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Another Sony Format Bites the Dust
Lam1969 writes "Reuters is reporting that Universal Media Disc, Sony's PSP-only movie format, is about to kick the bucket. While the discs' novelty factor resulted in strong sales shortly after the PSP's May 2005 launch, interest rapidly dropped and movie companies are no longer interested in producing titles. From the article: "Universal Studios Home Entertainment has completely stopped producing UMD movies, according to executives who asked not to be identified by name. Said one high-ranking exec: 'It's awful. Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray."'"
How will we store our dupes? There are so many!
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/30/ 1626239
Your proprietary format is worthless and weak.
Ha! Ha!
Comment from UNI since they are supporting HD-DVD... HMMMMM?
...bites the dust!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SACD is freaking the best digital sound format on the market AND it's 1 bit (DSD). How cool is that?
Did anyone buy this in the first place? I always thought this was a bad idea. I seriously do not understand how it got past the drawing board.
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The article or article summary is written by someone that wants HD-DVD to win, and uses the UMD failure to try to achieve that.
Common FUD tactics.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
The movies are dead yes, but the format itself will live on, no? How else are they going to ship new games?
In Media Fantasy Land, Blu-Ray has been around for years.
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
Because just this December I was travelling to Colorado in a car, and guess what I was using to watch movies? That's right, a PSP with UMD discs. I admit, they can be tedious; just like many other technologies, one piece of information (a movie, a book, an album, etc.) per storage device is starting to become obsolete (notice how companies put more and more bonus content on DVD's) because of the vast amount of space available on modern media. The UMD disc was inconvenient in this respect in that it held one game/movie per disc, and it was not writable, and not supported by practically any player other than PSP--a console which in itself isn't all that great.
Overall, I'm glad that this format, among others, is becoming extinct. The closer we get to a universal storage format (flash drives seem to be the popular candidate), the faster we'll get to complete integration of information. Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, said in the article, "We're hoping the format's going to be reinvigorated with next-generation capability that may include living-room or normal television playback." I, on the other hand, hope not.
Also, they had no distinct advantages over DVD. Why buy a UMD Movie, that is the same price as the DVD so you can watch it by yourself and can't rip it to anything else.
Finally, who in their right mind is going to rebuild their collection, or even build a new one in a completely useless format that only has a single device capable of playing it.
Any moron could tell them that this was doomed from the start.
I always hoped these things would die: 1) yet another gimick to make money on a saturated industry 2) yet another proprietary sony standard 3) yet more trash. These things are even more disposable than dvd's. I would think the resale is low, and the life expectancy of the whole UMD standard was already low, apparently now they're good and dead.
Doesn't completely invalidate his point though, Sony is responsible for many formats over the years that didn't achieve any kind of market dominance.
A dupe? Didn't see the first one.
Ya think Sony would remember this lesson and quit repeating it. They've introduced so many formats that *would* have been good, had they not been intentionally crippled by their media division.
Memory Stick is about the only format they've introduced that hasn't been bombed into oblivion by the reality of a market unwilling to buy crippled products. It's only a matter of time, however, since MS is inferior and more expensive than just about any other flash-card format.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Sony has its entertainment side, and its electronics side. For some reason they let the entertainment side tell the electronics side how to do its job and then they are !!! SHOCKED !!! when the electronics bomb. Hmmmm.
UMD, had little usuability because of DRM, (Crackable but who needs the headache). Also, was a low quality format because of the target device. Had a small odd media that was more expensive that its full size counterparts. And just for that final sauce releases were pretty much priced as high or higher than DVD.
Sounds like a winner
YAY! Another proprietary format bites the dust.
Yes, but certainly you must admit there is a long trend of failed Sony media formats. Betamax, Minidisc, UMD....
And don't tell me minidisc didn't fail, I agree it was (and sort of still is) a cool format, but sales sucked and no one ever really took advantage of the technology...
I hope Blue Ray does fail...I also hope HD-DVD fails. I'd much rather download my movies on demand, or stream them from my cable company or whatever. Eventually we'll hopefully have all of the movies we want at our fingertips and there will be no need for us to horde them in our homes. For those who want the "pretty cases" sitting on the shelf, they will hopefully be the minority. So long as I can watch the movies I want at a moments notice, I do not need to own it and covet it.
You missed CD in that list. You did remember that Sony was involved in the creation of the CD, right? Oh right, that one didn't fail.
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And this is a surprise to anyone?
The US and possibly the British markets are small. But the Japanese & Korean markets are reportedly solid. I work at a post house, and we are still turning out quite a few versions for UMD. There must be people buying them somewhere.
One studio is not indicative of the entire market. Unless that studio is Sony itself. They own the largest catalog of movies, making up over a third of the titles produced by major film studios in the last 60 years.
Of course not completely sony, but they did help to come up with the compact disc. Beta is also still used in a lot of professional area's, as with mini-discs.
You have to admit the comment about blu-ray is a bit strange.
There's a key difference: UMD is failing globally, but MiniDisc is very successful in Japan, though it might get killed by iPod & family.
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That could be why it wasn't included in the list of failed formats. Nah, that makes too much sense. Must be a conspiracy of some sort.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
It was always a no-brainer that the UMD format would fail in the movie arena.
It's the lack of interoperability that make the format useless - it's all very well being able to watch a film on your PSP, but there's no facility to use UMDs in your PC,PS2/3 or home cinema (unless you buy a TV adapter.)
It's the minidisc story all over again, but accelerated because UMDs aren't a home-writeable format.
--
Did I miss it? No, my list is of questionable (failed) technologies. Thus the omission of CD, which yes Sony had a hand in. I don't think 1/4 is good enough from a company like Sony. I'm betting on 1/5 after Blue Ray.
Think what they could do with all of the R&D money they waste, and advertising dollars they spend...if only they (and everyone else) could come to a consensus on a standard we could all reap the benefits.
Phillips did most of the work on that one, actually. And it's not really a proprietary format, unlike UMD or memory stick.
The format, whatever. The price was the fucking kicker. Who the hell is going to shell out $30+ for a god damned movie you watch on a 3" screen? If they would have priced them more like $10 a piece at least, you would have seen better sales. $30? no way.
Sony should have put MD into its PSP gaming device instead of comming up with a "new" UMD disc format. I think it probably would have been cheaper to have a recordable MD instead of developing a new disc format that from all accounts is failing at everything except psp games.
Also the 1 gig storage capacity of the mini discs would have been usefull and at 6$ dollars a pop pretty cheap compared to gum stick media.
Now both stagnate...
Hope they enable full-res H.264 playback from memory stick now. I guess they were holding it back in a futile attempt to make UMD videos more attractive.
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Step 1) Use Extremely Proprietary Format Step 2) ??? Step 3) Miserably Fail! I saw this coming from a mile away. UMDs are far from useful, especially considering it takes zero effort to rip a DVD movie to an almost-infinitely rewritable media (Sony's *proprietary* Memory Stick, ironic enough). Besides, don't we have Laptops and *dare I say* portable DVD players for on-the-go movie watching?
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They've decided to go back to a known method that worked in the 80's. You get the games printed in books and you have to hand code the hexdecimal in before you can play the game. Of course if you turn off the unit or switch games you'll have to re-enter the game. Since the printed word is compatible with all systems it's sure to be a winner! HD-DVD of course stands for HexDecimal DVD. You'll get the fun of hand entering all the hex before you can watch your movies too. The kids will love all the family time that gives you and for porn it'll be fantastic because you'll develop such strong hands!
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"The article or article summary is written by someone that wants HD-DVD to win, and uses the UMD failure to try to achieve that."
, 40057346,00.htm
That specific quote is attributed to an anonymous exec at Universal Studios Home Entertainment, a member of the HD-DVD consortium.
http://www.cnet.com.au/hometheatre/dvd/0,39025983
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
You're right about the other aspects, but I think the main problem is that you can only play it on a PSP (the Universal part is a euphemism)
The Raven
Since when is being able to play video on a television "next-generation"? These people are removing features, realizing that people won't buy without the features, and then adding the features back claiming they're innovative and new.
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I bet you anything if sony had included TV-OUT on theyre console UMDs wouldnt of died so badly.
i mean, being able to watch the movie on the go is very nice. BUT, it would of made so much more sense if sony had turned it into a portable dvd player as well..
It's always nice to find the UMD bundled with a DVD, but Sony at least isn't clueless. I still buy DVDs, and rip them to my 2GB memory stick. I can easily fit nearly half a dozen movies on my memory stick, and archiving them on my computer HDD at a whopping 350-600mb each is a breeze.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
What a concept, I mean.. who'da thunk it?? UMD isn't killing the DVD? OMFG, I'm flabberghasted!
For years Sony has played this game and for years they have lost. Anyone remember the minidisc? Betamax? Yet another Sony screw up, UMD.
So long as Sony tries to "own" the market on their own devices (the PSP) they will find that people shy away. I imagine that Sony was charging a bit of money to these companies to allow them to publish movies for the PSP. Now, I can hear you saying it... any fool can put an mp4 on a CD and play it on the PSP, but I'm talking about companies doing this with a license and selling it to you.
Sony needs to seriously change.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Think about it:
(1) Sony is affiliated with Sony Pictures and has ties within the film and TV world;
(2) Sony uses that influence to negotiate rights for UMD / PSP versions of movies dirt-cheap - practically give 'em away. New releases at $6-$8 a disc; older stuff, $2 or $3. Enough to cover production. So what if they take a loss on the rights? They'll get it back in sales of units.
(3) The format's pretty secure, so piracy is a marginal issue - and the inexpensive price makes it hardly worth the time to rip and burn if you could, unlike discs that cost between $18-$20.
(4) The ability to use the PSP as a dirt-cheap portable movie player - and a little strategic marketing in the right places could help parents see this as a Good Deal ("it does more than play those damned games, we can watch movies on it, too..."
(5) They let other movie studios start making UMD movies also; they license out UMD to some cheap Taiwanese outfit and make some $60 - $80 UMD movie players and sell 'em at Wal-Mart. They let the format spread itself around. They keep the money in the game market and the PSP-2 or whatever the next item is.
(6) Profit - not mega-millions, but not the loss that the current situation is likely to be.
I'm sure there are some flaws in my idea and I'm sure someone will point them out. But in the end, somebody dropped the ball here big time. I love the PSP; it's a neat toy. But I've never bought a single movie for it; in fact, I saw this coming and told my friends to expect it - dropping the movies inside of a year - and I said that the first time I saw a UMD movie at a Goddamned Wal-Mart with a $20 price tag.
But, I think that if Sony came back at it, even now, and tried this strategy, it could work. Even this late in the game, with the right promotion and presentation. But it's a good idea, so, fat chance of that happening, eh?
Blu-Ray is clearly the superior format (higher density, greater storage capacity, faster data read/write). Someone is pitching for the other team when they toss in backhanded comments like this (an incidental remark tossed in at the end). Look for any paid shill on the other team (any of the companies backing it), and you will find the identity of the poster (or poser in this case). Know and understand that these are the dirty tactics that businesses will use to push one technology over another.
Forget UMD, Selectavision is the future!
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You did remember that Sony was involved in the creation of the CD, right?
Involved, but not solely. Philips came up with it, it became a standard (until Sony decided to violate it!!!), etc.
Sony formats basically suck, and blue ray will die or not even get off the ground.
