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HD DVD Demo a Disappointment
triso writes to tell us that the recent unveiling of the new Toshiba HD DVD production model met with a few difficulties. From the article: "It was supposed to be the grand unveiling of a new generation in home entertainment when Kevin Collins of Microsoft Corp. popped an HD DVD disc into a Toshiba production model and hit 'play.' Nothing happened. The failed product demo at this week's International Consumer Electronics Show was hardly an auspicious start for the HD DVD camp in what's promising to be a nasty format war similar to the Betamax/VHS video tape battle."
So what? A failed demo is nothing to laugh at. I mean they probably has a slight bug, that shouldn't be a sign that the format is totally screwed. Give them a break!
Hes good at solving these kind of problems.
I think this is what happened when the PLAY button was pressed. http://www.theapplecollection.com/desktop/large_20 04/blue-screen-of-death.jpg
Because something not working is new for Microsoft?
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
Or did Kevin Collins of Microsoft Corp. not have a first born child to offer up to the IP gods?
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Tthis is not a failed demo. Even the Toshiba executives cant get around their new DRM technology.
but DVD is dead! We need a new format to watch movies on, and fast!
The Detroit News ran an AP story YESTERDAY with a pic.
/ 20060107/BIZ04/601070376/1013
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
First point, HD-DVD had a bad demo and Cnet has one of the Blue Ray players on their "Best Of" list. Sounds like things are going to be interesting.
Second point, another famous demo failure I will point out is the infamous "Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death" that Microsoft had back in the day trying to show it off. And after that, only a few hundred million people used the OS. What a failure.
Moving Pictures...?
...I just can't think of this ever happening and another opening event...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
oh where to start...The classic at comdex in 90' when Windows 98 bsod'd... Last year at CES Windows MCE crashed when Bill demonstrated the photo software... Any others come to mind?
lookie here: http://www.kbcafe.com/videos.aspx/bsod
If you're showing off a new product in CES, don't you make absolute positively sure that the product actually works?
I mean this was a production model, so either all their prodution models are broken, or they got REALLY unlucky and got a bad one..
If it were me though and I was going to showcase a new product, I would make sure that it acutally worked..
Quality Control is your friend..
I will not buy either until safely assured the DRM is broken and I can rip as I want.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Now, people are not going to be very impressed with HD-DVD. Considering all the effort that they put into the demo, they should have at least tried it before giving the presentation!
basiCreations Software
oops, didn't include the tidbit that it wasn't their product for those who didn't rtfa.
Surely they will try to find something in the BR camp to level things out.
Just as an FYI. Format wars don't tend to get out of controll in a free market, it's only controlled market where people try to fence off "intellectual property" (which isn't a real free market property at all) that it becomes a problem.
"Studio executives argue that people want to own their content and that DVDs offer the same portability options as downloadable programs or video on demand services."
Um, own their own content... LOL! Which face are the executives speaking from this time?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/APWires/headlines /D8F0QFU86.html
I think it must be a publicity stunt to have all their demos crap out on them.
1. It's good for publicity
2. When you pay your small fortune for your crap version and it goes down on you, you can't say you weren't warned.
It couldn't possibly be be sabotage, not all the time.
Could it?
As far as I know Windows Media Player 11 allows full legal backups of HD-DVD.
False.
I'll do what I did with DVD, DVD-A, SACD, HDCD. I won't buy anything until one player can play all of them. This was an impossible situation with Beta/VHS. I expect it will happen quickly with the hardware this time. The formats will confuse the hell out of people who just want a DVD though, sort of like back when Apple had a 100 models of macs that were all pretty much the same.
In my mind, who ever can fit the most bits on a disc wins. I don't give a flying carp about video quality or format wars... I want to cram the most data on a disc and that's all.
Karma is such a bitch, ask Texas
This is not a Betamax/VHS battle from the consumer's point of view. I mean, maybe the content providers and equipment manufacturers may view it this way, but there's a fundamental difference from the standpoint of the consumer.
With Betamax/VHS, there were pretty significant mechanical differences between the formats -- having a single unit that could play both types of media was essentially impossible without having two completely separate (expensive and futzy) transports. In the case of DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, they are all 12cm spinning optical discs with exactly the same physical characteristics from the transport point of view. Yes, there is a difference from the logical data formatting and laser point of view, but there is no reason that I can see (other than licensing from the respective consortiums) that a single player couldn't play CD, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
So fine, as a consumer, I don't give a shit. Frankly, I'm going to be buying DVDs as long as they make them, and I'm perfectly happy with that. Unless the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD consortium prevents manufacturers from making a unit that can play both types, I'm going to buy a new player that handles all of the formats, and they can jerk off as long as they want figuring out who's a winner, and I can buy pretty much whatever comes out and be able to play it.
Already there are comments alluding to the future stability of this product. Sure sure. I used to work at a company developing new tech. We had embarrasing demo screw-ups too. Most of the time, they were human error, though occasionally the software had an unforseen problem with it. Remember those old bumper stickers that read: "Shit Happens." ?
The demo failed, B.F.D..
"Derp de derp."
I don't envy the guy that's responsible for preparing and setting up the demonstration. Rest assured that heads are going roll for this fiasco.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Where's the movie for this? Was there really no cameras rolling?
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Not all of the HD-DVD demos were a bust.
BetaNews has some screencaptures of HD-DVD running on a Windows Vista PC (playing the Bourne Supremecy).
It's mostly a profile of "iHD", which as I understand it is a mix of EMCA Script and XML for the titles and interactivity of HD-DVDs.
seems to be the name HD-DVD: imagine when we get recordable ones.. HD-DVD-RW. The abbriviation needs an abbriviation. At least blu-ray sounds futuristic
-AlexC
Sure its something to laugh at. Laughing at a screw up isnt some evil attack on them personally..
If you cant see the humor in a failed demo, or 'take a joke', then you are in the wrong business.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(simple explanation)
Once your scripted part is done, you can always go back and do things more naturally, and answer questions. But at least it works once properly. If it fails during this part, you can always blame the operator.
Agreed, much like the usual alcohol per penny bargains, the only thing that will fly for me is data per dollar.
Oh, and access time.
Err, and time to deterioration.
And possibly imperviousness to scratches.
I think that's it.
What's with all the bitching? I seriously doubt anyone want's to plunk down the cash for a 50/50 shot of device not being supported in the near future. So here's an idea. Why not have a DVD player that plays BOTH HD formats. You already have the bulk of the device made. I can't imagine it adding another $20 to the cost of the total unit (lens and tracker).
Life is not for the lazy.
The impact of this will depend on how widely it is reported in the media. Although the situation is better than it was even just two years ago, most people still don't give a flying frak about HD-whatchamacallsit. Geeks wanting the most capacity (Blu-Ray) + videophiles/Black-Friday-mavens-who-somehow-ended- up-with-an-HD-set wanting HD content now (HD-DVD) = still not enough to create a fuss over a failed launch demo.
Having said that, I'll personally throttle the guy who makes the Blu-Ray launch demo, if it fails. Blu-Ray has always sounded cooler; it's the one *I'd* want, and damned if I'm personally embarrassed by a technical glitch.
Can somebody please explain to me what's so awful about DVD that it should prompt millions upon millions of consumers to throw away billions of dollars' worth of discs and players in favor of some new format? Honestly, I just don't see the urgency. A few extra lines of resolution had better not be the answer.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
http://news.designtechnica.com/article8394.html
a _last_minute_switch/index.html
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/09/27/hd_dvd_support_
I don't know if WMP 11 allows it, but HD DVD specs allow it.
I can't think of it not happening to them.
Thanks for the link. I love the fake applause and laughter they put onto that track. It's Quality to match their software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There's no way a new format could be a "new generation in home entertainment." It's just higher resolution and copy protection. I hate being lied to.
I find myself feeling like WWII era Ukraine. Squished between Hitler and Stalin. Destined to be punished by whoever wins. I, for one, can't wait to be liberated by either blu-ray or HD-DVD.
He probably forgot to rewind. It's not like HD-DVD is a futuristic random-access video-on-disc technology or anything like that.
;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
ever watch a dvd on a 50+ inch HD monitor? looks like balls. Thus, HD-DVD.
...stated in the article as wanting pre-recorded hd content, how many have digital video in (dvi/hdmi), and of those, how many are hdcp enabled?
iirc, both camps will require hdcp enabled sets to operate at full capacity, otherwise the signal gets downsampled. Their paranoia over the "analog hole" will kill these formats faster than a format war.
they say they're aiming for the 1st adopters. well the 1st adopters have hdtv sets without hdcp!
that and a good scaler will make your dvd collection look really good on an hdtv anyway.
just my 2 cents
Analysts say the early adopters, those who rush out and buy whatever new technology becomes available, will jump right in and pay $1,800 US for a Blu-ray player from Pioneer or $499 US for the Toshiba HD DVD player.
:) ). I'm sure they want a pretty penny for Blu-Ray licensing as well. As it is I am sick of Sony and their fire-and-forget policy on practically all of their products - which is to roll out product and practically drop support immediately. Ever try to get new firmware for a Sony product? Ever try to do an out of warranty repair? It's usually cheaper and easier just to buy a new one. The cost for them to even _look_ at the problem is insane.
Hmm, which one should I get?? This is typical Sony.
My understanding of the manufacturing of the discs themselves is that fabricating Blu-Ray discs requires complete retooling, while making HD-DVD discs only needs a retrofit of the equipment used to make standard DVDs. Then you add Sony itself to the equation...They have a long history of developing proprietary standards, which are arguably superior, but end up being so expensive for the consumer that they die (the standard, not the consumer
The fact that Toshiba's demo didn't work means nothing. Ultimately the marketplace will decide who wins, and the trump card in the marketplace is cost. If Blu-Ray sets don't come down to be competitive with HD-DVD, HD-DVD will win by default - just like VHS did.
