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Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Talks End
Last minute talks to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats have failed. Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, has stated 'the market will decide the winner.' From the article: "The two sides held talks last year in the hopes of avoiding a prolonged format battle similar to the one between Betamax and VHS videotapes in the 1980s, knowing that it could discourage consumers from shifting to the advanced discs and stifle the industry's growth. But the talks soon fizzled out, with each side reluctant to establish a format based on the other's disc structure. At stake is the $24 billion home video market and a slice of the personal computer market as PCs will be equipped with Blu-ray or HD DVD optical drives."
The two standards are too different to unify. The disc is different, the data layout is different, the means for handling interactivity are different, the codec is different... EVERYTHING is different. My only regret is that there are so many variables that we may not really learn anything about which is the best product based on who succeeds and who sucks seed... we may only learn who had better marketing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's right that the 'market' will decide the 'winner'.
It's just unfortunate that the market powers are the producers rather than the consumers. History repeating itself again. And again.
Regular DVD!
Hell, my HDTV is always in HD anyway, why would I need HD or ray's blue DVD's? That's just stupid!*
*This comment is a joke, but it is widely believed to be true in the consumer world.
-Buddy of DoQ
These days everyone knows what HD means. These days most people have DVD players.
Blu-Ray? What's that?
Because people like shiny, tangible things. They call them possessions. It's why e-books have not, and will not replace books.
HD-DVD Blu Ray
As you can see the difference is quite a bit.
I have been hearing this for the past... what... 10 years now? The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come. As long as this is the case, hard media will continue to exist and drive big business. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies have a datarate of 8-9 MB/s (which is rather impressive, considering they are packing about 6 times the amount of video data due to the increased resolution, into the same bitrate DVD video is in). Forget about Asia, how many people in the US actually have lines that fast?
What can I say that hasn't been said a million times before. This is yet another example of how closed door meetings determine the course of our society and how the rich and powerful control the interests of the entire earth.
This is something that rests uneasy in me, because I don't want to adopt a standard that fades. I don't want one of my favorite movies to be ONLY HD DVD and not Blu-Ray.
And the worst part is,
Here we go with another round of re-mastering and reselling. Just like the record industry and archiving their vinyl library to CD, or the previous migration from VHS to DVD, here is ANOTHER round of $20-$50 gotta haves to line the pockets of the man.
And the future will hold?
They will blame US again, when the reissues stop selling, they will blame internet traffic for the lack of sales, the industry is stabbing the same medium they MUST adopt to if they are to survive!
So what can YOU do?
Force them to make a decision, instead of making all of us gamble on their indecisiveness! Don't be an early adopting sucker, even if pride and envy tug at your wallethand.
This is like going to war based on manufactured intelligence & opinion poll results.
Don't call this insightful when it's just simply wrong.
/. crowd not recognize this?
How can the
Apparently you've never used a portable DVD player.
Nor have you ever had kids who watch the same movie a LOT of times (and I'd rather not pay for each view).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Last minute talks to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats have failed. Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, has stated 'the market will decide the winner."
should read:
Last minute talks to unify the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats have failed. Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, has stated 'the consumer will have to pay for our greed and inability to compromise'.
"What is the answer?" (Silence) "In that case, what is the question?" --Gertrude Stein
Amen!
I bought BetaMax becuase it was the superior technology not relaizing I should have been paying attention to who had the best marketing.
Only when there is one format left will I even begin to consider purchasing a HD-DVD.
In their pissing contest they are only hurting themselves by delaying acceptance and thereby sales.
With all the DRM and other crippling measures, nothing would please me more than to see both formats die and rot in hell.
What?
Ehh, there is a big difference, however, between an e-book and a book. The way you interact with them is different. The form factor of the book is a huge advantage when it comes to readability, usability, expendability, etc... If my paperback gets something spilled on it, oh well. If I leave it on the train, oh well. I can read while i fall asleep and if it falls out of my fingers onto the hardwood floor, it will be fine. It will never run out of batteries.