Paid for by Universal studios I'm certain.
retailers also are cutting the amount of shelf space they've been devoting to UMD movies, amid talk that Wal-Mart is about to dump the category entirely. Wal-Mart representative Jolanda Stewart declined comment on reports that the retailer is getting out of the UMD business.
Really, i haven't seen or heard anything of the sort.
"A high-ranking executive was more blunt: "We are on hiatus with UMD," he said. "Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them.""
Sony Pictures, who has the largest digital catalogue of movies, certainly is turning a nice profit for every movie that Universal releases on UMD... not to mention, the pure profits it is raking in from umd sales (Sony averages $500,000 in revenues for each title it releases on UMD)
This is clearly a swipe at Sony and BlueRay. little journalistic value whatsoever.. just gossip from a Universal Studio exec, the musings of a "hollywood reporter", and a brief response on the future of the PSP from Sony.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
It'll be at the point where they have absolutely nothing to fucking lose. Their kiretsu will fucking hate them, Japanese teens will fucking hate them, Taiwan will fucking hate them, the US will fucking hate them.
Australians will fucking hate them.
And they'll release some new completely open format, because they couldn't afford to pressure other companies into a proprietary scheme.
And it'll fucking just completely storm the world. And just as soon as Sony gains a 10% market share, they'll start trying to slip proprietary shit back in there. You just watch. Those bastards never learn. It's like a horrible time-loop, and God damn Data never gets the subliminal message through to the Data in the next time loop.
Riker never wins with Sony.
Sony should have pushed this heavily in the rental market. Practically giving them away to companies like Netflix. As you said, it would have pushed sales of the units themselves. UMD was obviously not a good format for the purchaser of movies, but it would have been great for the rental.
I don't know why these companies just don't pay me on retainer to tell them things suck beforehand.
Usually in big companies, when a few products totally flop, heads roll. I don't seem to be seeing this with Sony. Its obvious in my mind that there's a huge collusion between their Media and Electronics devision (guess who always wins).
The Blu-Ray standard, I don't even know why they're even trying it. Look at how well their Memory Sticks are going once Flash memory has become commoditized (its 30 or 40% more). The UMD format is going to work because its linked to the PSP. Just not for movies. I don't see Nintendo trying to sell movies on Gameboy cartridges (they won't fit) but they just make the unit for gaming.
I have an MD player, and I must say its completely unusable. Not the hardware. The software. Everyone complains about SonicStage. I've thought of buying another MP3 player (I have one w/ bad sound quality right now), but I'm really hoping they can pull off the next MD software (and get it working on my Mac). Nothing, even flash MP3 players have been able to beat the Minidic for sound quality or battery life that I've been able to find. The quality in the MD player is gained from the audio processor I'm sure.
My complaint to Sony have really neglected me as a customer. I'm still satisfied with the product. Hopefully someone at Sony who has a clue will read this Slashdot thread and fix it. I'm sure they're putting off more people from their products then they think. IMO, PS3 is really the hit or sink product (esp if they will be losing as much money as predicted per unit) and they want the Blu-Ray stuff to succeed.
Apparently UMD movies are encoded at DVD resolution (720x480), 16x9 if appropriate, and the PSP re-sizes the image down to 480x272 for display on the LCD.
Now, why do sony waste the space on the UMD, and processing power to scale video, if they don't have to.
I would have expected to see, by about now, a set-top UMD player. Sony's stated design goals are to reduce the size of a media player device to the size of the carry case for the media. See MiniDisc players for an example.
How cool would it to be to have an iPod sized DVD player that plugs into a TV?
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Minidisc didn't fail in other country's either...
oh that's right, I forgot America is the only place companies sell stuff, my mistake.
If Sony were to make a (cheap; current solutions are kludgy and expensive) adapter for the PSP that would allow you to output AV to an external system (re: TV), I'm sure sales for the format would go way up. As it is, nobody wants to have to buy it in two separate mediums. If I had a home UMD player, or some such adapter, I at least would be willing to purchase some more UMD movies. Oh well. Also, that last bit of the summary (about Blu-Ray)... It was my understanding that Blu-Ray looks like it might win the next format war, provided companies can convince everyone to upgrade their still-new DVDs to yet another format.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Funny that that high ranking exec was from Universal Studios.... now where have I seen that name before. Oh yeah, front and center on the HD-DVD roster!
Is it not simply sad to see a high ranking executive reduced to trash talking? How desperate is he?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, but the MiniDisc division is releasing the Sony MZ-RH1 which will *finally* allow me to upload all the content from my big box of home recorded mini-discs. FINALLY.
Hooray for Sony !!
"Isn't this kind of akin to saying that the CD format was dead in 1980"
That is because nobody had heard of it yet you insensitive clod!
The UMD's sucked battery life, but sometimes it was more convenient to buy it ready to watch on UMD. Especially on business trips, I'd rather buy a few UMD's rather than going to the trouble of ripping to Memory Stick. Honestly, I'm torn because it was convenient at times to buy something ready to watch, but at the same time I disliked that it was so closed.
Here's my big question: Why didn't Sony just use the Hi-MD format that already existed? Aren't the discs the same? I don't have a Hi-MD here, but the size and capacity seem to be identical (or very, very similar).
...It's a small disc that holds 1.8GB of data...this is more than the physically larger in diameter disc that nintendo uses (1.5GB) in their gamecube. When the system came out flash memory wasn't available at a resonable price - and actually, you still can't find a 2GB cf or sd card for $50 I don't think. So, for a game system, which is normally propriotary anyway, I'm not sure it was such a bad idea. Also, since the psp does have excellent hardware mpeg4 playback why not make movies for the thing since you can do very high quality video with mpeg4 at only 480x272 resolution and have tons of room on a 1.8GB disc for a movie.
I think the place where sony made a bad choice was on the price. I think if the movies were $5 to $15 dollars they would have continued to sell at a good rate - I may have even bought some...but at $15 to $30 when you can get the same move for $10-$18 on dvd for playback on a much bigger screen and with more extra's on the disc, who would want the umd!?!?!? I think the price is what killed the umd movies.
Let's see, various unsuccessful SONY formats (YMMV):
Then consider the one resounding industry success for which SONY was co-inventor -- the Compact Disk! The Compact Disk has been one of the most astounding success stories, though is now probably nearing its sunset years.
Oh, and what has SONY done around Compact Disk? Yeah, started issuing corrupt CDs (that don't even qualify to have the CD logo) with malware installing rootkits on unwary consumers. Go figure.
Go figure, but sell SONY.
These people are removing features, realizing that people won't buy without the features, and then adding the features back claiming they're innovative and new.
They pushed the greed Envelope too far. Now it's crammed full of pink slips.
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It's so ridiculously simple. Why would I re-buy a movie on UMD that I already own on DVD? For the one or two times I _might_ be compelled to watch it on the bus or the train? No thanks.
Let me easily connect the PSP to my PC or Mac iPod style and put my own movie content on there. That would be useful. I'm sure as hell not compelled to buy a movie to watch on a small screen.
As for making it compatible with TV sets, great -- FOR BIG SCREEN GAMING.. maybe.... But again, my DVD player's already sitting on top of my TV set and I don't have to go to the hassle of plugging it into the wall and into the TV and into my sound system. Plus the DVDs got all those nifty extra features that might not fit on the UMD disc. Again, with my _own_ video content, great.... I'm round at a mate's place and want to show them all the latest clips I got from eBaumsWorld.... again THAT is more useful.
About the coolest thing coming out for the PSP will be the hard disk drive.
Seriouusly though, do these people ACTUALLY USE these products? I suspect they're more interested in making up a new product category, then TELLING US WE WANT IT, as an easy, simple and LAZY way of trying to create another revenue stream.
Shit if the PSP is as restrictive as everyone says I might as well get a big SD card and stick with my mobile phone.
Or rather, at helping them lose. Beta is a wonderful example. Higher quality aside, it had the advantage of compatbility with professional gear. Indeed Beta won the pro wars and Betacam SP is STILL the standard to which things are compared (you often hear DV called "Betacam SP quality"). However they totally missed it on the consumer market and mainly by locking it down and keeping it proprietary ensured it's failure.
As a more receant example take HiMD. HiMD was a wonderful extension of their neat MD format that did ok, but really failed to launch. HiMD added much better quality, more storage, and most importantly of all, high speed async computer transfers. Orignal MDs had to be dumped to computers via S/PDIF which meant no faster than realtime.
Now it would seem this format would be ideally positioned to make major inroads for recording. DAT is on the way out fast and is expensive anyhow, flash devices cost a lot and storage is pretty expensive, HD recorders are large and inflexable. HiMD would have a big market as the next DAT in essence.... Except they locked it down all to hell. You can only transfer files to your PC with their peice of shit software. Worse yet, it orignally didn't even let you transfer it to non-DRM'd formats. So you'd record your band, transfer teh recording, and then you couldn't open it in Wavelab. Wonderful.
I personally am skeptical of Blu-ray mainly because Sony is the big backer. They've a good track record with pro formats, but they have hosed thigns in the consumer market so many times I tend to predict they'll fail just based on their track record.
Thousands left without paychecks. Meanwhile the managers who were wrong shrugged and ordered lobster.
In other news, a Smithsonian archaeology exhibit featuring the "capitalistic free market" will be opened later this week...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Somebody make an ipod clone with 802.11 mesh network and PTP capability. Proceed to make millions. It wouldn't even need the software right off the bat.. the market will fill the void.
Whoever puts this one out first with a slick interface to share music en route is going to make a lot of money. Then they can use that to thwart the **AA's of the world.
I had high hopes when I picked up the PSP, then I flipped it around, saw the stupid UMD drive, went 'oh', and put it right back on the shelf - where it will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
..don't panic
... yeah, we musta been nuts typing in programs like that. freaking crazy. but funny to look back on it now...
They co-created the CD with Phillips. Also they came up with the memory stick which pretty much sucks.
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Quality was OK, but not great. I noticed a lot of MPEG artefacts in Spider Man 2 - distracting at times, and some even in House of Flying Daggers. I still found the quality good enough to watch (the screen is BEAUTIFUL), but not good enough to justify the price of the movies.
The last movie I bought was Time Bandits and I never even watched it. I love that film but the time and place to have a good movie watching experience on PSP is basically a quiet dark room by yourself. As a father and husband that isn't any good to me.
I only bought one game (Ape Attack - not that good), I got part way through that and for games it is an ok device, but still after that basically my PSP went in the cupboard.
I got it out to try the software upgrade to add a browser. It was nifty getting it all working, but then I had a handheld computer with no keyboard or mouse and fairly small screen. Crap for Internet basically.
Back in the cupboard. Not even sure quite where it is to be honest.
It's not pocket sized. It drains its battery when left on pause. It picks up fingerprints and has horrible reflection problems on the screen. It only has one joystick etc etc.
I have to basically agree it's crap. Lovely device, in many ways but I just don't use it. Bejewelled on my Palm has given me 10X more gaming pleasure on the subway!
Other than Japan, where has MiniDisc succeeded, as compared with flash/hard-drive mp3 players?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Mini disc. Pffft. The Clik! Disk is here to stay!
