Slashdot Mirror
Sony's Obsession with Proprietary Formats
geoffrobinson writes "Jonathan Last, writing for a lay audience in the Philadelphia Inquirer, comments on Sony's push for the Blu-ray format:
'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history...
...Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table.'"
They could get away with this if they still made quality products, but they have flooded the market with a ton of junk. After buying several sony items that quickly died on me I will never buy sony again. The propietary stuff is just icing on the cake.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Far from being poorly supported, Blu-Ray has wide industry support (over 90 companies) and has the following companies on the Blu-Ray Disc Association board of directors.
* Apple Computer
* Dell
* Hewlett Packard
* Hitachi
* LG Electronics
* Mitsubishi Electric
* Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* TDK Corporation
* Thomson
* Twentieth Century Fox
* Walt Disney Pictures
* Warner Home Video Inc.
Of the major media houses, only Universal Pictures has pledged support for HD-DVD.
HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.
Both techs seem to be upgrades with associated licensing fees for the tech. Do DVD's lack any licensing fee's to whomever originally designed it?
Hmmm... Pie...
...if it loses. If Blu-ray wins, it's Sony making an absolute killing by developing the standard for hi-def DVD content. The author ignores that, and that the situation he described with Betamax is apples and oranges with Blu-ray (i.e. Sony making deals with dozens of companies to get Blu-ray drives and discs out).
Someone like my mother will go buy a new television - HDTV. She'll upgrade her cable box to HDTV. When it comes time to buy a new DVD player which do you think she'll pick? HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?
Of course she'll pick the HD-DVD because it sounds like it will work with her system.
As for the other Sony products.. I like their hardware. The Clie I have ran circles around the Palm out at the time. I HATED memorystick.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
I bought Sony's original MiniDisc recorders for field recordings. It's a workhorse and is still performing like a champ. When I retired my Walkman (you know, the cassette kind...) after 12 or so years of continuous use, it was not for mechanical reasons.
Ok, so mod me down. I just had to respond to a knee-jerk comment with another.
But Blu-Ray sounds cool.
No kidding. I'd say their biggest failure by far was that horrible compact disc experiment. What ever happened to that, anyways?
This guy's the limit!
It doesn't matter to me who wins in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. Why? Because regular DVD's look great! High definition looks better than non-HD, but not THAT much better (especially considering the costs). Sony says the ps3 will cost less than a blu-ray player... that's at $600! You can get an amazing DVD player for $150 with all the bells and whistles. When HD-DVD/Blu-Ray come to market and start to popularize, you can bet plain old DVD prices will drop. From a financial sense, DVD's trump HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD. ...not to mention that yargh, I'm a pirate matey, and I like to rip/burn DVD's -- something that'll be nerfed with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Ya, Compact Disc - developed by Phillips, not Sony. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i I heard it turned out really well.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Their proprietary formats recently have probably met the first goal of proprietary formats: feeds revenue into the company. Unfortuantely, they just keep failing to be adopted as defacto standards (for good reasons).
Look at their memory stick. While they didn't succeed it making it the de facto standard for portable media, I'm sure it's worked great for them. Their cameras, PSP, etc all use it and between their manufacturing and licensing I'm sure it helps them out some.
The PSP's UMD bombed for movies, that's a given, but it was a worthwhile "attempt." Personally, I think it was the price that killed it, had they made it cheaper than it would have been worth it for travelling purposes (and only travelling).
Sure, technologically UMB is not the best for gaming because of the power/loading time associated with discs but I'm sure the licensing helps them, but it was a good effort. Storing a lot of data for personal gaming probably doesn't have too many options. Besides, if company X wants to print a game for the PSP they get a piece of the production fee one way or another.
I have a feeling Blu Ray is where it all hits the fan. Unlike it's other more recent proprietary formats which can supplement their own products, Blu Ray can only survive on its own in the wild. It must be adopted as the main video format or else there's just little point in it. Sure if it fails you can still sell Blu Ray burners for Desktops and such, and if PS3 goes Blu Ray then publishers will need to kick a few pennies to Sony.
But in the end, it needs to beat out HDDVD to win and the only way that could happen is if they beat it to market or offered it as a cheaper alternative. I guess we'll see what happens here.
You know, if you're going to try to point out the flaw in my post, at least point to the right Wikipedia article. Yes Philips did have a major role in the creation of the Compact Disc (and later, CD-i). However, it only came about after they joined forces with Sony to develop it into a consumer medium.
This guy's the limit!
CompUSA are now offering a variety of BluRay Products for pre-order.
I wasn't bothered by the UMD format because it was specific to the PSP; sending out PSP games on SD cards or other compatible media was a waste of time because the games wouldn't run on any other system in the first place. Movies on UMD were inevitable since the PSP is a pretty good movie player, other things being equal. That Sony figured it was going to license the UMD format to other vendors seems pretty short-sighted to me, though. (Likewise Memory Sticks. Yuck.)
So, I agree with the idea that Sony is taking the wrong tack. I just need something more substantial than "Sony wants our money" as the rationale.
Most of those studios released UMD movies too.
For a while.
My great story is when I bought a MiniDisc player and thought it was great. Then, slowly but surely the proprietary Atrac3 format became more and more of a hastle. Forcing me to store 2 copies of all my music on my PC. Not to mention the extremely slow conversion and transfer rates to the damn thing.
I still have yet to shell out of a true MP3 player or iPod rather opting to burn CD's of anything I want to listen to. I will still, from time to time pull it out and load some songs onto it. But it just isn't worth it.
Oh yeah, and lets not talk about how the navigation buttons rarely work the way they are supposed to due to poor design.
Buttons aren't toys.
Well, HD-DVD is already out on the market... so let's see if they can go for cheaper.
Wait, it's Sony...
It is too hard to tell right now whether blue ray or HD-DVD will win. It is also hard to tell exactly what the adoption of HD will look like. Part of the problem is that the HD market is confusing, there isn't that much HD programming available, etc. Still, it is coming - just like its been coming for about 12 years.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
It always seems to come up that Betamax was 'technologically superior' to VHS, and there's always some /.er who posts a refutation. Instead of being redundant, I'd argue that Minidisc was Sony's worst "technologically superior" failure. MD came about a few years before Zip, and had more storage capacity (177 MB versus 100 MB), a smaller form-factor, and the discs were cheaper. However, the software was terrible for audio (you had to record directly into the audio jack) and there was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived. There was a huge market for Zip as a middleware between floppy (1.44") and CD-R, and Sony could've aimed MD towards that market and done well (and provided a superior product to those damn Zip disks).
.mp3 and provides hard drive functionality...but too little, too late.
I would hope that Sony has learned the lesson of MD: superior technology without user-friendly software is worthless.
Even when the first hard-disk mp3 players started coming out, Sony 'updated' with the NetMD software. That software must've been the inspiration for the rootkits of 2005, and was one of thoe most user-unfriendly products I've ever seen. Still no data-recording, even though competing players had that function, and an annoying three-copy rule on each mp3. Add this to a proprietary format and you get a terrible experience - no wonder MD never caught on. Even so, the hardware was good - the HiMD update allows
In accordance with E.O. 12958, this post is marked Unclassified.
I'd prefer bringing back the tape or having cartridges with plastic casing (like NES games) so my media doens't need replacement every 5 years. I remember seriously abusing NES games and cassette tapes and having them still work.
Both HD-DVD and Bluray are optical disks that will not play if scratched. If the media itself wasn't so fragile people won't need to back it all up in the first place. I won't be buying into any of this fragile DRMed media that will not play if scratched until I am able to back it up first.
Regular DVDs look "great" only in comparison with VHS tape, and VHS is a joke. DVDs and LaserDiscs both push the limits of the NTSC standard -- a standard that is decades old and well past due for replacement. I do think the HD disc format war is depressing, and all the DRM they are piling on is depressing, and it frustrates me because they are screwing up something we really need.
Not that I made the original post (with WiKi-link), however, the correct Wiki-link does not give you bragging rights for being "correct" (no comment upon the Wiki-correctness). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
The completely unnecessaray "memory stick" flash memory is the reason I don't buy Sony cameras, good as they otherwise are. And I'm in no doubt that memory stick was also the reason Sony had to pull out of the PDA market, every single review I ever read said something along the lines of "Great device.. superb display.. darn memory stick". If they had used SD as every living PDA supports I'm certain they wouldn't have had to pull out.
I just can't understand why Sony don't ditch memory stick. It's not best on price, nor performance, nor size, nor capacity. There's simply no reason for this Sony-specific flash memory format to exist.
Sony has a virtually guaranteed market for blu-ray disks in the PS3 gaming market. Unless the PS3 is a total failure I doubt blu-ray could be a real loser. I don't blame Sony for trying to use that market to push HD-DVD out of the market.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Think for a sec... if Blu-Ray becomes the standard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H accepted format, Sony finally gets their grip firmly wrapped around the industry's balls. After their Minidisc blunder, they are convinced they have it this time.
Now, if Sony loses this little war and the industry settles for HD-DVD, they still score a win. The Playstation 3 will still use BR discs and with it being a proprietary format, they can prevent just about every bit of software piracy and unlicensed game sales (a'la Dreamcast's GDROM, although Sega was cool with home development. Props to Sega). It'll be next to impossible to acquire the drives to read BR discs, much less burners and blank media.
Either way, Sony will score a decisive win in this battle. Maybe not the one they really want, but it's better than coming out of it all empty handed.
Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table.'"
I wouldn't exactly call Sony's efforts dismal failures. I know dozens of people who bought Sony stuff and are locked into Sony's bullshit formats, and who pay a markup of 100%+ or more for flash memory and storage (because of Magical Fairy licensing fees, I presume, the formats aren't superior to pretty much anything else out there.)
Besides, what other digital camera manufacturer gets money when their customers buy memory?
They are getting their money and are pretty happy about it - and most importantly, people are still buying their stuff - mainly because of the "Ooh, Shiny!" effect (you have to admit that to the lay person, their stuff does look good in stores), but sales continue.
And yes, it looks like the BR/HD competition will be worse for the consumer than the +R -R thing, as media is priced insanely high.
Really, the price is bullshit, I can buy a 250 gig hard drive for $60 - shipped - and the most expensive blank disk is $10 less (not including shipping) with a heckuva lot less storage than 250 gigs).
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Did you think nobody would notice that you linked to "CD-Interactive" instead of "CD", you fucking low-brow troll? Better go edit the "Compact Disc" Wiki to remove all all references to Sony!