The way you'd watch a downloaded/on-demand movie is not that much different from the way you'd watch a DVD - you don't interact with the disc at all, except to put it in the player. In fact, no disc is better since you don't have to change discs to watch different movies.
The main problem with on-demand is that it will be quite awhile until it can offer as big a library as DVDs can... You can get really obscure stuff on DVD now, but could an on-demand service offer that? Downloads could, but getting the stuff from your PC to the TV is a pain for the average person, plus download speeds aren't quite there yet.
Home movies will likely eventually be mostly downloaded/streamed, with a smaller "on disc" market, but it's a ways off... I used to think like you "it'll never happen", but I thought that way about music too, and now I can't even imagine buying a physical CD, unless it's from a band at their concert (because if it's a local or small band they probably aren't on itunes).
Two formats vying for a very small piece of the pie. HD-DVD is only worth it if you have a 50"+ screen, and most people out there just ain't got it. There will be no format war winners. They will both go the way of the laser disc.
I wouldn't worry that much about the extra expense, at least not from Samsung. They managed to drive CRT HDTV prices down very quickly once they got into the market with some aggressive pricing, and I would expect them to do the same with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. That said, all of the HD-format players are going to be expensive for at least the next year - probably too expensive for either format to gain significant marketshare given the relatively low (but growing) penetration of HDTVs.
IF either format has any hope of "winning" the first year, though, I think it's HD-DVD. Considering that the flagship players of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have MSRPs of US$500 and $1,000 respectively, it's going to be an uphill battle getting anyone but die-hard PS3 fans to buy BR...
I (and a lot of other people) don't want to move to a subscription or rental model. I'd still pay more, and give up small amounts of real estate in my house, in exchange for permanent access to a particular piece of content. What makes you think the video server will always give you what you ask for when you ask for it? It's a golden opportunity for them to push for eternally recurring minor charges instead of the pay once, play forever model we have today.
It doesn't matter if the bandwidth or infrastructure is there or not. Outside of a tangible something that I can bury in the ground, what guarantee do I have that the media I download today will be available to me in 5 years? 10 years? 25 years? 50 years?
The point is, my grandparents have books still around that my dad read as a boy. Most likely, the publisher of that book is long gone, or a lot different than it was 50 years ago. What if they'd "subscribed" to that book - yes, it could have been available instantly to them at any point, but for how long? If you subscribe to content, how do you know you'll still have that content if someone else controls it? That's the whole problem here. The only person I trust with my possessions is me.
They can't agree on merging one... so the obvious answer is just to drop one format. There is already very little incentive to buy this very expensive next generation format... failing to pick a univeral standard will probably just kill the whole thing.
Anyway, right now the high def dvds are looking a lot like lazerdisk, in the sense that it will be too expensive for anyone to buy it, and by the time it becomes cheap there will be a better standard out. There's just too much competition in the storage space for this dumbass strategy to work. Just because DVD was a success doesn't mean that the successor to DVD will be.
My bet is that what we will end up doing for hi def movies, is using the existing DVD media, but changing the format from mpeg-2, to something that compresses better like mpeg-4 or windows media. Extra processing power to do decompression may get a lot cheaper a lot faster than these lazers are.
You have to consider that at this point, PVRs already have the power to do streaming video decompression, and compression of video. It's not hard to imagine increasing the processing power there and adding additional functionality like a divx dvd player, and some basic video games (roms anyone?). You could probably do something equivalent with a modded first gen xbox.
DVDs were essentially high tech VCRs, which made sense at the time, but these days if people are going to spend more than $50 on some piece of electronics, they expect it to do a lot more than just play videos on their tv.
