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."

Comments

They might have a point

[Ohreally_factor]

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.

Re:They might have a point

[rmerry72]

High density plastic discs will never compete against external hard drives for serious backups. They are a proven, reliable media with the advantages of constantly being able to rewrite and reuse them as needs change.

I backup all my DVDs onto external hard drives and throw the shiny discs into the closest. The flimsy plastic is really only good for a couple of uses before scratching, fingerprints or other marks degraded them.

HD DVDs would be useful as a transient storage container for transporting data between locations, because its eay to transport and after copying the data to its real location it can be thrown away. But not as a backup. Same as DVDs today.

Re:They might have a point

[ScottLindner]

The problem is that magnetic media has a significantly shorter data integrity than what optical media *can* provide. The cheap media most people buy is about as reliable a hard drive.

Re:They might have a point

[rmerry72]

The problem is that magnetic media has a significantly shorter data integrity than what optical media *can* provide.

Under what conditions? Sealed in an air-tight, moisture-proof box? Handled with gloves like any fragile document from the 13th Century? The cheap media most people buy is about as reliable a hard drive.

Crap. No other word for it.

I've been backing up on hard drives for over four years now - in fact, I now have 8 hard drives purely for dedicated backups (well, I have a 1.5TB media library). Every now and then I need to restore a file that has been accidentally deleted or corrupted and I have yet to go to one of my drives and find it unusable.

Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums. If I wanted archive quality I'd go back to backing up on tape drives - that is the only proven archive media in the industry today. I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on /. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.

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?

Re:They might have a point

[fmoliveira]

My personal experience in all these years using these crappy disks confirms his experiences. And everybody else I known. These plastic disks are crap for backup, I have it as a fact, and have enough damaged disks to not get bored researching to confirm that.

Re:They might have a point

[plover]

Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?

Not me, unless you count "two" as a pile. And those two failed because I let them bang around in my truck and get scratched to hell, not because they were played or otherwise magically rotted.

Given much less care than LPs or cassette tapes, virtually all of them play as well now as they did when I bought them. ExactAudioCopy does occasionally report an error or two when I'm ripping them. I'd estimate that 90% of my discs are error free, and the rest are mostly 99% or better (EAC figures.) And while I don't deliberately manhandle them, I'm far from a paranoid audiophile with alcohol swabs and white gloves.

And as far as burn-'em-yourself discs, I've not had any data discs degrade on me (that I'm aware of.) Those, I definitely treat better than audio discs, with limited handling and their lives spent inside clean CaseLogic CD folders.

As for hard drives, I certainly haven't had the good luck you seem to be having. If I have an older drive that is powered down for a couple of years, the chances of it spinning up seem to be far from 100%. And that's not just cheap Maxtors I'm talking about (although Maxtor is no proof against failure), I've had it happen with a number of server-class SCSI drives, too. While it's certainly not a 50% fail rate, I'd guess that long-term stored hard drives seem to have only about a 90-95% chance of spinning up again.

No medium is perfect. And there's another point I've not mentioned yet, and that's the availability of readers / interface electronics. If I had backed up all my valuables on an old Winchester drive, what are the chances I'd be able to read it today? First, I'd have to find a working machine with an ISA bus, video card, possibly a monitor, a keyboard, and some kind of boot drive. I'd need to scrounge a copy of DOS, although pirating an ancient one off the Internet seems pretty doable (but creating a bootable disk is less simple.) Then, I'd have to find a WD503 ISA card for it, and cables. I'd probably have to come up with a network card, too, so I could get the data off the machine.

Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus. Maybe it won't be BluRay or HD-DVD that spells doom for the CD/DVD/hard-drive backup plan, but it will be something.

Re:They might have a point

[lgw]

Plastic media + fireproof safe = bad idea.

If you want a decent backup cheap, either optical or cheap hard drives are fine for a few years - just store them in a different building than your PC.

If you want to backup something important, put a tape in a safety deposit box. Just verify your backups when you make them, as cheap tape drives will go bad without any indication that they're no longer making usable tapes. (Good tape drives read after writing, to avoid the problem.)

And always remember: RAID is not backup. Neither is anything you can accidentally delete, or have trashed by a virus, or whatnot. A hard drive isn't a backup until it's disconnected.

Another reason for failure

[ezratrumpet]

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.

Re:Another reason for failure

[Ahnteis]

Floppies: Cheap, convenient, and sufficient for most people.
Zip files, 120MB floppy (whatever it was called): Expensive, more reliable, more storage, more features, etc., FAILURE.

DVD: Cheap, convenient, and sufficient for most people.
HD-DVD: Expensive, higher res, more storage, etc. FAILURE?

Well, duh. I could have told you that

[Achra]

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?

Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that

[Ohreally_factor]

Plus, DVD was playable on existing technology. You didn't need to go buy a $2000+ monitor to enjoy watching a DVD or appreciate the advance in quality and new features.

Maybe there will be a demand for HD DVD and Blu Ray when HD sets are a lot more common, but not until then.

Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that

[AuMatar]

Yup- for the third time now.

The actual uptake rates for HDTV are anemic. THats likely to continue for the rest of the decade. People are replacing dead TVs with HDs, but not running out to buy HDs (and not always replacing with HD, since there's still a huge price difference). Until the price difference drops dramaticly, and we give it most of a decade for the old sets to break, we won't see a significant market penetration.

Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that

[vux984]

The fact that HDTV is slated to replace NTSC come hell or high water. And those high-dev DVD's really do look nicer on HDTVs.

Almost. Those high def DVD's really do look nicer on ***BIG*** HDTVs. On smaller ("regular size") tvs dvds and hddvds look pretty much the same at normal viewing distances.

Admittedly 'big TVs' are in right now, but its going to be a *long* time before everyone has one. (If ever; some people are perfectly happy with a 20", 25" or 30" set.) Plus, for someone to be won over by an HD media format, he's going to be looking at his other playback devices -- his laptop/portable dvd player, the one mounted into the back of the seats in his SUV, the one in his bedroom, the one at the summer cabin...

Even if he has a big screen in his living room, the fact that the disc won't play anywhere else will be an issue. Tapes lingered on for years beside cds partly because they were recordable while cds took ages to get there, and partly because all our 'walkmans', 'car stereos', 'ghetto blasters' and other devices still used them. We could buy the CD, and make a tape to use in our other players until the rest of our world caught up.

Can we easily do that *that* with our HD purchases? Nevermind perserving the "HD" Can we even easily hook up a CD burner or SVHS VCR to our HD player to make copies? Can we rip them to our PSPs, and iPod videos?

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".

Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that

[ender-]

...so that broadcasters can broadcast more channels rather then better quality channels.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole problem with today's entertainment industry!

Re:Well, duh. I could have told you that

[aaronl]

What in the world horrid CRT do you own? Color clarity is markedly inferior on LCD! The color accuracy of a LCD will probably never be as good as on a CRT, simply because of how the display works.

As an anecdotal response, I know of no person with a HDTV. Not my family, not my friends, not my coworkers. I know a few people who have travel LCDs; everyone else has SDTV CRTs. A lot of people have LCDs for their computer displays (that's what things come with now), and most of the people I know that upgraded specifically to a LCD run dual-head with a CRT for graphics work.

HDTV is really just another example of the industry killing it's upgrade path with stupidity. It's a noticable, but not incredible, increase in quality. They screwed the early adopters, it's still too expensive, and the entire product landscape is crippled by DRM. Who wants to spend three times more money to get a slightly better looking picture, but that they can't use to do what they can already do with their older equipment?

Also, the AV Science Forum isn't exactly unbiased, either. ;-) The main page has stuff about outdoor TVs, why HDMI is already a pain to deal with, and lots of talk about which format is winning. Average people won't care about any of that.

No, no, no!

[RemovableBait]

High definition is headed for a niche market at best, not an industry takeover.

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.

Re:No, no, no!

[Skreems]

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?

Re:No, no, no!

[Sycraft-fu]

And while $1300 may sound cheap to the young geek, making deceant bucks at a tech job without a family, it's not cheap to the parents working blue collar jobs with their 2.5 kids to take care of. That $1000 difference is a lot of other things they probably need more.

For that matter my parents, who do not work blue collar jobs and do make more than me, still don't own a large HDTV and I'm not sure they ever will unless I get them one as a present. It is simply in the "too expensive" category. In their world, TVs are meant to cost a couple hundred bucks, and they don't care about the pretty picture. They've been to my house, they've seen Discovery HD on a nice TV with nice sound, it's just not a priority. So it *IS* expensive in terms of being "more than most peopel want to pay for it". Something is cheap when people feel like the price you are asking is less than it should cost. No matter what the absolute price, if they see it as not worth what you are asking, it's expensive.

10 really good reasons plus a new one

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:10 really good reasons plus a new one

[realmolo]

Yes, I agree.

I think that the various companies pushing "HD" movie formats are *radically* overestimating how many HDTV sets are actually out there. Most people I know don't own an HDTV. Most people in the U.S. don't own an HDTV. Most people in the U.S. don't *have* the disposable income to buy an expensive set. And as the article said, if you don't have HD channels, then the picture is worse.

HDTVs won't be everywhere until *most* of the content on regualar broadcast TV/cable is in HD, and the sets are under $400 or so, and HD DVD players drop to under $100. And that's a long ways away.