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
For my money Blu ray seems the better format but I have to admit Sony's track record is pretty miserable so if I had to bet I'd have to go with HD as having a better chance of surviving. Not sure how practical dual system machines would be? Probably more licensing than technology these days. Just hate to invest in yet another format that won't outlive my movies. 20 to 25 years seems the best you can hope for from any format. Laser lasted about that long and so did VHS, Beta lasted a while but not half as long as VHS. Although Beta is still a popular professional format. Wide spread adoption will save DVD from an early grave. The technology is already growing old but people wouldn't buy into dropping the format this early.
Betacam and Digital Betacam are used professionally... but sony has flopped (off the top of my head) Minidiscs, UMD, memory stick (sort of), and a load of other ideas.
I used to sell both computers and audio equipment, back in the 1998-2000 era, and it's astonishing to see what sony wasted. They of course couldn't jump on the standard flash memory bandwagon (compact flash or smart media, or later SD) - no, they had to invent their own thing, and of course it only worked with sony stuff. Stupid.
Minidiscs were a novelty, and were pretty cool for a while, but then... CD-R's and mp3 platers became cheap. Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25, or you can get something solid state for less than the price of a MD player? Even when a 512MB mp3 player cost $299, it was comparable to the high end MD player, in features and size. They should have LONG AGO made a minidisc MP3 player - the technology existed, and those disks hold about 480megs or so, not to mention $5 / 500MB is still a good price for media. But they didn't. Arrogance.
All the time, I see sony's marketing people put out all this shit which, in a perfect sony universe, would all interpolate, interact, and be amazing. But, in the real world, only a few people are going to buy all sony. They have yet to deal with that reality. People want their flash memory to be usable for their camera, mp3 player, and phone. They want their media to not be format locked.
It's just marketing stupidity and corporate hubris. Plain and simple. Develop good ideas, then drive them into the ground by making them proprietary.
~Will
sig?
UMD is not dying, UMD _movies_ are. And when I say UMD _movies_ I mean _US/UK_ UMD movies.
And with good reason. No one's going to pay $25 for a movie they already have in a higher quality format, when they can just rip their DVD and transcode it for PSP playback. UMD video probably isn't going to fail as spectacularly in Japan though, where most of the time, you can get a UMD _with_ your DVD purchase (For a little extra) I should know, I have a couple. And I certainly wouldn't have bought them seperately, since I could have just as easily put my videos on the memstick for free (Though that is one of the two advantages of UMD video; it's encoded better than you could possibly do transcoding, and it doesn't take up any space on your memory stick.) As for this 'cavalcade of failed Sony formats'... Seriously, drink the koolaid. No one else is buying that crap.
Betamax? Still the top choice for many professional video applications.
Minidisc? While MP3 players have their advantages, the latest generation of MD player/recorders are still going strong, even outside of Japan. Also, minidisc recorders are pretty much the #1 device for bootlegging live performances for its blend of small size, and high fidelity.
Blu-Ray? Let's skip past the part where it ISN'T EVEN OUT YET, and get down to the facts. The Playstation 2 cemented DVD in Japan. It hadn't caught on until then, they were still using VCD! So, considering that the Xbox 360 had such an abysmal launch (Usually what happens when your product can't withstand the rigors of...well, WORKING), which do you think is going to win in Japan? HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray? And don't forget, a growing constituency in the US and abroad care more about the outcome of that battle than what format Universal is going to put their latest summer blockbusting crapfest on.
UMD was about putting software in the PSP, first and foremost. The fact that they never had plans to manufacture anything ELSE to play UMDs should speak for itself.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The UMD plater is itself the same size as a Minidisc platter. They both come in protective plastic cases. What Sony should have done is used HiMD as the hardware format and used a special video codec to store video playable on PSP. They could have made PSP's able to play audio off the discs just like any Minidisc deck (hey, a way to help bolster the MD format!). Plus they could have released a ripper for converting DVD's to the discs (since MD disks are not read-only).
But that would have stopped any plans for double dipping consumers by making them pay for both a DVD and a UMD copy of each film.
See where the greed got them?
Apparently, they have learned a damn thing since Beta Max. What a bunch of IDIOTS!
This is the first I saw it. I don't load games stories in my prefs here. So it's not a dupe to me. I prefer my fantasy to reading sci fi occassionaly, and for playing I like physical activity. so-no video games, so no reason to clutter the screen all the time. an occassional artiel about it, mostly I read this one because it concerns sony, I company I used to actually like, because at one time, they actually made some cool stuff. I am hoping eventually the remaining smart guys at sony branch off and just dump the games and movies and music crap and go back to building neat stuff-without drm of course. Like really nice radios, advanced monitors, etc. Could care less about consoles, unless they sell one at a huge loss and it's a nice hackable computer, then I might get one. Gotta be cheap though.
First, I still use Beta, and have a great professional-grade late 70s early 80s beta deck. I love Beta.
Many Beta lovers (like I used to) tout the "Beta is better quality than VHS" line, and this was 100% true. Beta lost due to marketing ploys and buying off video distributors/publishers into VHS, ultimately killing the technology. Also killing the technology was Beta's choice to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours, sacrificing quality. Beta fixed this with Beta II and Beta III record modes, so it was only in the initial recorders, plus of course additional extensions like SuperBeta, Hi-Fi Audio, and so on. Beta offered more luminance detail and a cleaner image.
Can any modern late 80's or higher VHS VCR run circles around beta? Damn straight! The technology has since evolved in all recorders, in film, in the filters on various images, in audio and video pickups, etc.
Had Beta still been evolving today, they're be pretty close BUT Beta was defeated in '88 (officially).
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I saw this coming when I read the pre-release specs of the PSP. I saw this guy on a JetBlue flight watching a PSP movie. He held his arm out in front of him for 2 hours to do it. That's when I knew my insight was correct.
cat
Excuse my ignorance, but are there any ways for the unwashed masses to convert to + burn in the UMD format?
Maybe you can't buy UMD disks, but if you wanted to take your movie on the road perhaps you could still convert existing DVD's, etc?
It's called Universal Media Format, but it's only able to be played in PSP's.
Your proprietary format is worthless and weak.
There is no Free video format. MPEG-4 on Memory Stick is proprietary because MPEG-4 is patented and Memory Stick is patented. Even Ogg Theora+Vorbis needs a physical medium, which is generally still patented.
why the heck don't we have a format that uses 24-bit 48khz, or even 96KHz, I being convinced that the 192Khz of DVD-A is just flat-out overkill
I was under the impression that DVD-Audio supported multiple sample rates. At least Wikipedia agrees.
Memory stick does have one thing going for it - it's fairly robust. I've seen those things take abuse that's hard to believe, and still work. When compared to CompactFlash, they're WAY tougher, and these days they don't cost that much more (now that SanDisk etc can make them, ie no Sony media monopoly). That said, they're no better than SD media or the even newer and smaller form factors making headway into the market now.
Memory Stick was another Sony attempt to get a hold on the market with a non-interoperable product that forces users to buy all-Sony devices, then buy overpriced media off Sony. Surprise surprise, it didn't work. When will they learn?
But although your comparison is wrong, you're still right — one shouldn't judge a race before it's over, never mind before it's started. I think a lot of folks are looking at the fact that Sony is a member of the Blu Ray consortium and saying, "That settles that! Sony formats always fail!" Hardly logical. But of course if enough people buy that theory, it doesn't have to be logical.
I can't believe no one has mentioned 3 1/2" floppies, which were invented by Sony. Now there was a flop. :P
Comment from UNI
How can it be a Universal Media Disc without Universal Studios?
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff &ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&q=MicroMV
It's not why it failed, it's the price that killed it. DRM is on numerous medias and most people don't even realize it. Techgeeks aren't the only consumers.
UMD's were far too overpriced to be successful. A movie that plays only on a small portable screen should be priced greatly lower then an equivalent dvd, not equal it.
Hmmm... Pie...
It's not very surprising that this would have happened. The prices on them are on par to a DVD, and it's possible to get a used DVD of a movie at a blockbuster for a fairbit cheaper. The few people who actually use their PSPs to watch movies actually use a memory stick to store their videos, so they can watch whatever without the hassle of buying a movie that you would use far less than an actual DVD.
Minidisc has achieved great success in Japan.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray
Slashdot flamebait at it's best
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Maybe the profit Sony gets by forcing customers to buy their brand of battery/memorystick whatever is worth pissing off smart geeks!?! Short term profit over and over again.
Is embrace Apple's style of content distribution. Create a PSP/iTunes style program that organizes a user's PSP movies. Offer movies for download at a reasonable price ($5.99-10.99?). Offer a synch mode that copies movies and other items to your PSP (would require a big flash card or a harddrive). Releasing a UMD burner would be a great option, as well.
:)
If Sony won't do it, I'm sure Apple is working on it.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Hi-MD was 1GB. Maybe you say they should have used Hi-MD, I can see that. But it was clearly not a large-market item, very few players were compatible with it.
Neither was useful to me. The size of the discs is rather large. One disc is about the size of an iPod. To carry the amount of music I wanted, it took too much space.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yeah, and now my RCA minidisc player, Toshiba MemoryStick MP3 player, and Zenith Betamax VCR's are all worthless... oh wait, these products never existed because most of Sony's failed storage medium formats are proprietary. That's why they fail, not because of lack of technical merit.
Who the fuck modded this informative? It's more like completely wrong.
You've actually proved yourself wrong.
DVD is 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL), whereas UMD movies are 480x272.
That makes UMD movies roughly one third of the resolution of a DVD, and indeed at lower bitrates. H.264 is a good codec, but it's hardly better than high bitrate MPEG2 (MPEG2 sucks for small files, that's where MPEG4 shines; but on pressed DVDs bitrate isn't much of an issue). 1.8GB vs 9GB is about 5 times as much space - even given the 3x higher resolution of the DVD, that's more bits per pixel than UMD. And DVD movies can be as progressive as anything else (3:2 pulldown).
So no, UMD movies aren't low quality only because of the shitty player, but very much so because of the low resolution and lower bitrates too (excluding the issues of DRM and all). Not comparable whatsoever.
I'm no fan of the DVD format (much of a H.264 fan actually), but UMD discs sucks. Really. Big time. Enough that anyone who isn't blind wouldn't have issues seeing the difference on the average 27" standard def TV. The UMD has less resolution than crappy SVCDs - more like along the lines of VCDs or VHS tapes.
I recommend you see an optician sometime soon...
Minidisc has achieved great success in Japan. ...and IN MY PANTS!
blu ray's not a bomb mate... this (whips out a root-kit Sony Album), this is a bomb.
ôó
Any format that is that out of touch with it's userbase as to put such a title on a game system targeted to 14-year old boys isn't going to last.
Besides, my sub-$100, 7" widescreen portable DVD player looks better and plays the same old DVDs I already have. I can even hook up the cheap portable to a TV and watch DVDs on the big screen while on the road. Heck, the thing also plays MP3's, so I can get a thousand or so songs on a DVD and have many more hours of listening pleasure than I'll need in a week of Sunday's.
I also don't think it's going to be a mystery to anyone that a format that put 2 episodes of a TV show ("Lost") on a proprietary disc, and tries to sell it for 2/3 the price of an entire 24-episode season on DVD, isn't going to take off. Besides, how many films do you have occasion to watch very often, let alone on a portable; even a good film, like "Kill Bill", I can only see myself watching in a train station or on a plane so many times. The value just isn't there, and neither is the collectability factor in a proprietary format with such limited ability to view it. (Yes, I am aware they discussed a way to watch them on a regular TV, but that's like selling a man with a wooden leg more comfortable shoes - not to mention way too little way too late.)
