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Last-Minute Delays Looming for HD-DVD Launch?
An anonymous reader writes: "No official comment from Toshiba or Warner, but both Best Buy and Amazon revised ship dates for initial HD-DVD hardware and software on Friday, suggesting that high-def DVD enthusiasts chomping at the bit for next Tuesday's arrival of the first HD-DVD players and discs may have to wait a few days more."
Should have went with Fed Ex over straight parcel package!
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
im more interested to know the pricing.
I'm sure the alpha-geeks will be camping around the block to be the first ones in line at midnight to get this fine technology!
longer delay wont matter to me I dont want it with DRM Crap
Universal's "launch" title for HD-DVD is 'Serenity'. Mind you, I like Firefly and all that, but have I missed something? Is Serenity selling DVDs like hotcakes? Or is this Universal's way of announcing mediocre 'wait-and-see' interest in HD-DVD as part of the current format wars?
Then again, I might consider an HD-DVD player to watch Serenity. If, of course, I could afford a TV that would play it back.
On a slightly different topic, I wonder when, if ever, we will see storage alternatives you can actually use to make a full backup of a modern hard drive. I don't know about others here, but HD-DVD wouldn't even cut it for my laptop's comparatively small drive (by today's standards), let alone the 300-500 GB drives making their way into everyone's computers nowadays.
I guess it's always been like this, thinking back to the floppy, CD, DVD, etc. Anyway. Not to say that HD-DVD won't help, but I guess the question is if discs are even the right medium for data backup. It would definitely be one of the most attractive, if it had the capacity. Anyway..
Actually, there are reports and pictures that people have already gotten a hold of HD-DVD players and discs ahead of the actual release date from their local Best Buy.
6 7248&page=1&pp=30
See this page for more detalis/pics:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=6
I thought this comment posted on Doom9 was interesting about HD-DVD:
HD DVD was launched early. Yesterday, the first HD DVD players were being sold in Japan and a reader managed to grab one and two discs, and he was not pleased. I haven't managed to get any details yet as to which codec was used and if the disc was single layer or double layer, but 1080i content encoded with MPEG-2 to a single layer HD DVD would indeed be a disaster.. two times the space for 4 times the amount of pixels - you do the math.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
How could anyone be that excited over a super expensive player that only plays a handful of movies? Maybe in a few years when it's cheaper and there's actually something to watch on it... If you just want to see something in high res take advantage of your TV then just download high res trailers or something.
I was under the impression the many commercial institutions back up their financial & such data to tape.
It's a question of $/KB storage. Right now there's a perfectly viable backup media: another hard drive. External USB hard drives seem to run about $1/GB right now. Dunno what the pricing on a DVD burner is - less certainly when you figure in the swapping of media - but what you lose by paying less is the ability to have the whole drive on one piece of media.
Back when CD-ROM *readers* were new I think average hard drive space was maybe 200MB? Well even a rev 1 CDR held 600+, which was plenty, but while CD-ROM readers were starting to hit the retail market, CD burners were so expensive that only companies could afford them. My point? There was a viable storage media back then too that could hold a whole hard drive worth of data. It was just not cost effective compared with a second hard drive.
I use Linux. I use it to enjoy all the video I watch. I don't own a TV - nor do I want one.
It took ages before a geek named Jon made it possible for me to enjoy DVD discs on my entertainment system (not that it really matters since I playd DVD's on it like five times ever - I get most media from the Internet).
So. HD-DVD is delayed a week or month. So what? I'd be amazed if I'm able to play those on my GNU Linux before 2008 - if ever - regardless of a short delay..
(it should also be noted that I don't notice any difference between divx and DVD anyway, and prefer divx - so I don't really see the point of HD-DVD.. except. Oh way! DRM! The MS & MPAA sponsored "NO PLAYING DVDS FOR YOU LINUX GEEKS"-technology!)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
People are going to want to buy an HD-DVD player for their HD-TV, there are no Blue-Ray TVs to go with the Blueray players. I wonder how much of an effect that issue alone will have on the zombie masses?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Hard disks, unlike removable discs, have the advantage of being able to have the relation of the heads and media very, very precisely engineered, which means data can be laid more densely on the media. So unless there's a major breakthrough on optical density that has no magnetic denisty equivalent, fixed-media disk systems should always be able to handle more data than removable-media.