You got that right. M$ just wants to control you and make you pay $$ to "upgrade" to there latest Windoze Vistard and likE $ony they just want your $$$$ to use proprietary hardware ie stuff designed by the RPAA and MIAA to make you pay $$$ for their crappy music in 128kbps AAC (ie Apple Antagonistic Controller) rather than 256kbps non-proprietary MP3s whcih is why they shut down Napster and I get all my music from allofrussianmafia.com which is fair because they have a license which means artists get a few cents unlike $ony and the MPAA who would make the artists pay to haave their music on the iTunes music store which would be encrypted using CSS and HTML and stored on crappy bluray (ie PSP UMD disks only bigger and worse) disks which can't be copied not even for your own fair use because the corporations own the government and the government passes laws like the PATRIOT act to stop you from copying disks and putting them on Morpheus so millions of people can enjoy your copy without paying $$$$$$ to the RIAA for some crappy 128kbps AAC which you're forced to do because of the DRM in Windoze that M$ is forcing you to have and... (continued page 94.)
In other news Microsoft fanboy /. once again
Hahaha, yeah... In other news, Fox News blasted for catering too much to the Democratic party. Michael Moore accused of disguising government as documentaries. Also a new WSJ editorial advises you to put all of your money under your mattress.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Now that you've found the correct link, I'd suggest that you actually read up on it. You'll see numerous references to Sony (as co-developers) in that article.
This guy's the limit!
The last Sony products I bought were Walkman Cassette players and a Trinitron TV. Back then those products were values for the money. Now I look at everything from digital camcorders to various music players and see no good value. I see locked in technology that would cost me more to own so I find something else to buy that does give me value and quality for my money. The article mentions Betamax, the memory stick and that stupid mini-disc, all examples of proprietary, expensive and locked down technologies from Sony. If Blu-Ray is the same it'll have the same fate as the other products Sony has tried to pawn off on us. It'll smell like a turd but they'll have pretty girls and advertisements telling us that's flower perfume we're smelling but it'll still be turd. Sony thinks that they have the video game players locked in because of the PS1 and PS2 and they reason that those folks will migrate to whatever nonsense Sony puts down in front of them. This was the reasoning with the mini-disc and the memory stick as well. Sony thought they had the personal music player market locked up. I mean after all, wasn't the walkman the most popular thing on the planet? Folks won't mind if we lock them into our Sony's expensive stuff. Only it didn't work that way, other music players came and other memory options came out and that market once owned by Sony was gone with the wind. The article writer Jonathan V. Last is right, Sony is a prisoner of their own internal logic and keeps making the same fatal mistakes.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
The problem with the memory stick is that a lot of people went out of their way to avoid anything using a memory stick, simply because it tied you to expensive Sony products. And memory stick is one of the most confusing as hell "standards" out there with numerous variants. I have one device that uses a memory stick - a PSP. I certainly have no intention of buying any other Sony product because of it. The PSP's UMD bombed for movies, that's a given, but it was a worthwhile "attempt." Personally, I think it was the price that killed it, had they made it cheaper than it would have been worth it for travelling purposes (and only travelling).
Definitely the price. It should have been $10 or less per movie. Attempting to flog a movie for more than its DVD equivalent on a proprietary format that only plays on one device is sheer stupidity. It is doomed to fail. Still, Sony could salvage the situation and drive memory stick sales if after dumping UMD they opened up the PSP to play ripped movies at full res. They could still make a lot of money. Better yet (for them) if they hand out something akin iTunes for doing the ripping which also manages syncing the device and links to their own reasonably priced store. I read a rumour that there would be an 8Gb PSP soon so perhaps they are planning something like this. It has the potential to be great, but Sony is like an anti King Midas - turning gold into shit - so who knows.
Other than videos, the PSP is fairly reasonable as far as DRM goes. I can play MP3, AAC, WMA music and rip my own videos. The resolution thing is an annoyance but ripped movies look pretty fine anyway so it's not a big deal. If UMD dies, they should definitely unlock the restriction though.
I couldn't care less between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I feel both formats are irrelevant unless you have an HD TV, or a computer with a BD/HD-DVD ROM. All I care about is that one of them wins so this pointless pissing contest is over. Personally I feel it will be Blu-ray that wins but I guess judgement must be reserved for six months at least to see what happens with the PS3. Again, the PS3 could be an awesome device assuming Sony internal politics don't castrate the thing.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's just you. Sony has gone downhill of late, and a lot of people are critical of them. There are some stories about them that are unfair, such as that "OMG! Reading from graphics memory takes aaaaaaages on the PS3!!! We should get PCs with good old AGP graphics instead" thing, but they're no longer the great inventive powerhouse they once were.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I think that assuming the upcoming format battle is limited to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is too simplistic. I would add to the mix: existing DVD and the anti-format: movies via the internet. Exisiting DVD still looks quite strong since the quality improvements gained from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD arn't nearly as compelling as the gains when moving from VHS to DVD. Movies via the internet is more paletable every day with data rates improving and the cost of storage decreasing.
To me, it looks like a four horse race with DVD leading on the inside lane, Internet gaining ground on everyone else and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray weighed down by Big Media interested and lacking the speed to overtake DVD or outrun unfettered internet access.
UMD can only be played on the PSP, and only on the PSP's display.
Blu-ray Discs can be played on any BD player (when they're shortly available), and on any display. (With varying resolutions.)
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Look at the bottom of the slide. The typo isn't with the capital 'M' but with the missing 'A'
The studios listed for HD-DVD are *also* listed for BR ("CYA group"), but Sony's got more lined up for BR only. When little Joey wants his Disney fix in HD, and the parents find out it's only to be had on BR, guess what wins? Add the gaming boost from Playstation's market share and Sony may actually have something here.
Being old enough at the time, I seem to recall the video-tape wars.
Sony had a better product, it was smaller and had a higher quality then VHS.
It wasn't that it was inferior, their mistake was that they didn't license it.
It was shortsightedness that brought them down, much like what happened to the Amiga. If the opened up to other manufacturers, they probably would have taken Apples place, if not along side them. They were an awesome thing.
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality. Same reason I wait to upgrade my video card only when I need to. I only spend 50$ or so. That way the ones that are a couple of hundred now.. will be there for my pickings then.
Sweet.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
Well, only Universal has EXCLUSIVELY pledged support to HD-DVD. Sony are obviously Blu-Ray exclusive and Fox are in that camp for the moment, but most of the others are fence-sitting by either planning for both, or publicly letting it be known that they'll jump if HD-DVD does well in the next 6 months or so.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Sorry about that, my eyes have come to ignor instances of the "i" when used. All those iPod wannabes. Here's the quote and the correct link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc "In the early 1970s, using video Laserdisc technology, Philips' researchers started experiments with "audio-only" optical discs, initially with wideband frequency modulation FM and later digitized PCM audio signals. The compact disk was thus developed by Philips from its own 12 inch Philips Laservision disks." I already knew that Phillips and not Sony developed the CD. In my store of useless information. Additionally, it was not and is not a closed down proprietary format which nullifies your point anyways. I do also remember that Phillips has been none to happy with the locked down and drm'ed music discs sent out and wants those to not carry the 'CD' label on them. You know, I miss the old days when you go and flame folks and get flamed back. Anyone know of any places like that? :-)
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
PAL DVDs are 576p.
720p is 25% better. For NTSC, 720p represents a 50% increase in quality.
On my 92 inch projection screen, I can see every hair, folical and acne scar on a movie star's face. Honestly, I'm so blown away by a good PAL disc that I'll wait until whatever comes after HiDef.
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
or DVD and CD-ROM for that matter?
It may not make sense to us regular folk that go to work and collect our checks to keep wasting time and effort of forcing a proprietary format but for someone like Sony that has the resources if I were Sony I keep trying to do it.
Its one thing to develop, market, manufacture, distribute etc... the next new radio/tv/gaming/remote control... to earn large profits to feed the 800lb gorilla. But how little effort would it take to earn some extra change if you controlled a widely used format?
Considering they already have a level of control in all facets of entertainment, film, tv, hardware, gaming, PC's, music,...
Sony owns the rights to so much of the content. They end up with the R&D dept coming up with products and concepts for the electronics dept which have to keep the media and content dept happy - that means bundles of DRM obviously - but if you invented succesful formats before - or helped in the creation of them - and got bundles of cash for it why wouldn't you do that again.
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
Sony has even more memory stick formats coming. I just bought the sony ericsson w800 with a 2GB memory stick pro duo and now they announce a newer version of the phone on http://gsmarena.com/ that takes a different memory type.
therefore i cant just upgrade my phone and use the old memory sticks. im not a customer any more of sony.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Which one do you think she will buy?
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
You make it sound like Sony was the only company backing their technology in the past, and that was the reason they failed.
As well as Sony and Sanyo, Betamax video recorders were also sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Aiwa and NEC. The Zenith Electronics Corporation and WEGA Corporations contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. Department Stores like Sears in the US and Quelle in Germany sold Beta format VCRs under their house brands as did the Radio Shack chain of electronic stores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
The HD DVD Promotion Group also has a rather long list of members, among them:
-
Broadcom Corporation
-
CANON INC.
-
FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.
-
Fujitsu Limited.
-
Hewlett-Packard Company
-
Hitachi Maxell, Ltd.
-
Imation Corp
-
Intel Corporation
-
Kenwood Corporation
-
Konica Minolta Opto, Inc.
-
Lenovo Japan
-
Microsoft Corporation
-
Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co., Ltd. / Verbatim
-
NEC Electronics Corporation
-
Paramount Home Entertainment
-
RICOH COMPANY LTD.
-
SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.
-
TEAC CORPORATION
-
TOSHIBA CORPORATION
-
Ulead Systems, Inc.
-
Universal Pictures
-
Warner Home Video Inc.
http://www.hddvdprg.com/about/member.htmlIf Universal Pictures is the only media house supporting HD-DVD, it does seem a bit strange that Warner Home Video Inc. and Paramount Home Entertainment are also members of a group promoting HD-DVD...
I saw HD-DVDs in Walmart a couple of days ago. . . I didn't see any Blu-ray movies. That may be a problem for Sony getting people to adapt it, they're a bit behind in getting it out to the market (at least, what most people will use it for. I don't plan on getting a $1000 BR burner. Or any BR device for that matter)
I don't have time to make a sig
Frame for frame, sony had a better product. But they lost because VHS came out with tapes that could hold more. Doesn't matter for rentals, but when you stick your tape in, and want to record the superbowl, or a movie that with commercials has been stretched out to 3 hours, it made a difference.