Even for those that play the system to begin with, it just was a losing proposition from the begining. Why spend $20 for a movie you can only watch on a tiny screen when you can just buy a DVD, rip it to a memory stick, and then have the original DVD itself to play on any of the hundreds of millions of DVD players world-wide?
AE
Nobody is going to buy a movie twice just so they can have it on their psp. Formats like that will never work, and I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did.
it's still more user friendly than an n-gage. Guess I'll have to dust off the 'ol ruler I used to keep track of the line I was typing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Our intelligence indicates that Sony has not yet abandoned it's UMD program.
Here's the article: Sony's UMD format breaks through to the mainstream.
I can't help but laugh at some of the things the author wrote:
Apparently "extremely popular" is weasel-words for "we will hype the format now and abandon in 6 months".
Wow, customers must really appreciate paying through the nose for a UMD, and this can only be good for the studios! (note: this is an example of Irony).
The Inquirer article even quotes a Newsweek article, PlayStation Portable - New Format for Hollywood, which is less glowing but was clearly the only source of information for the Inquirer author.
Even Newsweek can see the rorting going on with UMD but they seem to not have a problem with it, as they tell of the studios "milking their catalogs" as if that's a good thing.
Taking only the first year and no long term sales expectance figures yet, no real economy pro would make such terminal decisions. Maybe they will take the production back a bit, but that is all. But saying that Blue-ray is a flop now BEFORE it came out, shows how worthless the whole quote and therefor /. post is
According to prophecy
I about choked on my dinner when I saw someone saying UMD movies didn't suck. Gimme a break.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Ok people wait a minute, this is completely unfair to BluRay. BluRay is NOT a Sony format. Some other big names are behinf it too.
Lets also take a look at history and the two most successful digital media format still being used today:
CD Audio (Red Book): Philips and Sony
DVD : 10 founders - Hitachi, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, Toshiba, JVC.
No granted those two formats didnt have any competition, but when you campare BluRay and HD-DVD who do you find behind each format?
HD-DVD: Toshiba and NEC
BluRay: Hitachi, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Sony, Thomson, LG, Sharp, Samsung
JVC, who was VHS proponent against Sony's Betamax, is not among the BluRay founders, but still is a BluRay supporter.
So please, do not count BluRay as a Sony Failure, it might end up being a failure but I dont think Sony would deserve to be the first to take the blame. (I would probably blame Fox first)
The most important quote in the Reuters
article seems to have been missed:
Feingold believes the PSP's biggest drawback as a movie-watching device was the inability to connect the gadget to TV sets for big-screen viewing, "which would have made it more compelling," as well as the inclusion of memory stick capability.
"I think a lot of people are ripping content and sticking it onto the device rather than purchasing," he said. "
(For those who skipped the article Benjamin Feingold, is president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
Sound familiar ?? Sort of like the excuses for decling CD sales ???
They just don't get it.
So where were the mp3 players at the time of the minidisc launch?
This thread is really stupid, because companies like Sony and Philips try to invent new stuff a part (lots) of them fail like DCC and minidisc mostly due to overestimating consumers cares about the added quality to the old cassette or form factor compared to CD, the professionals already had their DAT.
Some of the product are a success (CD, DVD) and they have to make sure to milk enough products to produce a successor before the competition does.
One simple way to save the UMD format would be for Sony to GIVE a PSP to every man, woman, and child on the planet (MWCOTP). Then the market for UMD would be a reasonable size, even if they restricted it to every other MWCOTP.
Hmm, I wonder if I can patent a marketing idea... Give a new gizmo/toy/gadget to exactly one child in each family that has more than one child who is at least within 3 years of age of the others... That way the parents would have to buy one for the other child / children just to keep the peace.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
I would want a minidisc over a cd because it's far mre durable. That said, I had a minidisc recorder and it more than anything made me hate sony; it was crippled with stupid artificial limitations, such as the inability to upload recordings to the computer, or that stupid DRM nonsense, or that crazy ATRAC conversion.
Another winfor nintendo in the handheld battle.
It would be mighty silly to stop mentioning the format, and claim that it was price alone. It was the format that drove the price.
Where the hell do you think prices come from? Any company can make DVD players, and the price reflects that. Any company can make DVDs, and the price reflects that. Combination of economies of scale and vigorous competition from multiple vendors. Sony created a new format that was locked to Sony products, hoping that would allow them to avoid the price wars.
Sony does these proprietary things *because* they think they can charge higher prices. The price didn't just happen, it's part of the plan.
In spite of the evidence of the stupidity of the typical consumer, it's becoming clear that consumers are still smarter than Sony executives.
This was fairly predictable. "Let's bring out a new format that's less flexible and charge more money for it." UK street prices for these were about £19 while, if you wait for the sales, you can pick up 4 DVDs for only £1 more.
I hope that all those retailers who replaced their last shelf of PC games with a UMD display got severely burned.
Ame
Maybe not with the company associations you've written, but you could get a Sharp Minidisc player, a SanDisk MemoryStick and a Toshiba Betamax VCR. Actually, there are a number of companies that produced those items.
Now, what were you saying again?
Bluray is actaully a good move. Only 3 regions, so I can watch japanese and american discs on the same device. I can't really say much about PS3 that hasn't been said, but I actually like the idea of brining the best parts of PC gaming like free peer to peer play, match making, and being able to store and play media on the device -- instead of paying for match making and having to stream data off a Windows PC. SCE actually supports Linux, and it's the only real Linux development environment for games. I'll never understand the Windows hating Xbox fanboys. I have nothing against xbox 360, but I just don't find it worth my money still.
You guys really drink the hateorad.
Hmm, thought a standard MiniDisc held 105Mb uncompressed...
Yes - after 5.25" floppies there were 3.5" and 3.25" floppies.
The 3.25" were used by companies such as Amstrad for Home PC's, whereas the x86 crowd took on 3.5" and that was history.
These are my experiences with UMD from a producer's perspective. I author DVDs for a living.
When UMD arrived we decided it would be a great product to offer to our clients. Some where genuinely interested. So we did some asking around because details were sketchy. What appeared was that the authoring tools that were developed by Sony where only being licsenced to 'selected parties' ie a really small group of only the largest companies. In Europe that would be one or two companies per country. These comapnies had to pay hefty license fees for development-tools were still at a pre-beta stage. Large portions of the interactivity had to be hand-coded and there was - for a long time - not a proper simulation-tool so the work could not be debugged or checked properly. The video on UMD is actually full-frame NTSC (720x480, 29.97fps) so the encoding to MPEG4/H.264 is very intense. Obviously this resolution is overkill for the screen of a PSP, and playback requires extra processing power (and thus battery time) to down-sample the video. Once the licensed authoring-houses had their master they had to rent a secure line to upload the disc-images to Sony. Sony also does all the disc manufacturing and believe me: it not cheap (or fast). The conclusion is: buggy and expensive authoring tools, expensive mastering, expensive manufacturing while also being extremely slow. We sub-contracted a company to author a UMD-title for one of our clients and we handled the affairs with Sony. The end-result for our client were UMD nearly ten times as expensive as a DVD, in roughly four months instead of one month for DVD and an extremely lack-luster market. That was their last time.
From the consumer's perspective: you can also download the movie on a P2P network or encode it yourself from your legally purchased DVD, load a couple of movies on your memory-stick and get much better playing-time. Tough choice.
Yeah, right. MDs can be recorded to 100s of times; let's compare like for like.
Even when a 512MB mp3 player cost $299, it was comparable to the high end MD player, in features and size.No, that was never the case. Have you ever seen an MP3 recorder ? MD lets you record on very small portable devices. And how long does it take you to transfer 512 MB of MP3 to your player, is it as quick as eject-insert-play ? I don't think so. Did you compare the original iPod size to high end MD players ? iPod is massive in comparison.
They should have LONG AGO made a minidisc MP3 player - the technology existed,What is your problem with Net MD ? Sure it's not MP3 but Sony offers a way to transfer MP3 to MD directly. Did you really think that they were going to "forget" about DRM, or try to support other companies' equipment ? By the way, Sharp etc also offer NetMD.
Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25, or you can get something solid state for less than the price of a MD player?
I would. MD is way more user friendly, it is re-recordable and the media doesn't degrade (not by far as much as CD-R I mean). Also it is small and cheap and you can play the same discs on your stereoset, walkman and car stereo. If it weren't for SOME advantages of MP3-players I would still have been using my MD-player. Hapilly.
I think you're being unfair on minidisc - it still has several advantages over other formats (although they're now outnumbered by disadvantages).
Compared to CDs, minidisc is small - that might not sound like much, but it means I can slip a MD player in my jeans pocket, my shirt pocket, hold it comfortably in my hand, whatever. For portable music, that's a must - CDs can never be as portable.
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better (OK, maybe "vast" is an overstatement, but for someone into hi-fi, try listening to a decent MD recording or a decent MP3 recording - the MD is clearly better; even my 9-year old deck sounds better than any MP3 I've heard, and I've heard a few). Most consumers don't care much about this (which is why you see so many Ipod owners with the original, nasty, low-quality earphones), but some people do. You can also get MD hifi units to put next to your CD player, which I've yet to see for MP3 (although I'm sure someone has made one somewhere); related to that, for MP3 players, you really need a computer for them to be worthwhile. You may be able to record from line-in on some of them, but that's not what they're designed for. I like listening to music on my stereo, not my computer. I still buy CDs - not MP3s. And I like my portable music player to sound good and be usable with my home stereo and music collection - all this fits much better with MD than it does MP3. Lastly, you exaggerated the price for MD units. I've never paid more than £1 for a minidisc (blank; although the new data versions are about twice that), and I've been using it since 1997. I've also never paid more than £170 for a player - hifi or portable - and for that money I've never had to buy the cheapest one, but have managed to get a good mid-range unit (my MD deck is 9 years old and still sounds comparable to CD, just about). That makes it better value than any MP3 player, for my needs. My current MD portable is about the size of an Ipod nano, give or take, and cost £150 two years ago. It sounds far better, and the battery lasts for days on end. It holds far less music, granted, but I personally prefer listening to an album or 3 several times per day than 200 unique tracks; if I wanted that, I'd listen to radio.
I know none of these reasons are likely to hold much weight with 95% of consumers, but if i was sure the format had a future, I'd still buy it (I'm not, so I don't anymore - my current units will be my last)
You're 100% right in saying that sony messed up with marketing the format, though: first it was touted as a replacement for CD when it should have been replacing cassette tape, then they tried selling pre-recorded discs. When MP3s started getting popular, sony held out and refused to give the few remaining MD fans a proper MP3 compatible unit - as far as I know the ones that currently exist are still crippled with poor software and DRM.
As you pointed out, this is par for the course with sony. MD, Memory Stick, the list goes on. Apart from anything else, it's bad business.
Of course blu-ray is a flop. They haven't sold one single disc. They haven't even sold any blu-ray players. People don't know whether to buy the disc first or the player first. It is the basic chicken-egg disaster all over again, and you know what happened in that situation. Do you call that a success??
