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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/
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
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.
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.
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
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.