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DVD Format War Already Over?
An anonymous reader writes "'Nobody likes false starts' - claims the assertive and risky article "10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed" published by Audioholics which outlines their take on why the new Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD formats will attain nothing more than niche status in a marketplace that is brimming with hyperbole. Even though the two formats have technically just hit the streets, the 'Ten reasons' article takes a walk down memory lane and outline why the new DVD tech has a lot to overcome."
About the only compelling thing in these new formats for me is data storage and back up, and I'm still not sure that they will be more cost effective than cheap raids or even external HDs.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
See what Gizmodo said in 2004.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Vinyl sounds better.
I guess, in the sense of risk-averse.
Relative to the Southern Baptist Convention, though...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Another reason that HD-DVD might fail is that the general public doesn't realize that there's a difference between "DVD player" and "HD-DVD player." The medium of content delivery didn't make a visual change such as the change from vinyl to CD, from 8-track to cassette, or even when comparing VHS and Beta.
There's a simple rule to follow:
Is this all that much better to Joe Sixpack than what he had before?
Cassettes were better than LP's. Not in fidelity. But in portability, durability, and most importantly - the cost of a 'decent' player - Cassettes were hands down better.
CD's were better than Cassettes. They sound GREAT. You can skip tracks just like you could on an LP. They are supposed to last forever! (unlike those cassettes that by now you know simply don't)..
SACD... Does anyone have an SACD player? No! (Except niche enthusiasts). Because, to Joe Sixpack, it's simply not worth the money for an immeasurable (to his ears) difference in quality.
Same goes for video. DVD was a great upgrade from VHS. It combined the cheap player aspects of VHS with the hi-def of Laserdisc. Suddenly, everyone could have a GREAT copy of their favorite movie (as long as it wasn't starwars - a whole other topic entirely), for the output cost of about $50 for a cheap player. What part of Hi-def DVD is going to be any different than SACD or DVDAudio? Anyone?
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
If people have the physical disc, then they would be able to copy or watch/listen to the content almost as many times as they want. That is something the XXAA doesn't want. They would make more money from on demand rather than someone actually owning the disc. Eventually, everything will be in a Pay-Per-Use format. The way to prevent it, stay away from the XXAA.
So many many companies out there are investing in HDTV products, because it's only an incremental improvement. Sony, Microsoft... OTA TV stations... satellite TV dedicating large amounts of precious bandwidth... PVR companies...
- Much higher quality video and audio
- Random access
- Don't have to rewind them
- Switchable audio tracks
- Subtitles that are optional
- Extras
- Nifty menus
Advantages of switching from DVD to HD/BR:I have my DVD burner and External Disks.
Movies, I have a under 100 euro region free DVD player. Suits me fine.
The article is a troll. Don't feed the trolls.
Both of my DVD players (including the one built into the 32" LCD I just bought) play MPEG4/DivX. In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie -- its just that none are available legally on standard DVDs. The only thing the new formats offer for the purpose of watching video is DRM -- hardly a good reason to upgrade for consumers.
...
I'll be amused if we start seeing DivX encoded pirated DVDs start to appear in the states that offer HD on a standard DVD. The studios response should prove interesting
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
Progressive scan dvd players are dirt cheap, rentals are plentiful and cheap, and movies for purchase are nearly as cheap.
Back to the drawing board, fellas.
When Div-X came out, I felt like the companies had to update to use the format ASAP. It allowed more content, and more definition at the same time. Five years later, we're still stuck to MPEG-2 DVD's. Guess Who's at fault?
Damn! that article looks familiar. Pete and Repete say "dupe!"
I fundamentally disagree with this statement. Most people now have at least heard of HDTV; there have been plenty of adverts for high-def digital cable and satellite services here in the UK, especially in the run-up to the World Cup (which can be viewed in HD with the required equipment).
I'm also pretty sure that people buying larger TVs today are buying HDTVs. The big thing about it is the 'Wow' factor of these sets. With a good HD source, the massive screens are pretty amazing. Now, people bought enough DVDs of old VHS tapes for a huge back catalog of old (and oftentimes, shite) films to be released on DVD. What is to say it won't happen again?
Personally, I believe it is far to early to tell what will happen. But, no matter what Audioholics says, High definition IS the future and it WILL take over eventually.
That is all. Not to say that it isn't better. It is, much. I just mean that that is all I have to say about Vinyl.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
i agree, this article is a bit of a troll. .."this pending format release/war is simply the most ridiculous thing I've seen in a long time."
while he makes some reasonable points, it seems the motivation that sparked this was frustration. just because its the "most ridiculous thing" hes seen in a long time (in his opinion) doesn't necessarily mean squat. look at all the other format wars such as beta/vhs and laserdisc/dvd...
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
The PS3 will be marketed as a kind of all in one home theater device. It already has the gaming aspect, that is obvious, and the built in blu-ray support. They have also said that it will have many aspects that a home computer is now used for.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I thought that the article was fairly concise, and accurately described 10 reasons why the format wars have already failed.
But they forgot another one - most Americans don't have, and don't want to buy, an HDTV set that would even need either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, nor do most consumers see any reason to pay twice as much for the same product they can use today.
Is this true in a few years? Perhaps not. But it's true today.
Which leads us to the conclusion that both Sony and our other player decided to fight this battle early, after what happened to them when Beta and VHS fought - the stakes are so high they're trying to front-end the decision, but both sides ended up trying to steal a march on their competition, resulting in two formats way too early for consumers to be interested in either.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That 4GB DVD is a poor way to backup my small 500GB hard drive. blu-ray and hd-dvd are about 25GB or so. Don't tell me the wars over when I need a high (higher) capacity backup solution.
Yes, most of us remember laserdisks. They were expensive when they came out and never really went down the price. the players got cheaper but they were always something that only the elite home theatre people had/used. And eventually they went away because a newer technology that made more sense came along to knock them out. I predict a new packaging that makes more sense (maybe something less scratch prone and smaller) will come along in a year or two and both HD-DVD and Bluray will find their way to garage sale bargain bins everywhere. Just like Laserdisk, 8 track tapes, and lawn dart games.
not sure how lawn darts relate exactly but it sounded good:)
What the author of this fairly dry article has failed to mention, is that congress and the FCC are mandating a change to HDTV. While it may be pushed back once more before it actually happens, even grandma with her 15 year old picture tube is going to need a HDTV to SDTV converter. More tech savvy consumers (the ones using DVD and not VHS, oh wait everyone!) will end up with an HDTV in the next 10 years, given the 5 year lifespan of recent TVs. As the price of the HD-DVD and BluRay drops, consumers will purchase them instead of DVD players, since they are backwards compatible.
The change won't be as well pronounced as VHS to DVD, since VHSes couldn't be played on a DVD box. However, HD-DVD / BluRay will not be a DVD-Audio. With DVD-Audio, congress didn't mandate we all switch from stereo to 5.1 systems. Had they, my feeling is you would have seen a slow but steady uptake, as I am sure you will with the HD formats. Further more a CD sounds pretty damn good right now, but there is a lot to be longed for in the interlaced crud that comes off of DVDs, the air, and cable.
I watch most of my videos as XVid AVIs with DVD resolution or less on a projector giving me a screen of over 100 inches (ie 2.5m down here). My projector is only 854x480. Most movies are encoded at 720x304 or there abouts.
And yet, even at 100 inches, it looks fine. Yes, I don't disagree that tripling the resolution to 1080i *should* make it better to watch, but how much. At that size, sitting about 3-4m away my eyes are constantly shifting focus from one side of the screen to the other, and we really can't sit much closer or we'd get a very sore next and miss a hell of a lot.
When designing PAL the designers settled on 480 vertical lines because when sitting at the recommended distance (3 times the width of the screen) the human eye can only see 480 vertical lines. 1080 lines seems like overkill.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
The other side of the coin is the lack of HD content available on TV - and this is a biggie. While Billy Bob is impressed by his DVD player, he is dumbfounded by his cable TV - which actually looks worse than it did on his old set (mostly because it's bigger). You see, nobody told Billy Bob that he'd have to get an antenna or subscribe to HD service from his cable/satellite provider. He was also not told that most of his favorite shows (Billy likes sitcoms and the Sci-Fi Channel) aren't yet available in HD, regardless of technology or service provider. As a result, many Americans are underwhelmed or feel like they got burned by HDTV. The last thing they're going to do is rush out and buy the next greatest thing.
I too have an HDTV but no HDTV service. (In my case, I knew regular TV would look "worse" and picked plasma over LCD/DLP because IMO plasmas look better when playing non-HD content.) DVDs do look significantly better - but the high price of HDTV service (extra $20+ a month, plus money to Dish Network for a new receiver, plus loss of ability to archive shows like I can with my old pre-encryption DVR) together with the lack of content (football, Lost, and Law and Order are about it right now for me) makes it far, far too much to pay.
I'm not certain off hand if my TV has the correct plugs (HDMI, whatever) to work with the highest resolution HD-DVD/Blue-Ray players. Be assured, if it doesn't, there is no reason that I would ever consider buying either type of player for many, many years to come. (P$3 is already off the list, so no sneaking one in that way either, Sony.) Even if my TV was supported, I'm not sure yet if entire-seasons-of-TV-shows-on-one-disk is better than ability-to-backup-and-play-from-server, if I were to want to do that. I doubt it.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm guessing the launch of HD media will be similar to that of DVD... It was very slow to get off the ground, people were reluctant to uprade until prices came down and releases were abundant enough. Eventually it will become more widespread (after the PS3, after computer companies start installing them on basic computers, after HDTV is more widespread) I'm guessing it will be a good 2 years before this starts happening give or take... Arguing that it will stay a niche is naive, unless you expect some higher capacity/better media to emerge, which doesn't seem to be the case.
the market place is totaly confusing, not to techheads like us, but to the general public.
Thats whats going to kill these formats.
You have HD dvd players (upscaling) that dont play HD-dvd's, Tv's are HD ready, HD compatable, what HD, 720p, 1080i/p? Component, DVi, HDMI, HDCP, region codes or not... Can I play my CD in my HD-DVD, my blu ray in my car..?
Your avererage consumer, ne average sales guy doesnt know the answers, it its new expensive and confusing it wont sell.
NO ... what's being mandated is a change to digital TV broadcast. Digital TV != HDTV.
...as a read-writable computer medium. Nobody's going to complain about being able to burn more data to a disk.
It will make no significant inroads as a ROM medium in any flavour. It may even damage PS3, as if they had picked Betamax.
Geez. It's not launching a whole new format. It's an evolution to an existing one. DVD and HD can happily co-exist. DVD will be phased out over the next 10 years just like VHS and pretty soon we'll all be buying HD movies simply because its the only thing out there. Anyone who doesn't want to buy them can keep using DVD but it will be like using a VHS now.
Get a fucking grip people.
I liked reel to reel... It was so versatile and you could choose what level of quality you wanted by the speed so you could set up for a party and have it going all night on one tape or you could have high quality and just one album...
:p
Bring back tape
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
There is no way in hell I am going to invest in a technology when there is a 50-50 chance that it will go the way of the Betamax. A brief and informal survey among my friends -- some of whom actually bought laserdisks and such -- shows the same thing. Also, the thing is so riddled with control mechanisms that I get the impression I would never really own a movie again: It seems that they could just decide to switch off my copy when everything they plan to do is finished and done. Oh, and then there is the region code thing again. That has to go before I will even consider it. In short, no way either way. Try listening to the customers and getting your act together next time, and we'll see.
The format wars - hey, nice going guys - will ensure that sales get off to a slow start. But 2-3 years down the road, there will be action and science fiction movies with special effects that will knock people's socks off. And when that happens, many will want to own a copy, and they'll buy if the price of these players is right. It's a matter of when, not if.