-R
So that hardware companies can have a new product. With the intense competition over hardware sales (battle between big guys and the no-name brands), prices have dropped really low for things like DVD burners, harddrives, etc. By introducing a new hardware spec, it'll give the "big guys" an edge over the no-name guys, so they can jack up prices on the new goods. All they have to do is convince Joe Schmoe user that the quality enhancements are worth the extra buck (or thousands if you include the HDTV, cables, etc.). IMHO (and in agreement with other posts so far on this topic) that these HD discs will not have that much of an impact. I'm waiting for holagraphic disks.
http://www.asti-usa.com
What happens if Windows does something unpredictable? You reboot. If that doesn't work, you reinstall.
So how is that different from your experience with Linux?
Actually, if I get something working in Linux, I expect it to work again reliably. If it worked before I went in front of an audience, it will work when the audience is there. You can't say that about Windows, at least not if you're Bill Gates.
If you do bother to become a 'power user', then you have a lot more tools than you do if you're a Windows user.
At the end it quotes:
"The (video) games industry since the early 90s has had two or three incompatible formats and it hasn't slowed the adoption of game platforms,"
when i think about it, this seems like a great analogy to say 'hey, look 2 different types of disc isnt really that crazy or impractical' but i think they're missing a big point. can anybody imagine what it would be like to have a single console per generation? something within me is screaming 'that would suck, less innovation, less choice, less everything'. instinctivly i know that with video games having different consoles is definitly a good thing, i just cant seem to qualify it in writing appropiately, im sure some of you will agree.
with data storage/movies/whatever though i find it hard to accept having two potential 'standards'. we're not talking zip disks or anything here, were you know that your probably not going to be able to use it on 'every' computer you come across. yes, development of more than one type of _potential_ storage media is a good thing but for something that is so important from a cost/ease of use point of view there is, IMHO, room for -1- standard only in the end. unfortunatly some people are going to get burned when that eventual standard emerges.
jaymz
We all like to bag Bill Gates, his BSOD demo and events like this failed HD-DVD demo. Out of curiosity though, has Steve Jobs ever had something fail like this during one of his demos? There has been much made lately of how much effort Steve Jobs puts into the preperation of his demos, so would be interesting to hear of cases where it still didn't go right.
Anyway, looking forward to Steve Job's keynote this week at MacWorld. Hopefully he will introduce something from totally out left field and blow us all away.
Where's my affordable dual-layer DVD media?
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
1. Ultra Hype New "Technology" 2. Display crashing of said technolgy 3. ???????? 4. PROFIT!!!!
I used to think DVD was acceptable, until I bought my 50" Plasma and saw "real" HD source material (and no, not everything that they claim is HD is really HD). You don't realize how much DVDs suck until you see them on a good monitor.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There is nothing Blu-Ray can do to win
Oh, except actually work!
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
The resolution is just so high on these new video formats, that the human eye is not capable of deciphering the image. Fortunately, the hardware makers are going to put limits on how much throughput can come through our monitors/tvs until the human eye can see the image. Once that part is taken care of, then everything will be fine. And to think everybody thought that scaling down the image on the monitors was a bad thing.
Yes, afterall we are all using NC's these days...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
What other OS on PC can people use that the hardware and software vendors would support with software and device drivers?
In this format war, it appears people will have more than one choice if one of the format screwed up.
That's comforting but I doubt Bill Gates will fire himself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
the movie industry can re-re-resell their products to millions of suckers that already own the Beta video, VHS video, laserdisk, DVD, and whatever other formats available.
Seriously, since when have standard DVDs not been good enough? I've seen DVD output on a huge HD television and it looks spectacular. Wouldn't it make sense to put off the update until we really need it?
The greed of companies today drooling over the upgrade treadmill that people have accepted absoultely disgusts me.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
A demo is 1 thing too fail but heck for me.. all i care about it that the 50- hd dvd/blue ray/dvd/etc player thing wich you can probly buy as early as next year works.
Julien. http://free.hostdepartment.com/8/81fortune/
That's like saying a 4 MegaPixel digital cameras suck because you can't print out pictures that are 100x80 inches. I never plan to print out pictures this big. On the same note, I never plan to have a 50+ inch TV. Really, my 27 inch seems like all I'll ever need. Maybe someday i'll get at 36 inch. But seriously, I never forsee in my life having the need for a 50+ inch television. So DVD is just fine for me.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think it's more than double the resolution. Is that not significant? If you think DVD is fine, than so is regular format TV.
Forget want or need. I don't know where in my house I can even put a 50 inch TV.
To be honest with you, I used to say exactly the same thing you said. I used to actually say I couldn't even tell the difference, but that was mostly because early generation source material didn't take advantage of it. I know it sounds stupid, but I actually find myself enjoying documentaries in HD more that I used to. It's like watching a documentary enacted on a stage rather than an obvious video. The color is so much more vibrant.
Wait until you see it, even on a small monitor before passing judgment. It's so much better than I expected.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
thats a really good point. after reading it i remember reading an announcement that loads of 'classic' movies will soon be released in UMD format for the sony PSP, i thought to myself 'jeez, that must be cheap'. i cant really see the argument for upgrading so soon to a new media format.
:)
yeah increased capacity, but for the average consumer what does this really mean? i've got a dual layer burner and still havent used up the 20 DVD-R's i bought 2 months ago. with harddrives as big as they are and recordable media so cheap and full of capacity it seems ridiculous to think that people will be flocking to upgrade _again_. if theres one thing the 90's & 00's have given us, its rapid 'suggested' upgrade cycles of computer components. it might be great that computers are developing so fast but its costing us all a fortune
unless games need to use the equivalant of 3 or more DVD's worth of storage (meaning just more crap to sit through when your trying to play) or peter jackson decided the lord of the rings should have been a 10hour marathon i cant see the immediate appeal for this technology. my parents & most people i know when im back home in northern ireland have only really got used to DVD these past 5 years.
jaymz
I'm sure the movie people are licking their chops at the prospect of selling many of us our favorite movies for the second or third time. However. . . They probably don't realize it yet, but HD discs are the end of that gravy train. There's nowhere else to go after HD.
You ask, aren't DVDs good enough? No. Personally, I don't think DVDs are good enough. They're the video equivalent of LP records. The video quality of DVD is basically the same as Laserdiscs, which have been around since 1978. For that matter, they're basically the same standard as NTSC, which goes back much further than that. HD isn't arriving too soon, I think it's long overdue.
Most importantly, HD discs will allow us to have a pretty close approximation of what was shown in movie theaters. The whole back catalog can be mined for HD discs. But if there are any future improved formats beyond HD, they'll run into the problem of finding material (other than IMAX) to show off its capabilities.
HD discs will be the video equivalent of CDs. That -- in my estimation -- is the threshold after which it won't be worth the hassle and expense of upgrading further.
You see what's happening with SACD and DVD-A? They're not winning the hearts and minds (and dollars) of the people because CD audio really is good enough. I don't think DVD video is good enough, but I think whatever comes after HD discs will falter for the same reason that SACD and DVD-A are faltering. The improvements offered will become too subtle for most people to be bothered about.
"Can somebody please explain to me what's so awful about DVD that it should prompt millions upon millions of consumers to throw away billions of dollars' worth of discs and players in favor of some new format? Honestly, I just don't see the urgency. A few extra lines of resolution had better not be the answer."
Amen, brother! You tell 'em!
I tried to say the same thing when this newfangled "CD" thing came out. We had all these hundreds of millions of vinyl records out there, and record players that could do a pretty good job of reproducing the music on 'em. Sure, there were some clicks and pops, and the dynamic range wasn't as good as it could have been, and maybe the stereo separation wasn't the best, and OK, yes, there were some problems with media durability - but was it really worth replacing all of that just for 30 or 40 dB of dynamic range and stereo separation? I just didn't see the urgency. One of these days, I'm going to get one of those things just to see what all the fuss is about. Who do I call to schedule an appointment with the Obsolete Format Police, so they can come confiscate all my cassette tapes? I *DO* have to throw away all my old format content when I buy a new player, right?
While on the subject of TV: frankly, I think color is overrated. You can say damn near everything you need to in B&W, without need for color - OR sound, which frankly has put hundreds of movie theater musicians out of work. It's a travesty.
Just because some bleeding-edge early adopters have TVs with 6 times the number of pixels that standard def DVD can produce and improved color gamut, and even sometimes doubled framerates, isn't any reason to actually introduce a new format capable of providing source content that good. Just because the 35mm masters that those movies are made from have resolution and dynamic range exceeding either SD *OR* HD isn't any reason to allow consumers to actually watch them with that level of quality. Or, God forbid, multichannel audio. No, no, give me a plain ol' 5" B&W mono TV and a bag of pork rinds, and I'm a happy Luddite.
I yearn for the days when a "moving picture" was when Grampa waved the book around the room so we could all see the illustrations.
[sarcasm mode OFF]
Is there some reason you DON'T want to watch movies in HD? And why do you hate America? [dammit, I said sarcasm mode OFF!] Having a Hi-Def set at the house and having watched several movies in HD from cable, I completely support the introduction of a format capable of supplying such movies in purchaseable disc form. I've watched movies from DVD on the same set, and they just don't look as good. That's not very surprising, I guess. So, the answer to your question is, unfortunately, that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will provide improved picture quality and thus an improved experience. For me and many others, that is sufficient reason to want to purchase a player in one or both formats. I'm sorry if that isn't the answer you wanted, but you knew that was it. We all know that DVD won't do HD, and we all know that HD looks better - so why shouldn't we introduce a disc format that CAN do HD? Since we DON'T have to throw away a damned thing, and since you can STILL get VHS at Blockbuster, I don't see why having a better medium will overnight mean that you can't watch your DVD collection. I honestly don't see what you're so pissed about.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Can someone enlighten me why this has to be a "format war"?
here's how I see it (keep in mind I haven't done extensive searching for info on the subject)
OK so we have 2 standards, why can't we as consumers only buy machines that will play both formats (as well as "legacy" formats) then manufacturers will primarily make players that will handle both.
