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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.
Its not a unknown fact that for many people, the PS2 was their first DVD player.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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
"It's now a test of physical strength," Tsuga said.
Matsushita plans to launch DVD players later this year with a price tag likely to top $1,000.
Customers will need to workout just so they can lift their wallet up to the counter to pay for it!
Samsung long ago announced that if the two high density blue laser DVD camps couldn't make up and get along, that they were just going to go ahead and start building drives capable of playing both hd dvd and bluray. That is to say, if the two camps cannot unify, then Samsung will unify them whether they want it or not. At least one other manufacturer whose name I forget has announced similar plans. I cannot help but wonder how popular this approach will become.
I also cannot help but wonder, faced with two contradictory and low-uptake standards, how many stores will actually want to stock hddvd or bluray discs? It seems to me that the only chance either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray has of actually getting widely stocked is by making dual-capability DVDs that can be played on either a next-gen dvd player, or a current gen dvd player (both next-gen formats support this; it's done by burning a disc with one layer of DVD and one layer of hddvd-or-bluray).
These days everyone knows what HD means. These days most people have DVD players.
Blu-Ray? What's that?
All life is staving off the inevitable. It's what you do in the meantime that makes it interesting.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
Because people like shiny, tangible things. They call them possessions. It's why e-books have not, and will not replace books.
It's an even lesser known fact that when the PS2 first launched in Japan that despite it selling out, few people were buying any games... The PS2 was the least expensive DVD player available in Japan at the time (much like the PS3 will be the least expensive high def disc player worldwide) and the games at the launch of the PS2 were lackluster (many suffering from anti-aliasing and other problems). People bought the systems just as a DVD player during the first few months--although I'm sure that most (if not all) of them bought at least one game after the first 3 months of the Japanese launch (when better games started coming out/programming issues were fixed).
Read my blog posts on usability.
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?
...HD-DVD has friendlier copyright and already has fabs producing cheap media...
I wish people would stop propogating the myth that HD-DVD has "better" copyright abilities. Both formats use the exact same DRM scheme. Both allow managed copy (HOWEVER please read up on what managed copy really means, it's not like a REAL copy ability).
Heck, Blu-Ray discs from Sony (at least at first) will let you have full res video over analog connections, have any HD-DVD studios followed suit? That would seem to tilt the copyright niceness a little towards Blu-Ray, though not much... both are pretty laden with protections.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
These days everyone knows what HD means. These days most people have DVD players.
Blu-Ray? What's that?
Yes, so people will "know" they have an HD TV, and "know" they have a DVD player - and so will not purchase HD-DVD players, just the discs - which they will then return in droves (or alternatley they will be buying dual format discs, which will lead them to wonder what the big deal is since those discs look just like DVDs - again leading many to not purchase HD-DVD players).
Meanwhile amidst the consumer confusion of HD-DVD the shiny new blue discs obviously need a different player, and hey look! I was going to buy a PS3 anyway. And it even works with my old HD TV without HDMI connections (Sony announced all movies they release on Blu-Ray will allow full resolution even on older analog connections).
After a few million PS3's are sold there will literally be an order of magnitude more Blu-Ray players around than HD-DVD units, and it's game over at that point as Blu-Ray wins through sheer economy of scale.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally, I don't think either format will win. My personal belief is that they're creating a solution to a "problem" that doesn't exist yet. They are building a product that would be useful to less than 10% of the worldwide market (those who actually have HDTVs). I see these new formats as a way of pushing more restrictive DRM and with the "format war" I see it very likely that they'll just bleed each other to death.
Read my blog posts on usability.
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.
"but within a few years a system will exist which will allow the streaming of any movie ever made via broadband instantly."
Remember the Qwest commercial set in a motel from around 2000? "We have every movie ever made, in every language, any time, night or day."
When do I expect to see streaming 1080p 48Mbps video over a "content-neutral" Internet? Not during the lifetime of Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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.
You're confusing HD-DVD with HD DVD-9 (admittedly an easy thing to do.) HD DVD-9, which uses MPEG4 based encoding on standard DVD, is pretty much moot. HD-DVD is an actual physical media format that uses a blue laser and can hold more physical bits.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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."
If a Slashdot reader can think that BluRay is the size of HD-DVD, and HD-DVD is the size of regular DVD, then what hope has the average consumer?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's okay, both sides know they can just blame any of their failures on piracy.
So since people seem to be confused about what managed copy really means, here is a great primer on the state of managed copy as of March 2006.
Summary:
* Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use the same AACS standard for copy protection (and thus managed copy protection)
* Players out now cannot do managed copy because the standard is not done - it's hoped the ability can be added later in a firmware update.
* Managed copies will likley require an internet connection so it can "ask" to make a copy, and possibly also involve payment for the right to copy.
