a good thing. Oh wait, we'll all just go to watching stuff on our cell phones, computers, ipods, etc. etc. etc... sigh.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
They're not 'working towards it' it's already there in the standards. It's mandatory HDCP. Blu-Ray will *not* output HDTV over anything else. Bought an HTTV with component? Throw it in the trash because blu-ray will only send it SD.
This uses PKI with revokable keys - the movie studios can just keep revoking keys that are hacked.
Of course that'll work until the the first popular TV model gets hacked, and they kill the TVs belonging to half a million users. That'll be one hell of a lawsuit.
I read an article just the other day saying that a lot of people think they are watching HD today, but they aren't. But these people like their "HD". So I suspect these people will buy Blu-ray players, attach them to their HDTVs (or even better, EDTVs) with analog component cables, and marvel at the wonderful quality. Never underestimate the placebo effect.