I don't know all of the Pro's & Con's of each format, but this would allow content creators (be it movies, games, data backup etc.) to simply look at the "features" of each format and pick which will do the bast job for the given task/goals. then when a new project comes around, decide again. on a project by project bases.
that way creators win, and the consumer wins. and joe smoe doesn't really have to care what the disc is.
"Can somebody please explain to me what's so awful about DVD that it should prompt millions upon millions of consumers to throw away billions of dollars' worth of discs and players in favor of some new format? Honestly, I just don't see the urgency. A few extra lines of resolution had better not be the answer."
I was just at Fry's yesterday. They had big ass HDTVs with sporting events on. Pretty impressive. Then, a couple of TVs down, they had DVDs playing on these same TVs. See it side by side like that, and DVDs look butt ugly in comparison. Now, frankly, I think DVDs are fine. But I also don't have an HDTV. If I watch several hours of HDTV, then I pop a DVD in, there's going to be a jarring 'blech' reflex. With that, I could see somebody saying "Hmmm.. it's about time I spent $300 or so on an HD player."
In short: the demand is there. Taking it a little bit further, extra capacity on the discs wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Most of the DVDs I've purchased in recent months were either 2-disc special editions, or multi-disc seasons of TV shows. If they are thinking ahead enough, they could put more hours of content on these discs and save some manufacturing costs. That could potentially be a motivating factor here, but honestly I do not know. In any event, I don't see what's so non-sensical about it.
"Derp de derp."
Analysts say the early adopters, those who rush out and buy whatever new technology becomes available, will jump right in and pay $1,800 US for a Blu-ray player from Pioneer or $499 US for the Toshiba HD DVD player.
I guess I was an early adopter of HDTV, because my set only has component inputs. AFAIK this means I won't be able to play EITHER format (at true HD resolution) because I can't support the oh-so-wonderful copy protection in HDMI connectors. As far as I'm concerned, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can both take a flying fuck at the moon.
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
Studio executives argue that people want to own their content and that DVDs offer the same portability options as downloadable programs or video on demand services.
Okay, Mr. Studio Executive, perhaps now you'll explain to me just why you should be allowed to control how I use something that I own?
(The scary thing is that Joe Sixpack would probably eat up whatever bullshit the studio exec spouted in response . . .)
Last time I checked colour is still 32 bit hence the fact 32 bit displays are capable of playing back hd material. While I won't disagree that the resolution make the picture better better, especially if you have the screen real estate to 'enjoy' it, the margin by which it is superior for video material shrinks rapidly as you step down to progressively smaller displays. Most people I know don't even have their displays configured properly to begin with, which tells me they don't really care about 'picture.' Which makes sense, a good movie is a good movie so long as the visual quality isn't so bad as to detract from the viewing. Then you have people who pay hundreds of dollars to have their televisions calibrated by a technician to an accuracy that is beyond the limits of human vision. Clearly, they enjoy masturbating over the fact their picture is 'optimal' more than they enjoy watching movies. reference quality monitors have their place but it isn't for the home viewer :) The mass market will be ready for hdtv when it doesn't cost them anything more to experience it.
The optical media hardware industry can't get CURRENT DVD media to work reliably in all CURRENT drives. Go to any of the major DVD recording Web sites and see how many people have insane problems trying to find media to work with their drives. How are they going to get this one to work?
If you can measure the failure rate, it's too high. And DVD media are a nightmare to get working reliably. Only buy top-of-the-line Taiyo Yuden media and DVD drives made in Japan. Nobody else - meaning the Taiwanese - can get it to work reliably.
Call me when there are HD drives on the market and media that work together RELIABLY.
In other words, call me in two or three years.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Exactly :). The system detected that more than five people were in the room, necessitating an upgrade of the license from "Family Viewing" to "Public Performance".
If the respective camps can't decide on a standard format, then the worlds consumers will decide for them.
The last thing consumers want is a format war, but if it comes to that, we will decide who wins based on quality, price and useability of product.
oh come on! don't you guys remember what happened during the windows 98 demo? Why would you expect them to be affiliated with any product that had a stable release for demo?
Who cares? Broadcom already has technology that allows players to handle both HD-DVD and BluRay. Eventually these combo players will take over the market, and HD-DVD/BluRay will become as irrelevant as DVD+RW/DVD-RW. People will just use whatever they want because both formats work for everyone.
So you are saying that if managed copy (as of now only HD-DVD makes it mandatory) works and iPod becomes a supported device then what is your argument against DRM again?
Is there something in the EULA that says I have to throw away my old player and discs if I want to use one of the new formats? Wasn't aware of that.
I predict the format war will be won by the standard with the weakest DRM.
Or the most porn.
Managed Copy is not a backup of the disc - it allows storing the movie on a HD, and broadcasting it around the house. But unlike a backup there would be no way to restore that copy to another disc should yours go bad, or even to another computer.
Also, Blu Ray was considering adding managed copy - I don't know where they ended up on that. Blu Ray was also considering dropping region restriions, I could find no word on if that came to pass or not...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm getting sick and tired of people saying things like:
"DVDs are great, why do we need anything better?"
When LaserDisc was introduced in 1978, they were GREAT. They were amazing. They could push right up against the limits of the NTSC standard. LD was really over-designed because very few people had TV sets good enough to show them off properly. DVD video is basically the same thing, it's designed to hit the NTSC standard. TV sets today are many times better than those of 1978, it's the signal standard that needs to catch up now.
So. . . 27 years after the introduction of LD format, how much longer should we wait for an improvement? 50 years? 100 years? Should we just give up on the idea of progress completely, and settle for watching blurry NTSC-quality images from now on?
No. We need a pre-recorded format for ATSC -- we've needed it badly for several years, in fact. This is the one huge element that has been missing from the HDTV transition.
Now we're on the verge of a video format that can show movies in a reasonably close approximation to how they appeared in theaters. VHS can't do that, LD can't do that, DVD can't do that. HD discs will. Nobody should underestimate the importance of this, because the back catalog of movies that can benefit from this presentation goes back many decades, there are literally thousands of them. There are movies from the 1930s or possibly even earlier that will look better on HD discs than they can on DVDs.
That won't happen again. If somebody 10 years from now tries to come up with some new format to replace Blu-Ray, or replace HD-DVD, they're going to run into a big obstacle. It's because most movies in the back catalog don't contain a lot more information than ATSC can present. Most movies weren't shot in 3D, they weren't shot in IMAX. There's nothing to be gained by presenting them in a format more advanced than ATSC-HD.
We can already see a preview of that, because there have been quite a few TV series shot, or produced, on NTSC videotape, which means they won't benefit from being put on HD discs. This is why I think HD format has a lot to offer, but anything that comes after it will probably falter in much the same way that SACD and DVD-A are faltering.
Why the comparisons to the MS blue screen of death? This isn't an operating system, it's a freakin' DVD player. This is one of those things the consumer expects to "just work". It's a simple appliance, like a microwave or a toaster. You wouldn't expect someone to debut some new toaster ("it makes your toast, but keeps your neighbor from eating it!") and have it not work. It is unacceptable for a DVD PLAYER to not work at a demo, and they should not be cut any slack!
I also assume they would haev back up machines and parts just in case. That is a bit difficult if this was demoing to the public though.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I guess they probably didn't enter the DRM key for the disk right after hitting play? Or did it not even ask for the key?
Either way it's not their fault, they were probably sold a pirated demo disc. It is always the pirates' fault, remember that.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You gotta stop watching porn on your 50" HDTV unless you want to see massive balls...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
All I can think of when I hear the posts of people saying 'My 59,000 inch TV makes DVDs look like crap' is two things. Firstly, get better movies, so you pay attention to the damn thing and not your TV, and secondly, that's complete nonsense. As a projectionist who has worked plenty with 35mm and DLP projectors (the $200,000 ones, not the Dells), I can honestly say that while the difference is striking between HD content and DVD, it's not nearly so bad as the difference between DVD and VHS. While the difference is there, it is not phenomenal, and you only notice if you watch a lot of HD content, and even then it seems more psychosomatic than anything. I can think of two recent examples to support this. The first is the recent article on Maximum PC when they took a bunch of people, and played their favorite content back to them using various different encoding methods. Out of 29 total tests, only 9 were correctly identified. The second is this video [ugoto.com]. Either way, I think the majority of the HD debate is just an excuse to brag about a nice TV.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
with HDMI inputs
Even if HD DVD was so open and friendly, you'd still get smacked with DRM when you use HDMI. Not to mention the licensing fee for the DRM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP
Paying for DRM, that sure sounds like fun to me.
You don't realize how much DVDs suck until you see them on a good monitor.
Boy, you got that right. I have heard people claim how much better DVD is than VHS- but a high quality VHS tape is better (the first few times you view it). Anyone who has ever watched a sunrise/sunset on a DVD will notice how crummy the quality really is. The lack of subtlety in the colors is quite striking. It ends up looking like a bunch of thick bands of colors one after another. I wonder is this from the compression or what?
It must have been some error in the DRM key validation procedure between the player and the disc (1). I believe it was quite a successful demo, it shows truthfully the roadmap for the "media consumption devices" of our bright future. (1) passive media acting as an independent entity? Isn't that strange, isn't the hardware I own omnipotent on the bitstream it receives at its input ports... oh, sorry I just woke into the '00s...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
It must have been some error in the DRM key validation procedure between the player and the disc (1). I believe it was quite a successful demo, it shows truthfully the roadmap for the "media consumption devices" of our bright future.
(1) passive media acting as an independent entity? Isn't that strange, isn't the hardware I own omnipotent on the bitstream it receives at its input ports... oh, sorry I just woke into the '00s...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
get better movies
Get better glasses.
I can see a huge difference on a 30 inch TV between 480x720 (DVD) and 720x1280. I don't have to be told whether it's in HD, I can actually figure it out on my own just by looking at it.