I can see them becoming a little bit more successful on the PCs and on consoles. PCs need a way to back up more and more massive data, and consoles need lots of space for more content. That's the primary reason that I'm pretty optimistic about the PS3. Video games are becoming enourmous in terms of space. These disks are on the order of 50 GB, which not that long ago was the size of an entire harddrive. Can game makers fill up all that space with artwork and video? Probably not yet, but I suspect we will start to see some extremely high resolution textures on the 2nd generation PS3 games. Maybe there's just not that much need to expand in that direction... but I suspect that game makers will find some interesting way to make use of the extra space. The main problem I see is lack of exclusive titles these days, game makers need to make their games generic so they can port them from system to system. Thus, the limitations of the xbox 360 will probably keep game makers from taking too much advantage of special things the PS3 can do that can't be ported.
It would serve them right to both lose. Then we might get some format everyone agreed on from the beginning.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's okay, both sides know they can just blame any of their failures on piracy.
Well last I heard, Xbox is going to have an HD-DVD add-on and not blu-ray.
How many other console add-ons like this have been successful? It will add only marginally to the HD-DVD install base, unless some really popular games require it (I still think the next version of Halo may do so in a last move by Microsoft to drive adoption of the format).
I'ts no surprise Microsoft is not adding on a Blu-Ray player since Microsoft is one of the main players in the HD-DVD consortium. However in the end it is what consumers buy in standalone players, not PC's that will determine the winner of the format war. Even in the PC land where you'd think Microsoft would dominate more people will be included to get Blu-Ray burners since they hold more data (which is why Apple is backing Blu-Ray). If Vista had been out sooner (which will support HD-DVD from the start but probably not Blu-Ray) it could have helped drive Blu-Ray from that end (whcih I'm sure was intented) but they couldn't even get that done in time to help.
Meanwhile the PS3 should be out before Christmas releasing millions of players into the market, and on the PC side Apple should have Powermacs (desktops) out in Q3-Q4, at the high end probably including Blu-Ray burners as well. And since they dual boot now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To me.
Just because you don't find it worth the money doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with you.
I seen some bittorrent releases in HD formats and the difference is huge. Granted the largest actually have to be scaled down to fit on my screen but you can't deny the difference. It is the difference between an actors face being a blur with darkspots for eyes and mouth and being able to see wether they had a good nights sleep the day before.
Does it matter?
If it didn't we would still be using 8mm film. Black & White.
Everytime a new format comes along you get the same old argument about it being to costly for a minor increase. Yet that never stopped anyone before.
We will see one of these being the winner in a few years time. The early players will be sold out in no time and take up will be a lot faster then you think and then when the next-gen format war starts you will be spouting the same nonsense.
TV is a lot more important to people then you think. A 1000 dollars to have the next best thing is nothing to a lot of people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Han shot first"
Parent makes a good point. In addition to availability, what about the content of the media itself, even if it is still available?
If we move completely over to a download on demand format, what's to keep studios from changing the content on a whim? People are already complaining about that, what with the 'remastered' versions of Star Wars (IV-VI) being the only ones available on DVD. What if they were originally released only through live streaming?
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
I have an HDTV, and I have to say, HD fails to knock my socks off. It's nice and a definite improvement, but it's not earth shattering. A 1080i discovery show does look better than a 480p DVD, but not a ton. DVDs look pretty good. Good enough it's not annoying or anything.
On any non-HD set, of course, there's no beneift at all.
It's nothing like the VHS-DVD jump. The benefits on ANY set are immense. The picture is better on all but the lowest quality sets and doesn't degrade over time. The sound as leaps and bounds over VHS, as good as the theatres if you've the hardware. There are all kinds of special features on most discs. Best of all: no rewinding, no fast forwarding, just seek to wherever you like.
So I understand why everyone made the DVD leap, and even that took a while. I am skeptical people will make the HD leap. HD sets are still rare and, really, HD isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's better, no question, but not earth shattering.
And of course one has to wonder how many will be shitty upsamples, not full remasters. I have HBO HD and they show movies all the time in HD... Or rather I should say it's an HD signal to the DVR. The actual source is not HD. It's DVD rez that's been upsampled. It looks just about identicle to the results from my DVD player. I wonder how many "HD-DVDs" will actually end up being poor upsamples jobs that really don't give much mroe effective rez than DVD.