Some good technical details there on how the system might end up working.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the broadcast TV/advertising business, the advertisers who pay $$ to place commercials on television are the customers, because they are the ones who are providing a source of income for the networks and they are the ones to whom the programming is catered; that is, a show makes it to television because it was successfully sold to enough advertisers who were convinced that it was a viable money-maker. The viewers at home who watch the shows and (as the marketers hope) the advertisements that go with them are the consumers. They provide eyeballs so that the networks can sell advertisements, but they themselves do not make payments towards the broadcast and thus are not customers but merely tools to be used as a selling point by the networks. As such, as long as they tune in, no one in control of the network gives a damn what they do or what they think of the product. This is why controversy sells and often, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
However, if I want to have a Blu-ray drive or a HD-DVD drive (or whatever new format may emerge), I am making a purchasing decision and am giving $$ to the company in exchange for a product. If I do not like the product, the company, their business practices, their marketing tactics, their use of DRM, or the pricing, I may choose not to make this purchase and as a result, the company does not receive my money. I am voting with my feet, I have some control over the transaction, and I do not simply accept whatever is handed to me which is what a consumer does. Customers must be satisfied; consumers must simply be enticed.
I cannot help but think that when, overnight, everyone started calling those who vote with their feet "consumers" that this is nothing more than marketing Newspeak designed to de-emphasize the fact that our wants and desires matter.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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...
Thats so wrong I dont know where to start.
Normal DVD's: 4.7GB (9GB dual layer)
Blu-ray disc capacity: 25GB (50GB dual-layer)
HD-DVD disc capacity: 15GB (30GB dual layer)
Unfortunately, these kind of drives will be a lot more expensive to produce since they will have to support both laser wavelengths.
Blu-ray uses a 405 nm laser wavelength.
HD-DVD uses a 405 nm laser wavelength.
There is no difference between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray lasers besides their numerical aperture characteristics, which is less of a problem.
In the meantime, both blu-ray and hd-dvd drives will already have to supply multiple wavelengths, because CDs, DVDs, and hddvdbluray all three use different wavelengths-- and next-gen DVD drives support all three. Is the difference between three lasers and four that enormous?
The massive amount of marketing which has served to outline the so-called "differences" between these two formats has made it very easy to obscure the plain fact that these two formats are almost entirely indistinguishable from an engineer's perspective.
Very few people care in the first place, and unification was their only hope of taking on the masses. A very small percentage of people are interested as it is, and the prospect of slightly better picture quality is not going to be enough for the average person to want to invest thousands of bucks into this technology and new discs for a long time to come.
I'm a mid-early adopter; that means I don't buy new tech day-and-date when it comes out, but usually 3-9 months later when the market begins to stabalize and the initial kinks are worked out. With this HD/Blu-Ray stuff I can tell you, it will be years before even I invest in it.
There is this core group of home theater junkies that have been programmed to believe that they are somehow ruining their lives by not watching HD-native content, that somehow they have been missing out on watching the same movies with slightly clearer picture and it's just like the stone-age. If you listen to them, we've been watching hand-puppets through a white sheet lit by candles.
The truth is, almost no one gives a crap about either format. The reasons the general public caught on to DVD were diverse yet simple : durability, availability, price (remember, most VHS tapes were not sell-through at release and cost $100 if you wanted to legally purchase them), and, probably least important to those people, quality. The leap from VHS to DVD was absolutely staggering, and at the same time brought widescreen home entertainment to the masses.
DVD to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray? Not so much. Yes, the picture is a bit clearer. So? That's the big advantage that people are going to invest thousands of dollars for?
It's just not going to happen any time soon. Most people have their DVD players hooked up with composite cables or S-Video at best, on SD displays. A properly callibrated DVD player, using component inputs, 16x9 mode, and an anamaphoric enhanced DVD (virtually all theatrical films released in the last 6-7 years) on an HD-TV monitor is gorgeous. Will an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray version be even better? Sure, but not enough to convince even someone like me to buy it - so good luck with the Wal-Mart crowd.
The simple truth is VHS was good enough for most customers - and there will be a new format (holographic media, etc.) before the majority of customers even care. The HD-DVD/Blu-Ray fight (they lost in the begining by not joining forces) is going to be for a tiny percentage of consumers, and everyone else is just going to watch our beautiful SD DVD's and continue to enjoy them as we have.
Just because a company tells you that you "need" the next best thing, doesn't mean you do; the transparent reasons for the studios to push this unwanted format on us are clear (DRM, increasing file size to decrease sharing, the box they put themselves in with DVD sell-through pricing [DVD was never meant to be this cheap, it was an accident]), and the only people that give a shit are those that only enjoy their movies if they have a piece of paper telling them it's got a higher resolution and is "better". If you are sitting there watching "The Godfather" and spend your time distracted by the background details because of the higher resolution, you are missing the entire point.
AEfx
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.
For all the well articulated reasons though, I sure hope that folks of the /. ilk do their part to kill this thing.
Here's an idea... we all have relatives & acquaintances who love forwarding alarmist & dramatic tin-foil-hat emails, right? How 'bout a little informal "Best alarmist subject line" contest right here for HD-DVD & BluRay's furtherance of HDCP, DRM & Trusted Computing? "New DVD format will let Bill Gates lock you out of your computer!" "Hidden codes on new DVD format lets Sony secretly make new DVD players 'expire' & stop working!" "New media won't play on old monitors or TVs!" (I'm still trying to decide if the fingers of innuendo should point towards the Trilateral Commission, the Free Masons, Scientology, the Skulls, or the Catholic church. I'm leaning towards the Skulls, but open to other opinions...)
Pi Ran Out