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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.
From the bottom of the article: But the bottom-line is that this is an exciting time to be developing next-generation high definition digital TV products that will take us well into the third millennium. ...Right. It's not like we all read news reports last week saying that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD would be replaced with HVDs within 10 years.
I think that HD-DVD will win the end, simply because it is the inferior format. Which is usually is the one that wins in the end.
But Greedo shooting first must be nice at 1080p, either way.
Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
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
I love it when major corporations fight large battles against each other instead of the consumer. ...Oh wait.
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
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.
>> instead of some incremental advance on blu-ray that gives us 100 GB or something lame like that.
* wolv looks at spindle of 100 DVD-R
* wolv looks at 5-pack of 100GB discs
Yes... damn them and they better not give us those lame 100 GB discs.
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.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
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.
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.
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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