Similar to DVD-Audio's lack of success
I was in Best Buy yesterday, and a couple techs were running a Blu-Ray player on a large projection TV. They were showing the sequel to some gothic/futuristic movie I'd never seen and don't rememebr the name of. I couldn't see any difference in picture quality though over DVD, and I'm a graphic artist. A customer there said "oh yeah it's much more detailed, you can see the gilm grain". Well yeah, I could see the film grain all right. It was like noise all over the screen. If the film is that low res that I can see the grain even at HDTV resolution, then how much better could the picture quality really be? When I scan a photo, if I can see the film grain, I've reached the limits of the resolution, and I've got the picture scaled too big. So if HDTV is showing the film grain, they need better cameras cause the picture could be much sharper than what I'm seeing with a proper camera.
Undettered though, I looked at another display they had which was showing HD movies on a smaller screen which was not rear projection. The picture quality was better, but I still couldn't tell, even looking at CG like Chicken Little, if I was seeing a better picture than I would get on a DVD. Or rather, I couldn't tell how much better the picture was. I couldn't tell if it was just a small improvement or a big one.
All these idiots had to do was make their demo disc show the movies side by side with the DVD version and it would make the difference clear. But they didn't. Instead the consumer is left to guess about the difference in quality between the two formats. Also, they only had a display for the Blu-Ray and I asked them if HD DVD had come out yet, and they said yes, and they pointed me to a small display in a corner with no video being shown. I'm looking at this, and I'm saying to my self, how the hell do they expect this thing to sell at all if they've got it stuck in a corner and they're not even showing video of it?
Oh and another thing. Instead of being in slick black DVD cases like all the rest of the DVD's, the HD DVD's were in these blue cases I think. Or maybe that was the blu-ray discs and the HD ones were in white cases. I think they were slimline too. Anyway the packaging struck me as really cheap and flimsy looking, and the discs were $10 more than new release DVD's, and these were OLD titles! Haha! Hollywood thinks they can get people to pay $30 for a movie which is selling for $15 on DVD at Wal Mart because it's been out for 12 months? DREAM ON!
Great. I can see the zipper on the back of Darth Vader's uniform, or the edges of Spock's ears. Big flipping deal. DV-Audio died for the same reason quadrophonic music died: who listens to music in that chair set up just so? Outside of audiophiles, no one.
This is technology without a need or a demand.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
And .... it doubles as a wood lathe in case I need to make a lamp or bowl.
I don't have to listen! I can stop whenever I want!
-g.
Well, the Divx HD profile is 1280x720 and only 5.1 audio at best. Both advanced formats are 1920x1080, and support up to lossless 7.1 96KHz 24-bit audio. And I've never seen a Divx HD disc without palpable artifacts, while the standard for VC-1 encoded HD DVD is transparency to the D5 HD master.
HD DVD is at least as much of a jump from Divx HD as Divx HD was from DVD.
My video compression blog
Funny, I can do the same thing on an iPod, by just reducing or increasing the bitrate of the songs I store on there. Exactly the same principle. Tape is just lossy magnetic samples of an analog waveform after all - faster speed is simply more samples/sec.
Of course, tape sucks in so many other ways...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Really? Hmm, so you don't mind the audio compression performed when recording to vinyl?
... but after 3-4 plays, the vinyl isn't going to have anything up there anyway. I don't really care since as a late thirtysomething male, I couldn't hear it anyway. What I do know is that the top end I can hear sounds a lot better on my $250 analog rig than on my semi-audiophool CD player. My thrift store copy of Dark Side of the Moon kicks the hell out of my CD version, for instance. The fact that I paid $0.50 for the LP and $8.00 for a used CD makes me like the whole LP thing even more.
Nope. What's done to CD releases these days is worse. See below.
You don't mind that the audio range is less than the spec for CD?
Nope. Both formats exceed real-world dynamic range requirements for music, even highly dynamic classical music.
You don't actually think the average(or above) needle on a record player can actually produce anything higher than 22Khz do you?
My Shure cartridge can easily hit that
Now, if you want to complain about the lack of production quality on music CDs these days, be my guest.
OK, thanks!
Mastering houses, under pressure from the record labels to make their releases louder than the other guys', are shitting all over the idea of dynamic range. Louder! LOUDER! LOUDER!. Pretty soon everything is going to be mastered as a modulated square wave.
I'll take Ye Olde Tech any day.
Wrong, and this is why this whole article is useless. Remember the first time you used a modem, how you thought "this is how all information should be transmitted", and when you tried to go out and tell everybody about it, their response was basically "leave me alone kid, I'm reading the newspaper here"? 10 years later, and people are starting to realize that "OMFG, newspapers might become obsolete!!!!?" Pleople like their technology at least 5 years behind of its time.
I'm not really defending the new formats (and I won't buy into them until they sell me a drive that can play both formats for = $100), but a bunch of guys saying "we don't need some new fancy format, we're fine with good old DVDs" sounds familiar.. Lets talk again in 5 years.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
"It isn't audiophiles that listen to their music sitting in that chair in the perfect location for all the speakers, etc.
;)
:)
It's their friends when they come over the visit. (and not by choice)."
Doh, busted
hehe, vintage pioneer quad system and that is soo true
HD-DVD/BlueRay wins for:
Portability/security - you can store backups offsite.
Cost per TB.
Cheap Hard Drive Space Galore wins for:
Convenience for time-shifters. Erasing is instant.
Video rental market. Returns are automatic.
Both win over DVD for:
Ease of full-system or incremental backups.
Storing a season's worth of a series on 1 or a small number of disks.
Storing ungodly amounts of audio.
Where HD-DVD and BlueRay missed the boat:
High-def movies on a single platter.
The video-on-demand/downloadable-rental technology is removing a large segment of the potential market. The MPAA likes this because the pwn your set-top box.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The next big format will take a different physical form, we went from audio/video on spools (loose tape, film) to cassettes to discs to...
solid state
SD, Compact Flash, etc. why not a movie on a chip in a credit card sized package? easy enough to make a secure ROM card, and each one can have it's own custom DRM hardware, or not.
Just slap it into the slot, pull it out when you are done, no moving parts, no optical surfaces to get scratched, worst case use some contact clearer like old NES cartridges.
Carry your favorite movie in your wallet, to enjoy at home or on the go (players built into public transportation seat-backs)
Even if the technology dosn't allow a whole HD movie on a card, the card could be the license key for on-demand download of the high quality version, with the portable version built in.
Ah, come on - these two formats have been out for weeks and people are already calling them failures. I say: give it some time.
Look at the current players. The Toshiba HD-DVD player is a subsidized Pentium 4 that sells for 500$, with Toshiba losing about 200$ on each unit. The 1000$ Sony Blu-Ray player is a similar hack, built not with custom chips but with a general purpose CPU that's way more complex and expensive than is required for Blu-Ray playback.
Think about the next generation of players, or even the generation after that. For starters, those players will use custom electronics that are less expensive and less complex than first-generation players. They will be smaller, draw less power, and will be built in far greater quantities. Those second and third-generation HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players will be far cheaper; I predict a 200$ HD-DVD player by the end of next 2007, and a 100$ player by the end of 2008.
Now, Blu-Ray will get a boost from the PlayStation 3 - which, by the way, will not remain at 500$ for very long. Just consider the PlayStation 2, which originally sold for 300$ and now sells for 130$. I predict that by the end of 2007, the PlayStation 3 will cost no more than 350$.
DVD took a few years to get established, and so will these formats. But the prices will start dropping, and more people will start using them. HD really looks great. And regardless of the trolls who claim that you need a 5000$ TV to enjoy HD, 720p TVs (which do offer a significant quality improvement over standard DVD resolution) are pretty cheap nowadays.
Let's also consider the other big factor that will drive HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray adoption: computers. Optical drives for computers are usually cheaper than stand-alone units. Soon, software players will be available, and computer manufacturers will start installing HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray drives in their machines.
Right now, Blu-Ray RW is incredibly overpriced, but when the drives can be bought for 300$ and the discs 3-4$ each, you can bet that people will start buying them in droves. Optical media does have some advantages over hard drives; people will not stop using discs and replace them with portable hard drives.
Will those new formats replace DVD? Of course not. DVD will keep on living for a long time. But the two HD formats will become quite popular: after all, HD does look awesome. Once you've seen HD content, going back to a normal DVD kind of hurts.
The markets? They did a bang-up job choosing which quadraphonic record format would win, which AM stereo would win, DAT or DCC. SACD or DVD Audio. Unless one side is clearly the Beta, the markets can never make up their minds. They will buy neither to avoid getting stuck with what may be the next Beta. Drives that do DVD-R and DVD+R were the thing that kept DVD burners from being DOA, not the markets. Drives that do both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray won't be allowed unless current licensing agreements change.
How ya like dat?
#5 - i bought a playstation 2 cause the guy said it doubles as a dvd player. boy, was i dumb - won't do that one again
#7 bullll shit. just like they say sports fans won't come back after a strike, enthusiasts always come back - heck the articles own argument list 20 years of coming back !!!! imho, anyone stupid enough to be an enthusiast, and pay thru the nose, deserves what they get (here in the boston area we have a stereo placed called godwins, that does hiigh end home entertainment (high end > 100K)
there are people moronic enuf to spend thousands of dollars on cables - thats right, cables, for thdir speakers, so i don't think the next gen anything has to worry.
I got to say that I have no respect for a technology driven decision amongst sellers of stories.
Problem I see is that technology companies had this idea to sell technology and movie houses saw it as a way of charging more for the same content.
And they collided instead of met in the middle.
It is a total conflict of interest to try and sell NEW* technology that does less and costs more, and then add the two rival formats,
this is a weird place they are taking us.
-- email me @ 30,000 ft
"If the recording industry had presented a plan to phase out CDs and the "format war" had been avoided (simply by the industry picking one format over the other) we would all be using DVD-Audio players and illegal downloadable music would be mostly confined to analogue rips or older music"
This is so full of it.
If they had pushed out CD's to replace them with DVD-A standard then the DVD-A DRM would have been cracked..
As it is now most people dont use it so there has not been a huge impetus to crack it.. yet it has already been effectively circumvented through that windvd crack.
this guy is a starry eyed idiot if he actually believes that drek he spews.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They will buy neither to avoid getting stuck with what may be the next Beta.
I don't quite follow this. Beta got trounced by VHS largely because the consumers found the image quality acceptable, given the longer recording times. It's the consumers that made Beta, well, Beta.
If consumers don't find that the new formats offer enough, compared to what they have, then they both will become the next Beta.
That's the alpha and omega of it. (sorry, sorry everybody.)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Nothing with hdtv is really finalized, like hdcp/hdmi and crap like that. Almost every now with an HDTV is SOL due to no hdcp/hdmi. The industry is really f~cking over the consumers this time. And they wont like it. Will they do anything about it? Unlikely.
Who made the VCR a success?
The porn industry!
I understand porn is a big percentage of DVD sales too.
While I agree with most of the points of the article I would like to hear
what the big producers in the porn industry have to say.
When the price hits $100 I'll buy one for my computer for backup.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As long as you have component analog or better, you'll get the full resolution with your display. While there was a lot of concern about copy protection reducing resolution out of the analog outputs, there was a lot of consumer pushback on that, and there aren't any discs that use that mode.
My video compression blog
Because I care -so much- about what "Audioholics" think about a new video product. Why do people with little or no established credibility think they'll gain my respect by writing articles entitles "Why product X sucks" or "Why products X and Y are irrelevent".
How about doing what they're supposed to be doing... providing objective information and letting me decide for myself?
Oh... right... because journalism is dead... that's why.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
DVD / HDDVD - Blue-Ray are not archival quality - None can even come close... Most writable consumer media starts degrading in 7 years.
Instead, try this:
www.inphase-tech.com
Guaranteed 50 year media life, first generation will be 300 GIG per disc, going to 1.6TB per disk. Drives going out to OEM's right now.
CLV LaserDisc is the winner! Yahoo!
Oh... sorry... wrong thread... and decade....
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
What bugs me the most isn't the geometric resolution but rather, the chronologic resolution (more simply, frames per second). I've heard the arguments that say the human eye can't see more than blah blah... but I know from personal experience that when you're watching a large screen and the camera pans, individual frames become noticeable and you can't focus on objects as easily as when the camera is stationary. 100 fps would be a nice upgrade especially for CGI-oriented movies like Pixar's.
