HP No Longer Exclusively Supporting Blue-Ray

linumax wrote to mention an MSNBC article stating that HP is dropping its exclusive support for Blue-Ray. They'll be offering support to the HD-DVD format as well. From the article: "The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war' between the competing standards for a new generation of digital video players that can record high-definition films and video games. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD-compatible devices are expected to hit stores worldwide early next year."

Comments

Dead on arrival.

[croddy]

This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015. It's going to be DVD right up to the holocubes.

Re:Dead on arrival.

[zaphod8829]

Right, and no one sees any reason to store more than 4.5GB on a disc anytime soon either.

Wasn't this the very reason they changed the DVD acronym to stand for Digital Versatile Disc rather than Digital Video disc?

Re:Dead on arrival.

[badasscat]

This trumped-up format war is going to be dead on arrival -- because 90% of U.S. televisions won't be anywhere near an HDTV signal until 2015.

News flash: they already are.

Even "wait and see" articles like this one admit that there are already 16 million HDTV's in the US, which makes for greater than 10% market share (more like 15%). And that's as a percentage of all TV's currently in use - if you realize that there are more TV's in use than households in this country, then you can also make the assumption that many HDTV-enabled homes also have standard TV's in secondary rooms. So the total household penetration is probably more like 20%.

And the adoption rate is increasing, especially now that there's more of a reason to buy an HDTV - we've got the Xbox 360, we've got all prime time programming (except reality TV) in HD, we've got Blu-Ray and HD-DVD coming next year. At the same time, prices for HDTV's are falling through the floor - they have been well below the $500 mark for a couple of years now. You can buy a 26" HDTV for $299 at Best Buy. People who say HDTV's are expensive are focusing exclusively on the high end - but high-end TV's have always been expensive, HDTV or not.

Maybe you literally meant that most TV's wouldn't be near an HDTV signal until 2015 (that's what you actually said) - I kinda doubt you meant that but I may as well address that too just in case. All major metropolitan areas that I know of in the United States have access to over-the-air HDTV, cable HDTV and satellite. Rural areas have access to at least satellite. 100% of the US is covered by an HDTV signal of some sort, and most of the US is covered by several options.

You people who think the world is going to be stuck with standard-def analog TV forever are literally living in the past. Your friends probably have HDTV. A lot of people on this site have HDTV. Most new network programming is in HD, the new game consoles are in HD, the new optical disc formats are HD. It's already an HD world, and at some point, you'll join us.

Depends on your definition of support

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to sound like Bill Clinton, but there's support in the sense of "backing" and support in the sense of "working with." For example, you could say Apple iPods support mp3, but in reality Apple backs AAC while still working with MP3.

The modern day laserdiscs, both will flop.

[rolfwind]

Only the most open solution can win. Consumers will realize if they can't copy (to some other medium) or if either one angles them in DRM, that it just isn't worth it.

AFAIK, both of them drown in DRM features and there's no real buzz for them outside some in the video-phile community, DVDs will prevail - they are good enough and neither new offering offer killer must-have features for the majority of people.

Since either medium doesn't give me a significantly big boost in GBs that I was expecting, it will probably flop on the computer side as a gotta have (as a burner) because Holographic storage will blow it away by the time burners come out.

Re:The modern day laserdiscs, both will flop.

[jerw134]

Consumers will realize if they can't copy (to some other medium) or if either one angles them in DRM, that it just isn't worth it.

Right, because consumers everywhere are copying DVDs to other mediums.

With DVDs, you have NO (legal) ability to do anything with the DVD aside from playing it. With the new formats, they will have managed copy systems to allow some copying. So your argument makes absolutely no sense.

Microsoft is at the root of this

[Kohath]

HP wants to support HD-DVD because Windows Vista will have support for HD-DVD, but add-ons like Java will be required for Blu-ray. Microsoft won't ship Java with Windows Vista.

This only matters for PCs and laptops, not stand-alone Blu-ray players. The makers of stand-alone players are happy to ship Java.

I plan on buying the PS3 as my high-def disc player. It will support Blu-ray and it runs Linux. Plus I can play games on it.

Irrelevant before hitting the market.

[pla]

The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war' between the competing standards for a new generation

First of all, only those of us who actually want to use this stuff will "lose" this war. As with the DVD +/- "war", we'll just end up seeing every device need to license both formats, boosting prices and causing massive incompatibilities where people argue about which brand of media works best in which brand of drive. And Grandma still won't understand why she can't burn her now-in-HD soaps to a plain ordinary CD ("But it fits in the drive!").



These industry groups REALLY needs to suck up their pride, and just play a hand of poker to decide which format wins. The winner will agree to buy out the loser's R&D costs (perhaps with a bit extra as a deal-sweetener), and the loser will in turn refrain from unnecessarily fragmenting the market. Then we all win. Even the industry groups.



But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait, I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few bucks each).

The "home theater" market does not have the same requirements as the data storage market. For home theater, just switching the existing DVD standard to allow MPEG-4 would allow for HD movies. But for data storage, particularly backups, we now have desktop PCs with 500GB drives - Which will still take 20 first-gen Blu-Ray discs, or 34 HD-DVDs, to completely back up. And many of us who appreciate the need for good backups have home file servers in excess of a terabyte.

What we really need, we won't get out of simple industry greed in pushing incremental upgrades on us - We need everyone to say "screw the sub-100GB optical formats, let's finally get one of these multi-TB holographic techs we keep hearing about, to market".

It's all just computers

[Saint Stephen]

My personal opinion is that "HDTV" and "HD-DVD" or whatever are totally missing the point. There's no point in buying one of these "flat panel televisions" -- just go buy a computer monitor. There's no point in getting hi-def content on a dead-plastic disc or from your dead mainstream media. It's all just going to be files on a computer.

My 2cents.

1080p

[HalAtWork]

(no 1080p, but honestly where are you getting a 1080p signal from anyway?)

From people building support into their products like these people. Hopefully nobody will have the same attitude in thinking "What's the point, 1080p isn't so common" because I don't want to see another fucking interlaced display in my lifetime ever again! There is no reason we should have to put up with visual garbage such as interlacing. Holy crap, it's horrid. I'd rather watch 480p (or 720p) than 1080i, but I'm sure 1080i would be the most supported option just because it's the biggest number (notice how many don't support 720p and jump straight from 480p to 1080i).

And HP matters how exactly?

[SuperKendall]

Out of all the players in both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps, I literally cannot think of a more insignificant player.

HP is dropping exclusive support simply because they are acting as a Microsoft shill to try and shoehorn Microsoft's menuing language into the Blu-Ray spec. Undoubtedly it would stick in Microsofts craw to have to develop tools to help people build Java based menus that are going to be a part of Blu-Ray, and simialrily they probably already have tools lined up to support thier own format.

However I don't think HP's slight shift in allegance will have any impact. If Dell had moved it might be a bigger story, although really the players that matter are the consumer electronics manufacturers as whatever player there are the most of are going to be the players computer owners will want burners for to play thier own media.

Currently still the war looks to be over before it began with Sony shipping Blu-Ray players in every PS3. Within a year there are simply going to be an order of magnitude more Blu-Ray players than HD-DVD, and that will be that as much as the monolithc marketing engines behind HD-DVD will try and drag things out.