Anyway if UMD Video does bite the dust, there is a perfect way to turn the disaster into a victory. The immediate and screamingly obvious next step is to uncripple the PSP so it can show ripped titles at full resolution. Then produce some funky ripping software akin to iTunes (with a built-in store with more titles if they like) and let PSP users use that. Sony might even make a few bucks from people prepared to pay a *reasonable* price for a movie. I'd hope they'd learn from past mistakes and do the smart thing for their customers and themselves.
But then again, this is Sony we're talking about here. Most corporates eventually snap out of the schizophrenic, self-harm phase. I wonder when Sony will.
Parent is correct about the resolution.
720x480(DVD) is also crappy as well, but it still kicks the crap out of UMCD.
I remember when they stopped manufacturing Laserdiscs. As stores were clearing their shelves, I was able to build up my film collection for £5 (~$10) a go. Boxsets for ~£10. So now UMD's are going the same way. Great!
i have said it before, and ill say it again, sony suck at this sort of stuff.
they should just stick to what they do best, but, we dont even know what THAT is any more since there are so many better and cheaper than them.
portfolio
sony didnt invent the cd, philips did. maybe thats why it didnt flop :)
portfolio
was licensed out, I own a teac and pioneer md player.
see the wikipedia listing under minidisc if you don't believe me.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
nd of course it only worked with sony stuff.
Actually, I think Sony was willing to license some of its technology, like Meory Stick, to others. But, I imagine their pricing and competition against cheaper or open standards kept other companies from even considering licensing Sony's proprietary standards.
Sony - "Hey lets make everyone buy two copies of a movie one on DVD and the other on UMD"
Consumer - "What ?! The PSP has no facility to play a UMD movie and output in a TV?! Well screw buying two copies - I'll buy the DVD, rip it, put it on a memory stick, and still get to watch it on my PSP"
Enough said really.
Compact Flash yes, but you can't blame them for not backing the SD format when SD cards came out after memory stick.
I agree with you on the early md players not being able to playback mp3s. They shouldve made the md players capable of playing back mp3s along with atrac from the start. Also they made minidiscs capable of storing pc data but decided to make the format incompatible with md audio. So that weakened one advantage minidiscs could have had and improved their market share. by the time sony bought both these things to the general md format (hi md) people had moved on the flash memory and hd based players.
sad.
There is still one area where the md format shines and that is in live recording. Dat is dead so maybe minidisc will take its place. Its the best format for stealth concert recordings and taping your own music practices.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Had achived - it's dead now and they've totally failed to make any inroads into the Japanese MP3 player market.
There's only one 'l' in 'Philips'.
Don't forget the 3 1/2" floppy disc. Back in 1983 or so, there were three competing formats at that size. One got used by Amstrad and Nintendo, another got used by some typewriter manufacturers, and the third was used... in the new Apple Macintosh. It was also used in an new HP computer at that time, but it was the Macintosh which caused the Sony format (which this time really was the best) to win.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
that's exactly what I thought. UMD was obviously crap, who wants to watch movies on a tiny little PSP, at like twice the cost of a normal movie? :/ Blu-ray on the other hand - well lots of people will have PS3s, and use that instead of a DVD/blu-ray player, and also it's just a good high density format. If they can get all their DRM and whatnot crap sorted out then it'll be fine.
which is totally what she said
"Have you ever seen an MP3 recorder?"
yes? My iRiver has that capability, and likely quite a few other mp3 players, probably even the flash ones.
which is totally what she said
Stupid really because DCC was a much poorer idea that should have been still-born and because of that MD missed its moment.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
I actually think it's pretty amazing that they got ANYBODY to release movies on the PSP format. With DVD and downloads knocking on our door what chance would it have of success. The only way I could have seen it working would be to use mini-DVDs so they could be played in the PSP via a caddy and a normal player with lower resolution. Of course that would mean using the DVD spec for the game data (in permanent caddies) but that probably would have worked.
Compared to CDs, minidisc is small
You got that one allright. Although there are mini-cd MP3 players quite cheap that fit that requirement equally well, if not better.
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better
This is just FUD, nothing else. It would depend on the player and the MP3, for sure, but trust me, I can get you an MP3 that you will be just unable to tell from the source, let alone ATRAC. In fact, many listening tests have proven ATRAC to be inferior to MP3 at equal bitrate. And you can choose your bitrate with most MP3 players, hence defining YOURSELF the perfect quality.
You can also get MD hifi units to put next to your CD player, which I've yet to see for MP3
Virtually ANY DVD player on the market will play MP3-CDs. Where have you been in the last 5 years?
I like listening to music on my stereo, not my computer
Dude, there is no comparison on hardware support. MP3 is way out of reach on this area. Most CD/DVD players will play MP3s, even at $30. You are just out of your league out here.
Lastly, you exaggerated the price for MD units
Still, it much more expensive than a an AIWA Z3C, which is a mini-CD MP3 player. $50 (although I don't think you can still find one).
My current MD portable is about the size of an Ipod nano, give or take
This is not one manufactured by SONY then... The MZ-RH10 is 80x19x84 and the Nano is 89x41x7... That's about 5 times bigger !!!! Have you ever had a look at a Nano?
I know none of these reasons are likely to hold much weight with 95% of consumers
Of course, since none of them are valid (or at least still valid). You need to look around: The MP3 world has also evolved in the last 5 years.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Sony does have/had some pretty cool shit. (too bad all failed) Why? - Because they try to force it down our throats. DId they actually think that the psp would actually carry the umd format? Cmon.. It takes millions to negotiate with other movie companies to release it on "your format", and what did they gain? a movie that can ONLY be played on THEIR unit... Dont think so, I have a $15 apex that does that for me on my tv. Where the hell is the VIDEO OUT on the psp? Devices work when they are able to replace something. Its not even about the format war beta/vhs etc... Its about usage.
... NO.. So it doesnt replace anythig it just adds to the damn clutter we already have.
Samething for the Minidisc... Nifty Sure, a trend setter, maybe, if it was cheaper. Can I stick it in my current player
Another Example that worked, is the "Walkman(tm?)". Why did it work? Because You were able to use your EXISTING "media"
As for flash... Its smaller.. We like small... But why did they take so long to match price levels with CF? Pretty Much USELESS unless you owned a Sony Product... (other vendors are slowly adding support for their flash stuff)
And now back to this BlueRay/HD DVD... Show us a product that will not add weight to our entertainement centers, show us something that is able to REPLACE something. Stop bickering and for gods sake start listening to YOUR consumers.
If you try controlling US with your DRMs, Your Downgraded resolutions, we will MOVE ON, or we will "Fix It" ourselves. And You WILL Fail.
Swinging offtopic a bit, Everyone is pushing the whole "HIGH Definition" Thing. I jumped on the bandwagon.. I got a somewhat small 32 lcd... Nothing Fancy, But For what I paid for it VS what i get from it, does not Balance out... SURE, I get the 20 or so Channels that are HD, but Did it REPLACE anything? DId It Justify The cost? Sony Are YOU LISTENING??? JUSTIFY THE COST!
Thank you for allowing me to rant this early in the morning, I better go before I get replaced
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Also they made minidiscs capable of storing pc data but decided to make the format incompatible with md audio. So that weakened one advantage minidiscs could have had and improved their market share.
It always puzzled my as to why they never pushed it as a data media format (though I think I read somewhere that it was somewhat slow.) At the time, the portable computer media format was the 100MB Zip disc, whereas the standard 74 minute MD holds somewhere around 150MB, is smaller, cost maybe $3 each (less if you shopped around.) Zips cost $10+ each, maybe $8 if you bought in a ten pack. Plus the MD is virtually indestructible. ok, I never really tried to "break" one, but they're pretty durable, and after one was "ruined" (rendered unreadable,) by a bad recorder, I was able to reformat it with a working recording unit.
I'd dare to lump myself into the 'smart geek' category, and I dont give a toss that my camera uses a proprietary technology, considering I can just plug it into my PC with my USB cable. I havent looked at the read/write speeds of other card types, and it will be a shame to not have the memory cards be compatible with any Canon SLRs when I eventually upgrade, but I like the format, it's nice and small, fast, and didnt seem that expensive. There's nothing wrong with Sony trying to create standards/'better' technology, it's just a shame they've not been very good at it so far =p I think they've got a real chance with blu-ray, since the PS3 supports it, but as far as consumer level products go, I guess the cheapest usually wins
which is totally what she said
Who the hell would make an MP3 CD? Make a damned ordinary CD... MP3 sounds bloody awful on a decent hifi (and I keep hearing about these 'blind tests' that say it's better than ATRAC.. well they must have been deaf too since I've never heard an mp3 player that could hold a candle to a minisisc).
When sony works on its own, the format dies. However, when sony works with a consortium, the format dominates - viz CD or floppy disc. And blu-ray is a big consortium thing.
I am trolling
I'm just wondering... Would it be possible to reverse-engineer the Minidisc storage medium and make a homebrew MD MP3 player that just treats the disc itself as a generic storage medium? Maybe one could try to interface to parts from a commercial MD player (ie. remove most of the elctronics and put in your own PCB)...
Seriously, I think that the Minidisc as a storage medium is quite cool. It's just everything else about it that had to be replaced.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
At the time of the MD launch, Sony said they were planning on producing an MD Data version. This would connect to a computer and store 140MB. At the time, I was using a computer with a 60MB hard drive, so this seemed very interesting. I visited my local Sony store, and enquired about it - they had never heard of it. I have still not seen a MD Data drive. Apparently the newer disks permit 1GB of data to be stored on something the size of the original MD. I would love to see a format with this physical form factor and capacity be the new floppy disk, but this seems not to be very likely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Check out "pmpmod" http://dl.qj.net/PMP-Mod-1.02-M4.02g3-Gaming-Conso les-PSP-Homebrew-Applications/pg/12/fid/1449/catid /140
Allows full resolution encoded movies on memory stick. If you already have the DVD this makes UMD pretty useless.
This is not so new, by the last week of last month it was revealed in the press that besides this info about Universal, 20th Century Fox, Buena Vista and even *Sony Pictures* are scaling back releases on the format.
-- SouNerd.com
Now if only the Media Industry would take a hint from this with their downloadable movies. If you sell Product A at the same price point as Product B, and Product B is more versatile in where it can be played, then Product A will fail.
Solutions:
1. Make Product A less expensive
2. Make Product A more versatile
3. Make Product B less versatile
4. Make Product B more expensive
5. Don't make Product A
Movie studios need to take note, just because you spend $10 million on a movie, doesn't mean you will make your money back, let alone turn a profit.
Cheesy Movie Night
the thing with memory stick was that it was obvious that it was a dumb, lockin idea - even to non geeks.
joe punter could tell straight off that there was no particular reason for sony to make a different shape but electrically-and-functionally-identical memory stick, when they're quite familiar with existing ones like SD and compact flash.
Maybe you didn't have a decent MP3 in all those MP3 players you reviewed. I can tell you you are living in a lie. ATRAC is very similar to MP3 in that it is a lossy compression format, based on the same general principles. Of course a crappy 128kbps MP3 downloaded from Napster 5 years ago will sound horrible in ANY MP3 player. But here you don't test the player.
But if it pleases you to think ATRAC is greater than MP3, then let it be. It's like saying MPEG2 is inferior to MPEG. This is just plain wrong, it just depends on the bitrate. a good MPEG file is much better than a bad MPEG2 one. And yet MP2 is better than MPG in many respects.