Indeed. Especially since both these new formats come with new encryption that will try to stop me from watching movies that I (would) have purchased. I put "would" in brackets because I'm not going to buy encrypted stuff.
Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) sucks!
"10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed"
I thought HD-DVD's were High Density, not High Definition.
Seriously I think these formates are going to go out the way of laserdisk.
Where would we be if a bunch of naysayers had gone around knocking Polavision, quadraphonic sound, or the IBM 4 inch diskette?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
He says that CDs took off in 1982 because of convenience. Wrong. CDs took off because of quality. Cassette audio tapes were the standard, then, and the best ones on the best players sound fabulous. But not as good as CDs. Joe six-pack may not care, but lots of people did care.
Why are people paying $4000 for HD monitors, when there is still limited content? Because once they watch soccer, the Olympics, their favorite drama...they don't want to go back. Now that they have the monitors, they are not happy with their rental DVDs. 99% of people don't care about DRM. They put in the disk and push PLAY. It plays. The hi-res is there, and they are happy.
Are studios turning out titles? Are they doing a decent job of encoding to the media's capability? No and No. But people will buy them anyway, because they can see the difference.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
There are some big problems with Blu-Ray. Getting the compression right is hard. I was watching a Blu-Ray demo at the Sony Style store at the Metreon in San Francisco. Now this is Sony gear in a Sony retail store set up by Sony employees playing a Sony demo disk in an environment intended to show the technology at its best. And I'm seeing blocky areas of bright light jumping in the background in a concert video. It looks like the compression algorithm has trouble with camera rotation.
Some of the content looks great; some looks terrible. It's painfully clear that you can't just dump the content into the compressor and expect good results; it's going to become another labor-intensive step in post production, at least for a while.
The first DVD released. It looks like total shit.
The first release doesn't indicate how the format will do.
Older films will unavoidably show grain on HDTV. That's the way film was back then. Modern films (80s and later) should look great once transferred properly.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I would have liked if this author used some reference to the Betamax vs. VHS format war--it's a very good example of history, though the author's point about the current technology being enough is a good one. I would like to see one of these format moving to the mainstream, because I'm really anxious to get effective backups. However, holographic storage is also very promising.
It is my opinion that the transition to HD will be pretty painless. Three years from now you'll be able to get a player that plays DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray for $100, and we will have forgotten what all the fuss was about. Oh, and one of the formats will be relegated to leverage the studios use against the owners of the other format.
-Peter
The reason Game Cube suffered was because of it's non-dvd format. The reason Sega Dreamcast never took off is becuase the other two, with DVD capabilities, were on the horizon.
In other words, they can already handle a full HD movie
They may be a able to show a downsampled 480p version of a HD movie, but I doubt very much they can show actual 1080i or 720p, since it would increase the price of them quite a lot.
Not only that, but they're mandating the change for channels broadcast over the air which excludes nearly everyone who would go out and buy an expensive new TV.
I've mentioned this multiple times before but these arguments against either next gen format sound exactly like the last gen format. "No one wants this new format" is exactly one of them. LD and VHS more than fit needs of consumers of the 90s so DVD was a technology without a need or demand. Wow I suddenly have deja vu again...
I have to say that if your pressed, honest to goodness purchased CDs are only lasting a couple of years, you need to look at the environment you are living in, because it must be extreamly harsh. I have only seen a couple of pressed CDs fail that have not been massively abused.
I also wouldn't count too heavily on tapes as being "proven archive media". Have you ever heard of people having to "bake the tapes"? That is because a lot of tapes that are only a couple of decades old have started to seriously degrade. Also, you can't just throw tapes into a non-climate controlled environment any more than you can a CD. About the only area that a tape has greater reliablity than a CD is when they are tossed in a pile on a desk without being put in a case. And that is only because the tapes have a built in case.
I am an avid home theater fanatic with a massive front projection screen and a high-end audio system to go with it. (Here's a bad picture of the system. For scale, each one of the front black speaker is 6 feet tall.)
For someone with a similar large format setup, this technology is a worthwhile leap in quality because I can see the lack of resolution and compression artifacts inherent in many DVD transfers. Having a large display surface area makes noticing such issues much easier even for novices. However, those people who are content with their Sony and Hitachi consumer level television regardless of the display technology involved (tube, LCD, and Plasma) probably won't see the difference nor will they care.
I'll go through the points quickly...
1. Nobody likes false starts
I agree that the Toshiba HD-DVD player is lacking in terms of usability and quality, but it is a Toshiba and a first generation product so bugs are expected. It would be rather unfair for me to compare to my US$10k+ Meridian 800 series DVD player that has gone through a number of revisions for refinement to a first generation DVD player from many years ago. Even if they were both new and unused, products and implementations improve with time. However, even the Toshiba HD-DVD "budget" player with its superior resolution still makes my combination of Meridian 800 with line quadrupler look soft in comparison.
This technology cannot simply be written off even though I am disappointed 1080p isn't available. For a majority of consumers, the difference between 1080i and 1080p will be even less noticable than the jump from 480i/p to 1080i. Even for an enthusiast this isn't a problem until the new 3-chip DLP solutions capable of playing 1080p are widely available from Marantz and Runco. I also find the lack of HDMI is a blessing in disguise. Sure, we can't run 1080p and multichannel audio over one cable but the amount of copy protection possible on that interface makes me cringe. The fact that movie houses have a right to protect their content isn't in dispute, but the very notion that with the flip of a switch any component can be rendered useless through key revocation makes purchasing expensive and esoteric a much larger risk than it should be. If nothing else, I expect the esoteric ultra-high end companies will produce (and they have in the past) a better interconnect format but that won't make a difference with Joe Public.
2. Format Wars Don't Sell Players
Agreed. This curse hit SACD and DVD-Audio as few years ago. The initial bickering and lack of material made buying into either format a liability. Furthermore, there were artists on both formats that I liked which weren't available universally across formats so I bought machines that played each format. Other technical problems such as no individual channel volume and delay adjustments and the lack of a single digital output made hooking up the player difficult for consumers. Meridian and others made a proprietary single interconnect but this wasn't available in any budget machines.
Arguably, the general public doesn't care about multi-channel audio because CDs are good enough. Besides fanatics such as myself, who here has both an SACD player and a DVD-Audio player? Not many. Penetration of these formats into the market has been very slow and nearly non-existant. Interestingly my car has a DVD-Audio system from the factory but the manufacturer probably did research and realized that their target demographic probably has the disposable income to play with such formats.
3. HD DVD and Blu-ray are NOT Quantum Leaps in Technology
From the article: "Consumers, most of whom rarely know how to properly configure their players or home theater systems, are perfectly content with their current DVD players..." (emphasis mine). The general public doesn't care. Many times I see my friend's te
The increase in capacity of these new disks is not so impressive. They reach what, 25GB, 30GB? It's a reasonable increase over the old DVDs, but not a revolutionary one.
Besides, what will really kill them in this context are the new digital video recorders, with the way they record straight to hard drive.
What's a 30GB disk worth when compared to a 160GB recorder?
I wont be, and nethier will my parents, be buying ether of these formats anytime soon. I don't want to start buying blu-ray tech only to find out a few months down the line that blu-ray lost the war and HD-DVD won, or vice versa. If I had to pick one though I'd go with blu-ray because 1) the name sounds so much cooler, and 2) it has more storage capacity. Believe me, I want beter video quality than DVD offers, but not if its going to cost me so god damned much money. Also, in a few years, holo-disks are going to start coming out with a predicted 100-300 gigabyte storage capacity initialy, with a thearetical storage capacity of more than a tarabbyte. (Yes I know I can't spell, so live with it).
The article - and many posts here - present valid arguments for why these formats won't take over this year or next.
But that's a very different thing from them being failures. It just means it will take a few years for them to gain traction. Once most people have HDTVs and are used to that quality, I can't imagine that they'll stick to old school DVDs for much longer.
It may take 3, 5 or even 10 years to get there, but it seems entirely unavoidable to me. The only thing that can stop it would be if something even better came along. But what would that be exactly? The HDTV format is proscribed by law and will be around for decades. The only improvement I can imagine would be if we could get rid of the disks all together, and have some kind of internet based film distribution.
Compare it to the CD. It took several years from it's launch until it was used by anyone except aufiophiles and gadget freaks. Many of the same arguments could correctly have been made in 1982. Nonetheless, the CD completely conquered and ruled the audio world in time.
From 1996:
http://www.robertsdvd.com/failure.html
1. My cousin has replaced his extensive VHS collection with DVDs. His collection is over 2500 films, and he sees no point in replacing what he currently has. It looks fine on a current HD set.
2. I completely agree with the crowd that is more interested in the new DVD format for it's data storage capacity.
3. I was a BETA guy in the 80's. I'll wait.
Most movies don't require HD to be enjoyed (or consumed).
It will be a long time before the masses find plain-ole DVD quality (on their $129 Wal-Mart 27" TV) not good enough.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
NO ... what's being mandated is a change to digital TV broadcast. Digital TV != HDTV.
This is true, but there's just one, tiny, problem. Most people don't realize that Digital TV != HDTV. Even the grandparent, who reads slashdot, didn't. So as the FUD increases and consumers run out to buy new TV sets to meet the digital TV deadline, just maybe, the adoption rate will increase dramatically even though there is no logical reason to do so.
On the other hand, $300 for a very nice 30-something" CRT SDTV v.s. $1500 for a rear projection 60-something" HDTV is a no-brainer to a lot of people. Actually, I should say that the $1500 part isn't even POSSIBLE for a lot of people.
Japan will soon completely swtich over to digital broadcasting soon. (Right now in Tokyo we have Digital/Analog simultaneously.) I went to the store, and couldn't find a digital-ready CRT, or a digital conversion box (I'm sure the tuner-box is available somewhere where everyday Suzuki-san will NEVER shop) for a conventional TV. Unless something changes very soon, I'll be fucked with my current flat panel Sony 21" CRT I bought 5 years ago and is still in perfect condition, when everything switches to Digital. I don't watch enough TV to justify buying a $2000 LCD/Plasma, and I swear I tried to justify it as much as possible.
I figured that with an LCD TV, I would save space, my DVDs would look minimally better (forget HD-DVD, after buying the LCD TV I'll be shit out of cash) and I would be able to continue watching a bit of TV when the conversion happens. Then I realized that I could save even MORE space by getting rid of my TV all together and not buying a new one. The only drawback was my movies (on DVD), but I have a projector. Good enough.
I have a hunch that a lot of people that only watch a little bit of TV will just say "forget it". Unlike the past, TVs are no longer the only passive form of entertainment in the house anymore, so getting rid of TV broadcasts are not as drastic as they were a few years ago.
I bought a first generation DVD player for 500 dollars from the WIZ back in 199something ( instead of a DIVX player) and it was great, for about a year. Then DVD's changed from a silver oxide inside to a gold one and my player couldn't read new DVDs anymore!!! No returns no warantee, just "Sorry Dude" welcome to the BLEEDING edge.
NO Way will that happen again. I'll sit this one out. Besides, I'm one of those people who actually LIKE 4x3. You can get 16x9 from a 4x3 matrix at the same width. But you can't get a 4x3 froma 16x9 matrix without loosing width. This is important with a projector.
Another problem is that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players only output high definition video through an HDMI port which most HDTVs don't have. Those early adopters of HDTV bought TVs before HDMI. Their best output is from component video. Later adopters like myself have TVs with only one HDMI port and that is already used by the cable box. HDMI switch boxes are very expensive (~$300). The studios have said that they don't want to output component HDTV signals because they aren't encrypted and could be stolen (the so-called "analog hole"). So that leaves those buying new HDTVs as the market for high definition DVDs - a chicken and the egg problem if there ever was one.
Hmmm... Samsung is planning to do a combo drive. I hope they release it. And I hope they outselll both Toshiba and Sony, which will of course never support both formats.