I've watched old silent black and white movies that were very enjoyable, but I'm still itching for some 1080p.
My guess is that one of the folks getting things setup slid in one of thoes Sony CDs...who knows that that rootkit would do when it saw a HD DVD.
Maybe you don't. But he sure does. He's not perfectly happy with DVD resolution on a 32" screen.
Anyone who has ever watched a sunrise/sunset on a DVD will notice how crummy the quality really is.
Anyone who watched a sunrise/sunset on a poorly authored DVD. Probably on a poorly calibrated display too.
I have heard people claim how much better DVD is than VHS- but a high quality VHS tape is better (the first few times you view it).
Yeah, a well-mastered VHS tape is better than a poorly mastered DVD. But a well-mastered VHS doesn't even come close to the quality of a well-mastered DVD. There are plenty of crap DVDs out there, just as there will be plenty of crap HD-BLU-DVDs too, if it ever becomes popular enough for anyone but videophiles to purchase.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Last time I checked colour is still 32 bit
Because the human visual system is not as sensitive to fine color detail as it is to fine brightness detail, many digital video systems downsample the chroma signal (which is what remains after the brightness is subtracted from the image) by a factor of 2:1 in each direction when viewing VGA. This means your 720x480 pixel DVD picture actually has only 352x240 pixels of chroma. But in HDTV, your 1920x1080 pixel picture has 960x540 pixels of chroma.
The Betamax shocking myth exposed in detail
:
Occasionally some people claim that that BETAMAX was superior or equal to VHS and VHS succeeded despite it!!!!
That is not true! It died from countless TECHNICAL deficiencies.
BETAMAX was merely a miniature version of a 60 minute U-Matic tape system with minor loading differences. BETAMAX had such a ridiculously long tape path difference between its VIDEO RECORD HEAD and its AUDIO RECORD HEAD that it was sheer lunacy to bother trying to use it compared to VHS to
1> stop fast forward resume play
2> stop rewind resume play
3> use in a shoulder held cam corder.
4> pause
Why? the long twisting winding tape path! A huge laughable long looping winding mess where you had to eat up lots of space and loop out lots of tape from the cassette to play and put back lots and lots of tape back into the betamax to resume play.
People went ape when they saw how tolerable momentary "fast forward' and momentary "rewind" were on VHS compared to slow unusable betamax.
Rewinding and fast forward was so incredibly tedious and useless on betamax that betamax first introduced fully threaded partial speed 'fast forward and rewind" where the tape was not reinserted into the cassette for safety.
The Sony LV-1901 console TV/recorder shipped in the US in November of 1975, the SL-7200 deck in shipped to US in spring of 1976. Both sucked for FF and RW compared to all existing VHS players in 1976. That began the decline of Betamax as word spread. Those beta units also were merely 60 minute recording units.
Even in 1978, the video explosion year, No betamax machine for home use (america) had a PAUSE on the the remote. NO PAUSE BUTTON!!!!!
Ha!
in 1978 (and the previous two years) EVERY VHS recorded had audio input dubbing, (a fun way to adlib over television shows with buddies), but in 1978 no betamax units had audio dubbing still!
in 1975 and 1976 the Betamax players had no ability to easily pirate video... they deliberately lacked audio/video inputs !!!! VHS tapes were used by all the "tape traders" and EVERYONE had Star Wars in the summer of 1977 on VHS illegally that I knew. EVERYONE.
Sony, after wondering why people wanted "pause, Fast forward, rewind, and video duplication "piracy") reluctantly added audio/video inputs in a special model of the SL-7200 deck, called the SL-7200A deck. But only addressed the audio/video input issue with that model.
Beta was dead by 1980, but the thing that really helped kill it faster perhaps was the FRONT LOADING deck where you put in the cassette from the front instead of the top. Beta from sony finally allowed that in 1981 though and was trying to keep up with vhs home users preferences at a faster pace than they did in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980.
Eventually all VHS players offered that for 4x and 8x speed viewing, but in the critical format year wars people HATED how slow beta was to do actual jumping around for fast forward and rewind.
No one on the internet remembers this or ever talks about this, except me as far as I can tell.
*** I USED BOTH IN late 1975 (My dad was eventually the CEO of one of the largest video tape replicators in the world) And used both in 1976 onward. *****
Anyway... then VHS developed 4 hour mode, and 6 hour mode.
In fact the Betamax was originally only 60 minutes because 250 meters of tape fits in a VHS T-120, and only 150-meters fit in a one-hour K-60 (later L-500) Betamax cassette. VHS used the tape up at a slightly slower speed too.
People really wanted 4 hour mode. And people REALLY wanted a 2 hour betamax mode. Both were created at about the same time (Summer of 1977 for Sony incompatible new 2 hour mode called B-II, and 1978 for RCA 4 hour mode.)
No Betamax ever had 6 hour mode. And 2 hour prerecorded betamax tapes looked like CRAP compared to 2 hours tapes of VHS but betamax people do not remember this at all. They overlook B-II and are misremembering 60 min
Also ironically, DVD has primed people for the idea that stored material that you purchase should be higher in quality than the live TV you watch. DVD picture quality is inferior to HDTV, so naturally you should have something of equivalent quality.
The real driving force on home theatres has been the drastically improved sound systems rather than picture quality. So now it is the turn for the picture to catch up with the improved sound.
I disagree with you as HD being a dead end. There is plenty of growth left past HD content, because frankly HD content is still crap when you compare it to computer monitor resolutions and to digital still photography.
As long as people keep buying ever bigger monitors there will always be room for higher resolutions. Think HD looks great on a 46", well I'm sure it'll look like crap on a 100" unless you are sitting back 15 feet" Yes I'm well aware you should be sitting back 15" but that's a point lost on most technophiles.
HD
1900x1080 at 24hz -- 2mp
My ancient (it's over 1 year old) Canon Rebel
3072x2048 -- 6.3mp
My new Nvidia 7800GT video card
2048x1536 60-85hz -- 3.1mp
The real stopping point for all technology is the human limitation. Until the day comes where we can no longer distinguish between watching a video and looking out a window, there will always be someone trying to improve the picture quality.
Someone will introduce a SHD-DVD player (super hi definition), and someone else will introduce a Bluer-ray player.
bad, too-low-rate MPEG2 compression, yes.
can anybody imagine what it would be like to have a single console per generation? something within me is screaming 'that would suck, less innovation, less choice, less everything'.
The difference is that compared to makers of video game consoles, makers of video disc formats are wide open with the licensing on their formats:
maybe they're pretending to like toshiba but really on a campaign to make them look bad. Or somebody got bribed by bmg, lol.
Isn't a DVD still a cleaner source than an SD broadcast? How do you cope with regular TV shows on an HD set?
Maybe the system fails after the 20 test rehearsals?
... and then they built the supercollider.
You do realize that, on good systems, normal, undamaged CDs don't really sound almost any better than normal, undamaged vinyl?
Otherwise your argument is fine, if a bit confrontational, but this is slashdot. If you argue back without pissing someone off then you're a very odd person, here.
Corollary: if you think DVD is crap, then so is 10,000,000,000 by 10,000,000,000 pixels. Holographic super-DVD.
In other words, your comment doesn't make a lot of sense. Saying that standard TV should make one just as happy as DVD ignores the "sweet spot' of human perception. Decreasing resolution below a certain point will rapidly decrease perceived quality. Increasing resolution above a certain point will cause no increase in perceived quality whatsoever.
In fact, one little known factor in printed high-resolution documents from bitmap files is that the results can be worse than a lower-resolution image, because of screening and interpolation problems. Similar issues exist with digital display.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Beta was better quality and just as usable
The first Betamax decks could record 60 minutes on L-500 tape, while VHS decks could record 120 minutes on T-120 tape. Thinner tape extended them to 90 minutes (L-750) and 160 minutes (T-160), and long-play modes further extended them to 270 minutes (L-750 in Beta-III) and 480 minutes (T-160 in SLP), but VHS was still way ahead in record time, which was important for the time-shifting use cases. (Recording times in PAL countries are even longer.) In addition, VHS's smaller helical-scan drum reduced video bandwidth but allowed for the VHS-C format, which let the same tapes be used in camcorders and full-size VCRs.
Solution: don't buy a HDTV set or disc player.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Phew! All I need to do is not spend thousands of dollars on a 50" TV, and I'll be able to continue thinking that DVD is adequate. I'll be sure to avoid the mistake of getting a decent TV... Which actually won't be that hard, because I wasn't planning on getting one.
Dissing HD because it isn't as much better than DVD as DVD is better than VHS is truly damning with faint praise. The thing is, VHS sucks ass and can't do even a halfway decent job of reproducing a mediocre format - NTSC. DVD does a good (not perfect, but good) job of reproducing content in that mediocre format. HD, however, is a noticeably superior format. It remains to be seen whether HD-DVD or Blu-Ray do an acceptable job of reproducing content in that superior format... but since they're both basically DVD extended to HD spec, I see no reason to think that they'll do any worse at reproducing HD than DVD-SD does at reproducing NTSC.
I have 10 years experience in broadcast video engineering, and a few video component designs in my portfolio. I have a true HD (1080i native) set, and an HD DVR to go with it. I can easily tell the difference between HD content and DVD-SD content, and I don't give a shit what Maximum PC has to say about it. Given the choice between a DVD of some movie and a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD of the same movie, I'd rather watch the HD version. I have no reason to feel embarrassed at preferring higher-quality video. If you can't tell the difference or don't think it's worth it, that's your problem and not mine. I don't need an excuse to brag, but I think perhaps you have some inadequacy problems to deal with.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Anyway, it seems you know just enough to be dangerous to yourself. If you think a normal DVD signal played on a TV of any reasonable size and any reasonable viewing distance is anywhere near the resolution limit of the human eye (at the foveal vision) you're crazy.
Furthermore, none of this has anything to do with sampling and interpolation issues. I don't know why you even brough that up.
