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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.
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?)
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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 have discovered that DVD has easily more than enough picture clarity for my pron watching needs, and I'm not sure I am really looking forward to HD porn... Maybe I just got used to grainy porn, but the high color fidelity, high contrast, and glisteningly realistic porn of DVD (rather than old school film transfer) is already more than a bit off-putting for me, sometimes.
As for dual angles: I wish they'd pick one angle and stick to it (hey, no pun intended), rather than have a movie edited to constantly switch cameras on me. Whenever it switches to bung-hole cam, I hit the alternate angle button, and by the time it actually switches (a few seconds), the movie cuts back to brown-eye-vision. If they really want to advance the technology, they should build a "hairy, bobbing man-ass" pixelizer right into the DVDs, for us more reserved porn enthusiasts.
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In that case, DVD will win. Seriously, only a few top producers like Hustler, Playboy and such appriciate HDTV, because they got the means to hire real beauties. Your average porn actress does *not* look more attractive in HDTV. The porn industry jumped all over DVD primarily because of random access. No more rewind/forward, easy looping, play at quarter/half speed and so on. Porn does not need to be watched in a linear, start-to-end fashion. What does HDTV bring to porn producers? Honestly, only much higher demands on them. But with HDTV cams at $1600 (Sony HDR-HC1) and dropping, perhaps it'll happen anyway. But I don't think the porn industry will lead it.
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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.
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.
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Yeah, but does anyone actually buy porn on a disc anymore? It would seem to me that the porn industry is already way beyond that, having offered downloadable and streaming content for years.
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"
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.
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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?
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