Many Japanese people agree with you... and so do I.
Sony used to be 'the' thing to get but for the past... I don't know, 8-10 years maybe, they've really seemed to have their heads up their asses. They are NOT Apple though they seem to think they are. What I mean by this is that in Apple's case, whatever they make is gold every time they slap their Apple logo onto anything. This is not so with Sony. There are too many competitors and Sony is not a culture all its own as Apple is at the moment.
My bad experiences with Sony started when I was selecting a laptop. I wanted to run a Japanese OS and expected that since Sony was a Japanese company, that I wouldn't have any trouble getting support. Boy was I EVER wrong on that. I should have gotten an IBM! It ha(d) WAY better Japanese language support than any other at the time. Pretty amazing considering it was an American company.
And from that point forward, my bad experiences with their stuff just kept piling up. I've been 'done' with Sony since about 5 years ago. Now I just wait for them to die.
That's almost true, but I remember some of the original DVD players costing upwards of around one thousand when they first came out.
Betamax, VCR, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD/Bluray have or will be prohibitively expensive at first. That's why for the first few months the only people who have them are those who have homes that appear on certain cable tv programs from certain cable tv channels who drop at least five grand on just the surround sound system, another five to ten grand on the video projector, about ten to twenty on the room and furnishings (heck, probably more!) and by that time it's not much to spend another thousand bucks on a Bluray or HD-DVD player.
Then they drop in price.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
How is this article not another repeat or just another article about how Sony sucks at proprietary formats? How is this not complete rhetoric? Or has Slashdot resigned to auto-approving any article with the word "Sony", "Blu-Ray", or "PS3" in it?
Ultimately, while they can't and don't support each other for the moment support, neither will win or lose. Both formats are backed by huge consortiums. What will ultimately happen is that players will support both disk types after a while and the version that's then supported by the majority of people (and has the lowest production costs with volume) will become the standard. There's no possibility of a repeat of betamax because the medias will physically fit in the same slot. If I were to bet blue-ray will become the preferred medium because the number of blue-ray drives out there will be greater than HD-DVD (PS3) and so manufacturing facilities and production will mature more quickly driving costs down. Its what drove DVD into the mainstream.
As far as Sony's obsession with proprietary formats goes, I am still amazed that they haven't yet given up on the MiniDisk. I've known exactly one person who ever owned a MD player, and beyond my own experience, it has never seemed to catch on beyond the "hey, those little disks are cute" phase. But still, Sony just won't let it die. I can't say that I fully understand. Especially today with the current MP3 player madness. I wonder if Blue-Ray will be similar. It may catch on in the computer market (especially for backing up purposes), and it has the PS3 to force it into the hands of gamers (albeit, those with a spare $600 laying around), but I can't tell if its ever going to catch on as widely as plain old DVD (or even HD-DVD). And if it doesn't, I wonder if Sony will jump ship this time... some how I doubt it. I would expect blue-ray to be around even if it isn't popular. Who knows, tho... we shall see
I think he was refering to the mini-disc.
Is is just me, or are others too, getting bored of slashdot's new found love for Sony bashing?
As someone whose system was trashed by Sony's rootkit, I for one can't get enough Sony bashing.
The day Sony goes out of business is the day I'll call for less Sony bashing. Until then, I can't get enough.
Die, you pigfuckers at Sony! DIE!!!!
Original versions of Sony's minidisc platform wouldn't allow you to digitally upload material you had recorded. You had to route the audio outout and use an analog process to get the stuff to your PC. When customers complained, they responded by providing the upload capability, but you only had one shot at it: the recording was then marked uncopyable!!! Finally, they currently support unlimited uploading, but I suspect it has other odious restrictions.
If I didn't have so much invested in Sony hardware, I'd drop them like a rock.
.nosig
It was made obsolete by Sony's other great experiments like Digital Audio Tape (DAT), MiniDisc (MD), Super Audio CD (SACD) and of course RootKit Enabled CD (RECD).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Propriatory formats are a good example of a good strategy for making money that clashes with the requirements of customers.
If you force people to buy only your memory sticks (for example) then they are less likely to move to something else which doesn't support them as they'll end up with a format that is useless.
In addition, the markup on these items can generate a healthy revenue. The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
However this serves to right royally p**s off your customers. In addition, it means that the very thing that you use to lock people in is the very thing that keeps people away from buying that product in the first place.
Hence why I never will buy a Sony phone or a Sony digital camera and generally don't recommend them to anyone else either. At least when your Canon breaks, you can buy any other MiniSD supporting device and re-use all your memory.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Most studios released stuff on minidisk and betamax too.
Because slashbots are conditioned to hate Sony.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
You completely missed the parents point. Using studio support as a metric for determining which format to support is meaningless, as the studios listed supported UMD which was a complete failure.
When I sold electronics I was told this story:
Sony said you could make Beta machines but had to pay a $25 royalty fee.
JVC said you could make VHS and had to pay a 25 cent royalty fee.
I don't know if this is true but it was what all us sales grunts were told to say by our manager. Who knows, perhaps it is even true...
Didn't find the specifics on Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
Are we perfect? No. But where I should move when I renounce my U.S. citizenship, North Korea, Libya, China, or Iran?
To: Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Corporation
From: Djinns'R'Us, Wish Granting Department
Re: Recent requests after bottle opening
Dear Mr. Stringer,
We are pleased to announce that we have fulfilled your latest request: to make Sony "the next Apple". Although we had to steal resources from projects in our Monkey's Paw Department, we have managed to complete this task up to your specifications.
We hope you enjoy the restructuring. Sony now resembles Apple, circa 1996.
Sincerely,
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Dear Coward, It brings tears to my eyes to read an unattributed, cursing fit of uncalled for outrage from a Anonymous Coward. Just like the old days of the web when anyone with a computer and a connection could and would spit forth their entertaining Jerry Springer type of values and morality. All that venom because I made a mistake in a link? I admit that I tend to not see anything with the "i" from iPod in it and I didn't see that one. I queried 'CD' from Wiki and quickly saw the Phillips attribution and thought I was home. My mistake. That doesn't make me a troll or any other creature that lives under a bridge. At least two posts in this thread give the proper link and the fact that Phillips and not Sony created the CD format is still true. Also, unlike Sony formats, the CD format isn't locked down and is used by one and all. Sorry if that upsets you. But 'low-brow?' , now that's uncalled for. And really, it doesn't make any sense at all. Low brow would have been me putting a goatse link in or perhaps calling someone a "fucking low-brow troll" - now that one would have made me pretty low-brow. But I'd never do that since that would be classless. :-)
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Then why is it that the first 3 HD-DVDs released were all from Warner Home Video? ( Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby and Phantom of the Opera )? Content producer support is anything but decided at this point.
With a redesign slashdot, why not make all these stuff Ajaxed? It's very easy to do. Save bandwidth and user headache.
I can probably do this in a day if I am a slashdot programmer.
On the blue ray versus hddvd, I think if you believe in name importance, I think blueray is just much better than hddvd. It's easier to pronounce, shorter to say, not confused with zillions of other *dvd* name out there.
On the proprietary, as someone pointed it out, anything else (dvd, hddvd) out there is also proprietary. Someone says it's not properietary that counts, but (fill in blank here). The fact is that with regard to this point, the article is wrong, the article talks about the proprietary problem, and it's not!
And why 100 millions PS2 out there, I think blue ray will prevail unless some stupid obvious, hard to fix problem come out. Look at M$, they screw up a million times and people still use their OS. It's the install base, Sidney.
While the link to info on CD-I (interactive CD) is interesting, maybe you were looking for the article on the CD?
From the all-knowing Wikipedia article:
At the end of the 1970s, Philips, Sony, and other companies presented prototypes of digital audio discs.
According to Philips, the Compact Disc was thus "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team."
At least Apple is also a member of DVD Forum, and it might not be the only one on the list yet to choose their side.
UMD could have been successful, if Sony "opened" it up more. I think that's the heart of the matter. It's not that they have propretary formats. It''s just that they cling to them too tightly.
I would have been very interested in a UMD drive form my computer. Small, well protected. Burn my own PSP media. Very cool. It woud And a blu-ray based UMD disc later on (for PSP2) would have been the bomb. And if I could plug my PSP into my TV and watch the UMD like that would be very cool too. I actually wish Sony would retry with UMD, but this time do it right.
T.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Because the Bluray one is supported by Sony, and HD-DVD isn't.
The one that Sony supports is obviously the one that will fail, because Slashdot hates Sony.
$599 $599 $599 $599 rootkit rootkit rootkit rootkit rootkit.
Sony, Sanyo, Toshiba, Pioneer, Aiwa and NEC all supported Betamax. Presumably some studios did, too. There's no loyalty among corporations; *if* Blu-Ray starts looking like a failure, those companies you listed will not hesitate to jump ship (same goes for HD-DVD, of course).
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
FWIW, I bought a Loewe Concept 32" box a few weeks ago. This is a very nice piece of kit, and is replacing the trusty 14" Panasonic CRT that has served me faithfully for many years but didn't even do widescreen.
It's pretty obvious what kind of signal you're looking at on the new box. Freeview (broadcast, digital, non-HD, compression varies with channel) and VHS are watchable for stuff that doesn't matter, but unsurprisingly DVD blows them away for anything serious. (It made little difference on the old TV, because the picture was so small and the resolution so low that it didn't matter...)
That said, I think the most relevant factoid here is that the upscaling in the TV is excellent for most images. Watching a DVD movie, it's quite hard to distinguish the picture from the quality of the HDTV samples that have been flying around unless you are literally watching them side-by-side. Naturally, there are some areas where upscaling can never beat real details: crowd scenes and panoramic shots, for example. But these are relatively rare.
I think this is what will make it difficult for the HD formats to take hold if they're DRM-encumbered and priced uncompetitively. The usual rule about not screwing the early adopters if you want your product to succeed applies. A lot of enthusiasts have spent silly money on HDTVs recently. One thing they often didn't have until quite recently was HDCP. One thing most of them always did have was good upscaling. After all, would you buy a stupidly expensive TV that looks worse displaying today's channels worse than what you've already got?