If you look close up, it's almost too good. I can see compression artifacts a lot easier, and what looked like a flat field of color on a standard TV (say, on cartoons) now looks "noisy" because of the far better color (I only got it last month, so my impressions are pretty fresh). After the novelty wore off (and I didn't get up right next to it), I found that I didn't really notice. And when I compare to my old 32" standard TV in another room, it looks a lot better overall. Convergence is perfect, color is better, and it squeezes out everything it can get out of the SD signal.
So overall it took a little getting used to it, but it's awesome, and I definitely wouldn't go back. I'm really looking forward to HD movies.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
(to put it in terms Slashdot will understand) That's like saying all you have to do is not try Linux, and you'll think Windows is perfectly adequate as a server. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Thank you.
My set (42" Hitachi) ALSO has only component inputs. Two of them. And so I don't get to have "HD" either. The HD nazi has spoken: "No HD for you!".
Blech...
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
If a DVD looks that crap to you, the highly-paid compression engineers weren't doing their job. A *properly encoded* DVD stream looks way better than VHS, in every way.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Why? Why do I want this?
.. I'll just get it on Pay per View, or on HBO On Demand).
It seems like people are spouting all of this "oh, it looks so good on HD". Who gives one rat's ass. To me, it's like saying "Well, the crap they're producing sucks, so we'll give it to them in Hi-Def and then they'll be so distracted by how GOOD it looks, that we don't have to have a good story."
Look at all those great stories that were produced (and loved by generations) before all this digital crap came out. Sound of Music? It's a Wonderful Life? Annie? Those were good stories, and the quality sucked. But if the story / content is awesome, who cares if you're "immersed" in the spectacular quality. You want to see it high quality? Get off your couch and go there. Grand Canyon in Hi Def? Please. Go there, see it's breathtaking beauty. Then you can look at whatever you want to see -- without having to see what the director wanted you to see. Sporting events? Who needs to see the sweat beading off the football player's ass. Action movies? Why do we need to see every droplet of blood that flew off the bad guy's head.
Booooring.
I have better things to spend my money on. DVD works just fine for me (and honestly, if I really want to see it
= Grow a brain...
and they want us all to upgrade to HD and pay top $ in the process? I seriously don't see the point. Current DVD's are fine for me and I will be upgrading to neither HD-DVD nor BluRay. Sorry MIAA, Sony, Toshiba, Microsof et all.....my money is staying in MY pocket.
I just got a HD TV for Christmas. It has a HD tuner in it and looking at the difference between over the air NTSC and HD is very noticeable. No doubt about it being an upgrade in that respect. However, putting a DVD in and trying to compare it to HD makes the difference much harder to determine. I know it doesn't fully realize the potential of HD but perceptually it is getting close (at least on my screen and with my player). Once the HD content comes out in whatever format (HD-DVD, or Blueray) the potential should be filled, but for the average consumer the difference may not be enough. It will eventually catch on, but for the most part it is going to take quite a few years to do so, for what's the point of HD content if you don't even have a HD TV? We will be in the next decade before HD discs are mainstream, just look at how VHS is holding on even though DVD easily demonstrates the superiority of its format. However, going to your comparison between music and movies. CDs did hit a wall. No one but the audiophiles would find a problem with a standard music CD. Listeners don't know a difference. SACD and DVD-Audio have never taken off and never will. However, music files have taken off whether it is mp3s or aacs or whatever format you prefer. I hardly ever listen to a real CD now. All of mine are ripped onto my computer and I listen to them when I am working or I'll throw them onto my iPod and plug it into my car or put in headphones or whatever. I think movies will end up the same way. Let's say HD discs eventually become the "CD" of the movie industry. Anything afterwards will not have a better perceived picture quality to the average consumer and they will look for value in some other direction most likely being portability. We are already seeing this a bit with the video iPod and the PSP. I would love to have a device where I can carry my whole movie library around and then choose what to watch. Why have little kids scratch DVDs trying to put it in themselves when you can stream the movies off a computer with no possible way for disc destruction? It seems logical to me, although it will take time for all of this to become mainstream (we do see evidence of people already doing all of these things). This is where I see the future: there will be no main disc format after either Blueray or HD-DVD, it will be some type of DRM laden file that you can take wherever you want (similar to how songs from the iTunes store are). Hopefully Blueray or HD-DVD are eventually easy to rip though, because I really like having control over my files without DRM. One can hope at least.
It's not being a Luddite to ask if a technological advancement is really worth the asking price. I'm the one of the biggest gadget freaks there is, and I have zero desire to have one of these stuid behemoth HDTV mounted on my wall, what with all the techno glitches and format instability. It's all just polishing a turd. Where's the real revolution in entertainment?
VHS being capable of about 250 lines of resolution and Beta being capable of about 300 lines of resolution. No matter what you would like to believe, Beta had superior picture quality.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to understand what those Betamax users were all about. They weren't interested in FF/RW and other "special effects", they wanted the best quality image they could get out of the films that they wanted to watch at home. They weren't about trying to steal and be a pirate of terrible image quality as you claim to have been. For many it is about quality rather than bells and whistles.
-sigh- I wish I was still so young and naive as to believe that it's possible to live without compromising in some way.
Oh, sure. You are exactly correct. I've still got all my vinyl records, most of which I took care of from day 1 and thus still sound good. I'm actually rather fond of the sound of vinyl through good tube amplification (Luddite!) But, I prefer color TV to B&W, and really stopped reading books with pictures a while back :-) I guess I was a bit snarky, but then GP made some really stupid arguments (throw away all my DVDs? Huh?) and I don't have much patience for that. Probably shouldn't have responded so quick to the other guy, who says that anyone with an HD set just wants to brag. I bet that one won't get me any nice guy points, either.
Honest truth is that LPs really don't have the dynamic range, s/n, or stereo separation of CD. It's a limitation of the medium, not the format. They do have the advantage of being all-analog, which I believe is a point in their favor when compared to 16/44.1, and which should result in better frequency response; well, wider response, anyway - between the variations of the cartridge, preamp, and RIAA filter the linearity of an LP's frequency response is marginal at best. However, I don't think that technically there's *any* way for an LP's performance to exceed something like 24/96, if done correctly - which, incidentally, early CD's weren't. Done well, I mean. Early players often had only 14-bit A/Ds, and 16/44.1 was a compromise anyway. That said, of the few albums I have both CD and good vinyl copies of, the vinyl is usually better.
Err... sorry. That was off-topic. I could expound for hours about audio formats, quite a bit of which would be subjective, and I'll bet you've heard most of it before anyway
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
This effect occurs because of discretization. Remember that there are only 255 choices for the level of each color chanel. The eye can easily distinguish 255 colors. When a picture is dominated by a single hue (e.g. blue sky, orange sunset) the borders between areas with different levels become quite clear.
I watch DVD's on a 120 inch front projector and they look great to me.
When will these idiots learn? You fake demos! At worst you have 2 or 3 computers/devices running simultaneously so you can switch to another when the first doesn't work.
The first LDs were 30 mins per side (yes, the 12" ones), the later CLV ones were 60 mins per side.
So for most movies you had to flip once or twice and swap discs once.
Despite all of this, LD was a success. It was around for a long time. It was perhaps not a widespread success, but then again the discs cost $50 a piece or more, were huge (as you say) and so prone to warpage that renting them was an enormous risk.
As to VHS, most say VHS won because it recorded more time (4 hours initially, 6 later, Beta topped out at 4 3/4 hours for most of its life) and because Beta had no porn. The movies being on VHS format and not Beta was probably an effect, not a cause. Additionally, JVC was more aggressive in licensing VHS than Sony was with Beta, thus making more VHS players available at more competitive prices.
I don't know which HD format will win, but barring a case of over-DRM, I am sure one of them will succeed. There is demand for HD content, at much more than there was for LD content, and that survived for years.
I know I have stopped buying stuff on DVD because I know the quality just isn't high enough to want to own for long. Renting DVD is still fine, but I really don't do that either since if I just wait a few more months I can set my TiVo and get the show in HD off of HBO or Showtime and it'll look a ton better.
I don't buy TV series on DVD because I don't feel like owning them in a quality markedly inferior to what they were when I watched them for free.
So I do stay that there is a need for HD content on demand. That probably means on disc format, but perhaps PPV could substitute.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not really, because most people are happy with standard TV.
If you think a normal DVD signal played on a TV of any reasonable size and any reasonable viewing distance is anywhere near the resolution limit of the human eye (at the foveal vision) you're crazy.
That's good, because I never said that. I was making a philosophical corollary. Which I indicated. You were the one who was saying that a lower reolution image is just as good as a higher resolution image if it is less than DVD.
Furthermore, none of this has anything to do with sampling and interpolation issues. I don't know why you even brough that up.
Think about it. Try using the gray matter.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You didn't need to flip CDs over. You can change tracks by pressing a button. CDs sound the same the first time you play them as the 1000th time. Portable players were eventually developed because CDs are read with a lens, not a fragile needle, and small enough to put in a jacket pocket.
These were all compelling reasons to switch to CD. Note that I haven't mentioned sound quality - if you keep your records clean, vinyl and CD basically sound the same.
Hands in my pocket
I probably should not respond to your post, as you give every indication of being a troll, but, just on the off chance that you are not, do a slight bit of research before you post your remarks - please?
You claim that Apple is not releasing innovative products. Let's look at the releases in the past year. As has been pointed out, there already is a video iPod. Great new server? Hmm... I guess you haven't heard of the Xserve clusters at Virginia Tech. New systems? How about the Quad Core systems released late last year? You aren't going to find those in the consumer line systems from Dell or any other manufacturer on the PC side right now... Software? What about Aperture, which can save a lot of time for photographers - and time is, as they say, money. Based on the releases of the past year, I think people have every right to expect something interesting and possibly even innovative to be announced at MacWorld this coming week.