As a result, the right medium for backup, assuming a willingness to make the investment, is and always has been tape. Because it packs much more surface area into a single reasonably-dimensioned package than can be done with a removable disc, it will always be better at holding bulk data.
I already watch HD content on my computer for free. Why would I want to buy a player when I can just hook my computer up to my tv and play the discs from there?
Oh you know Sony and it's Blu-Ray bretheren are going to start plastering the Blu-Ray logo on all their HDTVs.
Depends on circumstance. For a full system recovery, yes. If you have large amounts of data and are looking to recover a small portion of it, no. The lack of random access to tape makes it an excruciatingly slow process.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Good point. I wonder when the first "Blu-Ray Ready" television advertising campaign will begin.
E pluribus unum
My impression is that most people are fairly happy with current TV resolutions. They may not be great, but they are adequate, and in some ways it may be a mistake to go with higher resolutions. The future seems to be pathed not in more pixels, but in pixels that can go on a variety of devices. By this I mean people are more and more interested in watching TV or obtaining media from the Internet. To me, the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray debate has been almost comical, since companies are fighting over control of the next generation of a dying technology, meanwhile Apple and others are working towards creating systems that have equal or even less resolution that todays media, but is far more portable and that you can obtain without leaving your room. Download media from the net onto your computer. Take it with you on your video iPod or other similar device and watch it while you are waiting to see your doctor. Or if you are staying home, watch it on your TV in your living room as it is streamed over your house's wireless connection. This is where the future is at, not on a overly DRMed disk.
ok, offtopic as fuck but you said you were a linux geek so I might aswell ask and take the karma hit...
I've got windows/suse 9.1 installed on my laptop and it uses grun to load up. I want to replace suse with a different version of linux... how do I do that without messing up GRUB and making windows not able to load (bearing in mind I don't have the windows CD) and what distro of linux should I choose as somewhat of a noobie? (ideally free in both senses)... and there goes the karma...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Funny you should mention this. I was out buying a television set last night (just a small 28" to replace a worn-out set in the living room - not the monster one in the basement). The salesman pointed to a Sony set and showed off the slot right in the TV for putting in memory cards from a camera for displaying on the TV. Being a Sony TV, it was that stupid Sony Memory Stick technology. I explained to him that if it was at least some sort of accepted standard like SD I would have at least contemplated it. Will Sony ever learn with their proprietary formats?
BroadbandPig
... who doesn't care one bit about HD DVD/Blu Ray right now? I get the feeling they're launching this new format to a population that largely doesn't give a toss. Very few people outside the tech/geek groups know about this.
:)
Look at HDTV. Very few rushed out to buy it. Most people just upgraded as their old TV died. Hell, there's still a majority of content not in hi-def.
Oh well, at least I get to analyze another major industry change as it unfolds. Always interesting
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Maybe you could try aquiring a copy of Norton Ghost to backup your windows. As for linux, we'll i'm kinda of a noob myself. However, I do prefer SuSe 10.0. 10.1 should be finished by the end of April. http://www.opensuse.org/
Depending on what version you choose, it will more than likely automatically detect Windows. Ubuntu is quite popular for novices and Fedora is also good. If for some odd reason the version just doesn't happen to detect Windows do this:
/boot/grub
Open a terminal as root or su into root
cd
Use your favorite editor (`nano`|`pico`|`kate`|`gedit`) grub.conf
add the following lines
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0) <~~ look at your current grub.conf to find out exactly this should be
chainloader +1
makeactive
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
As soon as the DRM can be overcome, then "fair use" is possible.
Before then, it is just controlled encrypted data, which you may able to watch under certain conditions and restrictions: conditions and restrictions which are likely to change.
The DVD format and DRM have become an unofficial open standard.
In fact, they oughta bundle some of these players with Serenity. How could a geek resist?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Well no....not really.
There's enough problems with standard DVDs and the DRM scheme (with an e, not an a). Yet here people are, ready to rush headlong into FURTHER enshacklement in this new medium.
Wow. Higher resolution. Higher prices. Lower availability. Less rights to fair use.
