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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."
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
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