That is perhaps a crude model of the situation before the Beta and in which the Beta itself was treated, however now the provided general experience of purchasing and then finding the Beta useless very quickly has altered the situation. It has encouraged precisely the current situation, that of general hedging by not buying anything until one has dominance over the other.
I don't quite follow this. Beta got trounced by VHS largely because the consumers found the image quality acceptable, given the longer recording times. It's the consumers that made Beta, well, Beta.
In the case of VHS vs Beta, consumers didn't have a reasonable other choice. If they wanted to videotape Star Trek episodes, they had to pick one or the other. So the decision wasn't whether to buy, it was what to buy. And VHS killed Beta because of the extended recording times.
However, there's already a choice that's a clear market winner - DVD. Players are cheap, (I can now get a DVD with stereo audio and DVI for $30) media is cheap (movies cost ~ $10-$20) and it's widely supported.
So the choice consumers make is not "Which HD-DVD to buy?" but rather "DVD or one of them expensive, risky HD thingies". If they go DVD, they get all their movies and titles, decent video/sound quality, and don't pay too much. If they go HD-whatever, they get marginally better video, no noticable difference in sound, and a limited, high-priced movie selection.
Which would YOU buy? I don't know about you, but I'm in NO HURRY to adopt HD-DVD - I might end up buying an LCD TV in about a year to replace my aging 19" CRT...
On a side note, I've gotten to where I just don't like DVDs anymore. I have 5 kids and a busy career. When we rent DVDs, we end up paying late fees a good percentage of the time. When we buy them, they often get scratched or lost. I don't have time to be a "DVD cop". But a Dish Network Pay-Per-View is easily recorded on the DVR and played over and over, with no media to lose, no trips to the local video store, and no stupid envelopes to mail back. (a la NetFlix)
When we want a movie, we buy it on PPV. The selection still isn't fantastic yet, but it's just so much less hassle! IPTV is definitely where I'm going to go, as soon as it's available for my DVR!
My vote for the next media format: IPTV on-demand, with a DVR or iTunes. The real question is simply: does Apple have the gonads to actually penetrate the living room, or are they content to just be a cool fad?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
To be honest BLueray and HD-DVD falls short of the mark, what about HVD Holographic Versatile Disk
With hardisks hiting 500Gb now (Ive got 2 x 300Gb units) the storage capacity of HD-DVD and Blueray are just plain pathetic, at 25Gb per disk with data transfer speeds that are total rubbish.
So you wont see me updating to either of these formats mentioned, nope Im in the HDV que, with its far better 300Gb per disk and 1Gb/s transfer speeds.
HDV also has lots of room for growth in the format, with disks having a capacity of up to 3.9TB as the technology improves.
Yes HDV will be expensive but wait a while, it will adjust very quickly as people realise what a hairy dog with fleas (DRM) HD-DVD and Blueray are.
You guys seem to be under the impression the MPAA gives a flying fuck whether you WANT hi-def DVD's.
They will very soon pick a format, and you WILL buy them.
The RIAA did it. I don't see them passing up on such a good thing.
http://www.negativland.com/minidis.html
HD-DVD and Blue ray are pretty useless, a standard DVD DL with it 9.7GB is perfectly able to store any High-Def movie in Divx/Mpeg4. The only reason to swith to these highly expensive thechologies are DRM !!! and it is a perfect reason for me for no switching.
A regular DVD upconverted to 1080i or 720p on an HDTV looks really good to me, and it doesn't cost as much as you think since these special DVD players have come down in price. Plus you get to keep your DVD collection.
Chris
It's the the S/PDIF format can't handle the bandwidth for 6 channel uncompressed audio. It was designed for 2-channel audio. When you play back something like a DTS or DD track, what it's actually doing is sending a compressed signal via S/PDIF. If you hook it in to a non-DD/DTS aware DAC you'll get invervals of static and silence.
Without a new spec, they can't do uncompressed DVD-A transfer. It is my understanding that HDMI will support it.
SACD is a whole different ball of wax. It doesn't work like CD or DVD audio. They are PCM, meaning they take level snapshots a certian number of times per second. CD takes 16-bit readings, 44,100 times per second. SACD is PWM and works like variable speed electric motors. It takes only 1-bit samples, but does so at a rate of 2.8MHz. There's a whole line of reasoning as to why that you can look up if you want, but suffice to say normal DACs can't handle it.
Given how common credit-card debt is... probably the $1,300 set.
Another $1K for a flipping sweet [boring_commodity] may not fly, but TVs, along with cars, are one of the areas where mainstream consumers will leap at the chance to get something flashy. When you have people over, they'll notice if you have a ridiculous TV on your wall. The fellas want to come to your house to watch the game. If you're really sick, you can position your uberTV by a big window so everyone outside can see what a big-time player you are.
If you like TV a lot, you'll probably like a lotta TV.
Of course, I remember DVD taking years to really become dominant, and that was absolutely logical: Our audio went from tapes to discs, so the same goes for video. HD-DVD, Blueray, the new hottness from Bell Labs -- these are incremental improvements, and everyone already has a DVD collection. I, for one, am going to wait and see before I buy in.
I've always thought competition is good, and it is... but in this case, I'd rather just have one standard we could all stick to. While these two formats (Blu-Ray & HD-DVD) tear each other apart, i'll stick to torrent (for high-def) and standard DVDs, thanks - until a standard is reached, atleast.
1. Nobody likes false starts
;) All new technologies were rip-offs when they were released, I would say HDDVD is FAR more reasonably priced at release than ANY past technology of its type.
HD-DVD is a greater step from DVD than DVD was from VHS. The reason is simple, they are finally upgrading video, which is what matters. Sure DVD was an upgrade, but not so much as HD-DVD, we are talking 1920x1080, that is almost a 16 fold increase in image information from DVD.
2. Format Wars Don't Sell Players
Some movies will only be released on one format, especially the ones in the Sony camp as they are tied to a studio, making it EXACTLY like a game system with software, pick your system for which studios movies you like the most.
3. HD DVD and Blu-ray are NOT Quantum Leaps in Technology
With HDMI there is convenience in the hook ups only taking 1 cable. Also to see HD material it will be much more convenent using 1 HD-DVD or Bluray disc rather than 5-10 DVDs, sure you don't see this now, but when HD recording is big this will be a major issue.
4. Studios are Conservative, Greedy and Unmotivated
Hm, it's hard to argue this one. Conservative, yes most. Greedy, yes. Unmotivated, well their lawyers aren't
5. Playstation3 Cannot Save the World
Having bluray in the PS3 can only help it as a movie medium, what its doing to it as a gaming medium is a whole other ballgame (crippling it IMO). If you don't think there will be more bluray players in households because of the PS3 you are nuts.
6. Those Who Ignore History...
If history has shown us anything in electronics its that if you don't release better technology, it will pass you buy faster than you can blink and someone else will do it.
7. People Want Technology that's 15 Minutes Ahead of Its Time
This is the biggest selling point I think. Rather than having to deal with HD sources, which there aren't many of, and are unknown to most consumers at the time of purchase. When you buy an HD-DVD player you can see which movies are available when you do it, and buy them right there, take them home and watch them.
8. Enthusiasts Are Getting Tired (and Smarter)
Our whole economy is based on new consumers, there are more early adopters every year, not less.
9. A Skeptical News Media Doesn't Help
Trying to compare SACD to HD-DVD is pretty pointless, they are far different in the consumers eyes. SACD is for audio elitists, where HD-DVD is already more mainstream and for everyone.
10. Broadband and IPTV to Compete?
With all the HD content you are still going to need somewhere to keep it, and if you want it portable HD-DVD and bluray discs are the place.
Just wanted to clear this up. The deadline that you're referring to for OTA TV transmissions isn't for them to convert to HDTV, but just to convert from analog broadcasts to digital ones. They are allocated a part of the digital spectrum, but can either broadcast one HDTV channel, or I believe 4 or more standard definition digital channels, which appears to be the route most smaller broadcasters are taking (hey, 4x the commercials!).
All that would be required would be a new receiver box. I've heard that they are even considering subsidizing these receivers for everyone, since the sooner they can complete this conversion, the sooner they can auction off the current analog TV spectrum for billions upon billions of dollars.
When will they learn.
You CANNOT stop people from illegally getting something that they want. For two reasons.
1. There aren't very many reasons to buy something one can get for free.
2. There are a lot of unrecognised people who are really really smart and who have a ton of free time who make it possible for the rest of us to ignore those few reasons for buying something we can get for free.
As long as there are copy protection features there will be crackers. As someone very wise once said, "You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all. After all, we're all the same."
"In a world that exists without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
While you are correct that HD-DVD/Bluray support the new DD and DTS specs there's three problems:
1) You need a new reciever to get the benefit. Yamaha's current top of the like, the RX-Z9 doesn't support it, nor do any of Rotel's recievers or processors. So you are essentially SOL. I suppose there might be recievers out there that could get the audio over the HDMI jack, the Toshiba units claim to transmit 6 loslessly compressed channels over it, though it isn't listed on recievers I looked at (though they still could support it). Basically though, you are waiting until there's new recievers that handle it. However all that doesn't matter because...
2) Movies aren't mixed for these new formats at present. Right now Dolby Digital and DTS ARE what you actually get in a theatre. The reason they are offered on DVDs is because they are also offered in theatres. You've already done the mix, paid for the licensing, etc, if you have room on the disc bring it on home. Well, these new formats aren't used yet. To get them in widespread use either requires convincing producers to have it done just for home use, or to convince theatres to upgrade en masse. Given the general lack of success of SDDS and even the small adoption of DTS (DD is the only one you find on all films and DVDs) I'm calling it not that likely. And let's not forget...
3) You need a system that can reproduce it. Most people I know, even those wiht HDTVs don't have surround sound. They just use the TV speakers. There's 0 beneift in that case. Of those that do have surround, the majority have poor setups. The little satalite deals from people like Bose. Ok so they give an acceptable soundfield, they are fine for movies, but they lack the detail to really make a difference on the new formts. It's hard to hear the different between DD and DTS on such a setup, so forget the new ones. You really will need to have a good setup, with large speakers and a quality reciever to hear it. Now you are talking a 4-digit (or more) sound setup, on top of video.
Really, all you are getting is a better picture at least initally. The audio will have to play catchup. Even the better picture is questionable. It takes a good digital transfer to get good HD. It sounds like they weren't willing to do that for many launch titles and just used the existing one, and thus the result is less than stunning.
As for me, I think I'm sticking with DVD. I have a 4-digit TV and 4-digit sound setup. However, DVD is good enough. I've seen all the lackluster HD transfers on HBO HD, I don't need to pay for that shit. I am not spending $700 on a player and another $30 per disc to see something that looks and sounds no better to me than a DVD, which I generally get for $8-15 online. For that matter, since I got a pre HDCP TV (it's a tube, no digital inputs) I could get screwed on the HD anyhow. No thanks.
All I got to say is if even the people with the high end gear are unimpessed, they've got a problem. Maybe I'm just odd, but I'd bet that with all the BS, all the restrictions and the crappy launch, many of us are just going to give it a miss. DVDs are fine, we are content with our "close enough to theatre" experience.
The comments I read here are depressing. . . Can I possibly be this far out of touch with the world around me? Or are you all just a bunch of ignorant goofs, as I'm beginning to suspect?
By any normal logic, a high-definition videodisc format is badly needed, overdue, and should be a raging success. The transition to HDTV is well under way, it's been going for several years, and all the other pieces are in place. We have the sets, we have the OTA broadcasts, we have cable and satellite, we have HD DVRs. . . The only major element still missing is a format for pre-recorded movies. This should have been on the market two or three years ago. I see people saying it's too soon, and I just can't believe it. From where I sit, it's nearly too late. If HD is faltering, it's at least partly because we haven't had a HD disc format until now.