In other words, the likely early-adopter market for HD formats can already watch DVDs at enhanced resolutions, which makes any native HD format less appealing relative to status quo. If HD-DVD or BluRay (wish someone would decide how we're supposed to write that...) are going to take advantage of the benefits they do offer, that means they've got to have very little downside. And that means they have to be priced similarly to the DVDs they're replacing, and they have to be easier to use rather than more difficult.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The submission makes it sound like Jonathan Last is some kind of technical expert. He's just a reporter on the technology beat. He does make some good points in the article, but he also makes some of the lame mistakes ("the DVD already had one competitor, DivX" and "household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads") typical of those self-taught "experts" who doesn't know technology as well as they think they do.
Oh god, now someone's going to drag out the 'Actually, Betamax died because the porn industry didn't support it' thing.
It's not that animation can't look good on dvd, it's just harder. The easy way to get good quality is high bit rates. But on dvd that means 2/eps per disc. It's hard enough to get 4 eps/disk made when you've got manufacturing facilities that would rather turn out copy # 10,000,001 of Titanic than a 50,000 run of Tenchi ni Narumon spread out over 13 discs. The alternative is to spend a ton of time/money on crap like variable bitrates and color balancing. Disney can do that for Miazaki flix, Animego probably isn't going to for an obscure mecha or shojo show.
On top of that, hopefully once Hi-Def hits some of the shows I really love that suck on DVD will hopefully be remastered right (Nadesico is the big one, too much red in that series for low bitrate mpeg).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah, well, I'm sure you like that seven year old size XXXL "Magic: The Gathering" T-shirt you still wear, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Spunk gargler.
Nice lists and links, but what does it all mean? What do the media licenses look like? How much per disk? Are they tied up in one company that can raise and lower them at will? How about that player? Is the technology shared equaly for participants or horded by one company. Is there flexibility for extentions or are you pretty much forced to go with the reference? How much do you pay toward the licensee?
Now I don't know ANY of these answers. Nope, none. But I'll bet these answers will go much farther toward explaining whether a format is really open than publishing a list of companies that will use the technology.
Just because Sandisk makes and sells MemoryStick media doesn't mean that MS isn't proprietary for all intents and purposes.
TW
...who own 90" screens. Until the price drops on 'em, the point is moot for about 90% of the TV-owning public. Not people like yourself, of course.
As an aside, I feel that there's a law of diminishing returns on screen-size. Once they get past 50" or so, you really need to move to a town that has some good movie theaters. You still can't beat 35mm.
The appeal of a home-theater system for watching movies is pretty limited. I always find "home theaters" to be dark and isolating, and a big space hog. Have you ever seen an old mansion with a built in bowling alley, or indoor shooting range? It feels a little like that. I'd rather tough it out with the hoi polloi.
The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
While I am by no means a fan of memory stick (most of my devices are CF or MMS/SD, the sole exception being my Clie):
1. My third-party (non-Sony) MS was cheaper at the time than a comparable sized SD stick, and didn't have part of the memory wasted on the "secure" part of "secure digital".
2. If your device is a camera, you want one that uses CF or xD anyway.
3. If you were using SD, your new camera's mini-SD, and your old memory is useless.
4. If you were using MS, your new device is MS-Duo, and your old memory is useless.
5. If you can use the sticks, they're a quarter the size of new ones and your new higher res camera needs bigger sticks anyway...
6. Smartmedia, CF, CF-II, CF-1e, MMC, SD, Mini-SD, MS, xD, MS-Duo, what's next? I vote for a USB host mode interface so you can save your snaps from your camera direct to your iPod.
7. The moral of the story is, all formats suck.
Well, I'm not a pirate. And the choice between HD-DVD and BR-DVD matters to me. Why? Capacity! I want it for a recording medium. With 15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for BR-DVD, the latter would be the way to go if the pricing between them would be equivalent. Obviously, if BR-DVD stays at twice the price of HD-DVD, then it might not be worth it.
Of course the big market the manufacturers are looking at is the HD video media market, selling new players and licensing the manufacture of all that media being produced for it. But even there, having 25GB instead of 15GB means a better tradeoff between more content vs. less lossy compression. At the same compression, you can get 60-66% more content (or fewer disks for an entire mini-series in HD). For a fixed content, a higher quality level can be chosen for the compression.
One potential risk is that if the level of technology is really the same for both (I really don't know if it is or not) then the more dense format could be subject to more errors, given other things equal. In the end, we'll just have to see what works.
I think it will be a slower uptake. DVD's predecessor was VHS. That was a big difference. The jump from DVD to (HD/BR)-DVD requires a number of factors.
I think it will be hard enough to get a large consumer adoption even if there wasn't a format competition. I suspect that a large segment of willing buyers will put it off just to wait out the war and see who wins. Or maybe they are waiting for the less popular content that can't get shelf space in the stores while there are 2 formats of content competing for that shelf space (as well as DVDs).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is exactly the reason I'm not buying a Sony digital camera this week. They want to run it off of a Memory Stick, which is useless to me anywhere else. One criteria for my next digital camera is that it use an SD memory card since I already use SD memory in other places. I don't find that this has negatively impacted my overall choices in the final analysis.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"and made their own specification with twice the storage capacity."
Unfortunately, there is no practical difference in storage capacity between the two.
HD DVD has a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB and a single-layer capacity of 15 GB. BluRay is single layer 25 GB, dual-layer is 50 GB. However, give the limitations of 1080i, there is no *practical* difference between the two. Do the math yourself.
Any attempt to compare the two is either misinformed or biased.
Not at all. As you have stated UMD can only played on PSP & Blue Ray can only be played on a BD player. Media companies decided it wasn't worth it to create UMD content. I personally think Sony blew it with the UMDs.
If they can't capture market interest with Blue Ray (and I don't mean media moguls, I mean end users) then content will initially come out on Blue Ray but dry up as users don't buy into that format.
The comparison is completely valid in its point: studios will support what sells. If BL doesn't get traction, studios won't produce content for it. If the PSP sold like Gameboys, UMD movies would probably still be made by all of the original supports and other come latelies. Support now / = support later.
...when your competitor has it too.
The salesperson will tell her, "With Blu-Ray every movie fits on a single disk. With HD-DVD you will need two disks for each movie.
And the salesperson will be full of crap. Single-layer HD-DVDs hold 15 GB--more than three times what single layer DVDs hold. If you encoded the HD video using the same MPEG2 format used by standard DVD you'd get about 75 minutes of HD video on a single layer HD-DVD--not enough to fit most movies. However, the compression used on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is more efficient, allowing for much more video to fit on a single disc. You could easily fit double the video as a result (2.5 hours) and perhaps even more (up to 4 hours).
With the release of dual-layer HD-DVDs there will be much more space than required for any movie out there, allowing for more extended features/enhanced content. Even Sony themselves concede they don't envision too many movies that would even fill one single-layered Blu-Ray disc, much less a dual-layered HD-DVD.
Which one do you think she will buy?
If she listens to the full-o-crap salesman then probably the Blu-Ray machine. Then she'll be upset when she finds out she payed almost double for the player and finds out that HD-DVD movies DO come on single discs, she can't notice any difference in picture quality and only a fraction of movie releases take advantage of the extra Blu-Ray capacity to deliver extra content.
This is Beta vs. VHS all over again, and perhaps Sony thinks that since it has the capacity edge (where VHS had much longer playing/recording times) that it has HD-DVD beat. Sony would be wrong. Firstly, when Betamax first came out the best reording time was something like 120 minutes (The "Beta III" speed and longer tapes came out later allowing for 3 or 4 hours on a tape, but by then VHS was out). Consumers could've forgiven a smaller capacity, but not one so small that they might have a hard time fitting a movie on one tape. This time around, it isn't too-small vs. larger-than-needed, it is large-enough vs. larger-then needed. Secondly, Sony is repeating stupid mistakes by insisting on too-greedy licensing terms and using more complex technology. Aunt Bea might not like the idea of switching discs for some longer movies (if it were true), but if it means saving $500 on the player and a few dollars in the cost of a video she might not think it such a problem.
Software, hardware and new technology. Yes three different things but can you define failure? People rip on Sony but look at Apple if you want to see an equal amount proprietary (there goes my -1 troll moderation). Take a look at the overall sales of those companies in the last 15 years and use that to determine who failed. Each use a method of proprietary in a different way but once you buy into Apple, you are pretty much sticking with the formats and method they use, not much different from Sony if you ask me. People laugh at Sony and worship Apple for the same thing. Again, what do you mean by failure? Before you reply, remember, the technology itself is sound from both both the expected adoption rate is different between the two but those overall sales and income figures bewteen the two speak loudly.
Ok, Betamax died. But did Sony lose money on Betamax? Or minidisc? Or memorystick? Seems to me like that stuff was doomed to tiny market share, but guaranteed to be high margin. Because no one else sold the stuff. Right?
So maybe they're repeating a money printing strategy that's worked for them for decades. We might get chaffed buttocks from it, but that doesn't mean Sony is losing.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
You're exactly right. Movies via the internet is paletable for a great many people now. As soon as someone creates a client that makes it all easy and uses bittorrent we'll have a new iTunes Store. Though, regrettably, I will most certainly have DRM.
Valve software are using the internet in order to sell games, and these are currently far larger than the majority of films. Granted the userbase is more knowledgable, but perhaps if media center PC's were sold with the capability from scratch?
Righty, co-developers of the "final" CD-format Sony may be but the way the article reads is that Philips started, Philips continued the development and then teamed up with Sony to create the CD-format that we know and use. It does not read; "Sony and Philips jointly started developing the technology from scratch" (all this is of course assuming the Wiki is accurate). AFAIK Philips also holds the rights to the final specs, something they have use to make record companies bent on copy restriction not being able to get the official CD "stamp". Note again, that I did not provide the first Wiki-link nor am I in a position to judge the Wiki-article's correctness as to the actual events.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
In 1979 Philips and Sony decided to join forces, setting up a joint task force of engineers whose mission was to design the new digital audio disc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD
I just wanted to mention another important aspect to this debate for me, which is how much data each format can hold. Currently Blu-ray specs claim to be able to store almost twice as much data as HD-DVD. I am a photographer, and honestly, doing backups everyday is painful when you generate up to 25gb of new content daily shooting RAW and capturing audio in the field.
Ok, so i guessed this guy had a bit of a bias when i read "the coming trainwreck that is the ps3". I'm no fanboy, but i think reporting should be gotten straight. Blu ray is not a "Sony Proprietary format" any more than the dvd formats are, since both come out of alliances between big media corporations. In fact blu ray currently has more support than hd-dvd, the latter's main asset being microsoft. And even then microsoft won't be able to stop people putting blu-ray drives on their computers. I personally don't care which type wins, as long as one of them does. Currently Blu Ray seems to be taking the lead, and i rather hope it totally crushes the competition early on so that we don't have another stupid format war on our hands.