Plus, many people just bought new TVs in the last few years, since the price of 32" CRTs dropped through the floor. They're not about to upgrade.

Mass confusion.

[Rdickinson]

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.

Re:#3 is the killer

[nobodyman]

Ah you left out one:
  - more robust forms of DRM

In my mind, this is the real motivation behind the HD-DVD / BD camps -- they aren't trying to sell consumers on HD quality, they're trying to convince Hollywood to adopt the format based on how well you can lock it down. Then, just kill of DVD's. Why entice consumers when you can *force* them, right?

Of course this scheme will fail -- you can't convince Hollywood to embrace a new technology (for any reason) because they are scared of change and hate risks. You have to drag them kicking and screaming into new technology.

Reason 11 - no one cares

[RatBastard]

They forgot reason 11: No one gives a wet fart about high-def DVD. No one. A few videophiles and the usual "gotta have the next bestest toy" nerds love the idea of high-def DVD, but Joe Sixpack (and Sally Sobstory and just about everyone else) does not care at all.

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.

Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W

[macdaddy357]

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.

One over the top claim

[plasmacutter]

"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.

I have to say...

[Belial6]

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.

Re:The Markets Will Determine The Winner Of This W

[mcrbids]

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?

The deadline is not for HDTV but for digital TV

[Optic7]

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.

Re:wrong on so many fronts...

[aaronl]

If I go to the store, I see lots of CRTs, and about as many LCDs. I can go to Target and buy a 32" SDTV CRT with component inputs for around $330. I can buy a 30" SDTV LCD for $800. More than twice the price for a smaller screen with the same resolution and worse color. I'm up to around $900 for higher than 480p. That sucks.

Most people don't want to spend four digits amounts for a TV set. They go to the store, they see a $300 TV that's the size they want, and they buy it. Maybe they really want a LCD for some reason, so they buy the $450 20" LCD. Most people see the prices as 2x - 3x more than a CRT, and say forget it.

Extremely few people are willing to spend the $1800+ to have a 1080p TV. That's just an absurd price to pay for television. It's especially absurd when you realize that $1800 buys you the low end.

Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.

Here is a page from May of this year: http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5108443-1.html

The basic sentiment from that page, and most others, is that LCD is getting cheap because it's the worst on tech on the market. My own experience confirms this, even. CRT looks better and is cheaper. DLP looks almost as good as CRT, and is comparably priced and sized to LCD.

Basically, people *don't* care about HDTV, and the early adopters *did* get screwed. All of that HD tech the big money spenders bought won't work right because it lacks the industry DRM infections. They industry then went and confused the hell out of the market with all different versions of HDMI, confusing terminology left and right, and different vendors abusing what *had* been established terms.

Re:Yep, it's the Laserdisk all over again

[evilviper]

After all, once the pipes get big enough, why should I bother to pay $20 to buy a disc I'll watch once or twice when I can pay $2 to watch it each time I want, when I want.

First off, the pipes won't be big enough for HDTV in reasonable download time for well-over a decade. Just calculate how many days it would take to download a 50GB movie on your connection.

The consider you'll need to buy a second line, or upgrade your speed, since your connection will be effective unavailable as you are downloading each movie, for DAYS at a time. Internet access isn't free.

Then consider how much money it's going to cost companies to pay for their own pipes to let you download 50GBs from them, and try to figure out how that will turn into a $2/movie business model.

My way is more convenient.

How is maxing out your connection (which you pay for) for several days more convenient than NOT wasting your connection, and getting the disc in 1-2 days as Netflix currently does?

It's cheaper (you can P2P the popular movies between boxes)

Bullshit. Bandwidth is massively expensive. There is too much variety in movies to expect several people to have them available when someone else wants to watch. ISPs will rake Netflix over tho coals for having their customers uploading 50GB files. Far too many users are behind firewalls and NAT routers for this to work. Nobody is going to max-out their upstream, all day, every day, making their connections useless. Asyncronous connections mean you need 10+ people who have the movie, and are willing to share, for every 1 person that wants to download it. Nobody is going to want to pay for Netflix, pay again with all their downstream bandwidth, pay again with all their upstream bandwidth, wait several days, etc. It's complete nonsense, until bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper, everyone has connections that is orders of magnitude faster, etc.

My way has no postage, no delivery,

Bandwidth is FAR more expensive than postage, and you'll have pretty much all the same delivery problems.

no "I'll go to the store and buy the movie tomorrow".

Yes, and far worse than now.

In other words: Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. And, Bullshit.

They'll have a year TOPS before the average consumer passes them by for set top boxes and the iTheater store.

What strange, magical, mystical world do you live in?

As an "avid consumer"

[netsavior]

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.