Whee!
Color me unenthused.
(Translation: Fuck that noise!)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I couldn't stand old big projection screens(big blurry images). Sure if your looking at a small screen from a distance it won't matter to you. But pixels most certainly are noticeable on bigger screens.
Hmmm... Pie...
HD-DVD being delayed. That's not a very big problem considering only about 5-10% of the population owns high-def tv's anyway. A lot of people here also have the right idea that people are more interested in portible content right now, but this should change as the price of HD-TV's go down. All I can say is that at least this format isn't being developed by Sony. Heaven knows what they will do with there format. Which would explain why so many more studios are going with it. Honestly this has been fairly interesting to watch.
Ok... people are stupid, but not THAT stupid.
Did people think you needed a "Beta" TV to plug a Betamax player into?
Instead, people will buy one player, and most likely occasionally buy the wrong discs for it. Just like my girlfriend didn't know the difference between Xbox and Gamecube when I bought her a Gamecube.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Hey guys, bad news.
Nobody's waiting. Nobody cares.
Get your shit together, come up with a single format that is backwards compatible, provides a clear benefit, and doesn't screw things up, and THEN people might raise an eyebrow.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Needs to further comment.
If you look at sales rank, Serenity is currently #32 at Amazon. Firefly is (still) at #14.
Revenge of the Sith is only 49th.
So yes, I'd say Serenity is selling very well.
Firefly was also the 2nd most TiVo'd show while on Fox, so that shows that people who like Serenity have technology gadgets and disposable income.
It makes sense to me.
HDTV is absolutely amazing. It is so fun to watch a sports game and see every detail of the players in the game. Technology advances are getting awesome.
> With DVD discs being basically as good as the eye and
> mind can comprehend, why would they need another format?
Have you seen an HD broadcast of your favorite TV show (Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, etc?). It's definately better than a DVD. Maybe you can't tell if your TV isn't very good, but I use a 100" front projector (AE700), and there's a significant difference.
I would probably still buy most of my movies on DVD, because they're much cheaper, but there are some movies (Serenity, LotR, Terminator 2, Star Wars, etc) that I'd almoost definatley buy the HD version of.
Ok... people are stupid, but not THAT stupid.
... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. (H.L. Mencken, 1926)
No one in this world, so far as I know
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
What's the over/under on a later release being caused by looking for more (useless) ways to prevent DVD pirating?
Everyone's favorite Jewish kid!
Betamax was before the big media revolution. Back then, people wanted a VCR to plug into their TV. There wasn't different TV standards. But now, from the average unwashed consumer's point of view, it's very confusing out there. When that consumer goes out to buy a TV now, there's regular or HD. There's narrow or wide screen. There's Component or HDMI. And of course the salesman is going to tell the consumer that he needs a high definition source to take advantage of that new HD TV. I think it's easy for the consumer to confuse 'high definition' (generic) with 'HD-DVD' (brand). BluRay doesn't exactly say high definition, does it? I think BluRay will follow in a long line of Sony probably-technically-better-but-no-one-adopts-it technologies like Betamax, MemoryStick, UMD...
BroadbandPig
According to threads at AVSForum, HD-DVD players went on sale at Best Buy and the like, and some posters there have bought them and posted pics as proof. Doesn't sound like there's a delay to me.6 7248
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=6
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I love technology and all (this is Slashdot) but I, for one, am totally not interested in these newfangled media formats, and I'm yet to hear of anyone in my circles who is. The current DVD resolution works just fine, thanks, and I'd rather the folk pushing these new formats take their DRM-encumbered junk and shove it where the sun don't shine (and I'm not talking the inside of a disk drive here.)
I sincerely hope that most consumers think that this HD-DVD stuff is not worth dropping the cash, and stick with DVD (which has only been mainstream for a small number of years anyways.)
Tape. LTO3 can hold 400GB of data, uncompressed. Of course, it's expensive as heck, but it does exist.
I recently got myself a DDS4 tape drive. I thought about my backups and came to a few conclusions:
I'll never keep it up if it involves messing with a stack of DVDs.
It's got to fit all my backups in one piece of media.
It won't last if it interferes with my normal usage.
