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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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.