I see people saying HD isn't much better than DVDs. What is wrong with their eyes? They need glasses, they need laser surgery, or maybe they just need to see some actual HD video and be blown away by it. HD video is a much, much greater improvement in quality than DVD was over LaserDisc. (In fact, its arguable whether DVD video quality is better than LD at all.) In my opinion DVD was never even really needed. We could have made do with LD until a hi-def format was available -- which should have been two or three years before now.
The article lambasts the new formats for not providing "real HD" at 1080p and giving us only mere 1080i or 720p. WTF? He completely lost me on that one. 1080i and 720p are real HD, they are the broadcast standards for HD video. As far as I know, 1080p isn't even a standard, it's just a marketing gimmick that somebody dreamed up. If your life depended on it you couldn't tell the difference with your eyes between 1080p and 1080i or 720p video. It's ironic that he would try to draw a distinction between 1080p and 1080i while people on some other planet (the Mole People of Myopia Six!) are claiming they can't see any difference between SD and HD.
HD is coming. We simply can't be stuck with NTSC video standards out of the 1950s from now until doomsday, that's not acceptable to someone who believes in progress as I do.
Now the bad news. . . Things I agree with the article about: The whole format war is a huge headache. DRM is a huge headache. HDMI is a huge headache. People don't want headaches, and they sure don't want to shell out big money for headaches. The companies foisting this nonsense onto us better wake up and realize they are competing for our beer money. They're competing against books, against vacations, against pizza, against a million other things that consumers can spend their money on. And its a competition they are capable of losing if they try hard enough.
I think the key in VHS vs. Beta was that VHS tapes were available in 2/4/6 hour lengths where Beta was sold as L-250/500/750 (I think) lengths, something that Joe Sixpack couldn't understand.
Dynasty was a 1 hour show and one could fit 6 episodes on 1 tape for VHS.
All they knew was that 6 hours was longer than L-750, or at least sounded like it.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
When is the launch date? Any idea on pricing?
"First off- not everyone buying new TVs today goes for HD. THe vast majority don't. "
LCD sales are booming. Go to Target and see what TVs they have for sale. Tons of LCDs. And that's a low-end store. And virtually all LCD TVs are 16:9. That means they're really more suited for HDTV content than regular TV, even if they aren't full rez. These people are becoming HDTV consumers almost by accident.
"LCD prices are barely dropping (and not everyone wants an LCD- horrible picture quality compared to a tube IMO). Sales of HDTV are basicly flat."
Sales are very far from flat, and LCD prices are dropping like a rock. At the beginning of this year, two of my coworkers got Sharp 45" 1080P (resolution and input) LCD direct-view panels for $3600, and we were aghast as to how cheap they were. Two weeks a coworker got a Westinghouse 42" direct-view LCD 1080P (resolution and 4 inputs) LCD direct-view panel for $1500. Does falling over half in 5 months mean not dropping? And if you want a 1368x768 panel, you can get a 42" direct-view LCD panel for $1200 right now.
Sales of HDTVs are booming.
"And the OTA drop dead date has been pushed back twice already- its going to be pushed back again."
"The product has failed in the marketplace so badly even Congress had to admit to it and push back adoption dates twice."
Congress is only mandating digital TV, not HDTV. And the drop-dead date is when the old channels get shut off. Digital TV (including HDTV) is already available in all major markets, you just aren't forced to use it yet. Is FM a failure because AM is still around?
"Basicly, the vast majority of people don't give a shit about HDTV. On top of that the format changed so even early adopters are scared of reinvesting. HD is a no go, write it off."
Far from true.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"The whole HD format just isn't looking to be very user friendly. That's going to hurt it. I think there's a very decent chance it will be repeat of the "LaserDisc"."
And so could these guys Defective by Design
I know it's been said a billion times already in this topic, but I gotta say it myself. Are you running a video rental store where you constantly loan your discs out to people who let them sit on their vehicle dashboards in the hot sun? I have a collection of original DVDs that I make frequent use out of, and I expect to be able to continue to make use of them for a long, long time. They aren't made of hardened safety glass, if that's what you mean, but I would have to stretch to call them "flimsy." Maybe you have kids, but if you are letting your children handle these discs, you must also let them handle your old LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, wax cylinders, and myriad other somewhat-fragile storage media that have existed throughout history that we have to be reasonably careful handling.
I'm all in favour of ripping DVDs to put them on a central storage medium for convenience of retrieval, but it sounds like you've got a huge grudge against this kind of media. Did a gang of DVDs steal your lunch when you were six?
I agree that HD's are still more cost effective and will probably conitue to be.
However what discs are really good for is offsite storage since it's easier to mail them off to other places, and keep an envelope of a few discs here and there. So I'm looking to Blu-Ray as a tertiary backup and offsite solution that can more easily store backups in an entireley different location rather than all in one city.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
11. There's crap-all to watch. Who really give's a hairy hoot if you can see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" in 1080i, 480p, or 1b (1 bit). Hell, if forced to watch in one of these formats, give me the blinking white dot anytime.
12. It'll be obsolete technololgy. By the times the tech companies are done bickering over the best format, and there's buy-in from the major studios, and a significant number of titles have been published, and the desired price-point has been reached, and HDTV has made a significant in-road into consumer's houses, the "next big thing" will be available.
HDV (Holographic Versatile Disc) offers nearly 4TB of storage on a single disc. It's currently beyond the price-point of any sane consumer, but could easily hit a rational consumer price before Blu-Ray or HD-DVD seriously take off.
Flamebait. RTFC mate. Four years ain't long to be shouting a "best archive mnedia" mantra. As I said:
Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums.
Though with all the Web 2.0 hype going on around the place, seems a lot of people consider 4 years to be an eon ago, lost in the backwater of time.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
Shouldn't CDRW be archival? The phase change material is non-organic and I can't think of a reason for the polycarbonite to fail, so the only possible weak link is the glue. So use a non-organic glue and you should be good for 50+ years no problem. I know that the manufacturers said CDRW might have a shorter shelf life initially but I never saw a reasoning for that claim and their ideas about CDR longevity have long ago been disproven.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
On the contrary, it's far from it.
Four Letters kids.
D E C S S
Not literally DeCSS mind you, but since every retard can decrypt, break and burn DVDs thanks to easy to use tools, studios have been eager to get push new un-piratable specs. They can't use DVD, since there's already a DVD spec and breaking that spec and starting over means new hardware anyway... So why not just make new specs for modern hardware? That way they can also justify lockdown on digital output. The HD-DVD crowd seems to awnt to jump on the idea to barely make a product that's barely better than the current incarnation of hardware, but BluRay seems to want to push this shit to the limit. 200 gig disks? Indestructable polymer layer?
Yeah, it's got DRM. But so do DVDs. CSS is a form of DRM. Not saying we should put up with it, but when it comes out en masse, I say we break it and whatever updates to the DRM system the BluRay group puts up. Sure, DRM is pretty evil, but it's pushing the new format war(my DRM is better than your DRM!).
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
>Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, >particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. >Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are > degraded beyond use? What in the world are you talking about? I have hundreds of audio CDs dating back to the beginning of the CD (86?), and not a single one of them fails to play. Some have been played perhaps a hundred times over the last 20 years or so. I take no particular precautions, they sit out in the dust sometimes, get tossed into the passenger seat of the car and then fall on the floor and flop around for a while. I may have had one that would skip, and when that happens, usually, just cleaning it off with Windex on my t-shirt fixes it. Note that I am referring are professionally-produced CDs for the most part. Cheapie CD-R media burned at home definitely is not likely to be as durable. If nothing else you can delaminate the plastic from the media if you try. But short of intentionally damaging it, all of mine dating back about 6 years also still work. Brett
Before all the whole DRM mumbo jumbo, when I first read into HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I was thinking more "Hey, this is gonna have more disc space. Here's hoping there's more content pushed into this." While I was lingering near Blu-Ray, I ended up heading back towards HD-DVD's path before phasing out of both, and deciding to stick with DVDs. The reasons were the following 1) More promotion of High Definition, less on the amount of content 2) Digital Rights Management(DRM) So, pretty much, I was praying for more content, and it seems hardware makers have failed in my eyes, instead trying to boost the picture quality. Oh Hollywood, what have thou done?
Nope, to qualify as real archive quality, it has to hold up to a host of environmental conditions, and few home burned cdrws will meet 50 years - as pointed out in this thread, some wont read in 3-4 years.
From what I've heard, the first generation of holographic drives are aimed at users with huge storage needs and libraries (Think $$), kinda enterprise class stuff, with consumer drives to follow.
The point that really got me is #2: Format Wars Don't Sell Players.
I know that when I had to choose between DVD+R and DVD-R, I initially refused to go with either. I finally ended up getting a recorder that could do both, although what I was really waiting for was for nearly all new DVD readers and players to support both.
I, for one, can definitely tell the difference between 480p and 1080i. I would love to get my hands on a "better" format. However, I don't plan on buying either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until one format comes out as the clear winner or both formats are almost fully supported on all new readers.
The Buffalo Linktheatre plays HD DivX and WMV at 720p and 1080i. I own one primarily as a network media player, and whilst it does suck at this, it may be worth looking at as a HTPC replacement if you wish to play HD content from sources other than HD-DVD/BluRay
HDTV does not mean you are bound to plasma, LCD, or DLP. HDTVs are going to be increasingly common because CRTs are starting to be made HD. As a technogeek on a budget, I just picked up a 30" Widescreen Samsung HD CRT for 750, and I saw HD CRTs ranging from 500 to 1200 depending on size and manufacture. I imagine as the technology becomes more common HD will move its way down to smaller CRTs.
Is the lack of a tuner.
And since most people get their HDTV from non-OTA sources, it doesn't matter whether it has a tuner or not. Personally, I do get tons of HD from OTA, and my TV has a tuner, but I don't use it because I only view TV from a PVR now, I have no use for a tuner without a drive.
Yes, $1500 is cheap for this TV. It's not half of street (Best Buy will sell you the TV right now for $2K, go order one). But it is cheap. However, $3600 was also cheap for the Sharp 45" when my friends bought it (list was $8K, street was just a hair under $K), so the comparison is fair. Prices have dropped a lot.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
why this idea gets so much traction. Look at most DVD's: look good but there is blockyness and artefacts. Now look at LOTR: visibly different.
Could the reason for HD looking so much better is because it is less compressed?
I think so.
I've purchased my favourite CD at least 4 or 5 times at least:
Once for me, Once for girlfriend, once when it got destroyed by girlfriend's sister, once to replace scratched copy of the CD and also... the DVD containing most of the songs as video clips. This DVD was stolen with my PS2. Now I can't find that DVD anywhere.
Bottom line: Easy to destroy or lose. More money for the RIAA.
Easy question: What happens when CDs are phased out? Music on DVD only?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
It must be true. First time you baldly asserted it, I didn't believe you. But since you did it again, I'm soooo convinced.
e ction=platforms&id=3087
I wasn't quibbling with your argument that BluRay may have a problem finding customers because people don't care enough. I was calling you out on your wildly incorrect assesment of the state of who is buying HDTVs and LCDs right now.
And I was right.
You don't even know what direct view means.
LCD is by far not the worst tech on the market. If you think so too, I think you're not looking at decent LCDs. I'd never buy a plasma or a DLP. And I like my current rear projection LCD a lot more than my previous CRT HDTV. I'm not going to lie, the picture does suffer in some ways. But it's two years old now. And it's a lot better in many other ways. Current RP LCOS TVs (like the Sony SXRDs) look much better and fix all the problems I have except viewing angle (which direct-view LCD fixes just fine if you want to pay for it).
Direct-view CRT is dead for HDTV. My HDTV I got rid of is better than what you can get now in CRTs. There is no margin to be made on CRTs anymore, so they are decontenting them a lot. It is making the pictures worse, and the reliability is dropping through the floor. Quality (longevity) cannot be seen on the store shelf, so in a tight commodity market it's the first thing companies take out.