Anyhow, you have strayed from the subject, which I will try to return to... there are plenty of stories about demos blowing up in Jobs' face. They don't get the degree of press that Gates does, but, then, this is usually the case... Every tech firm has stories of demos gone bad. Some are humorous, many tragic, and some are truly acts of Murphy.
Corollary: if you think DVD is crap, then so is 10,000,000,000 by 10,000,000,000 pixels. Holographic super-DVD.
That doesn't sound like something that should be called a corollary. birge's statement was something following the pattern A implies B. Assuming this is true, a corollary to this statement would be ~(not)B implies ~A. In this case, something like "if regular format TV is not fine, then you don't think DVD is fine either". What you have suggested is ~A implies Z (or anything else), which does not follow logically from the statement that birge has given.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The Maximum PC example was for Audio. I'm not saying that you can't tell the difference- it is there, and for me, you, and I'm sure others, it's noticeable. Personally, good audio is more important to me then good video, but all I'm trying to say is that the average person can't tell (the ones who buy a HD set and no HD receiver/DVR), and since they are the target audience for this kind of thing, that makes a big difference on the end impact.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
No, it was that if B is good enough for you, then A is just as good as B. But C is better.
In other words, there is no difference between any two things less than C.
It follows from this statement:
"If you think DVD is fine, than so is regular format TV."
... and then they built the supercollider.
I should clarify my corollary - which would be (if expressed in this stupid way). If C is good enough for you, then B is just as good as C. But D is better.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I once saw a demo for the (then) latest version of CorelDRAW; it crashed in the end. Come to think about it, that's good enough: usually I can't run CorelDraw for ten minutes without a crash. And no, that's not one single troubled machine, it was like that with any machine in my university's computer labs.
Circumcision is child abuse.
"Are things good enough?"
No.
Just as LPs represented a remarkable leap from tolerable (78's) to hi-fidelity, DVD represented a leap from suck-ass (VHS) to decent quality. And there are still plenty of people who like LPs. But just as CD's were introduced and turned out to be better than LPs in most ways, so too does HD video represent an overall improvement over SD video. It's not just a few lines of resolution, either - it's six times the pixel count and an improvement in color space, and it's still not as good as the source material in most cases (35mm).
HD looks better. DVDs don't do HD. That makes DVDs not good enough.
The same movies that are on DVD can easily be on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, in true HD format. Neither you or grandparent will have to get rid of anything. You won't have to sell your little 19" TV, and the Obsolete Format Police won't come and confiscate your collection of DVD's. No one will force you to buy a larger TV than you want, or drive a larger car than you want. No harm will come to you from allowing others to watch movies that look better than yours. I still don't see why it's so wrong to enjoy better quality video, nor what there is to be proud of for not wanting HD. Techno glitches? Format instability? Don't know what you're talking about. Haven't seen any of it. My HD looks great all the time.
Important to a person's life? If TV is anything more than an occasional pastime, worry. If TV of any kind is important to your life, you've got bigger problems than SD or HD. Read a book. Watch a sunset. Have sex with your partner. Find a partner, if you don't have one. Bounce your baby on your knee. Visit your grandmother. Make someone else's life better. Quit worrying about what kind of TV I have. Quit trying to tell me why I'm a fuckhead for wanting a better image on my wall.
Polishing a turd? Yes. That's right. 90% of the content available on DVD or VHS or fucking carved stone tablets is, at best, mindless dreck. That's because Hollywood keeps making money by paying people like Ahnold $70 million to make a single shitty movie. Where's the real revolution in entertainment? Aha. Now we're getting somewhere. I'll tell you what *I* think, and you can feel free to wipe your ass with my opinion: the real revolution in entertainment has it's roots in TRON, and can count LOTR as a failed genetic offshoot. We have, for the first time in history, the ability to create photorealistic imagery of anything we can imagine with digital rendering. Storytellers are free to tell any story they want, in any way they want, if they can only think of it. LOTR proved this, and showed also where the weakness is: Hollywood. Peter Jackson and Weta Digital did a phenomenal job of bringing a complete fantasy universe to life... but couldn't storytell their way out of a wet paper bag. Now, I personally like the books, not because of the plot line, which is bested every weekend by thousands of AD&D games around the world, but because of the characters, the depth of the detail in people and places and such, and because of the way that people interacted. The best Jackson could do was to take Tolkein's completed story, dumb it down and sex it up for the sheeple, and see how pretty they could make it. Well, they made it pretty... but now it's time for a real storyteller to take the reins and make a *good* movie. Imagination is now the only limitation. That, and getting anything worthwhile past Hollywood. As long as Hollywood keeps regurgitating remakes and emasculating literature, movies will continue to suck.
Of course, that last paragraph - none of which has anything to do with HD or SD - is all my opinion. Yours may vary, and hopefully does. It would be a boring world otherwise.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
...the second one, for sure. The Internet's usefulness was augmented by breasts (and augmentations of same), as was the VHS, and I believe that the entire motive force in our modern market is seeing tits more clearly. The progression is simple to follow:
Renaissance: Nude art.
As nude art lost its appeal (poor "resolution", you might say), magazines were introduced. Black and white, even worse "resolution", and much much cheaper than nude art.
Early 1900's: Magazines, nude art.
And then came VHS. Magazines? Who wants to see static images? WE WANNA SEE FULL-MOTION <insert porn genre/action here>!!!!!
1970's: VHS, magazines.
DVD > VHS > magazines, but they're all still in wide use.
Late 1990's: DVD, VHS, magazines.
Now it's on demand!
Late 1990's continued: INTERNET!
So, as you can see from the above progression from whackin' it in a museum to picking your perversion and whackin' it in your own room, better porn has been the major factor in the initial success of most major mediae. All have stayed around, but the older ones have dropped off mainly in terms of userbase. In other words, porn drives the entire entertainment market at the outset of each new format.
I predict that porn will be the initial push for video in the new formats, but that software will be the push for all else.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
I want to actually see an HD movie on an HDTV first. How much better than DVD is it really? Besides, the thing that really bugs me in movies are in panning or action sequences where the camera isn't fast enough and everything becomes blurry. I'll care when the medium is affordable, durable, reliable, and capable of cool footage. Or when good movies are made again (guess I'll be waiting a while, huh).
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Still waiting for these execs to figure out that this is old news. With solid state memory getting cheaper each year it will take some time before PHBs figure out its advantages over this old technology. I guess people just have gotten used to the skips, scratches, snap, crackle, and pops. Yeah, flash is still expensive compared to cds but hey for bluray HD-DVD and whatever next they come up with to suck that cash out, you will still be paying high prices until mass production kicks in(unless they do the bleed-until-i-profit thing). In a while your cd-dvd-vcd-svcd-xsvcd-hddvd-bluray-abc-def-ghi-zzz player will have more moving parts, more things to break, more scratches, and another old player in the landfill. And they will still be trying to get demos to work...
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Don't forget the need for larger capacities of removable media.
In other words, though I couldn't care less what movies or content they decide to put on these new media, I would always appreciate the ability to archive/backup much *more* data on these disks.
These companies are undoubtedly ridiculously greedy. It remains to be seen whether they can retain some amount of reason and come up with a technologically innovative offering.
Side note:
CD/DVD technology is already decades old. I would expect a bit more than 30 or 50 GB in order to be truly impressed. I'm really not sure how hard these guys are working on this stuff that is being hailed as the Next-Best-Thing to carry us for the next two decades.
All in all I'm a live and let live type but Plan9? Are you NUTS?
rc is brain damaged for fun just to thwart your ideas for scripting. That excude for a windowing system makes _me_ cringe and I'm far from a touch typist but the constant back and for with stupid mouse/keyboard mixed use. The file system "protocol" is a weird hash of fields big enough to handle storage for years and lack of integrity that boggles the mind. And Pike refuses to see it. I'll give you that binds are useful and you can do a lot of neat stuff with them, but it's not got the application support for personal use, and as anything more than a toy server the CS religion ruins scalability. Open a file for my pid? Get real.
best response to this article. I don't plan on buying an HDTV until I have to, which will be whenever my current TV breaks.
Wasn't HD-DVD going to use guess what... .NET for DRM protection while Blu-Ray was going to use the original Java? Figures...
That, ladies and gentlemen is why real geeks/slashdotters DON'T use Microsoft software - it crashes/doesn't work/bsod's/insert favorite type of MS-related malfunction here - on the most important moments.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
As implied, format shifting. Being able to take one's bought and paid for product and convert it to be able to play on various devices other than the initial media supported, rather than having to buy copies for DVD, iPod, HD-DVD, and everything else.
That's an interesting point, because it seems to me that the move to a higher definition video format is not the final one.
We'll be doing this every 5-10 years for some time, I suspect.
Each time, we'll be wanting to buy the same content in the new format - after all, some films you really want to see on a huge screen at the best possible resolution (the LotR series springs to mind). Each time we'll fork out for a new display, a new player, maybe new tamper-proof cabling and a whole new movie library. How much will all this cost?
While we're not going to have to throw our old stuff away, we will be faced with DVDs being phased out, repairs becoming more expensive (a lot of players are not worth repairing even now) and the whole push will be on the new technology.
The same thing happened in audio - vinyl to 8 track to cassette to CD - but the changes were a lot slower.
Is there any reason to suppose that we won't be seeing the successor to HD_DVD or Blu-Ray in 5-10 years?
I'm going to hold off on stepping up for 5 years or so. If I can skip a generation, I'll be happy, and so will my wallet. I'm no Luddite, but I am wondering whether the continual upgrade cycle is really just a cash cow for the large corporations and whether we really benefit that much.
People want larger displays. To make larger displays look good, it helps to make them higher resolution. An NTSC DVD has a resolution of 640x480, which is not really all that great. Additionally NTSC displays only support interlaced display. Since a lot of the content that people watch are movies, shot on film running at 24 frames per second, it would be nice if you could display progressive content so that it would more closely match the source content. Yes, most DVD's are actually 24p, but to display this content on a NTSC television, your DVD player actually has to perform a pulldown on the content to turn it into interlaced.