Compact Discs are still my preferred format for audio, DVDs came out AFTER CDs and already we are being expected to upgrade our video collections again? I just bought Indiana Jones on DVD last week, I don't think I'm ready yet.
Also, how will this affect NetFlix and other media rental services?
Soon to appear on /.
Report shows PS3 causes manhood to fall off...
Ken Katagari reportedly contemplating World War 3 to exterminate XBox users...
All Sony office buildings engulfed in flames, employess unaware...
Blu-Ray secretly developed by China to spy on americans...
Cell processor actually made from chewing gum and used condoms...
XBox 360 makes you smarter and more attractive to females...
Didn't we all used to hate M$, what happened techies. You can't have it both ways, bashing Windows while dry humping XBox.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
Yeah. First there was Memory Stick. Then came Memory Stick Pro, and my Memory Stick reader couldn't read it, which was a pain as my Dad's camera took Memory Stick Pro.
Then I got a phone with Memory Stick Duo, and guess what? Phone couldn't read Memory Stick or Memory Stick Pro, reader couldn't read Duo.
Then came the Memory Stick Pro Duo.
Meanwhile, my new Canon SLR can use the same CompactFlash cards I was using 4 years ago, and my new 2GB CF card works in my existing card reader.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Warner Home Video released the first 3 HD-DVD titles. So I doubt that Universal Pictures is the "only" one of the major media houses to pledge support for HD-DVD.
Before this upcoming generation sony has been the least control freakish with drm on their consoles. Sony released their primary console on cd's while Nintendo has been using their own proprietary cartridges and charging out of the ass for licensing fee's along with the high cost of cart manufacture.
This continued with the proprietary format of the gamecube versus' the ps2's dvd drive. All you needed to do was mod your ps2/psx to play your games. Media was never an issue. This little bit of DRM is in all consoles.
Hell, I remember back when the psx was popular that some attributed PSX's success due to ease of modding and burning games for it. Saying Sony's history in consoles is that of above industry lvls of drm and proprietary formats is a joke.
Hmmm... Pie...
No the salesperson will tell her whatever he has to persuade her to buy the system that the store has decided they want to push, and dissuade her or any other customer with enormous amounts of FUD from buying the other one. Presumably they will decide which one this will be on the basis of which makes more profit for them.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
"'Tis but a scratch!"
Check out the gradients for Blu-ray versus HD-DVD.
y =blu_ray_vs_hd_dvd
I've been following this battle for two years, but Blu-ray is finally pulling ahead with an accelerating gradient. It's a little too early to call the battle, but I now think that Blu-ray is the percentage bet.
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entr
UMD could have been successful, if Sony "opened" it up more.
Maybe if it had been a mini dvd that played in a dvd player. UMD confronts the problem that nobody is willing to buy the same dvd twice so they can play it on a psp. I'd rather spend the cash and rip my dvd to mpegs and watch them on a laptop.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I tend to think both blue-ray and hddvd will be a dud for several years at least. People are happy with dvd and the format confusion will scare off a lot of people.
When they get cheaper they will probably be good for computer backup if anything.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I won't use either HD or Blu-ray disks for a long time, for the same reason I don't use Double-Layer now: the blanks are too expensive per GB. I simply want to burn stuff off my computer. Right now I can easily buy blank DVD-R's for $0.30 each. Try matching that price with DL. I suspect HD / Blu-ray will be similar. *shrug*
The big difference between Sony and Apple is Apple didn't try to force iPod users to convert all their music to AAC.
I own an iPod because it is well engineered AND because I can play MP3s on it. When I first got my iPod I bought some music from iTMS but after listening to if for a while I decided 128kbps just doesn't cut it for me. If iTMS had offered different encoding rates (160kbps, 192kbps) I might have overlooked the AAC + UnFairPlay stuff.
The other thing Apple and RIAA don't get is that when music is priced cheaply (e.g. AllOfMP3 prices) I'm willing to buy crappier music. With AllOfMP3 I frequently buy an album and only end up listening to it a few times. I also buy music from AllOfMP3 that I own on CD but have had trouble ripping (the CD plays fine in the CD player but the MP3 always come out with glitches). Back when iTMS was the only game in town that I knew of I would never buy music from iTMS that I already owned on CD -- I would spend time polishing that CD, searching for better ripping software etc.
Despite Apple's short comings I'm happy with my iPod and would buy another one BECAUSE it supports MP3 (the community standard) in addition to its proprietary format. If Apple decides to ATRAC me I'll move on to a different brand of music player.
I've never even looked at Sony's ATRAC music players and Memory Stick cameras.
Storing a lot of data for personal gaming probably doesn't have too many options.
I dunno, ever heard of MiniSD? Also, compact flash.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
DVD:
720x480 (assuming progressive scan) for a total of 345,600 pixels per frame (usually 24 or 29 fps)
in reality, it's truely 720x240, but we'll pretend it's 480 for comparison sake.
HDDVD:
1920x1080 (already progressive scan) for a total of 2,073,600 pixels per frame (also 24 or 29 fps)
Yeah, I suppose I'll trade you my $345,600 for your $2,073,600
And yet, I can't find a SINGLE blueray disk on the shelf at Frys Electronics. However, I remember seeing at least twelve or more HD-DVDs.
BlueRay was dead before it even got out the door. How pathetic!!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality.
My dad has always been a fan of new technology. When we got a satellite dish (no cable in rural areas) we also decided to get a VCR so we could tape movies and such (we had a fairly advanced system with a high-gain C-Band LNB that worked with an "amazingly small" 8 foot dish!). After seeing a noticeable difference in picture quality we decided to get a Sony Betamax VCR despite the slightly higher cost.
It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the short recording time--I believe it topped out at 120 minutes, and there was a LOT of stuff that we recorded that ran over that. We did find longer tapes eventially that held 180 minutes that helped quite a bit, but they were harder to find and more expensive (over 50% more expensive even though they were only 50% longer). "But wait--I'm sure Beta tapes could hold more". Yes they could--but not when it first came out. Betamax ended up with three playback/record speeds (Beta I/II/III) like VHS, however The Beta III record speed was not on our machine (it wasn't on any at the beginning IIRC).
Eventually we had problems with our Sony VCR--it would play back but when recording the video would drop out--at first for a few frames, then for seconds to minutes, always at random intervals. We replaced it with a Sanyo--another Beta because of our existing library. This VCR could record in B-III so we now had an ample amount of time even on the most common-sized tape. However, VHS had gotten a foothold by then and aside from price, I recall the REAL selling point was the much bigger recording time.
There was another issue too which affected our alliegence to the Beta format even before it became too hard to find pre-recorded content. Eventaully our second Beta VCR suffered from the EXACT SAME RECORDING PROBLEM as the older Sony did. Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the repairmen said the same thing--that these problems with recording crpooed up more often in Beta VCRs than VHS, regardless of the make or model. So Beta VCRs might've had better PICTURE quality, VHS had better HARDWARE quality (more reliable). Given the delay in Blu-Ray player releases due to last-minute "extra testing", as well as the delays in the PS3 (and speculation that it is due to problems with the Blu-Ray player) it sounds like there could be some stubborn reliability problems, and with HD-DVD players and movies already out the pressure to get to market could possibly mean Blu-Ray players might be pushed out the door before they should be.
Of course it is much too early to predict a winner in this format war, and they may coexist for so long that both will be supplanted by an even newer technology before one camp wins. In any case there are a few uncomfortable signs that Blu-Ray has lost its edge from a market-competitveness advantage.
> I think that assuming the upcoming format battle is limited to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is too simplistic. I would add
> to the mix: existing DVD and the anti-format: movies via the internet.
And more. Using MPEG4 encoding a current DVD9 can do a pretty good HD. More and more players support various MPEG4/Divx media, standardize it and let studios see market and sooner or later one of em will try it. It just might turn out to be 'good enough' for most people.
And of course the major wildcard is whether Holographic DVD will get to market soon enough to turn both HD-DVD and Blue-Ray into a dead end. If they can solve the transfer rate problems with Holographic DVD we could even see uncompressed HD content. Talk about ending the format wars, that would certainly be game over in the quality battle.
Internet delivery is a non-starter. The tech isn't there and even if it were the studios aren't clueful enough. They will insist on being totally fascist with the DRM to the point where nobody is likely to care. No current broadband provider is provisioned to deal with HD delivery and any attempt to force the issue will end any hope of maintaining network neutrality. The net will of course remain THE place for p2p trading, for every Pirate Bay closed another will replace it although perhaps none as in your face as they were.
Democrat delenda est
Yes, but for gaming you probably want something in a non volatile format, or close to as possible. You don't want to have to worry about magnets, static, a disk/cartidge getting slightly wet, etc.
Compact Flash can store a lot, but can also get nailed easily if you're not careful. Discs are pretty much fine so long as they don't scratch or melt. Granted, there's the deterioration that all CDs and DVDs deal with but that's years down the line, and nothing lasts forever (my SNES cartridges can't keep my saves for very long).
You're going to wait a long time. I have a Sony radio on my shelf, it was built in 1962. Sony is not going anywhere.
Unless you are some kind of console fanboy, why on earth would you want them to die rather than simply improve?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
While you need to remember your histrory - you don't necessarily need to always do what hasn't been tried before. There is a huge difference here between blue ray and every other failed proprietary technology in the past. People want it, BADLY. The HD-DVD is not going to be included as the only reader in a gaming system (360 thinks they are going to do an add on). People want HD content. There is a market for it. For large TV's there is nothing like HD. Sony has the Nutt Flush here. The PS1 and PS2 are by far the most successful consoles with Xbox running a distant second. The PS3 looks primed to sell 4 million units in 6 months at $500 each. They are going to succeed because of the PS3 - not the other way around. To think the BlueRay is going to be the betamax is forgetting what happened in the bettamax case. Betamax lost not because it was inferior, or cost more but because it didn't have the library. More people are onboard for Blue-ray so if I had to pick a horse now, I would be on BlueRay all the way.
It also suffered because there was another way to watch video on the PSP. Without the ability to rip a DVD to the PSP it would have done better I'd imagine. I'd have probably bought a couple for trips rather than just ripping my simpsons dvds.