ATRAC has this advantage that it is locked in, so you cannot do anything with it. MP3 is much more open. You can make a very good MP3 as easily as a terrible one.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Yes, The fact that Minidisc is far more durable than cd's is what has made me really wish sony had actually thought about what they were doing. Minidisc can hold any data, 170? MB worth of data. Had they marketed it not only as a music storage format, but as a general storage format, they would have been unstoppable. In the days of Zip drives and other such wonderful inventions, they had a format that not only was smaller, but had more capacity, and was durable. Oh, and it was much cheaper. Zip disks were quite expensive from what I remember, but maybe that was more due to demand and lack of competition.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Doesn't almost EVERYTHING achieve success in Japan?
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better (OK, maybe "vast" is an overstatement, but for someone into hi-fi, try listening to a decent MD recording or a decent MP3 recording - the MD is clearly better; even my 9-year old deck sounds better than any MP3 I've heard, and I've heard a few).
What?
MP3 is a lossy perceptual encoding format. ATRAC is a lossy perceptual encoding format. What sort of mp3s are you comparing MD to?
ATRAC is 292kbps. If you can tell the difference between it and a 292kbps mp3, blind, I'll be impressed.
What was their last successful medium? The 3.5" floppy?
8mm Video Tape?
I would want a minidisc over a cd because it's far mre durable.
But isn't that only true because it's shorter? I guess the physics principle is torque, but of course a CD is more prone to bending/cracking because forces leveraged further from the center put more stress on the middle of the disc.
Why bother with that when you can just use a keychain flash drive with much higher capacity, better portability, and pretty much universal compatability?
It's true because it has a hard plastic case around it, protecting the disc, and you could throw it across the room or rub sandpaper all over both sides without any worrying about doing any damage to the actual data. This also helped protect it from light, which is anohter thing that is known to damage CDs, especially recordables.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Oh, and about your listening test comment, here is some infos:
a blind test is a test where one will be presented with three pieces of music (the same piece usually the original, ATRAC ad MP3 in our example) and will be asked to rate them in order of quality. But the listeners does not know which is which - except for the original which they are asked to rate the others against.
That way, there is no bias either conscious or inconscious. A huge number of people couldn't believe what a 'placebo' effect is. It is the fact that your brain can very well tell you there are differences between two files when there are none.
Here is a public listening test comparing MP3 to ATRAC at 128kbps.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
@@@@@@ AUDIOPHILE ALERT @@@@@@
Probably owns an audio DAT player.
In the article you linked to, where does it make that quote?
The sound quality issue isn't FUD; ATRAC (in its latest incarnations) is simply a better compression algorithm for audio quality (at comparable file sizes); see here or here for example. Now, I'm not saying you couldn't produce an MP3 which sounds better than ATRAC, but in common usage, ATRAC generally has more fidelity. Saying that, I'm sure as MD drops off as a format and MP3 becomes even more mainstream, MP3 will improve to the point that it overtakes ATRAC - and it's not a huge difference at the moment. But it's big enough for me - I didn't spend money on a decent hifi to waste my time listening to poorly compressed music on it. They're both compromises, but at the moment, in practical usage, ATRAC is less of a compromise than MP3.
A DVD player which plays MP3s is not an "MP3 player" - you'd have to use a computer to burn a CD/DVD specifically for listening on it. This is not the same as having one MD which I can use in a portable player or a deck. How many people do you know who keep their MP3 player contents sync'd with CDs ? If I'm listening to music while walking home, then decide I want to carry on listening to the same music, but on my hifi, I can simply take the disc out of my MD player, put it in my deck, and i'm done. With a computer based format like MP3 I'd need to burn it to a new medium first. Again, a computer is required. I spend all day in front of a computer - when I'm relaxing, listening to music, I don't mind using a cd player, but having to use a computer is an intermediate step i don't want.
Of course, with some portables you get a line-out which means you can plug it into your amp and listen direct from there, but not many come with a line-in which you can record via without using a computer. that's fine for many people, who want to use it via a computer. I don't.
And my MD portable IS a sony - an MZ-E909, at 71.1 x 77.6 x 12.5 mm (2cm smaller in height but 3cm wider, and about 5mm deeper - not that much difference - they both slip into a pocket easily). For that I get around 40 hours battery life (and more like 100 hours if i don't mind one AA battery piggybacking) - a nano gives about 14 hours. The build quality is also much better, IMO (magnesium shell - dropped many times with no ill effects, and even sat on a couple of times). So i get a slightly squarer, slightly thicker body, but only have to charge it every few weeks rather than every few days. Again, not a big deal, but it suits me.
I'm not saying MD/ATRAC is better than MP3 in all it's forms, it isn't - I'm just saying that it isn't quite the dead duck some people would have you believe - at least not in technical terms. For me, it's a great format, let down only by Sony's refusal to make it more mainstream. MP3 on MD could have been huge, if Sony had not been so dense a few years ago. Now anyone who hasn't already invested in the format would be mad to buy into it.
If they had added a UMD slot to the PS3 they could have kept it alive, even if the PS3 UMD slot only played movies not PSP games.
They chose not to do that and so now they have to live with that choice.
I was ready to buy into UMD as a portable movie/game format until they announced that PS3 would NOT have a slot.
Why aren't regular CDs and DVDs like this again?
When I was a kid, I went to my dad's office and he had some sort of digital media drive where you put the CD in a bulky plastic cartidge, and slide the whole cartidge into the PC. Those things stayed in better shape than most of my 3 1/2 floppys.
I would say that the reasons for many of the failed Sony storage solutions include:
/.
- high pricing
- reluctance to license, or make an open standard
- not really offering any reasonable technology advantage over the alternatives
Sounds like Sony storage suffers the same issues as their music and films divisions. So put I could intepret this as greed and paroniac control - hmm, sounds like another company that is not held to high regards on
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And yet I hear in Korea, only old people use Minidisc.
The did produce it. I have a portable MD DATA drive still from many years ago. It was slow and proprietary and the drives used a disk format and didn't support any of the standard OS disk maintenance and repair tools.
Junk. Which is probably why you haven't seen one.
The only think I liked from Sony in recent memory was the Clie NX* PDAs and even the had some silly proprietary stuff/limitations (that third parties managed to work around, thankfully.)
Flash drives weren't arond at the time. Now of course, 1GB of flash costs around $40, while 1GB of minidisc costs $5.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I encode my music using LAME and the "- V 1 -vbr-new" strings - I very much doubt you could tell the difference between that and CDs.
Just because you don't know how to make high-quality mp3s, that doesn't mean noone knows.
When I get a movie, I just want to watch the movie.
Damn, the anti-piracy / commercials / trailers that can't be skipped on most DVDs are super-annoying. When the kid wants to see the movie, I've got to stand there and wait for a couple of minutes (pressing FF when the disc deems that I am allowed), and then finally press "play"?
I learned how to use DVDDecrypter / DVD Shrink based on this annoyance alone! Now I tell everyone about it. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, studios!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I can, and yes I have tried.
MP3 doesn't retain the very high or very low frequencies as well, in my opinion. The difference is minimal (actually, miniscule would be more accurate), but when I'm sat in a dark room concentrating on the music, or listening to each chord through a decent pair of headphones, it's that sort of thing that i'll pay money to improve. MP3 doesn't cut it for me (yet).
Saying that, I'm the kind of person who spends good money on different kinds of cable and can tell the difference between them when listening to music. For me, most MP3s are like listening to FM radio - it sounds great until you play it through a half decent setup, and then play the same thing from CD or vinyl, at which point MP3 starts to sound a bit, well, hollow.
I don't think I've seen a single other company support the standard.
They do exist. Older Samsung camcorders such as this one take only Memory Sticks for flash memory.
According to the Samsung website, their newest camcorders take either SD/MMC or are like this one and take, niftily enough, SD/MMC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro.
This may, admittedly, suggest that the Samsung camcorders are just Sonys in disguise.
OK, say your MP3s are identical to the CD original. Where can I get those MP3s? From Itunes? From a mate at work who rips the latest White Stripes CD for me? (note: piracy is wrong :) Or from sitting at my computer, checking the internet for the latest updates and tweaking settings in my CD Ripper, waiting for it to finish, copying it to my ipod, burning it onto CD, etc etc?
As I've said, that isn't what I want from an audio format; for me it's not a technical exercise - if it takes hours of effort to create a copy of some music i bought because i wanted to relax listening to it, what's the point? If it needs a computer, then already, i'm having to do extra stuff, even if that's only turning the computer on and opening up Grip.
Well, I'm talking about right now. And I'd rather pay $35 extra to be able to transfer files to almost any other machine. USB drives will work anywhere, MDs would need another drive installed which would severely limit compatibility (unless they put out an MD USB drive, which would be a lot bulkier than a flash keychain).
.... for me to poop on!
beta != betacam
I have had a PSP for about six months now, and if I want to watch a movie on it, I buy a DVD and rip and encode the movie for the PSP. If the UMD format discs were not so ridiculously expensive, I would certainly buy them, but in Ireland you can pay anything between 150% and 200% of the price of the DVD for the UMD version.
Sony have nobody to blame but themselves, and I have no sympathy for them.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
On /. - surely not. First of all, UMD is not Sony's only movie media for the PSP. Most PSP owners I know (including myself) rip 'em from DVDs or torrent the suckers and run them from the memory card.
Secondly, this certainly isn't the end of the UMD as we know it seeing as all the PSP games are delivered on this format.
I suppose, however, "Movies on UMD may be discontinued, leaving users to watch them from Memory Cards, but still play games delivered on them" doesn't quite have the same impact.
480x is crap.
I can re-encode dvdss to 1500kpbs at full original res 720x480p and still be under 1.5gig!!!!
But we all know the psp would die at decoding 720x480p, ie more pixels.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
MP3 doesn't retain the very high or very low frequencies as well, in my opinion.
... listen to what you are saying - if you heard someone else make a comment like that wouldnt you think they were a twat?
...
When MiniDisc came out in its first incarnation of Atrak was booed by audiophiles for suffering the EXACT SAME inadequacies (lack of top-end and bottom-end frequencies) as your are describing with regard to MP3, but - just like the Atrack system has improved over the years so has MP3 and the myriad of other codec's floating around these days.
but when I'm sat in a dark room concentrating on the music, or listening to each chord through a decent pair of headphones, it's that sort of thing that i'll pay money to improve. MP3 doesn't cut it for me (yet).
I can understand forking out for a decent music system its easy to tell the difference between a plastic midi-hifi and a decent seperates system!.But your comment is borderline obsessive. You sound so obsessed with the sound quality and the finer intricacies of the sound; Do you actually enjoy music? Good music is good music. Its a shame you judge it chord by chord or frequency by frequency. You sound like an obsessively biased audiophile fanboy who's more interested in tweaking his stereo than actually enjoying music (as opposed to listening to the inadequacies of your set-up). I cant imagine what it must be like to be so distracted by the details of the sound that i couldnt enjoy my music collection!
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Count me in on the legion (for certain values of legion) of PSP owners who thought UMD movies were a pretty good idea, but not for $20. They should have been giving the damn things away like candy. I've been flying a lot for work, lately, and the PSP is a nice thing to have on a plane. I've only bought one disk that wasn't a game, and that was Green Day's concert album. Everything else, I thought to myself "nice, but why don't I just buy the DVD and convert it myself." That's because of the price. If they made the UMD movies in the $5-10 range, that would be below my hassle threshold, and I'd pick them up that way instead.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
Yeah, with CD's I think people chose size over durability. Originally, CDs had caddies, but people didn't want them. This was a mistake. People don't always know what's best for them, that's why you still see stories about people not wearing seatbelts, and dieing in accidents.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
1. Mini CD players are pretty lousy, on reliability and sound quality (at least those that friends have had haven't lasted that well).