Consumer DLPs don't have good near blacks. The rainbows are pretty much gone, but they still use temporal dithering to emulate luminance, and it makes the picture jittery to my eyes. Plasma is the same way. Also note there is no real 1080P DLP right now because all consumer 1080P DLPs woblerate and thus don't actually display all 1920x1080 pixels at once like a true progressive display would. I just don't find consumer DLP very pleasing.
As to your comments about DRM, they are typical uninformed Slashdot crap. I bought one of the very first TVs with digital video input, and it supports HDCP (thus has no compatibility problems). And even if you want to use analog only, you have no problems either right now because the image constraint token is not being used (due to being unpopular).
I can't see being confused by the versions of HDMI. Just ignore all that crap. I assure you that isn't confusing the average person, they don't know what HDMI is, let alone the versions.
I don't agree about the TV prices. LCD (and plasma) TV sales are booming.
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?s
That means people are spending more than they absolutely need to. It isn't going to matter soon anyway. CRTs can only get so cheap (shipping along is expensive), and LCDs will catch up on price by the end of this year for any size over 20".
What do you mean by abusing what had been established terms? I'm have to say I'm slightly skeptical since you seem to have problems with the terms yourself. Could you fill me in?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What part of Hi-def DVD is going to be any different than SACD or DVDAudio? Anyone?
Who cares about Hi-def - this article is about HD-DVD and Blu Ray.
But..but..but... you say?
I look at it like this: Give me a single BluRay disc with every episode of 24 Season 5 on it. Encode it at 480p if you have to, I don't care. I would much rather manage 1 disc than 6. With a non-scratch hard coating on it no less.
And TV series seasons are a big part of DVD sales. With BluRay, manufacturing and shipping costs go down. It's better for everybody. This also makes NetFlix worth more for what you get.
Like the cassette, it's not the quality, it's the convenience. Plus you'll have one to back up your computer. And if capacity is the winning feature, BluRay KO's HD-DVD. I'm not a big Sony fan, but their hardware guys got this one right.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sometimes I wish the Internet had become popular a little sooner than it had. I remember reading reason after reason why DVD would fail. Some of the primary reasons were that
- it wasn't a recordable format
- people's TVs weren't good enough to show the picture,
- noone would pay that much money for gold plated S-Video cables
- The format was too easy to destroy by scratching it
- Who would pay $20 for something that was $14 on VHS
There were lots more reasons, but the important thing is that these reasons are all stated about the new formats as well. And guess what, DVD did take off. In fact it's huge. I can't even find VHS here in Oslo Norway anymore. Ok, there's sometimes a VHS tape in the bargain bin at the toy store. But let's face it, DVD took off and took over.
Now here's the thing about why HD-DVD and BluRay will take over and it's the same damn reason that VHS is finally going the way of the Dodo.
In 5-10 years, a consumer will go to the store because their DVD player is broken and they wil be presented with the option of buying a DVD player for $50 or an HD-DVD/BluRay player for $45 since the store bought 100,000 of them at a good price. So since the HD-DVD/BluRay player will be able to support all their existing library, they will save the $5 and buy the cooler technology, not because it's cooler, but because they saved $5 by doing so.
Now, with regards to that arguement, I've learned from posting in the past on Slashdot that some jackass will say my argument is invalid since the DVD player doesn't play VHS. And my response is simple, yes it does, combo players that handle both formats are all over the place and cost less than a stand-alone VHS player in most circumstances since the store chains by substantially more of them and often can make a better profit margin by selling the combo for less than the lower-demand VHS standalone unit. Yeh, the manufacturers are a little screwed on it, but really, they sold 100,000 combo units at $2 profit vs. 1000 units at $10 profit. Still a better deal for them.
So, now mom and dad bought their new VHS/DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay player made by a Chinese manufacturer for $45 and are shopping for a film at BestBuy. Guess what, the new releases are next to one another and the HD-DVD or BlueRay disc costs exactly the same amount as the DVD release. In fact, it might even save them 50 cents to buy the higher quality format. So, they buy it, hell they may not even know they're buying high defintion or even know what it means, but they're getting the film they wanted at a good price.
So you're asking how will HD-DVD/BluRay discs cost less than DVD. Well that's simple and I'm in that business actually, so I know the answer for sure. The machines that make the glass masters and actually press the discs consume materials. They can make either DVD or HD-DVD right now (BluRay addons coming soon) and although the material to make the HD-DVD costs more, the shipping weight is less. So when you purchase a million blank masters to be stamped, the cost savings in shipping weight will offset the cost of the material itself. So when shipping a million of these babies from China comes to pass, the manufacturer will in fact pay less to press a plate and this will not be profit the the manufacturer, I know this since we're nickled and dimed by the studios all the time. The studio will pay less for the disc and then Walmart will press them to pay less. The studio will say, "We can't budge on DVD, they're as cheap as they're going to get, but we can cut a little on the HD-DVD and BluRay."
So, the above article is bull**** if you know what I mean. We're already getting orders for HD-DVD and it's going out into the open.
As for a storage format. HD-DVD and BluRay burners are the promise land for the video industry since it's finally a disc format that can be used to store an entire HDV or DV tape as raw data. Now we can stop having to send tapes everywhere to make the films. We can simply send the DV/HDV material on a BluRay disc and this will shave a minimum of an hour off of each project.
You hit upon the biggest fear of the movie and hardware companies: as technology progresses, IPTV and similar things will become much more common and perhaps eventually the normal way of acquiring movies and TV. Not there yet. Maybe another 5 or 10 years.
What will that mean for media providers and suppliers who have a gigantic established -and VERY profitable- industry devoted to putting actual discs and packages in stores? It means the end of the line, that's what. No more disc pressing plants, no more packaging, no more shipping boxes and warehousing, all of which have huge markups, all of which the media companies use to make tons of money.
HD-DVD and Blue Ray represent the LAST whole generation of physical media consumers are likely to buy. From the media company's perspective, this is their last shot to rake in obscene amounts of cash for movies in plastic boxes and they know it. Desperate companies do desperate things, stupidly. These weren't the smartest of companies to start with. They are much too rooted in their old ways of doing things that they won't even be able to comprehend when they've been obsoleted by IPTV or etc.
The same threat faces broadcast TV suppliers: networks, syndicators, even local TV, all of which exist mainly to distribute content over their analog RF network and collect ad revenue. But what happens when their RF network is simply obsolete? No advertisers will buy when nobody's watching. All hell is going to break loose and quick.
The only hope the networks have to survive is to embrace digital downloads even if it means alienating the local stations. At some point, the production companies that supply the networks will figure out that THEY too can offer direct sales and bypass the entire system while pocketing the money directly without regard to whether the network picks up the show or whether it has perfect ratings or an open airtime slot on X day and time.
IPTV can make all this happen.
I hope the planet you live on gets a Best Buy soon, because here in the world where I'm from we have them all over and HD units are almost surpassing normal TV sales.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who was (is?) your math teacher? I feel the overwhelming need to punch him...
(1920*1080) / (720*304) = 9.473684
NTSC is 480, PAL is 576.
The recomended viewing distance for standard TV is ~8X. It's ~3X for HDTV.
You can claim all the crazy crap you want, but that won't make it true.
Many, many people have seen HDTV, and can definitively tell you that anyone who isn't blind CAN SEE THE HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES.
BAD MODS. NO COOKIE.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The thing is, as good as the stills look real HD video is EVEN BETTER. I cannot say that strongly enough because there are the heart of things is the key; Is the new HD video enough of a jump in any way to impress consumers? I can say after having had some tastes, hell yes. 1080i video is amazing in motion. You don't need a DVD next to it because as soon as you start watching it you can absolutley tell it's much better.
The other reason why people get confused and think consumer will reject HD video is because consumers adopt lossy audio so readily. But think of where we listed to audio mostly, in the worst possible places to hear a difference between good and bad. Very few people just sit and listen to music, for most people it's background.
But video is different, basically people are spending a lot of mony to get very high quality video setups at home because theaters suck nowadays and it's worth a lot of effort to be able to avoid them. So people care and notice when video quality is a lot better. I know from observation of my friends who have no idea really about what all of the video standards mean but man they know what HD video means from cable feeds, and they would love to have that same level of quality with movies.
People will embrace some HD format. If a good online downloading system came to be I think that might be most popular if it had the full resolution with some artifacts. But I think the MPAA is too scared of Apple to let that be so it will come down to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, which as a side note I am assuming Blu-Ray will win because HD-DVD decided not even to play in the same league (no player in anything that will sell in the quantities the PS3 will).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there any info on pricing of the in phase drive and disks?
Perl Programmer for hire
I stand corrected. My mistake.
Nope, have to ping you on that one. I'll pull out my old university text to prove it. You telling me I should be sitting 20m away from my 2.5m projector screen???? You can claim all the crazy crap you want, but that won't make it true. Many, many people have seen HDTV, and can definitively tell you that anyone who isn't blind CAN SEE THE HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES
Yeah, right. Yelling helps your argument. Some difference, maybe, minor difference, more probably. Huge difference?
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
I think every journalist spouting an opinion should put some significant money on it. That'll add an edge to the discussion, and likely produce opinions we can trust more.
http://www.tudumo.com - todo list with tags
Switch your resolution to 800*600 right now. That is close to PAL or NTSC what we view in HD capable TV sets.
I think posting a bullshit blog entry is a new way of getting rich by google ads etc.
Go to http://www.apple.com/quicktime , get Quicktime 7
Get some HDTV content from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/
Watch. BTW don't be lazy to switch the resolution to match content. It is very highly compressed content so you don't want CPU/GPU mess with resizing.
If a friend or blog says HDTV is not needed etc, remember what you watched and smile like me.
I have HDTV capable TV, I want my content. Easy as that. DRM etc? I don't really care. Nobody cares! Also HDMI is much more practical than SCART or regular copper/component connections customer wise.
Also RMS can shout as long as he wants, nobody is nuts to give consumer a 35mm like content without any kind of protection.
Sorry for replying to my own post, it is better than 5 guys replying to it :)
it is 4800 per minute, not second.
So I'm hungover... But "Supermodel Computes Sun's Corona Dynamics" still didn't sound right to me.
872835240
Any discussion of video technology adoption that ignores the impact of pornography is incomplete.
So the question should be, will pornography on the new formats be better in any substantial way? More interactive, more content, more arousing? Will they be making films of a longer duration, will they be providing more extras?
Wait and see what the adult industry does with this format - if they yawn and put out 60-120 minute, linear 480p movies with no more extras than a DVD, then the format is not going to have a rapid adoption rate. If they get more creative with the new format, well, then there's a shot.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I have loads of CDs that are 5 years or older, and have no problems with them.
You may argue reasonably about their qualities as a backup medium, but your claims about their durability are pure anecdote at best.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Simple, they stop selling DVDs - which will eventually happen. Then, what are you going to do?
The fact is, they can't lose - The Content industry and the Tech industry need each other.
The only unknown factor is which one!
Saying 'gonads' and 'penetrate' in the same sentence is a bit of a double entendre - especially since Apple will fuck everyone with DRM!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
How can these discs have 50y guaranteed archival life when they haven't been around for 50 years to prove that?
Is this vapourware or can we really expect them to deliver?
but I thought it was supposed to go the other way?
I'd say each of them has failed due to the overwhelming ignorance of average Americans. They're still too busy reveling in the greatness that is regular DVD quality. Most people (msyelf included) will think "I just spent $2000 (or more) on my current home theatre system, screw this HD-DVD crap, my next system will use that."
Blu-Ray, on the other hand might have caught on would its creators have learned how to fucking spell.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Within 1 year, someone like Apex or some other Asian consumer electronics company will come out with a hybrid drive that will play both HD and BR DVD's as well as DVD and CD. Within one year, expect a recorder that will record everything.
Within 1 year, you will be able to buy a hybrid player that doesn't care if your using HD or BD disks, or DVD's, or DVD-Audio, or CD, or VCD, or Divx, or WMV, or whatever.
Its the old, if you can't beat em, join em mentality. Eventually, both the HD and BR camps will realize that neither is a commanding format, and by allowing dual-licensing devices, it will ensure that the REAL meat and potatoes of the movie industry, SELLING THE DVD's, is where the money is and is what is most important. A player with no movies is a waste of money.
