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."

Comments

Will we ever be able to fit a large HDD on a disc?

[achesterase]

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..

Doom9 Comment

[ect5150]

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.

Re:Doom9 Comment

[evilviper]

a reader managed to grab one and two discs, and he was not pleased.

Perhaps he didn't use the HDMI connector?

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.

This comment shows a serious lack of knowledge about how video compression works. Increasing the size of the picture does not require an equally large bitrate increase. A lot of MPEG overhead is fixed, and can't be reduced, no matter how low the resolution is. Meanwhile, motion estimation/compensation, DCT, etc., do not require twice as many bits to work on 2X the pixel-area, and lossy visual tricks become more effecient when you increase the resolution of an image.

For an easy example... you may find that D1 NTSC video (720x480) video encoded in MPEG-4 will look fine at 1000kbps. So, using this mistaken idea, 360x240 video should look just as good at 256kbps. If you try this, you will find that is certainly not the case, and decreasing the resolution to lower bitrate has severely diminishing returns.

So, doing the math, 2X the space should be perfectly acceptable for 4X the resolution. In-fact, another poster already pointed out that 15GBs should be more than large enough for a couple hours, at standard HD-broadcast bitrates, assuming limited extras.

Also, 1080i (1920x1080) is exactly 5Xs more pixels than PAL DVDs (720x576) at a 20% higher refresh-rate, and 6X more pixels than NTSC DVD (720x480) at the same refresh-rate. So, I don't know where that 4X came from.

Re:Will we ever be able to fit a large HDD on a di

[castoridae]

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.

Am I the only one..

[cliveholloway]

... 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 :)

The Next Player...

[Digital Vomit]

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.