Enter some sort of HD media to solve some of these problems. Both HD formats support progressive and interlaced content in a variety of resolutions (720p, 1080p, 1080i, etc). Both HD formats also support MPEG4 compression which is significantly more efficient and can produce images with a lot less artifacts than the MPEG2 that is on DVD's. Heck even DV video which is very compressed and color space constrained (4.1.1) loses a LOT of information when you encode it with MPEG2. Think how much detail you are losing when watching your typical Hollywood movie (probably scanned from film at 4K line resolution, and maybe edited RAW uncompressed).
In terms of raw resolution, going from SD to HD is the difference between playing your favorite FPS at 640x480 or running at 1024x768 (or 1280X1024).
But I also don't have an automobile. If I ride several hours in an automobile, then I hop on a horse, there's going to be a jarring 'blech' reflex.
Solution: don't buy an automobile or motorcycle.
Big difference. Using an automobile helps you earn more money by getting to work on time - or running a business. Seeing more pixels on a TV screen doesn't really make the content any more interesting. It's just not that useful compared to other things that money could be spent on.
... and then they built the supercollider.
On the surface, it seems the camps are promoting their format to the fullest, without regard for whether they will win the format or not...
This makes me suspicious... maybe the VHS vs BETA is just a smoke screen.
Seems to me more like a DVD-R vs DVD+R pseudo-battle.
If the camps "push" the right buttons, both formats will appear in the common home device (probably even the devices on the opposing sides).
Why?
Because, this is a way to convince the public that BOTH formats need to be licenced. Both camps will make license fees, and enough uncertainty to keep the upgrade cycle moving along. (DVD peeked out, became an one-shot, and didn't need upgrades like other tech standards... example: VGA, SVGA, XVGA.)
Double the fees, and good side effects... hmmm, could it be a smoke screen?
..bright screens for bright people, but now I've got to wear sunglassess.
Apropos this from Freedom to Tinker's predictions for 2006.
17) HD-DVD and Blu-ray, touted as the second coming of the DVD, will look increasingly like the second coming of the Laserdisc.
Live shows in general were always coming up with "oops" moments. Another classic was a semi-live action series called "The Avengers", which (at that time) starred Patrick McNee and Honor Blackman. In order to make the fight scenes realistic, they trained Ms. Blackman in actual martial arts to quite a high standard. This had one drawback. She was actually a good deal better at fighting than the stuntmen were at getting out of the way. More than one ended up unconcious in the studio, but with no ability to edit the recordings, they just had to stay there until they cut to a different scene.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I keep hearing from everyone that Blu-ray is going to win because Playstation 3 is going to come out this spring and have a game player AND a blu-ray player for under $500.
This is ludicrous. Pay attention to the article:
"Analysts say the early adopters, those who rush out and buy whatever new technology becomes available, will jump right in and pay $1,800 US for a Blu-ray player from Pioneer or $499 US for the Toshiba HD DVD player."
OK, so a high end blu-ray player is going to cost 1800 dollars in May. Low end players will probably be 700-900 dollars. How on earth is Sony going to put one of these players in a PS3? Are they planning to lose $500-1000 per console. It's not going to happen. They'll either cut out the Blu-Ray drive or more likley delay the PS3 until Blu-Ray is economically feasible.
Mark my words. This is going to kill the PS3. If its delayed until Early 2007, the XBox 360 will have a massive marketshare and will be dominating sales. HD-DVD players will probably have become available by then with a large library of titles, making Blu-Ray more and more irrelevant.
3 to 4 years from now when Sony starts fading away along the lines of Sega, everyone will have an easy answer to what went wrong. It'll be Blu-Ray, and their insistence on trying to force a technology down the throats of the uncooperative masses.
-sigh- I wish I was still so young and naive as to believe that it's possible to live without compromising in some way.
Christ, if you think you'd have to be "young and naive" to think you could do without either HD format then you have real problems. You're well and truly in the grip of the marketing machine. Snap out of it.
Personally, HD-DVD can go shove it - I'm goin with BD.
To the point, both new formats hold MUCH more data than current DVDs, allowing for longer movies on one disc. And BTW: that "its only higher rez" bs you were saying? higher rez takes more space, therefore the requirement for a bigger disc. It also means that if you play XBox, PS2, and PC-DVD or CD games, companies wont have to choose between making a game with insane photorealistic graphics and a decently long story line (20 to 40 hours MINIMUM) or keeping the number of discs down to 2 or 3.
That's down to a fundamental limitation of movies that nobody (in Hollywood or the tech world) wants to address, a real elephant in the room situation - everything's geared to shooting at 24 frames per second. Not only are movies shot on film at 24FPS, but even the new HD cameras used by people like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez work at 24FPS as well!
No matter what resolution of HD the next-generation discs display, they're still going to be encoded from 24FPS originals. So it doesn't matter how much detail you can see - as soon as things start moving in your super new Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie, you're still going to get blurs on live-action and that irritating clipping/strobing effect whenever people move too quickly in front of a greenscreened background. 24FPS is about the lowest a film can be projected and not get visible strobing between frames, and was originally chosen (as with so many things) for financial reasons - the more frames per second are shown, the more film is needed, and film costs money. So it's always been a 'just barely good enough' system.
If they'd really wanted to make the ultimate leap in visual quality, the HD backers would have pushed for an increase in framerate as well as resolution. The 60FPS Showscan projection system devised by Douglas Trumbull back in the early 80s supposedly exceeds the human eye's maximum 'refresh rate' and as a result looks far more 'real' than anything else - including 24FPS cinema projection, which is being held up as some kind of gold standard for how HD should look.
But that wouldn't help improve the look of anything shot in 24FPS, so no 'old' films (ie, anything ever made) would benefit. And Hollywood would never make such a radical (and expensive) change to their working methods in order to provide 60FPS material either. So I guess we're stuck with 24FPS movies until someone invents the holodeck.
You must think in Russian.
Except Linux is free and a decent plasma or LCD television will set you back thousands ;)
Speaking of which, the really BIG question is whether to wait for SED in Q3/4, or buy a HDTV plasma/LCD now. Yes, Yours Truly wants a proper HDTV display after having used a HD PC card tuner for a while - a 22" CRT is fine, but it really doesn't have the oomph for home cinema.
ISO certified == THX certified
similar to the Betamax/VHS video tape battle
Actually, the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD battle is totally different from the VHS/Betamax battle, because:
1) JVC did not hog the VHS standard that they invented (just like IBM did not hog PC). So manafacturers could just build their own VHS machines. This was not the case with Betamax.
2) Betamax was vastly superiour to VHS (in terms of screen resolution and other important aspects).
I am happier with the regions than I was, being in the Japanese region will be fine by me - but I'll still be sad not to be in the Euorpean one.
I was trying to find more recent details on what they had chosen, thanks for the confirmation.
I figured managed copy would be added since Sony will also find it useful. I am sure that will require a network connection though (to tell the home office what is being copied by who), making it rather annoying. I don't think people will like maanged copy very much in practice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anandtech doesn't think so, according to their recent update from CES:i =2666&p=13
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?
Pioneer had a side by side comparison of Blu-ray(at 1080p) and DVD(480p upscaled to 1080p.
"The problem is that the jump from progressive scan DVD (480p) to Blu-ray and HD-DVD at 720p or 1080p just isn't that great, even on a 46" display. When viewed side by side with DVD content, the picture looks quite comparable, it's just that the Blu-ray/HD-DVD content is noticeably sharper (which makes sense since it is much higher resolution)."
After seeing the pictures of the Pioneer side by side comparison, I'm underwhelmed. Yes, it's sharper but it's not worth the high cost for upgrading.
HD looks better. DVDs don't do HD. That makes DVDs not good enough.
That does not logically follow. Begs the question. You're assuming anything that looks better makes whatever came before not good enough, and that's not true. Is HD good enough? What about that double-resolution ultra HD they're playing around with in Japan right now? Does that stuff make ordinary HD "not good enough?"
At some point, ordinary folk will decide something *is* good enough, and then "better" formats won't matter. Look at audio CD vs. SACD & DVD-A. Hell, lots of people are happy with clearly degraded mp3 over CD for the sake of convenience. And the same thing *may* happen with DVD vs. HD-DVD/Blu-ray. For example, I have no interest in owning a ginormous TV, so a good DVD looks great to me and I have no need or desire to upgrade for a long time to come (basically, until my current equipment gives up the ghost for good). Are there others like me? Sure. Enough to make HD DVDs a bust? Guess we'll see.
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
Keep in mind that ripping any CSS protected DVDs is likely to be illegal in your country.
Point. But more a point towards "wow, these laws are sortof stupid" than any real sort of warning. Unless one seriously expects companies to start looking at the contents of peoples' computers and then sueing them for it. Welllll, okay, nevermind, that's actually not that far off. But they really should not be allowed to get away with things like that, and I think it's better to hasten the day when that issue inevitiably comes up in a big way than to wait as public opinion adapts more and more to the currently strong zeitgeist of "if you aren't doing anything wrong...."
I mean, not to bring up politics, but yaknow . . .
But hey. Weren't there legal decisions in the favour of being able to make backups with older techs? But each new technology the fight is fought again, and each time the consumer side loses a bit more. Of course there are legal justifications for it (it being illegal to break encryption, etc etc) but there are enough random laws that these cases could in theory be justified many different ways for many different results.
Honestly, that's one of the reasons I'm relatively unlikely to buy DVDs (and much less likely to buy either of the new formats). Why in the world should I pay money for something that I'm not even allowed to use how I want, simply because the companies involved are greedy in an unrealistic way (ie. the actions motivated by their greed do not actually get the results they intend anyways)? And then it pays for things like the industry lobbying for the kind of laws that make it illegal to do things like making (what really should be perfectly legitimate backups, honestly, try to argue against it from a logical point of view knowing that the guy is using them for personal viewing, just making a bit simpler what he paid to be able to do anyway). Sorry, no thanks.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I can see a huge difference on a 30 inch TV between 480x720 (DVD) and 720x1280.