Lots of the companies on that list are also supporting HD DVD. For example:
Warner has been one of the first two companies releasing HD DVD titles in volume. They have annonced many more HD DVD than Blu-ray titles.
Apple has been shipping HD DVD authoring and playback software for a year. Nothing for Blu-Ray.
LG is planning a hybrid HD DVD/Blu-Ray player.
My video compression blog
There are many examples of proprietary technologies with similar history and there are some where the proprietary issue is not the reason for failure.
IBM PC won out in the PC wars in part because it depended on an "industry standard" (ISD). Among the losers were TI, HP, DEC and a list of others that made an attempt to define a niche where proprietary would work.
If you do want a proprietary technology, then you have to make the production costs of using your technology very low. If blu-ray discs cost a significant premium, that will be a barrier to market entry for companies that provide complementary products and services. If Sony charges a lot of money to include blu-ray capability in complementary devices, that will be a barrier.
Sony has to decide what partners it must have in order to achieve success. These partnerships cannot be exclusively the larger brands. Smaller players tend to be more agile and more likely to define the need for a new market.
Market barriers are a two-edged sword. Sometimes they work and sometimes not.
Some barriers will
"If all the American people want is security, let them live in prisons." Eisenhower
If Universal Pictures is the only media house supporting HD-DVD, it does seem a bit strange that Warner Home Video Inc. and Paramount Home Entertainment are also members of a group promoting HD-DVD...
If you're saying that it's strange that people would say that Universal is the only provider supporting HD-DVD, you're right (though I'd call it ignorance or FUD). It's not strange at all, though, for studios to be platform-agnostic. In fact, it's shocking to me that studios like Fox, Universal and Disney are supporting one format over the other. The technological differences are minimal for the purpose of distributing HD movies (the most Blu-Ray's higher storage capacity can offer is potentially some extra space for, well, "extras"), so the only reason to support one format over the other is making an attempt to take the choice away from consumers: "Sorry, but if you want to watch Die Hard in high definition you're going to have to get a Blu-Ray player because HD-DVD is for poopy-heads."
Just because the media arm of Sony screwed up with the whole rootkit fiasco, it seems that every third article is out to slam Sony. Blu-Ray holds twice the capacity of HD-DVD - isn't that alone enough to make it superior to HD-DVD from a technological standpoint? Sony has been repeatedly innovative on the disc format front - the CD was obviously a success, the hybrid Super Audio CD maintained backwards compatibility with older players while the DVD consortium pushed the DVD-audio crap out, and now Blu-Ray seems entirely superior to the HD-DVD. The DVD consortium has been _less_ consumer friendly than Sony when it comes to audio - why should I expect anything different now?
You're the type of person who still buys the pan-and-scan versions of movies for your VHS player, huh?
Yeah, HD is the same image as SD if you cut off a third of the picture, and blurred everything.
And how are your 8-tracks doing? Never justified the expense to move up to tapes or (god-forbid) CDs. You can get 8 tracks for pennies now. Good stuff.
(end old fart rant)
Native 1080i format material is simply mind-blowing. Granted, there's not a lot of it out there yet. I think most people commenting on this have not seen this level of detail yet -- even on their "friends" set. I've never met a person who watched a native 1080i show and didn't just stand there with their mouth open. No, a 27" TV is not sufficient to fully appreciate the level of detail apparent. The tech gets cheaper every day -- it's just a matter of when to jump in and enjoy it.
And that's not to mention that here in the US, we'll all NEED digital tuners in a few years (2008?). Or all the other options having the capability to display HD material gives you (like an extra big computer monitor).
Native HD material (like many TV shows broadcast now) is what will drive HD-DVD and Blu-Ray sales. Movies not so much until the digital film technology becomes more prevalent (and movies are being shot in higher rez formats). Internet streaming of this type of material (even bittorrent like methods)is slow -- the files are gargantuan.
This BluRay vs HD-DVD is just a licensing fee battle. We already have free to use formats for audio, video, HD video, etc but there is no $ in using free formats.
Essentially, the hardware and content industries just want their licensing 'tax' to remain on each player, recorder and each media disc. Look to the recent China backed video format CVD to see that licensing prevents new technology from being used. The manufacturers are still geared towards a 10 year lifespan between major technology upgrades and their icensing is designed to keep it that way.
We'll see. I'm no videophile, but I can see some pretty nasty digital artifacts from compression on DVDs, especially in dark scenes. The resolution may be better than VHS, but I'm not convinced the overall picture is.
If I have to look at every hair, folical[sic] and acne scar on Jack Nicholson's face, I may have to break out my VHS player while I recover in the fetal position.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060526/1122205.shtm l [techdirt.com]
The prices are cheaper because you're not actually licensing the music.
And quit crying about iTunes, someone who can't figure out how to get around fairplay and thinks that AllOfMP3 should be the model for music sales really shouldn't be on slashdot.
No, it's just simple greed, and that's not necessarily a bad thing either. They're supporting one format because they'd rather have just one format. The economies of scale are much greater for 1 format than for 2, and that means supporting 2 formats is going to cost them money. Sure they'd by denying you the choice of which format to have, but they also know a majority of their customers would rather not have the choice in the first place if the two formats are functionally the same.
The point was to try and get everyone using the same format, but the primary backer of HD-DVD appears to be Microsoft and they can afford to prolong the fight indefinitely.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
What sony is doing is pretty obvious, since they make alot of stuff that needs media in every shape and form, they "invent" new media that fits it.
t ory/0,12449,881780,00.html :-)
PSP = UMD, PSP + Sony Phones (thats alot) + Sony Professional stuff = Memory Sticks. Professional Broadcast still uses Beta.
Why use and pay royalties when you can create your own?
And minidisc actually won the format battle, they beat the DCC tape (you do remember that), only to be beaten to a bloody pulp by Napster and MP3 players.
Blu-Ray was proposed to the DVD forum but rejected over the Toshiba format, because HD-DVD is cheaper to make. The interesting question is, how much cheaper will it be when there is 25 million PS3s out there with games on Blu-Ray discs?
And why pick Blu-Ray over plain DVD for a next gen console? well consider this:
The PS-ONE was a 4MB machine with a 640MB media format, storage factor 160
The PS2 was 32MB machine with a 9GB media format, storage factor 280
The XBOX was a 64MB machine with a 9GB media format, storage factor 140
The 360 is a 512MB machine with a 9GB media, storage factor 18
The PS3 is a 512MB machine with a 50GB media, storage factor 94
Lets just for arguments sake say that most XBOX games took up 2GB space, most of that would be used for graphic assets i would guess.
This is on a machine with only 64MB memory, the 360 has 8 times the memory & 7 times less storage, and the need for higher res textures and more assets is evident.
Sony clearly chose the right format, its just damn expensive right now, but everyone knows that the best price for a product is where the production line can follow the demand, and in the PS3 case it will sell out at launch, it will be hard to get one for quite some time. After that period it will drop in price, Capitalism 101
And about the Betamax vs VHS war, give this a read.
"Read this, and the next time someone tells you that, of course, Betamax was superior to VHS, you can tell them that they are wrong. It's an urban myth."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/s
Basicly the VHS won because... it had more storage
The resolution isn't better then VHS. They are both 480i. The only quality improvement in DVD over VHS is that DVD is digital so the signal quality is better. There are fewer artifacts, but they are still plenty visible, especially on a big screen.
It's true that DVD was a big technological improvement over VHS, but the improvements were mainly convenience factors--menus and chapters so you didn't have to rewind and fast forward, small, durable form factor, multiple languages and subtitles, etc. High-def DVD will be a much, much larger improvement in quality over DVD then DVD was over VHS. Instead of just going from analog to digital (which gets converted back to analog on 99% of DVD player/tv setups anyway), you will get a true, 100% digital signal with an order of magnitude more pixels (1080p compared to 480i). I'll take that any day over those stupid chapter menus.
And I love my XBox 360, because it does the one thing I want it to do better than any other product out there (still getting a Wii, though :)
Microsoft means nothing to me. It's just a company like 1000 others, and like a 1000000 others would *like* to be. I, like most consumers, have affinity for products. I own an Apple, but don't worship that company either.
I have to point out, that the list here is a list of manufacturers mostly, not providers. Most manufacturers will try to back both horses. Whether or not they will be able to is another matter, but I guarantee they want to. They win either way. And, in the end, if one format wins they will just go to producing machines for that format. As far as the guys on the list, a lot of them were making both. Some Beta manufacturers died in the process, but in the new war, even if they go the wrong way, safe bet they are building the other as well, just waiting to release in case of format death.
Well, in theory Blu-ray is 60% larger, because a HD DVD layer is 15 GB and a Blu-ray is 25. However, HD DVD dual-layer production is trivial (most titles in stores today are DL), but for Blu-ray, it's still theoretical. Word from replicators is they've still got a 70% failure rate making single-layer Blu-ray discs, and DL isn't mature enough for anyone to have gone on record for yield or open-market pricing.
At this point, HD DVD titles on the market are:
30 GB
VC-1 compression (roughly 2x more efficient than MPEG-2)
Dolby Digital Plus audio
While the first Blu-ray titles (which haven't even launched yet) will be:
25 GB
MPEG-2 compression
Uncompressed audio
Combine lower capacity with lower compression efficiency, either the discs aren't going to look as good as what HD DVD is already providing, or they're going to have to leave content off.
My video compression blog
And by "one" you mean "three" ...right?
...one of which is half the price.
Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Paramount.
I imagine that number will grow once consumers are presented with two types of new "dvd player" set tops
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
It's not proprietary if everyone is using it. ;-)
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I'm trying to figure out why the author seems to think Sony will fail. Is it because he thinks coming up with a storage medium format isn't a profitable venture? (which it apparently isn't) Is it that he thinks that proprietary and closed are the keywords here? Though the author states that VHS was a more open format (open in the sense that other manufacturers could implement their own players/recorders with little to no cost), I was under the impression that the HD-DVD format and the Blu Ray one are on equal ground in this respect.
I don't know what it is about the year 1999 for technology but both my laptops, my blue-and-white Mac minitower and my MiniDisc recorder are all 1999 vintage and they perform like champions.
I've been using the same MD recorder for 5 years (bought refurbed on eBay) and it's kept right on going. It doesn't get babied. It gets knocked about something fierce. And it is still in great shape.