2. Sound quality. Those so-called listening tests aren't worth the paper they're written on. The Sony kit generally has much higher quality DACs than most other consumer MP3 players (and as a side note, SE Walkman Phones have higher quality output stages than iPod Nanos). I've got several friends who have systems that easily show the differences between these formats; ATRAC is definitely superior at any given bitrate than MP3. The same people also happen to work in the industry and would be quite happy to prove you wrong.
3. MD HiFi units. We are talking about truly decent quality MD recorder units.
That's what we're talking about. MD could have been that ultimate ubiquitous storage format, but instead, sony screwed themselves over with incompatibilities, and tons of DRM. Minidisc as far as the specs are concerned is the better format. Had they executed it right, there would be a minidisc reader in every computer, and there would be no need to carry the drive around with you. There was times when USB Sticks had the same problems, with having to install drivers to use them, and not working on most machines. Try sticking that USB stick into a windows 98 machine and see what happens.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
i'm surprised nobody has mentioned that they REALLY shot themselves in the foot for UMD sales by allowing h264 to be played from the memory stick. why buy a umd when you can buy the dvd, rip it to 264 for ipod/PSP and have both formats available to watch on whatever device you desire.
What they need to do is start bundling a UMD in with a regular DVD in special edition packages.
maybe for a few bucks more (cost of the media) I could see these sales going up easily. The thing is why would people pay double for a movie just to see it on a tiny screen, when they could easily rip it onto a 2gig mem stick?
Who cares if they flops, I'm no Sony fanboy, but any reasonable company that attempts new ideas will make flops. Nintendo had Virtual Boy, Sega had numerous flops, the Laser Disc (those huge ones) was a flop, Apple has had flops. Of course Sega went down because they had too many flops, but they were taking risks and trying to bring new life to their company. Sony has enough other products and revenue they can take risks like this with no problem.
AFAIK still in use for DVD-RAM disks. I still have a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drive which uses a cartridge.
So the format is proprietary and closed. That makes it "universal" how?
-b
myselfmusic
I mean cmon companies can keep to the normal thing and do business, what Sony are trying to do is push technology, and help it evolve, and with all the failures, they've had many success' so just thing some may fail, but in the end they'll hit one and run with it for as long as it can, and that may pave the way for more breakthroughs, only time will tell with Blu-Ray.
I know that others have already replied, but my two cents is: for starters, L170 (don't know how to do the pound symbol on my keyboard) is (as of 10AM 4/4/2006) $298.46. And you paid that two years ago - I'm talking in 1998-1999 when I worked in retail audio, a good MD player, especially a portable one, was $299-$349 (USD, in L that's L170 - L200, and in 1999 L's too - it's also 2,674.48 Sweedisk Kronor).
The media has come down in price, but they should have made it cheap to begin with when CD Recorders started to buzz in the computer world, and those first 128MB MP3 players came out. They kept prices high, which drove people to lower cost alternatives.
I thought in 1999, and I still maintain today, that a Minidisc MP3 player released in 2000 would have conquored the portable music world.
~Will
sig?
Okay, I see what you're doing here. You basically take all downsides of various MP3 players and compare them with a MD player. But that is what makes MP3 great: The variety of offerings. Flash, HDD, CD based, DVD players, computer interaction is what makes MP3 the greatest choice around.
Basically, your only complaint is that there is no portable player with an extractible media that can record, and it is a valid one. But no other advantage can be found to MD today. None.
As far as home is concerned, I don't even have a player anymore. I have an HTPC, linked by SPDIF to my amp and everything is on my HDD. Physical media is a thing of the past. I don't even have CDs anymore exept for my car.
And when I want to listen to music in the subway, I plug my iPod in my puter and transfer my files at a speed that would leave your MD in the dust.
Basically, MP3 is not a metter of players or recorders, it's a state of mind. Many players for many needs (but yours of a recorder that can record on a media readable on your living room).
Write boring code, not shiny code!
"but they did help to come up with the compact disc."
Philips seems to come up with good formats... compact cassette, CD to name two. But both of those were essentially a collaboration between the two companies.
However, neither has had much success lately, as both Philips and Sony favored the MMCD format until Lou Gerstner (IBM) convinced them to join Toshiba. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#History
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I consider SD to be the heir to Smart Media. I mean, look at 'em:
sig?
While it's likely the PS3 is going to sell pretty well (depending on how much it retails for), it's not likely going to replace anybody's DVD player. Nearly everybody already has a DVD player hooked up that they like, have the remote for, are used to, etc. They're not going to suddenly start using the PS3 as their new DVD player unless they want to trade up to Blu-Ray. If the user has an HD TV and wants to watch Blu-Ray movies on it, that's one thing. But most people are going to see, for example, King Kong on DVD for $15 and on Blu-Ray for $25 and pass on the Blu-Ray version because they're satisfied with the DVD version or they still have an older TV. Blu-Ray is basically pointless for people without HDTVs, meaning NEARLY EVERYONE.
"I didn't spend money on a decent hifi to waste my time listening to poorly compressed music on it. "
I'm kind of a nut about sound quality and what I will say is that if you use 256kb/s mp3's you'll have great sound quality. And the iPod does support lossless audio, so you can go with that.
I don't really have an issue with the MD format, except that it's all but dead, and mp3 is just supported everywhere. Yes, most people encrypt their mp3's poorly, but it's just the 90% rule in action.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
>Who the hell would make an MP3 CD? Make a damned ordinary CD... MP3 sounds bloody awful on a decent hifi .id files or whatever show up so you get names of the music your playing on a few supported players.
many advantages for MP3 CD,
I)theirs more sound per bit so
1) more music per disc
2) you can spin the disc slower or less duty cycle.
a) longer battery life
b) less prone to skipping
c) longer cd life (less likely to rub: spinning slower = less momentum, so less disk distortion, and easier to read a scratched disc at slower spin rates
II) more future format flexibilty,
1) mp3 now can support 5.1 surround sound (high bit rate rip from a DVD)
2) categories: my car mp3 disc player supports directories, etc in the mp3 format discs, so you can easily catagories, no such thing on inflexible audio CD format.
3)file name is more supported than the CD name system, the CD burn programs I currnelty use don't even support the dual mode disks you have to create to make those
Indeed not. But by then DAT had failed in the consumer marketplace and was largely a professional format. MD and DCC were the first consumer formats to use digital data compression and were the first digital recordable formats to be aimed specifically at the consumer.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
You're fooling yourself. Set a CD ripper to 320kbps, pop in a CD, copy it. It's that simple. Setup is a one-time thing. Ripping takes five, ten minutes tops.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
that's not my point. i'm not saying that MD is "better" than MP3 in any real way: i'm saying it suits some people more - even if those people are outnumbered 100 to 1 - because the few strengths it does have, for some, are far more important than the many strengths MP3 as a format has.
i'm not interested in which is "better" in absolute terms - i merely responded to a "MD is rubbish" post that I thought misrepresented the format.
If Sony wanted to make UMD's popular, they would have included for free a copy of UMD movies with every DVD purchase. Do that for a year or two until they get people interested in the format. Then come out with stand-alone UMD players to connect to TV sets. Agressively market the design (i.e. give it away for almost nothing) for 3rd party players.
Instead, they came up with a format that was only playable on an overpriced game system then charged $20-25 for UMD disks that could be purchased on DVD for $12-15. I got the impression Sony felt they had invested big in the PSP and the business plan said it was going to pay off in 18 months and by-gosh, they were going to make it pay off in 18 months even if it meant absurd revenue predictions from UMD format licensing. Which meant that companies had to add $5 more per disk retail to pay Sony for licensing.
But you know, given that this is Sony, they'll blame *piracy* for the demise of UMD. The thought process will go like this....
"Hmmm, UMD failed because people were ripping DVD movies and putting them on a memory stick. What we *should* have done was to make the PSP so that it was incapable of playing a movie from a memory stick. Also, we should ask the U.S. Congress for laws that will throw people in jail for ripping movies from their DVD. Those dirty pirates."
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
1. You haven't heard of any decent mini-cd players. I have.
2. "The Sony kit generally has much higher quality DACs than most other consumer MP3 players", so you acknowledge it's not better than all MP3 players. "ATRAC is definitely superior at any given bitrate than MP3", tested on those bad MP3 players you are talking about, I am pretty sure you're right. Those listening test are based on the format itself, not the hardware to play it on. And as you said, there are MP3 players on par with MD players on that front.
3. "MD HiFi units": The lack of recorders in the MP3 world is a fact, and IMO the only advantage that remains to MD units. That said, I see it as a very little value. MP3 (and ATRAC) is a lossy compressed format, made to be listened to, and nothing else. MP3 made from CDs (for example) will be great for listening purposes but very little else (mixing, editing, etc...) and I find the ripping/encoding process of making MP3s much faster than recording a piece of music on a MD recorder - but you need a computer. And for music that has to have archival quality, MP3 is as bad as ATRAC for the purpose.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Compared to MP3 players, the sound quality is vastly better This is just FUD, nothing else. It would depend on the player and the MP3, for sure, but trust me, I can get you an MP3 that you will be just unable to tell from the source
Not only its it FUD but is pure bullshit to boot. I think the myth of poor quality mp3's is left over from the old encoder days a few years ago. Back when mp3's where just taking off a lot of hackers where trying to backwards engineer the mp3 format for the free encoders. Since the real encoder cost money and the free encoders where just good enough people went with the free encoders. The where good enough but not perfect. You could tell the difference between the original and the mp3 because the mp3 would have compression artifacts and distortion. Nobody was using the real encoders that cost money because the free encoders where, well free and mp3 wasn't a standard yet. So people only heard mp3's from these poor quality encoders. As mp3's became the standard and people started using the real encoders mp3's all the problems with them have been cleared up.
Also this was 15 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The poor quality free encoders that couldn't get it right have been abandoned. While the ones that did get it right, lame, have gotten good, damn good. So good that there is no difference in quality any more. I personally can't tell the difference between a mp3 encoded with lame, musicmatch, or windows mediaplayer.
The there are so many other variables in listening to music that make these comparisons almost foolish. Since everyones ears are different what sounds good to one person might sound like crap to someone else. To me those ear buds they send out now with just about any mp3 sound like crap. But to some people they sound wonderful. For me the best head phones I used to have where a $9 par of maxwells that came as a free gift when I bought a set of cdr at walmart. They sounded like crap to other people but they where fine for me.
I just replaced them with a set of these active noise filtering head phones that I paid 70 bucks for. People where right, those maxwells where crap.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Judging by my friends in Europe, MD was successful there too. It seems like in N. America MD didn't do so well. Really there was a big gap in the market here for a long time before portable MP3 took off.
Knocking it because it "had [achieved]" success and is now dead due to MP3 players is like knocking tapes because CDs ruled the market. MD was bigger first. Now, just like tapes, it's been superceded by a better technology.
Do you notice that Sony seems to hate their customers lately?