And I've synched up DVDs with HD broadcasts of the same movie on my 32" HD set and flipped back and forth between inputs to compare them, and while I see some difference, I'd hardly even call it noticeable. And if I were watching just the DVD, it would never occur to me to say "Hey, this just isn't good enough to enjoy, dammit!"
It's a lot like where I sit when I go to a theater: before the movie starts, I think it's really important to get a good seat, near the center, not to far forward or back... whereas once the movie starts I realize that where I ended up sitting actually matters very little toward my enjoyment of the movie, as long it wasn't behind a really tall guy or next to a herd of loud teens.
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
If you can't tell the difference or don't think it's worth it, that's your problem and not mine. I don't need an excuse to brag, but I think perhaps you have some inadequacy problems to deal with.
"it's your problem" -- this is the part I don't get. Some people seem to think it's a "problem" if I and people like me are happy enough with DVD. Just who has the inadequacy problem here?
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
I've had servers set up for me, only to find that someone decided to do some maintenance and screw up the demo.
Some of my friends already had them, but I'd say it was about 50/50. When the players hit about £50 ($75), then it went to about 90/10.
DVD gave a considerable improvement in terms of picture, decay and features.
If anyone seriously thinks that the mass market is going to go spend thousands or even hundreds for a TV set to watch content in HD, they'll be mistaken. A lot of people will switch when their TV starts going wrong, and right now, a lot of them still won't pay the extra to get an HD-ready set - they'll buy a cheap TV.
HD
1900x1080 at 24hz -- 2mp
24 fps? Heck, they better do better than that. I've seen 60fps clips (and, yes, they require insane amounts of space), but increasing the framerate does way more wonders than increasing the resolution.
After seeing 60 fps clips, 30fps equivalents just look crude. For instance, strobes flashing don't really seem to be very flashy at all. Panning around a scene look choppy and actually distracting to what goes on. 60 fps makes things seem way more natural than increasing the resolution ever did. At least that's my opinion and experience.
But if they did both those things I would be as exstatic as a audiophile/videophile/geek could ever be.
Yes. I know film is shot a 24fps, but there's no reason they should be, nor is there any reason why a new standard should inherit the weaknesses of existing ones.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
While I agree "blu-ray" sounds futuristic and pretty cool (I guess), HD-DVD does benefit from having the term "DVD" in its name, which is comforting and familiar to Joe Sixpack. Plus lots of people these days have heard of "HD" so the term HD-DVD would lead most people to believe its a high definition DVD, which is pretty accurate. Whereas "blu-ray" says nothing about the product.
Joseph?
Well thanks Anand for posting comparison shots between BR and DVD taken with a mobile phone camera. I'm sure that'll do justice to the resolutions. (Hint, next time try using a camera resolution that can at least capture NTSC detail.)
My personal experience (from Tokyo Electronics Show last autumn) is that HD does give an edge. It's most likely very dependent on the content though. (Eg there are some really impressive comparisons between LOTR in DVD and 1080p formats.)
>A 50+ inch teleevision
Jesus H. Christ!
Just think of the retina burn that'll result from watching advertising on that fucker! I'd rather get my foreskin caught in my zip than have such a device in my house.
If you're happy with your 27" TV, then I'm not surprised you're happy with standard-def discs. I'm happy for you, and you'll save yourself a lot of money by not upgrading.
Some people have bigger, HD screens and want a device that can give them movies that make the most of them. Those people will want to upgrade.
Basically, your complaint is the same as asking why new consoles are coming out when I was perfectly happy with the games on my Dreamcast.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You may be a videophile, but the vast majority of the population is not: they are still content with the quality of VHS, and moved to DVD not because of the quality of DVD but the convenience. I'm sure there will be a market for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, just as there was a market for Laserdisc - but it will be a long time before any HD-formats become mainstream, especially if the HD-formats remain low volume for a long time (meaning players and discs remain comparatively expensive compared to high volume DVD).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
DVDs stopped being "good enough" for some people the moment they started watching films in HD over broadcast. Before HD came along, DVD looked better than broadcast TV, so if you're a video quality freak there was a reason other than convenience to buy/rent that film on disc rather than watching it on Tivo. But if you've got a good, big screen then broadcast HD is really quite easy to tell apart from a DVD of the same movie. Which is a good enough reason (for some people) to want a better format.
DVDs will carry on being released for years still. If you don't think a HD format is worth upgrading to, don't.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Are you talking about a different demo than the one done after Bill Gates' CES keynote speech? Because in that demo the disc player seemed to work fine. Or did they go back and edit it?
LaserDisc didn't fail. It survived for many years and was still going strong right up until DVD format came along and pushed it aside. Your platform doesn't have to take over the world to be counted as a success. (Unless you are Bill Gates!)
Incidentally, LD had a few advantages over DVD. The full-size cover art was nice, and nobody ever had to sit through a bunch of promos, FBI warning, or other stuff like that because their player wouldn't allow them to skip over it. There were no region codes either. (Although there were PAL and NTSC versions.)
DVD Audio and SACD haven't "failed utterly" . . . Not yet, not quite. But yes, I think they are on the way to destruction. I just don't think we are there yet with video. I think HD video will present enough improvement for most people to appreciate and want it. But I can't prove that, we'll just have to watch and see.
It may be that Blu-Ray (or less likely, HD-DVD) will become the new LaserDisc format -- beloved of collectors and video geeks, surviving for years or decades, but not destined to quickly take over the world the way DVD did.
I think I see the problem. Exactly when did I say that a low res image is as good as a high res one if it's less than a DVD? I think you're completely missing the point of what I said, and reading way too much into my simple comment. I was making the argument that if people are NOT happy with regular TV, than they are likely to not be happy with DVD as well. Given that they are similar formats, that seems a pretty reasonable statement, no? So then you start talking about interpolation, which is meaningless in this case since nowhere were we talking about displaying a signal of one resolution on a display of another.
"Mark my words. This is going to kill the PS3. If its delayed until Early 2007, the XBox 360 will have a massive marketshare and will be dominating sales. HD-DVD players will probably have become available by then with a large library of titles, making Blu-Ray more and more irrelevant."
PS3's will be at minimum $600-$700 at launch. It will have a decent Japanese launch (contrary to the 360), but will not survive against a 360 system costing under $250 with the same graphics.
It was stupid to incorporate Blu-Ray into this console. A simple dual-layer 9gb DVD is plenty for hi-res textures. How many cutting edge PC games take more than 9gb? None.
I watch a fair number of movies every week but I really have no use for DVD's or HD-DVD's. My local cable provider provides a lot of HD content and the On Demand HD selections are expanding.
I no longer rent or purchase DVD's. Although they look "ok" on my 52" Mitsubishi, they are disappointing compared to the HD content I regularly view.
The optical format is arguably not the best format for backups. The only advantage I see is portability. Most people with a decent home theater setup do not care so much about portability.
Let the manufacturers dispute this while IP TV evolves and makes the whole point moot. You know somehow, someday, regardless of DRM, we're going to own huge hard drives full of HD movies delivered via IP.
http://www.techyrants.com
Those pirate b*stards ripped the Bourne Supremacy and put it on HD-dvd?
Then made a film about it for bragging rights on the internet?
Someone should report them to the Anti-Piracy Bureau and the MPAA.
You are pretty close in your prediction, at least to my prediction. I think HD is the death-nell for the multi-plex much in the same way the multi-plex was the death-nell for the drive in theater.
I didn't realize that Nell had gotten a new job being the bringer of death to drive-in theaters.
(Try "knell".)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you.
Dmitri Skylarov.
Remember how Adobe got the DoJ involved in arresting him for writing software that broke DRM in eBooks so that text-to-speech readers for the blind could read them? Then they got to soften the publicity blow by claiming that they no longer thought he should be locked up but still got to keep him locked up since the DoJ considered their opinion irrelevant once notified of the crime.
Or how about search and seizure of your computer any time the RIAA gets a John Doe file sharing lawsuit turned into a real name? In the more traditional realm of failure to repay your debts, how about evictions by the local sheriff for failure to pay rent?
Yeah, corporations have absolutely no power to initiate the use of force against people at all...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I told you Mrs Delarco, and so did the judge, quit stalking me. 7th grade english class was over 13 years ago. I don't have to use proper Enlish or spelling anymore if I don't want to.
The Beta Vs. VHS wars was because the PHYSICAL formats of the cartridges were incompatible! What we have is that a bit of 'programming' can have a player the supports BOTH formats (Blu-ray vs HD-DVD) so both companies can produce thier own discs and "my format only" players but other companies can produce players that support BOTH formats so neither can "win" early on.
Then either company makes money on making the disks and getting royalties on that disk format from the companies that buy the disks that they produce or from the production of the disk format itself.
Neither format should be totally exclusive. It's possible that both require a separate laser as the color may be different but even that cost is so low now that it may not make players of both formats more expensive at all!
Of course these companies can shoot themselves in the foot and require EXCLUSIVE contracts for their format excluding the competing format of ALL companies that buy a license to produce and then it's anybody's guess who wins!
So both companies can produce and support their format in these so called 'wars' and make money IF they don't do the exclusive B.S. and we can support and use ANY format supported by multi-format players. There never was (AFAIK) a Beta AND VHS player unit (that sold well)!
By the way: does anybody know who won the DVD-RW DVD+RW format wars? I didn't keep track.
I'll think of a really good SIG just before I die.
Ahh yes, the old quantity over quality arguement. Only quantity matters huh.
If only quantity mattered to 70 percent of buyers, then JVC had itself a market.
dumbfuck.
If dumbintercourses are willing to spend lots of money, then it would be economic suicide not to cater to dumbintercourses.
The courts should be looking at that and seeking to force a solution to such anti-competitive tactics, if they weren't already on MS' leash.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.