For anyone considering which of these two devices to blow their money on, wait. In 1 year, you will buy a multi-format player or even recorder that will cost 1/5 th of what you paid for your original 1 format player.
These formats won't fail, but neither will become singularly victorious. Like DVD-R and DVD+R, they will be merged into a ubiquitous drive which will mean that every player sold generates revenue for the individual license and content holders.
The war, truthfully, is over, because there was NO WAR to begin with!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Let me post that again...
/. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+."
"I'm sure there are people on
Nice plug to rally the troops, but think about that... what were the available drive capacities 7, 8 or 10 years ago. Lessee... well, looking at the outer edge of that, namely 10 years, we are back in 1996, before Win98 so we are dealing with some Operating Systems that can't even recognize beyond 2.5 gigs per device. Yes, there are a few geeks like myself out here who don't mind STILL making use of a drive that small but my personal take on them is that IF I can get a drive that old to work today, I know I am only going to really use it for an Operating System install... and THEN, I'm not going to use that system for anything I can't afford to lose because the reliability of that drive is going to be based more on luck and a little bit of voodoo, than archival qualitiy specifications.
I collect old computers, so I am regularly examining old drives and tossing them into the trash because time has taken it's toll on them. You typically can get 5 to 7 years MAXIMUM of useable, DEPENDABLE life out of a Harddrive before it is going to start failing beyond the means to recover data. Sure, you might get lucky if you find an Unused 1.6 gig drive from a decade ago, but you are only lucky in that you NOW have started that 5 year timer until the drive is useless.
Here is a simple test, if anyone out there feels that Harddrives are a more reliable means of storing data than optical media. Take a CD or DVD, and bang it on it's edge on a table surface. If you drop it from a high enough height, you will eventually cause the plastic medium to crack or shatter. This is true. Now, drop your Harddrive from the same height. I can hear people sucking their teeth.. I can see the cringing. Ok, Only drop the harddrive from HALF the height necessary to crack or shatter a CD/DVD. Still cringing? Don't like the idea of dropping your Harddrive at all? Gee.
Ok, so maybe Durability and Archiving shouldn't necesarily go hand in hand. I mean, if you are REALLY looking to archive information, I suppose you would write your backup information to the drive, then immediately store it away safely in a shielded storage vault. Guess what? If your Optical burner is CLEAN, and your Optical media of good quality, and handled with that SAME AMOUNT OF CARE that you applied in storing the Harddrive away, the Optical media will outlive the harddrive magnetic storage in a heartbeat.
Let's face it. Optical readers and burners need to really be cleaned at most after every 20 hours of use. If you are not very anal retentive about keeping your equipment clean, or the quality of optical media you use, then you are going to see more potential failure of data retrieval after only a few years. That is because most CDs and DVDs that consumers can write to are a DISPOSABLE product that is not designed to be archived for decades. I remember a cheap CD brand, called Sirus, that would develop water spot-like degredation all on it's own within 4 years.. and that was after being stored in a jewel case in a fire safe. I also remember at the same time another cheap CD brand called HiVal, which I still can read off of today (burned back in 98)... and a couple of those never got stored with more care than being shoved in the back of the CD travel caddy. I'd say you get what you pay for, but the truth is that sometimes it can be a crap shoot.
Magnetic Media depends on rearranging magnetic particles on a substrate. Audio tape, video tape, digital tape, Harddrives. Just like you can wear out portions of a tape (and I'm not talking about stretching the tape, although that is ANOTHER downside to tape) due to overuse, Harddrives have a limited amount of regular use before portions of them become unuseable. That us the nature of the beast. Now, if properly handled and stored, you will NOT see that same wearing down of an Optical Media. Yes, scratches on the reading surface, or dama
Two words: Laser Disc!
There's a format that largely claimed the same thing over VHS as HD/BRD does over DVD. It also had many of the same problems by comparison:Rashella827
limited selection, high priced media and players. It could deliver on its promises as can HD/BRD, but not at a price that a vast majority will be willing to pay. Even at the beginning, DVD was fairly inexpensive to get started, $500 or so for a player and about $30 for movies.
I don't really see HD/BRD taking off unless licensing agreements change to allow multi-format discs. That will future-proof the $1000 players and allow a much wider sellection of movies on the same hardware.
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.--Linus Torvalds
>Which would YOU buy? I don't know about you, but I'm in NO HURRY to adopt HD-DVD -
>I might end up buying an LCD TV in about a year to replace my aging 19" CRT...
I'm in the same boat. We have an old (circa 1998) 27" TV. It's the only TV in the house. I dont' think it's HD capable.
Even if I wanted an HD-DVD player, I don't have anything to play it on! I guess I could hook it up to my 17" computer monitor, but since it is also old and doesn't support HDCP, it may end up being a waste of time. Besides I want to watch movies in the living room.
So before I will go HD-DVD, I'm going to need to buy a new TV. The next time I'm going to buy a new TV, it's going to be one of those big flat-panel $2000 jobbies I see at Sam's club all the time.
The thing is, I can't imagine the next time I'd have a disposable $2000 available to spend on anything, let alone a _TV_. So unless the old TV breaks, it's going to be YEARS before we buy a new one. Which means anything better than regular old DVDs are lost on me.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I use both optical and magnetic backups the optical ones i usually don't trust because they can become scratched very easily, i know what some would problably say magnetic drive are problably no good for back up but i have several seagate hard disks that i'm sure are about 15 to twenty years old and when i took them out of an old computer i had purchased the data on the disks was 100% readable! (it had pc-dos loaded) and now i use it as a backup for my encrypted data because i'm sorry but you just can't do that with an optical drive i have to use it in real time and use my SFS driver to store my data. i trust my magnetic drive more than my optical.
Look, I have a 5.1 Surround sound, butt shaker enabled, pop-corn machine, Blacked out windows, 7 foot projection display, stadium seating, 300 square foot movie theater in my house. This is just not a "Media Room."
I don't think there is anyone who cares LESS about HDDVD/Blueray.
I can't tell much of a difference between Progressive Scan and HDDVD as demonstrated in the store (except the usual here is a CRT bubble with a DVD playing, and a $9,000 HD Plasma with a HD-DVD playing, see how much better?)...
I have a 2000 lumen 1024x576/1024x768 projector (yeah I know it is not 1080p, but it is still higher quality than I need) and HD HBO/Starz/Network channels with an HD-DVR (which is the only DVR my cable company offers otherwise I would have a much better Standard Resolution Tivo), so I have seen a lot of movies that way and I just could care less about the barely perceptable differences between these and DVDs, and I am definatly not an average consumer.
Hell I have a decent VCR (most VCRs are crap) and it is connected in with SVideo, and I can tell you that some of the old VHS tapes don't look that different from DVDs.
I guess I am just not "in" to quality that can only be measured by reading the specs on the box.
>You can walk out of a Best Buy with a 50 inch DLP HD television for only $1300, on sale.
>That's pretty damn cheap. On the other hand, you can walk out of K-Mart with a very high-quality
>(for CRT) 32" flat-screen for about $300. Which do you honestly think mainstream consumers are going to buy?
If our one 1998 vintage 27" TV died today, I'd be hard pressed to spend $300 to replace it. I can't imagine when the next time will be when I'll have $1300 of disposable income to buy anything, let alone a TV.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
They did a bang-up job choosing which quadraphonic record format would win
That particular blunder is largely irrelevant now that we have 5.1 channel SACD and DVD-audio in the market place.
Oh, wait....
www.wavefront-av.com
Watch CSI Miami in hd. I was watching it yesterday on my hdtv and omg The color that hd allowed me to see and the quality was amazing. Just forensic factor on inhd2 is also great except I dont like seeing real dead bodies in hd lol
I think 3-4 years is if you use the absolute lowest quality media on the face of the earth. I have cd's and cdrws that are coming up on 10 years old now and still work.
I think if you choose a quality media most of those short life stats are BS.
I work in an electronics retail store and have notice many people still are confused with the differences between CDs and DVDs....or maybe it's just the part of Ohio that live in :)
I think another thing that is scaring off potential HD-DVD and Blu-Ray sales is the fact that there exists right now another technology that could make both formats obselete: the so-called holographic versatile disc (HVD).
Unlike HD-DVD (which can store 30 GB maximum) or Blu-Ray (which can store 50 GB maximum), HVD's can store hundreds of gigabytes using current technology, and improvements could push an HVD disc that using the same physical format of the DVD to around one terabyte. That's 20 times the storage capacity of a double-layer Blu-Ray disc, which means you could fit the entire Extended Edition editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies with H.264 compression on a single 1 TB HVD, including the four-track commentaries, Dolby Digital EX track and DTS-ES 7.1 track! And you can put on a second HVD all the supplementary materials from the current Extended Edition releases plus all three documentaries from the upcoming special release of the trilogy coming in September 2006.
Also, because of HVD's enormous storage capacity, this could drastically cut the cost of theater digital projection units. Instead of having to install a big bank of hard drives for each projector, you can reduce that to a small console-sized HVD player, which means for each theatrical-quality copy of a movie the total shipping weight will be just over 0.5 kilogram, vastly less than the weight of six heavy reels of 35 mm film for a two-hour movie. This right there could make true worldwide simultaneous release of major movies much less costly due to substantially reduced duplication and shipping costs.
I just recently bought a 50" HDTV (yes i'm one of those single geeks with money to blow). I bought one of the HD-DVD players the other day too. I have to say, horrible experience. I ran into a big problem, I haven't upgraded my eyeglasses to accept the HD format yet. I was at the eye doctor the other day and he said that my current lenses only gave me 20/20 vision. I need 1080p/1080p vision to see the HD-DVDs. So i went to check out some glasses, picked up a pair i liked but they only supported Blu Ray. Finally found a good HD-DVD compatible pair of eyeglasses and the frames were $500 more than my old 20/20 glasses!! $2000 TV + $500 HD-DVD player + $700 HD-DVD glasses to watch HD content = slightly better looking picture! Definitely worth it! Now my tv looks better than real life!
I have audio CD's from the 80's that play just fine. Ripped them all last year to my iPod. Now CD-R/RW technology is a whole other kettle of Actinopterygii.
Long term storage on magnetic tape is problematic as well. You've got problems with stickyness and print through. Just ask any old time Dead Head taper.
BluRay may not have archival quality media *yet* which is precisely why I noted when it's available.
It took a long time until they produced archival quality DVD-Rs, but they now exist. The same is true for archival quality CD-Rs. I have used about 1200 archival quality CD-Rs for my image archive. I'd like to move this to significantly fewer of something else that is reliable.
By the way.. what's up with this holographic SPAM on every forum on the planet whenever a new media product has been announced? Your web page hasn't changed in over five years. Are you still trying to IPO or something?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
I would rather buy a 'roided up media computer with über storage and hook it up to my HD home theatre system and rent downloaded movies for 5 bucks or so than to bother with a possibly soon-to-be obsolete technology at early adoption prices. If one format takes off over the other or something else comes along to replace either or both then I just buy either an internal or external "whatever" drive and install it/hook it up to the PC. Two birds with one stone if you ask me...and you didn't.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
Actually you really don't even need a full 1080p projector (I prefer projectors myself), a 720p video feed still looks very noticably better than a DVD. I would say even that is like the difference bteween VHS and DVD in terms of jump in quality.
Not that I too am not looking for a real 1080p projector! But I like to pay no more than $1k for a projector and it will be some time before 1080p reaches that point I think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are at least FIVE DVD players capable of playing high definition video from regular red laser DVD*Rs in MPEG-2 (including ATSC/DVB-T), DivX, WMV, and MPEG-4 (some models), in addition to standard DVDs. Street prices range from about $250 to $430:
IOData AVeL LinkPlayer2
Buffalo LinkTheater
JVC SRDVD-100U
DVICO TVIX-HD M-5000
Zensonic Z500
Most have DVI or HDMI, and all have digital audio outputs.
