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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.
- 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: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!
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?
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.
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! --
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:)
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.
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.
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.
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
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 = $100), but a bunch of guys saying "we don't need some new fancy format, we're fine with good old DVDs" sounds familiar.. Lets talk again in 5 years.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Ah, come on - these two formats have been out for weeks and people are already calling them failures. I say: give it some time.
Look at the current players. The Toshiba HD-DVD player is a subsidized Pentium 4 that sells for 500$, 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?
"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!!
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.
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!
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.
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
From 1996:
http://www.robertsdvd.com/failure.html
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.
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.
"Geez -- our customers really don't want to see every pimple on her butt or the incision lines from her boob job."
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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
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.
A lot of people have spent good money on HDTVs, and they're starving for content.
As someone who watched Prison Break, 24, House, Lost, Alias, Invasion, Bones, American Idol and Tout le monde en parle last season, totalling 10 hours of HDTV shows a week, and considering I don't watch Desperate Housewife, Boston Legal, West Wing, most HBO shows, ABC/NBC/CBS sitcoms, CSI (all three versions), Las Vegas and just about any other american TV show right now, I wouldn't say that people are starving for content. Sure, we might not have news in HD, but most entertainment shows are (even Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live are in HD!).
Now, wether this content is actually GOOD or NOT is another debate.
I'm not so sure the porn industry needs high-definition.
My first encounter with higher quality porn came from my days of working on high-end hotel entertainment systems a few years ago. We'd gotten in some samples of DVDs where the manufacturer was touting the high video production quality of the product, all the way to using a higher than average bit-rate when encoding; none of this soft focus stuff. My boss wanted to know whether there was a big enough difference there that it would make for a good demo (the real money in hotel video on demand is all in the porn). As a single guy who had a 65" HD-capable Toshiba rear-projection CRT setup at home, I was the obvious flunky to check that out. I watched for a bit that night and brought the DVDs back the next morning, frown on my face. When asked "what's the problem?", I said "two words: razor bumps. I don't need to see that much detail."
Fast forward to last year. My sister had a nice HD LCD TV, so she jumped at the chance to get her cable upgraded with Comcast's HD box ("The Sopranos" in HD was the big draw). Late one night I stopped by, wired up the component video, sorted out the surround sound issues, and went browsing around the channels for good HD content to show the result off. After going through a few channels of "HD" that was obviously just upsampled junk, I found an unexpected source for some great quality video obviously shot in real high-def: HBO's "Cathouse", a documentary series about the goings on at a Vegas brothel. This was just amusing for a bit, and then I saw her eyes get big and she moved closer to the TV. She works in cosmetic surgery, and her first comment about the picture was "my God, I can tell you what they did wrong when they stitched her boobs back together".
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.
I work in the industry, designing technology that goes into high-def RPTV sets. My own opinion largely matches yours, that the majority of people won't really be that interested in either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, at least for several years. I totally agree that the jump in image quality from VHS to DVD was much more significant than it is from DVD to either the 720p or 1080i HD formats. Recent large 1080p HD sets have excellent scalers that can make a 480p DVD look pretty good, although the level of detail will be a little lacking. Videophiles will want true HD sources now, but the more typical consumer will be content to wait.
Regarding LCD color, LCDs now have enough color depth and fast enough response time to match the color performance of CRTs. A CRT has a logarithmic color response to input voltage, which matches the human eye very well. An LCD has a linear color response, so electronics in the display have to mimic CRT behavior by applying a gamma curve function to the input signal. Nicer LCDs do this quite well (take a look at Apple's Cinema Display), and can match the best CRTs in color. The vast majority of LCDs do not do this very well, however, and so a cheap CRT will always have better color than a cheap LCD.
Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.
Actually, no, direct view means anything that doesn't involve projection, but instead the image generation device is viewed directly. CRTs, LCD flat panels, and plasma flat panels are all classified as direct view. Non-direct view means RPTV (CRT-based, LCD microdisplay, LCoS/SXRD, or DLP) or front projection (typically either LCD microdisplay or DLP).
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.
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
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.