I need to backup daily to get into the routine (too easy to forget if it's once a week or month)
So, I looked at how much I had to backup, and I had about 15GB of data that I backup daily. Lots of data is static (music) and can be archived on DVDs once. I looked around, and DDS4 had the right capacity (20GB per tape).
The tape backups include my root partition, which allows recovery of the whole system. I just insert a tape in the morning, cron takes care of starting the process, and spits it out when done.
The next video player I buy will be one that obeys *me* and not the *disc*. I am so sick and tired of seeing the little icon that means "no, you can't do that" when I'm playing DVDs on my current player. Never, ever, ever again will I buy a machine that disobeys me like that. If I want to skip the FBI warning, I had damn well better be able to do so. There is absolutely no reason I should not be able to skip to the middle of the movie as fast as I can turn the machine on and press the FF button. None whatsoever.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Tape drives do have random access, they can rewind. Of course, seek time is about 60 seconds on my DDS4 drive, but it's still a whole lot better than the time it takes to read the whole tape.
.tar.bz2 file, you can just tell the tape drive to seek to the right position.
If you have an index, and don't write your backups as one huge
Granted, it's not nearly as nice as a hard disk, but not as bad as you seem to imply either.
The discussion is interesting towards the bottom:
"The player is required to obey what the disc says. All the initial HD-DVD discs will allow 720p/1080i output over component, but future discs may not. Copyrighted SD DVD discs cannot be upscaled to 720p/1080i over component, but non-copyrighted ones can."
If true, I see what they're up to: get people hooked on a "fully functional", sane system; then start selling crap discs with DRM half disabling your system.
I'm not buying, even though HD "Serenity" is tempting, until I KNOW that I can play purchased content on my existing equipment: now and in the future.
I know it is incredibly common mis-usage at this point but the expression is 'champing at the bit' not chomping. Referece
On a slightly different topic, I wonder when, if ever, we will see storage alternatives you can actually use to make a full backup of a modern hard drive.
There is one: it's called tape. Only problem, you need to amortize the price of the drive across many media to enjoy the good price/capcity of the media. That's why it's only attractive for large systems.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I can't say this is true for all Best Buy's, but I work in the warehouse at our local BB and we received ours today on a drop shipment in time for our Monday ad (we are closed Easter Sunday). All the stores in our district showed an "On Order" status which means it arrives usually by Fedex or UPS and not on our normal trucks, which makes it hard to put a finger on an instock date because we don't control the trucks they are coming in on. However, all of the stores in our district should have gotten them the same way we did today and I'm assuming it would be the same across the board.
Oh and we setup one of them in-store with Serenity and I must say it looks nice but I'm not totally blown away. The picture was still a little grainy in some of the scenes almost to the point where you were like "ok...", but some of the scenes looked amazing. So overall, I'd say it is an improvement over normal DVDs however, nothing next generation...yet. Once they start actually focusing on getting high quality movies to HD, it will be a lot better I'm sure. Also, it could have been the TV we had it on too. We wanted to put it on a Sony XBR but that was shot down by the higher ups =(
Hope this eases some tension.
Don't buy that HD-DVD player without reading this page first!
Joseph?
Good quote... showing just how ignorant he was...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
These DVDv2 disks are a step in the right direction, but the max spec is only for eight (IIRC) layers and even right now hard disks are bigger than that top spec.
There are lots of people trying for three dimensions, we can only hope that they will charge cost-plus and not play the screw the customer game that many tape makers seem to have been doing recently.
There is an interesting format in research for just that, using hologrophy.
It won't be anything to compete with BVD or HDDVD as a distibution format because they can't be pressed in their thousands like BVD and HDDVD can.
I wonder what the absolute overkill would be for consumer grade storage mediums. The only thing that really fills the Hard Drives of today is Video, and I suppose that will only get worse the more we use HDTV.
We have relativly modern drives (Ultrium 2) with a relativly good backup software (Veritas BackupExec). Just a few days ago, i restored about 100mbyte, located in the middle of the tape. Time needed? About a minute of seeking to the right positions, a few seconds to restore the date, and another minute to rewind. That's acceptable for me.
fuck hdmi
and fuck your gah damn humanity verification. can't even read the gah damn thing.