Seriously, I can't think of anything that Sony has done that could be seen either as pro-consumer or respectful of their customers in the last 5-10 years.
The Rootkit fiasco is pretty telling when the president of sony not only didn't apologize but seemed arrogant about it's use... "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Where was the "We'd like to apologize to our customers for this breach of trust..." kind of speech? Heck, he still thinks that copying music to an iPod is ripping him off! Sony seems to hate their customers because they won't behave the way Sony wants them to.
"Pretty Shiny" isn't enough to overcome how Sony treats their customers on a daily basis.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"Betamax? Still the top choice for many professional video applications."
No, Betamax was never the choice for professional video applications.
You might be thinking of Betacam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam) which is similar to Betamax, but it not compatible.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Mini disc. Pffft. The Clik! Disk is here to stay!
Ugh, iomega crap. "Clik" as in "click-of-death" is more like it.
LS-120 forever!
Okay... so your's is 71.1x77.6x12.5mm, (2.8x3.06x.49 inches)
.5 cm thicker.
The ipod nano is 3.5x1.6x.27 inches (88.9x40.64x6.86 mm)
So yes, about 1.8cm shorter, but 3.7cm wider and a bit over
Though I disagree with "not that much difference"
Volume wise, the nano is 24.78 cubic cm. Your MD player is 68.97. That's almost 3 times larger (~2.8)
So you accentuate the positives of your particular player of choice (40 hour battery life as opposed to the nano's 14 hours... gee... that's around 2.8 times longer... for something that's about 2.8 times bigger.) and ignore a size difference of the same magnitude.
I won't even get into the sound quality debate.
I have one of those cheap USB flash drives that plays MP3s and it does it too... and to a couple other formats too (you select them on the menu) that gives me something like 16 hours of recording time in 512 megs. Don't remember offhand what the other formats were, since I've never used it other than as a simple MP3 player for long trips or to transfer files to and from work.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The rootkit ended up being a positive thing with the music deptartment losing even more clout. What does that have to do with all the duped stories, and sometimes racist comments about OTHER deptpartments at sony. It's just annoying seeing how once bluray is out all these people including you will go out and buy a PS3 while claiming to boycott it -- all over very poor reasoning.
I've been on this site a long time, and I've never even seen a string of such muck raking submissions even over Microsoft in the midst of the antitrust trial. If all slashdot can do is bitch about music companies, and copy stories off theinquirer.net it's not very appealing.
both fit into a trouser/shirt pocket easily and without causing discomfort; both are light enough that they're unnoticeable while walking around. to me, that's not much difference.
40 hours versus 14 hours is significant, for me; i can take my MD player on a week's holiday without having to take a charger. i can leave it in my bag for weeks at a time without having to remember to charge it, and without ending up with no music on my journey home.
there comes a point where smaller is not necessarily better. my MD player is already too small for me (and my large hands) to comfortably use - having an ipod nano would make no difference to how noticeable it is to carry around, but would make me notice when the battery runs out halfway through a journey.
there are smaller MP3 players than the nano, but none is as popular, because the nano offers something those players don't. likewise, my MD offers me something the nano cannot - just because that offering wouldn't justify it to you, doesn't mean it doesn't justify to me or anyone else.
my main priorities, in descending order, for portable music are 1. sound quality, 2. size, and 3. battery life, in that order. MD wins out (IMO) on the first and third, and is more than acceptable in the second category.
The CD did die in 1980.
But it resurrected to save Mankind.
Akin to Amen.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
... for netcraft to confirm this.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
>>Who wants to pay $5 per minidisc in order to listen to music when CD-R's are $0.25
>I would
at one time the MinyDisk probably had a advantage over competing products,
now $5 for a degradeable moving parts 100mb disk? why not spend $23 for 5* that ? http://www.digi4me.com/home.php?cat=148
A smaller more compatible 512mb CF card? (or $30 for a 1 gig CF) and the reader wont wear out near as quick. (thats the one I would worry about, how long the reader last, not the cheap replaceable media.
> Also it is small and cheap and you can play the same discs on your stereoset, walkman and car stereo.
thats where the C.D. takes back the advantage, for portabilty do the CF, for comatibilty do the CD, you can have all your music on a CD, and a CF, and still be cheaper than just on MinyDisk (pretty much still needed to buy the CD to get legal music to the MinyDisk anyway.) probably faster to transfer to these 2 formats for downloaded music than just to many disk also, I already have a $30 CD/DVD writer, and a $10 CF card reader attached to my computer. and of course a DVD player to the stereo...
The quote about Blu-Ray being a bomb is in paragraph 5 of TFA, not the article he linked to. The article he linked is to establish that Universal is a part of the HD-DVD Consortium (see the answer to the "Who's on each side?" question), establishing motive for the anonymous exec to cast doubt on Blu-Ray.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
It's "Disc" not "Disk".
And you use too many exclamation points, it makes your post seem like a troll.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Even if the format is proprietary it may not cost as much as the 1-2 penny figure for cd's but it sure as hell doesn't cost more then $2 bucks to produce a umd and a bit more for the packaging. VHS tapes should still cost more then any other format to produce (unless you count chip based cartridges for the gba or something, they win for most expensive media).
Even at $7.99 umd's would make a nice freakin profit.
Hmmm... Pie...
DAT wasn't always intended as just a professional format. It "coulda been a contendah" if only it hadn't been crippled by the record companies and their brickbats in Congress.
I think any time DAT comes up in discussion it's good to remember that, since its failure had a lot less to do with any shortcomings as a format than due to political maneuvering. That's not to say that it didn't have shortcomings (in particular, the mechanisms wouldn't have been cheap compared to analog cassettes) but I think the public would have liked it, if it had been introduced on time -- well before CDs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Back in 1999-2000 time frame I was looking to use the Sony Memory Stick as a backup storage medium for a telcom project for a major (at that time) telcom company. Getting any data at all form Sony was painfull and they wanted an outrageous fee just for us to get complete tech details on the product. After spending many weeks going up the Sony US food chain, I said forget it. We went with another product that was bigger, but easier to handle.
Sony is too big and has too many levels on mismangement..... Sound like any other large companies we know of....
Yes, Sony has many failed propietary formats...
Joseph?
Just like many Sony formats before it, it is not surprising in the least that UMD has failed miserably.
Joseph?
Killed by a TLA.
8 to 12 songs vs 150 to 300 songs maybe?
You're so right. In fact, I always thought minidisks would have made the ideal replacement for the floppy. Imagine Sony's delight to have one in every PC in the world. Instead they screwed it all up with their lack of imagination and their self-crippling content-protectionism.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
... for a proprietary format which claims to be called "Universal" Media Disc.
Minidisc is also essential in a lot of audio/video(audio component) acquisition (even over DAT). However, this is finally starting to slip as a lot of independents are now starting to use iRiver recorders.
Sounds like a Caddy CD-ROM to me.. although he may have had a floptical, I doubt it. Damn, you were a kid then? I'm old.
...working 14 hours a day in an uber-restrictive office. Our IT manager blocks any URL with the word "game" in it, and he'll even do reverse look-up to make sure a numerical IP doesn't resolve to a URL with the word "game" in it. I couldn't read the comments the last time around, because it was listed under "games.slashdot.org". Thanks for the repeat.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
alt+0163 = "£"
*or*
£ in HTML.
Slashdot doesn't go back far enough to have an ancient article discussing how tiny TVs (think video-Walkmen) of the late 80's were massive flops.
So this person never got the message: "Hmmmmm...I know! Let's add a tinly lil' DVD player to it!"
Guess what, foos! Nobody wants to watch the flakin' TV screen that's that damned tiny.
Now, when someone builds a TI DSP chip and projector that can fit in a wristwatch, and project on a wall brightly, then I'll be happy to listen. Until then, hit the road chumps.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This was a complete bummer to me. I purchased the psp about 5 months ago. In my opinion there have only been 4 games that are worth buying. I only have three of them, but I have over 20 movies. I may use my psp 7 hours a week, and 95% of that time is watching umd movies, or movies I have put on the memory stick. My wife was recently in the hospital the last 10 weeks, and when I would visit her in the ICU I would burn home movies to a stick and let her watch it on the screen.
I do think though, if they put more content on the movie, or made them cheaper they would see more sales.
You can also get MD hifi units to put next to your CD player, which I've yet to see for MP3 Virtually ANY DVD player on the market will play MP3-CDs. Where have you been in the last 5 years?
Actually, I've bought 2 Sony DVD Players, and NEITHER will play burned *or* mp3 CDs. Go figure.
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Blaming the physical medium (Sony's UMD or Blu-ray) is a red herring. The fact is (was), UMD movies for PSP initially sold well but then dropped off dramatically. What does that tell you? UMD is a fault? Bullshit.
The lesson to be learned here is that the market for full-length feature films played on a tiny device with a tiny screen isn't going to be the boon that it's being hyped as, it's a novelty at best. And sometimes the novelty will wear off sooner than you think.
The problem here is with the concept of movie playback on small, portable devices like the PSP (and for that matter the iPod in it's current incarnation). The screen is just to small to keep the viewer engaged over the course of a full-length feature film. Resolution and quality are a non-issue. Even if it was incontestably pristine quality, can you imagine watching a movie like King Kong on a little two inch screen?
This is just another example of placing the value of someone's hardware gadgetry ahead of the value of actual real world user experience. It doesn't matter if you put the movie on a chip or a disk or stream the damn thing from a satellite in HD, the concept of movie playback on a device with a miniature screen isn't sustainable in the long term. It's a solution in search of a problem.
I'm sorry, but no one wants to watch a movie on that Tiny PSP Screen. No one wants to watch a movie on an iPod Video. Movies last 1 1/2 hours to ~3 hours. No one wants to passively stare at a damn little screen for that long. People want to watch movies on their comfortable couches on their big screen TVs. Having movies on the PSP is a cool idea, but it is not practical.
The caddies cost a whole lot of money. When you're protecting your $10 CDRW, it's worth an extra $5. When it's a $0.25 bulk disk, a caddy is a useless investment. When it starts looking a little scratched up, copy it to a new one.
Back in the day, I had CDrom drives (not even recordable) that required caddies. They were a huge pain in the ass and had a moderate tendency to get stuck while ejecting.
a complete failure in the UK.
i think mainly due the fack that CD player were well established. the labeles didnt push it, and you had to order MDs due none of the big record shops (or small ones) carrying them in any large number.
who wants to wait 5 days for a MD to come in, while you can just walk down the aisle and pick up a CD?
No. The minidisc isn't just a smaller disc it is encased in plastic.
I seem to recall seeing minidisc data storage a while back. A quick Google search brought up this Wikipedia entry. Looks like it was a non starter though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data
The real question would rather be: Why on earth would anyone buy a SONY DVD player?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
You have a point, though they are responsible for a couple that made it big, too (CD format with Philips for instance). In High Definition Audio, all formats flopped in the greater marketplace, Sony's SACD is the format of choice amongst audiophile fans of classical music and jazz. To declare a loser right off the bat is a little silly.
yes, I think the bass player for our band has something like that, he used it to record a riff recently to help memorise it.. I'm not sure if you could fit 16 hours into 512MB of mp3 format recording, maybe at a low quality.. I thought that 128kpbs did around 0.5-1MB a minute judging by file sizes? Obviously you could still record quite a lot though, at least 3 hours worth
which is totally what she said