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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."
I think you mean Windows 98.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Samsung already announced they would make a unit that can play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray http://www.techspot.com/news/18625-samsung-to-supp ort-hddvd-and-bluray.html
:P
That's because people who use Linux realize there's a better fix for most things than "reinstall the OS". This seems to be the standard way of fixing things in windows when things start going wrong. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen someone recommending "reinstalling the OS" for Linux as a general solution to everything.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I suspect introducing a new standard to displace/replace DVD could backfire. As other posters have pointed out, DVD represented a paradigm shift in quality and features beyond VHS and other analog formats. It was revolutionary. HD DVD is more evolutionary. The reason why this might backfire is because the digital nature of media makes computers the ultimate fallback hardware. Here's what I mean. My old CD players won't play DVDs. My old DVD players won't play DVD-Rs or MP3s. But guess what will play everything? My computer. I finally got around to hooking up my computer to my home theater projector to watch a TV episode I recorded (don't worry, I always buy the box sets when they come out), and I'm hooked. Now I am seriously considering ripping my entire DVD collection so that it is instantly available. No more farting around loading discs, wading through slow menus, and all that crap. As companies like MS and Google push hardware and software that are designed to support every media format, pushing yet another new format on people could encourage them to do what I do but in an illegitimate way: pirate movies and TV and just play them off your computer. If you think of DVD Audio or Super Audio CDs, you have a prior example as an illustration. I don't own any DVD Audio or SACDs, but I've pulled stuff down from the web just to test it out. I didn't hear any difference because I'm not an audiophile, but if all of a sudden there was a shift away from traditional CDs to DVDA or SACDs that made my old ones stop working, I would simply rip everything onto my computer and run it all through my iPod. I can see a lot of this analogy holding for HD-DVD or whatever replaces DVD. DRM is obviously going to play a critical role in all this. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
A-Bomb