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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.'"
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.
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.
CompUSA are now offering a variety of BluRay Products for pre-order.
I am sure that many of Sony's flagship products are very good.. however they started slapping their name on a bunch of products that were just regular consumer items and were of poor quality, diluting their brand.
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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
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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.
So, if you want to burn your own HD-DVDs, then you better go Blu-Ray, 'cause there aren't any HD-DVD burners coming out anytime soon. I have my first Panasonic Blu-Ray drive in my machine now, and it works great. Burns DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RAM, CD-/+/RW, and 25 and 50 GByte Blu-Ray disks (both -R and -RE). Plugged it into a CentOS 4.3 system (that LINUX for you Windows types) and it just worked. May be expensive ($900) right now, but that is the introductory price (read: recover engineering costs ASAP!). The real price problem right now is media, at just under $1US per gigabyte for rewritable (50GB BD-RE is $43 street, if you buy in quantity). The only HD-DVD media I can get is already recorded with a movie. Not really a computer product, just a TV product and that is sooooo 1980s!!
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:
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Broadcom Corporation
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CANON INC.
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FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.
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Fujitsu Limited.
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Hewlett-Packard Company
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Hitachi Maxell, Ltd.
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Imation Corp
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Intel Corporation
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Kenwood Corporation
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Konica Minolta Opto, Inc.
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Lenovo Japan
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Microsoft Corporation
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Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co., Ltd. / Verbatim
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NEC Electronics Corporation
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Paramount Home Entertainment
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RICOH COMPANY LTD.
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SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.
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TEAC CORPORATION
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TOSHIBA CORPORATION
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Ulead Systems, Inc.
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Universal Pictures
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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...
A lot of the cable/satellite HD isn't really HD (1080i) but lower resolution at as low as 4-6Mbps. Same bitrate as DVD, so don't be too surprised if it doesn't look much better. By HD they usually mean "a little better than DVD", but it's not a huge difference. Often it's worse that plain old DVD. It also varies from show to show, I've found the local cable HD sports broadcasts to be pretty good, but still not HD. I don't have a set yet, because I can't see the benefit either. I just looked around to see what's out there and wasn't impressed. The only way most of us are going to get HD content is through a player, so I'm simply sitting it out until there is one established format -- at which point 1080i sets should be more common, far less expensive, and demonstrably usable to their fullest with the players and STBs.
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.
1) The Blu-Ray license agreement requires that no one make a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player. HD has no restriction.
2) The Blu-Ray standard allows players to be disabled when they phone home via Ethernet, should the keys of a player ever become compromised.
3) The Blu-Ray standard will not allow one to burn their own movies. Blu-Ray DVD players check for a hologram, which if it isn't present, will not play video. Say goodbye to making backup copies or putting home movies on HD.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Yeah, because even though HD-DVD and Blueray use the exact same content protection system, blueray's drm is far more onerous.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
I can't hold that against Sony. Calling it an IEEE1394 port isn't going to help anyone. Keep in mind, Sony was one of the first (the first?) to use 1394 on consumer video products (video recorders to TVs). Their brand name for their implementation of the standard was/is iLink. Apple had there own registered monicker for their implementations, called Firewire. It was only after Apple decided it would be a good idea to put the "Firewire" name in a kind of "Creative Commons" type of use to promote the standard by other industry players that it became the name for 1394.
From there, is Sony better off changing it and confusing customers, or not changing it and confusing customers?