Yeah, it uses shitty ATRAC compression. You can only NOW (past couple of years) get MD recorders that can record in raw PCM digital. And at that rate, a 1GB MD only will record 15 minutes. And you can only NOW get MD recorders that will dump digital data to computers. I have to use the "analog hole" to transfer interviews to my computer. But guess what? It's JUST FINE for something recorded for a podcast! And it sounds way better than analog cassette! And it takes up less space than a recording analog cassette recorder!
When this little chibi-chibi finally ascends to the Akihabara District in the High Plains of Heaven, guess what I'm going to go searching on eBay for? You got it. Another MZ-R70 MD recorder.
Oh yeah, this Xmas I got a DV camcorder. Refurbed Sony. From eBay. It's sweet.
Sony sucks in so many ways. But they got famous for their electronics for a reason.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
SD is the ideal format for this, then. SD cards are generally not sensitive to static (so you can throw them in your pocket) and they're very durable without having to be large. CF is more fragile (instead of being poured in a lump of plastic, they're made in manufactured packaging with several pieces, typ. at least 5 of 'em, and it's got little holes on the bottom that CAN become irrecoverably plugged up) and it's also too large.
Compared to flash, discs fucking suck eggs in every department except in some cases capacity... but there are four gigabyte CF cards. That's right, little widget the size of a small postage stamp and about twice as thick as a credit card, four gigabytes. That's damn near what a single-layer DVD has. It's well more than a single layer mini DVD. (7cm?)
Flash also has numerous other advantages; no spin-up time, unparalleled seek times, fairly high transfer rates on the newer devices, and dramatically lower power consumption on reads. Actually, it's probably an even bigger savings on writes, since you're not burning anything or trying to heat it up a bunch. Even Minidisc uses a laser; it heats the recording surface to just above the Curie point and then writes the heated area with a magnetic field.
Flash memory is the only reasonable storage medium for portable devices. I can fit two feature-length movies on a 1GB SD at QVGA res and have them look very good for their resolution (using MPEG4.) On a 4GB SD, you should be able to store two movies at VGA resolution without too much trouble. The devices are only becoming faster and more dense.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yep. Sony used to be a good brand - I've always had Sony TVs, and they've worked great so far. An old Sony Hi-8 video camera also worked great for a while, and only recently did it develop recording problems (it's really old though, so it's to be expected). Our really old small Sony TV has been running great since it was bought, except that the remote eventually died (which was to be expected, since it withstood a lot of abuse), and a small problem with the on button (it started to misbehave, and for a while we simply used standby mode instead of using the button).
However, Sony has been screwing up with newer consumer electronics. The original PS2 had some problems, but the later few models (which were redesigned on the inside) lasted forever, even modded. However, Sony recently began using cheaper laser drivers and cheaper optics, and the last big PS2s were a fiasco (unless you modded it and patched it properly - something as simple as rigging the laser drivers to run at 5V instead of 12V fixed the problem!). The newer, slim models are even worse, the optics can actually catch on fire.
The proprietary format stuff is also pathetic. It just highly annoys me that I've got a friend who has a Sony HDD portable player, which proudly boasts MP3 support. Nice! Or not. You still have to use sony's proprietary software to load the songs, since it stores them in a very weird file structure and - get this - ENCRYPTED (or more like obfuscated - I hear the encryption is just a crappy variable table-based substitution where the table is derived from the volume ID or something equally stupid)
HD-DVD has the Image Constraint flag that would cause it to downgrade it to 520p on analog connections. However that will likely be a nonissue as movie studios will "seemingly" hold off on activating it on their discs till 2010-2012 or forever.
Wikipedia has an article on it. There is no bit of drm that blu-ray has over hd-dvd. Just rumors and people spewing nonsense.
Hmmm... Pie...
As a bonus, I bought a half gigger SD card for $40 last month.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
How many times will people repeat that Blu-Ray has more drm just so they can hate sony more? I've studied the specs and looked at wikipedia's articles of both techs. HD-DVD comes with every bit of DRM that blu-ray does including the image constraint flag which would allow studios to force 520p on non-hdmi connections.
Hmmm... Pie...
If you're willing to deal with rebates you can knock that out any day of the week on ecost. I signed up for their bargains newsletter and they regularly have 4GB cards under $200, or 1GB cards under $30. Right now they have a 512MB Kingston for $17 ($8 after rebate) The big deal is that they have a 1GB 40x speed card for $9 after rebate, $40 initial purchase.
I don't think they carry them any more but I paid $63 plus tax for a 1GB PNY SD card at Wal-Mart, not on sale.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think the 3.5" floppy drive SONY invented was pretty successful. You are probably sitting next to one right now.
Because they keep influencing the industry with their methods. By this I mean prop formats that lock you in -- Sony is most famous for it, but others have tried to do the same thing. And with their quality going down but their prices continually going up they make all of us look even more like suckers than we are (which is saying a lot because so many are suckers) and that negatively influences the industry as well.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I've read every comment in this thread thus far, and yours is the first to mention the reason why HD-DVD will win. It's dead simple - Blu-ray players cost twice as much as HD-DVD players. Not only that, but the Blu-Ray discs also cost more because they have to be produced using a totally different process than current DVD's. You can argue all you want that Blu-Ray is slightly better as a format, but this is EXACTLY the reason a slightly better Beta format lost to VHS. When two products look exactly the same to most consumers, and one is significantly cheaper than the other, consumers will pick the less expensive one.
You can argue all you want about prices dropping soon, but they will drop on both sides. It is pretty clear that Blu-Ray will stay more expensive in the near future when this battle will be decided.
Claiming Sony has never won a proprietary format battle is plain ignorant.
Sony's BetaSP and Digibeta standards are near universal in professional (American) television production. Their Umatic 3/4" videocassette standard was the format of choice before that. Their DVCam and HDCam tape formats are reasonably popular too.
It's just in the consumer sector where they fail massively. But given their domination over professional video storage standards, can you blame them for still trying?
He said that if they still made quality products.
AFAIK, MiniDiscs were around 1992, which qualifys as the not-so-recent past. I don't see how his comment is contradicting your comments about older Sony devices that worked well.
I got a Sony Vaio laptop from a friend, and the DC plug inside the laptop died promptly just after a year. After fixing that, AC power is kinda flaky and the laptop has basically become useless for me.
The PS3 is why I think you're wrong. Since over 50% of televisions sold these days are HD, and the PS3 is going to likely sell millions of units, it won't be a question of "what format should I choose?" It will be "I can buy a movie with 4x the resolution that plays on my existing system? Ok!" People will probably ask for movies that are "PS3 compatible" at least as often as they ask for "Blu-Ray", I'll bet.
E pluribus unum
Comment removed based on user account deletion
..... *if* Blu-Ray starts looking like a failure, those companies you listed will not hesitate to jump ship (same goes for HD-DVD, of course)......
If the two formats are more or less functionally the same, then the price of the players, recorders and blank disks will decide which format will win. The fact that BL can hold a bit more data than HD-DVD will not help if the media for the former is significantly more expensive. I have read that the HD-DVD blank and pre-recorded disks can be made on the same equipment that the current normal DVD are produced with, whereas this is not the case for BL. If this is really true, that should give that format a significant cost advantage, if the player/recorder prices are are about equal.
All theory is gray
I think the makers of Blu-ray players need a killer app to sell the systems, or else be doomed to failure. It needs to have something to offer consumers that their current disks cannot provide. I don't think higher resolution movies by themselves are going to be a big selling-point for users unless the cost decreases dramatically. Now, if they could provide additional features with the disks, like the Ipod's ability to condense thousands of songs into a single compact skipless device with no extra media required to buy, ever, that might move their players, but as is? Doubtful. The average consumer doesn't have enough disposable income to give a damn.
But "Average Joe" really doesn't get HDTV. My guess is 75% of PS3s hooked up to HDTVs, will be connected by the RCA video in 480i.
Um, check out this list. Which of these "prop formats" lock you in? There's more than one that does, but there are also many great formats. Many of the formats e.g. Compact Disc are of course developed as collaborations or consortiums, but Sony is clearly an innovator that has given us a great deal of technology which has become industry standard and most of which isn't "locked down".
Also, remember that some of Sony's failed formats are admired by the geek community - i.e. Betamax. Personally I think HD DVD is a cheapo implementation with less long-term potential than Blu-Ray and I can't wait to get my hands on cheap Blu-Ray drives and media; a format that will hopefully grow (with the addition of extra layers) at the same rate as my iTunes collection until the next format arrives.
Is HD-DVD really less proprietary than BlueRay?
I won't be buying HD-DVD or BlueRay players or movies so Sony's including BlueRay into the PS3, a product I do plan on buying, makes sense as a way to push it into living rooms. If it holds more data than HD-DVD then it makes sense to go ahead and use it because there really is not a need for the average consumer for a product better than DVD which leaves video games and software which are often data hungry. With their included hdd and higher resolutions these systems could be even more data hungry so why wouldn't Sony provide the highest density format, that they don't have to license from someone else, instead of something else?
It really doesn't matter. HD-DVD and BlueRay are both products looking for consumer interest that isn't there. It's been to recent since the VHS to DVD switch and people don't want to reinvest and don't yet feel a need for a more dense standard. High-end user's such as myself that would be more likely to switch will be turned off largely by the DRM involved. For the time being, the DVD is king of the entertainment market. If anything is a challenger of the DVD it's the download and in that case it's technology like bit torrent that has the biggest chance to make a lot of money from the change. Physical discs are passe.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Seconded. Several years ago the company I worked for bought purchased a Sony VAIO laptop with Windows XP Professional. It was expensive. It looked good. It came formatted as FAT32 and separated into several partitions. Absurd, but true. Additionally, there wasn't an OS CD to reinstall the OS - only a "backup" CD which restored the HDD to its FAT32 state. Customer service was completely unresponsive. What utter crap !! We had to purchase a regular Windows XP Professional license, so we might as well have bought the laptop with XP Home Edition (or even with Windows 98 if was available).
:-)
The whole experience turned me away from Sony for computing products. (Although I highly suspect that Dell would have been worse
Bluray vs HD-DVD is MUCH more similar to 3DO vs CD-ROM particularly regarding the corporate groups behind each technology. The major difference now being that hardware engineering is so flooded devices are already spec'd able to play both HD-DVD and Bluray on the cheap (hardware-wise).
If you doubt me, read this review from February 1993.
Reform your analogies, compare one or the other to 3DO and the result is the same. Bring up Betamax at your own peril.
Carry on.
It's not that they have propretary formats. It's just that they cling to them too tightly.
;)
Is that not the definition of proprietary? I do believe IT IS!