Most interestingly, these players all have networking included (this is why Fry's has theirs in the network section instead of the DVD section), and some include wireless. So you can play your streams directly from your PC (for example, if you have an ATSC/QAM tuner card) without burning anything!
Inexpensive players! Plentiful burners! Cheap media! Networked playback! HD!
Who needs HD-DVD or Blu-ray!?
Xesdeeni
Now isn't it also a poor assumption to say that you need all 300 million TV owners to convert to make a format a success? It seems to me that even 500k HD users in the first year alone (after which HD-TV's start to get dramatically cheaper) is a pretty big success, and not a target anyone but Sony is even likley to have projected matching.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Damn box said it was going to be the "Standard".
Still got my external one and some stuff on the "More expensive than gold" floppies.
Better than lugging around 100+ floppies. Good tape drive would have been better.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The goobermint said so.
I can watch Lost and Jay Leno in HD, and the picture is gorgeous.
The question is, will I pay $24.95 for Serenity on HD-DVD? I think not. Whatever the standard will be, they need to do something about the price first.
Omg, this made my day :D
Wow, you spent $10K on a DVD player. You should really be ashamed of yourself. Do you know how many lives could have been saved for $10,000 US? I don't know how people like you can live with themselves. If you had any sense of morality you would donate your assets to charity and hang yourself in the basement.
I'm just wondering where I can buy some of those Apple farts mentioned in the article. They sound really great. Does anyone have a link?
Machiavelli, a graphic novel
Easy, if your data is gone in 50 years they'll refund your four dollars.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Omg, their promo video - That's hawt!
"So, LCD has color problems, viewing angle problems, and is expensive. CRT has excellent color, full field of view, and is cheap. Plasma has excellent color, full field of view, and is expensive. How is LCD not the worst of the group? For rear projection, DLP is still the winner, with LCD having problems, and LCoS having less problems than LCD, but more than DLP, and is more expensive than both."
LCD does have some color problems. It doesn't have viewing angle problems (in direct-view), go to a store and look at a good LCD display from the side. Even at 85 degrees off angle, it looks fine on color and resolution.
I do not find the look of plasma pleasing. I already said that. I'm not even going there.
I wouldn't give you a nickel for a consumer DLP rear projection TV. Rear LCD looks much better (and is cheaper), and rear LCOS blows rear LCD away. I cannot put up with the poor near blacks and the "jittery" picure of DLP. DLP gets a lot of marketing push from TI, I'll give it that.
You again assert CRTs are expensive. True, in certain sizes. In the small sizes, LCD is already making huge inroads on price meeting CRT on price in some cases, in the middle sizes LCD can perhaps catch up by the end of the year. In the large sizes, LCD is already ahead on price. And again, current CRT units are very low quality, even from the top brands. There's no money left in them so they are in a price war, making them crappier and crappier to stay below other technologies on price.
CRT will be a niche market soon. No, it won't die. Film and vinyl are still alive too. But LCDs will make more sense for most things. Plasma might stick around, and SED might come on too.
Your assertions about DRM are still incorrect. Yes, it's DRM, I'm not denying that. I don't like DRM. But you also imply that HDTV ports are confusing, the customer is confused by them and having a bad experience with them. That's simply not true. Analog still works fine for everything except 1080P, and all digital ports on HDTVs have HDCP, so they work fine too.
As to waiting until it's bypassed, HDCP is already easily bypassed. Also, buying into DRM only if it is bypassed is not going to accomplish your goals. If you deny companies your dollar because they use DRM, they get the message that DRM isn't a way to make profit. If you pay them for DRM stuff because it's been broken, they get the message that DRM can be profitable, and that next time they should make it harsher so it won't be broken. Eventually, they'll make it so you can't break it (or so inconvenient that it cannot be). Note that HDCP is no more harsh than CSS, it's more of a money making scam for Intel (who I believe created it) than a real restriction. Unless you bought a computer monitor and wanted to use it to view HD, you will have no problems. And even that works right now, it'll only stop if the image constraint token comes into play.
I don't get your comment about buzzwords. Was that meant as a reply to the industry redefining words? They're just making new words. Nothing new there.
Cabling has been confusing for a long time now. How RCAs on analog amps were labelled "in and out", but if it was a tape deck, then "record and play" (because otherwise people couldn't figure to hook ins to outs and vice versa). Then composite video came (I had the first home TV with composite inputs). And then S-video, a crappy connector that is difficult to get oriented and seated. Component debuted a long time ago, long before HDTV, and that didnt' help much with its reuse of a red RCA.
Europe figured it all out with SCART. Well, except there's some SCARTs that accept RGB, some only accept composite, and others will take S-video but not RGB. And 5.1 (also around long before HDTV, debuting in about 1990) can't be carried over SCART.
Cabling has always been a mess. HDMI is the latest attempt to try (and probably fail) to make a single connector do it all.
You're really picking nits over that article. I found 10 others that were similar but didn
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
233 deg. C, btw.
I don't think I know the temperature of combustion for any other material...
(Money probably isn't this kind of paper, of course, so YMMV).
No but yeah but yeah but yeah because but what happened was was this whole fing
happened what I don't even know anyfin about because
Ashley Cramer has been going around saying that
Samantha's brother smells of mud but I ain't so shab never
even not even stole no car so shab.Tozer!
until they release Diana Dors movies on HD-DVD.
I rode on a school bus with a slot-loading player for 45 RPM 7-inch vinyl singles. I don't think anyone ever made a changer, but vinyl has been around for a long, long time and a portable mini-jukebox wouldn't surprise me.
Google reveals http://ookworld.com/hiwayhifi.html , lots of pictures and info on car record player kits.
=S
I listen to my vinyl on a Rega Planar 3 (25 years old) with the Rega RB-300 arm (15 years old) and a Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge (10 years old). For me, the sound is often as good as my Linn Ikemi CD player (which cost more), and sometimes much better if the CD re-release was poorly done. It's inevitably subjective because it can't be double-blind -- you know when you're listening to vinyl.
My next purchase is a Nitty Gritty record cleaner, then I'm considering upgrading the turntable to get more enjoyment from my records. Unlike CD reproduction where differences are damn subtle, reading the wiggles in a groove is primarily a mechanical problem that has always been well-addressed by careful, precise, alas expensive engineering.
If you have vinyl, don't ditch it until you've heard it through good equipment. All these models are still in production, or you can buy a second-hand audiophile turntable off craigslist from someone like me.
=S
There is no reason that BluRay players won't be dirt-cheap just like DVD players a few years from now. So cost is a non-issue. What consumers will ultimately be facing in a couple years is $50 for a DVD-only player, $70 for a combo blu-ray/DVD player. Which do you think the consumer is going to pick? They will pony up the $70. Soon as the cost difference is that small, they will quit even selling DVD-only players.
This article discounts the impact of the PS3 on the format war, but Sony sold 100 million PS2's and over the next 5 years will likely sell upwards of 50 million PS3's...with 10 million sold in the first year. Now, these people aren't buying PS3's to play movies, but if you are one of those millions of people who happen to own a PS3 and your favorite movie is released in BluRay format and DVD format, with the BluRay only being a couple dollars more perhaps (again, prices will drop quickly), which movie do you think they are going to pick up?
Also, HDTV's will take over the market. It is difficult to buy a non-hd TV now days that is larger than 30", and large TV's are becoming quite popular.
People seem to be judging the viability of the technology against its ability to be adapted overnight. What is wrong if it takes 10 years for BluRay to become as common as DVD, there is no hurry here.
Just a quick word on HD-DVD, it is DOA. Every publisher will publish on BluRay, not every publisher will publish on HD-DVD. HD-DVD has little support, and only gets support from companies like Microsoft because M$ wants to try and devalue the PS3 as much as possible in consumers eyes...a bluray win gives the PS3 a huge marketting advantage over xbox. Also, the large installed base of PS3's will ensure that every publisher produces their content for the format early.
CDs that I burned in 2001 still work five years later.
Most of them have no visible scratches, and none of them have fingerprints except on the edge and in the center.
They are in such good condition because I always keep them in their jewel cases when not in use, and hold them only by the edge and center.
I also burn two copies of everything, so if one CD has read problems, I can use the other to fill in the missing information.
Every couple of years, I go through my CDs, a few at a time when I have a few spare minutes, and read them to make sure that they still work.
I haven't yet had one successfully-burned CD fail on me.
I haven't had my DVD burner as long, but I am using the same procedure for DVDs, and I don't expect many problems there, either.
Since DVDs will fit into slim-size CD jewel cases, I use those (100 for $14, less if they're on sale) to protect my DVDs, instead of using the more expensive (and much larger) DVD cases.
Also, I don't ever write anything on the disc itself.
Instead, I write the information on the sticky side of a Post-It note, and stick the note on the inside of the transparent cover.
(Since the disc is always in its jewel case when I'm not using it, I don't have to worry about mixing up different discs.)
If you take a few simple precautions, your discs should last for a long time.
...
Of course, all bets are off if you have small kids in the house.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I have cd's and cdrws that are coming up on 10 years old now and still work.
You forget that CDs have a fairly large amount of error correction built into them to compensate for minor scratches and aging. If a disc degrades to the point that your drive reports errors then the degradation has been going on for some time.
Trolling is a art,
This is way off topic, but I ran across an old post you made about Open Source Game Programming. I couldn't post a reply to that since it's so old. Normally I wouldn't do this, but I figured you might still be looking for a good RAD tool for game development. You might want to check out DarkBASIC. It's not OSS, but it isn't too expensive either.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Everything must be digitalized. I used CDs before, and DVDs, tapes and casettes, I even tried to memorize it, but nothing is like knowing that all the good stuff is in da box.
My CD collection got scratches, 'cause I listen to music when I'm drunk and careless as well. So I built my own home media system (ol' stationary with SB Live!) and today all my music is 1s and 0s running around my HDDs.
There's nothing like sitting at home, listening to digital music with my digital girlfriend.
And you see, that is why hype-formats never make it. They're just not about love.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Seven years is an eternity for backups. If a drive dies, you generally know it long before seven years later. For home backup, anything over two years is icing on the cake. Do an annual full backup and a monthly (or more frequent if you're paranoid) incremental backup.
Don't get me wrong, I'd kill for a 300GB per disc storage medium to back up by three or four terabytes of home spinning storage. I'm not counting on it being within my personal IT budget, though. As a consumer, my strategy for determining whether a backup medium is viable or not is as follows:
To reliably protect against any catastrophic failure including lightning strikes, you must have three copies of data at any time, one of which must be offline. Thus, the cost of HD-based backup is 3x the cost of storing it once. The cost of rewritable optical backup, by contrast, is the cost of the hard drive plus the cost of one optical drive (if it gets struck by lightning, your insurance should cover the new optical drive, deductible notwithstanding) plus the cost of twice as much media as you have data. For non-rewritable optical backup, multiply the media cost times the number of backups you will make during the expected life of the hard drives: 3-5 years. For me, that's 2 full backups and a bunch of incremental backups.
Typically after ten years, backup drives are not likely to work reliably. After about 5 years, though, the cost of backing up becomes prohibitive as the size of the media becomes too small proportional to the size of your hard drives. Thus, using 5 years as a lifetime duration for both hard drives and optical/tape backup drives seems reasonable.
Compare the costs, assuming that your total hard drive storage will triple over five years. The cost of the backup drive amortized across five years worth of backups should be less than the cost of buying two spares for every hard drive. If it isn't, the backup medium is either too expensive per gigabyte or the drive is too expensive. Almost all tape drives are too expensive. All optical drives currently on the market are too small to be practical, and thus fall outside the 5 year obsolescence boundary already, dual layer DVD notwithstanding... and dual layer DVD media costs more per gig than hard drives and is non-rewritable, thus it falls into the "too expensive" category..
I'm eagerly awaiting cheap Blu-Ray media. Current costs of Blu-Ray recordable media are about five times what they have to be for it to make sense as a backup medium, but since the hardware isn't out yet, it's too early to judge....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.