I'm not saying I disagree with your mentality, just the terminology
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I disagree, because of HDMI. One cable with hi-res video and audio combined, that makes life easier for Joe Average. The price of those cables might be an issue, but maybe not, given the price of the sets.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Alright, Blu-ray has already won. First to market and from a company everybody knows and the best buys and circuit citys of the world will sell the living crap out of. Now don't confuse me for a sony supporter, I hate them for what they did to my pc and the last few junky pieces of home electronics i've recived from them. So horrible DRM or no, Blu-ray still wins, they're here now, and with the ps3 with the player built in it's over. Sony shall have it's format, and those of us with sense will just keep using our not very old, still awsome DVD drives.
Before you get into some techincal argument that AAC is not proprietary.,Fairplay currently is. Only Apple products play Fairplay protected AAC files and currently they enjoy something like 70% of the market. In other words it is certaintly not a given that proprietary formats will always lose.
But then again, as others have pointed out Blu-Ray is far from proprietary since so many manufactures and content distributors have signed up to support it. (unlike Apple and Fairplay in which case again, no one but Apple is allowed to support it)
Right, the 6X increase in resolution from DVDs to HighDef isn't nearly as compelling as the 3X increase in resolution from VHS to DVD.
Movies: yes. Highdef movies: No. It will take days to download a 50GB Blu-ray DVD rip on all but the very fastest connections, assuming you do nothing else with the connection at the time.
That's not to mention that you've got to STORE that data somehow, and buying pre-pressed Blu-ray discs is much cheaper than burning to 10+ DVD-Rs, external hard drives, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Screw technological superiority, the thing we noticed about Betamax players vs. VHS players was that the slow motion and freeze-frame quality was better, which was great for stopping on that shot of Shelley Long's butt in Night Shift. Oh, and the tapes were smaller, to0. All things that benefit users. Anyway it benefited me and some other teenage boys, anyway (the freeze frame part -- screw the tape size). VHS was not better in any way that I could see, but I could see things to like about Betamax.
I enjoy watching movies with other people, and I'm not alone.
This, and the fact that you can rip dvds to memory stick, killed UMD video.
it's much cheaper to by seagate 750gb drives right now. i guess you will need some sort of blu ray drive to rip hd movies onto your hard drive. seagate 750 gb is 70 cents a gig. just the media for blu ray is 1 buck a gig. and only the shitty 25gb is available atm. thats not even talking about the drives
oh, and that shit about blu ray getting cheaper? well harddrives will be getting cheaper before blu ray is even available
this is not even zero value for the early adopter, but negative value
Well, it sounds about right about the price, but the problem IMHO goes deeper than just price.
E.g., Sony TFTs for a while didn't just cost twice as much as an Acer with the exact same panel, they also outright lied about the latency. Now the latency is fudged anyway, but there is an ISO standard about how to measure that fudged number, and everyone else aligned to that. It was the sum of the rise time _and_ the fall time. (And due to the fact that it only requires you to come within 10% of the target colour, even that sum was massively lower than the point where that asymptotic transition was close enough for a human eye in either direction.) Sony was the last to quote only one of the two as the latency, instead of their sum, making it sound as if they were twice as fast as the same panel in another manufacturer's display.
E.g., consumer products? How about Sony selling MP3 players that could _not_ actually play MP3. They converted an already lossy format to another lossy format, only this time Sony's proprietary one, and then played that. Yay for getting your 192 kbit/s encoded MP3s converted again to a shitty Sony format, in 64 kbit/s, no less. I.e., they had no qualms with ruining quality for the consumer to push their own proprietary format.
E.g., the PSP? Consumer product all right. I can't see any corporation declaring the PSP their new workstation or anything. Yet tell the people with more dead pixels on a PSP than on a computer monitor with 16 times the total pixels, that Sony cares about the consumer.
E.g., the infamous Sony rootkit? That was their music division that pushed that upon the consumers.
E.g., the heavy-handed customer-relations of SOE? You know, the ones that banned people for being tipped with duped in-game currency (as if you could even know that the money you got were duped), and then teleported the protesters into space? That seems like a consumer division to me. I can't really imagine a corporation declaring SWG or EQ2 as the corporate IM standard.
So, nope, I don't buy it that their consumer divisions are somehow still "the old Sony" that cares and all. (Assuming that an old Sony like that actually existed.) Sony as a whole seems to have developped a corporate culture of utter contempt for their customers. The customers are there to be shafted, cheated, abused, and told to get a second job already if they want a Sony product.
Don't get me wrong, I do own a PSP and a PS2, and I'll get a PS3 if it has good games anyway. But I have no illusion that some Sony division cares about me. And when I do get the next Sony product, I'll read the spec twice and do some research, because I can know that Sony _will_ try to fuck me up the ass. I'll bring a condom along too, just in case they manage to.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"When they get cheaper they will probably be good for computer backup if anything."
Perhaps. But with the current rate of SATA disk price/size decrease, I suspect both formats will already be obsolete by the time they hit palatable pricing. Might as well get another disk for the computer backups.
Don't mod this informative. There is no information to back up the claim.
That has to be the most stupid comment I've read this year. Congratulations.
The sad fact was that they didn't really need to even open it up, just use some common sense and not let their greed and desire for DRM that borgs us all win out over a usable product.
My initial thought when the PSP was still a baby was to include the UMD version in each and every Sony released DVD for free. Also to give out UMD's as promotional items at fast food restaurants, etc. Quickly every Tom, Dick, and Hairy has at least a few UMD's that are utterly worthless to them, yet just bothersome enough to either buy a PSP or borrow a friends to check them out and then the sales begin.
Not being able to utilize surround sound output and video out for movies from the PSP is lunacy, a portable full-featured DVD-like player that also plays games is a killer app... oh, but wait then they would need to actually have a few good games to make that work...
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
this is an interesting test - try to download a file from this list http://208.109.20.145/j4jJxRKd/redhat/?hash=EA2DCB 92F729B6C3A616482CD1D029355A87DD5C:/home/arkady/go myplace.49.com/paintings
Right, the 6X increase in resolution from DVDs to HighDef isn't nearly as compelling as the 3X increase in resolution from VHS to DVD.
DVDs work with your current TV; most people did not purchase a DVD player until they were $200 or less. In contrast, a 42" HDTV and a BlueRay player will require a complete upgrade. Most people also don't know how to hook up the player so that they get the best signal.
So no, I don't think people will care about these HD formats any more than they care about Super Audio CD or DVD Audio, which is to say, not much at all...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Already covered this in another thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187539&cid=15
I'm getting oh-so-tired of repeating the same facts over and over again. It's like people refuse to hear anything that doesn't happen to support the opinions they've already established.
People aren't going to go out and buy an HDTV so they can use their HD-DVD/Blu-ray player. Quite the opposite. People are already buying HDTVs for many reasons, and that number will steadily increase.
There's a fundamental difference here. Anybody can see a 6X increase in resolution. Few if anyone can actually HEAR the difference between 44.1Khz 16bit PCM and DVD-Audio/SACD.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How many of those major media houses supporting Blu Ray aren't owned by Sony?
I'm getting oh-so-tired of repeating the same facts over and over again. It's like people refuse to hear anything that doesn't happen to support the opinions they've already established.
Irony alert! Maybe we're not all hanging on your every word, you twit.
People aren't going to go out and buy an HDTV so they can use their HD-DVD/Blu-ray player. Quite the opposite. People are already buying HDTVs for many reasons, and that number will steadily increase.
If we're talking about 5-10 years from now, then I agree with you. If we're talking about now, then no, there not are enough people out there that 1)Have HDTVs 2)are savvy enough to hook them up to get actual HD resolution. This is unlikely to change as long as an LCD or Plasma HDTV costs 3x as much as a flat tube CRT of the same size. (CRT HDTVs are woefully undermarketed, but that's another discussion).
There's a fundamental difference here. Anybody can see a 6X increase in resolution. Few if anyone can actually HEAR the difference between 44.1Khz 16bit PCM and DVD-Audio/SACD.
I wonder why DVHS wasn't so successful then, I mean, anyone can see the resolution change. Why wouldn't they go out any buy it right away? Maybe because it was expensive, poorly marketed, and difficult for normal people to connect and configure. Exactly like both HD-DVD and Blue Ray!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
No, not MY words. I'm just one of many people who is repeating these things constantly, because people like yourself just don't get it through their skull.
"enough people" FOR WHAT? Nobody here said highdef formats would replace DVDs in a month. This isn't the videogame console market!
Why are people so fixated on LCD, DLP, and worst of all, Plasma TVs (or is it just when they want to try and discount HDTV)? Not only are CRT HDTVs plentiful, far less expensive, and far more capable, but they are also just as big, with most projection HDTVs being based on CRTs. In fact, I can't even find Plasma TVs anymore... Big retailers have completely removed them from their shelves.
Just a complete straw man. I didn't say people would go out and buy anything that is higher res. I merely said you're comparison was vastly unfair, to say the least.
This is becomming a recurring theme. If you've got nothing else, I'll just be ignoring you as a troll. Feel free to have the last word, though, if it makes you feel any better.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"enough people" FOR WHAT? Nobody here said highdef formats would replace DVDs in a month. This isn't the videogame console market!
The question is, will people adopt either HD-DVD or Blu Ray quickly enough for studios to displace DVDs as the "release everything" market? No, because HDTV adoption rates are too slow. If they survive at all, they will be high end, videophile products like Laserdisc. DVD is entrenched, and will be for the next 5-10 years. What will replace it? I don't think either of these new standards will, to be honest with you.
Why are people so fixated on LCD, DLP, and worst of all, Plasma TVs (or is it just when they want to try and discount HDTV)? Not only are CRT HDTVs plentiful, far less expensive, and far more capable, but they are also just as big, with most projection HDTVs being based on CRTs. In fact, I can't even find Plasma TVs anymore... Big retailers have completely removed them from their shelves.
Dead wrong. CRT-based RP HDTVs are the ones disappearing from the shelves. My cousin recently got a 54" Mitsubshi CRT RP HDTV for $1200-they are slowly discontinuing this line. Why? Joe Consumer equates HDTV with the "slim and sexy" LCD and Plasma units. These are much more expensive than front-firing or projection CRT TVs, so big box retailers and manufacturers accept this. I wish it wasn't the case, but that's the way it is.
I noticed you snipped out the part where I mentioned that HD DVD was expensive, poorly marketed, and difficult for the consumer to configure. Maybe because you don't have a counter argument?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)