First Blu-ray Drives Won't play Blu-ray Movies

aapold writes "Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs. Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format." All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

Comments

Genius!

[C0R1D4N]

That's gonna take the market by storm for sure.

Re:Genius!

[copyfight]

I've been saying it all along blu-ray and Sony are going to fail because of 5 letters, MPAA :-P

Re:Genius!

[Gli7ch]

I don't get it. Were you being stupid on purpose or is the P on the end of your :-P included in your 5 letters?

Re:Genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's four letters, genius.

Here's another four letters for the reason blu-ray is going to fall flat: SONY

Re:Genius!

[ppc_digger]

Maybe the fifth was the cease and desist letter to DVD Decrypter :)

Re:Genius!

[ThePengwin]

I need an awesome Sony paperweight to add to my collection, and this will be perfect!

Thanks Sony!

Re:Genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

What market!!!

With the collaps of the housing bubble, home equity extraction will come to an end. Joe six pack will no longer be purchasing high end electronics. This should put an end to HD DVD and his buddy Blue Ray.

Nothing to see

[anjin-san 3]

"Nothing to see here"

Yeah, I think that sums up the latest blu-ray problem

if companies from the past behaved

[yagu]

If companies from the past behaved as companies today:

• Transistor radio announced. Will not play radio transmissions other than those from owners' transmitters.
• Color TV! All Shows reproduced in realistic black and white (those are colors, aren't they?)
• 100,000 mile car tires! Guaranteed for 10,000 miles!
• 10-speed bicycles! (speeds are produced by owner pedaling at various cadences)
• Stereo Hi-Fi! Two channels of high-fidelity sound through one speaker!
• Windows! (opaque)
• Digital Cable! oh wait, never mind.

But hey, not all is lost, from the fine article:

Bautista is optimistic that both issues will be resolved "soon", and says that despite not being able to play commercial content, the drive is still useful as a "storage device"...

So the drive is "useful as a storage device". Cool! Now I can get rid of my 250GX2 SATA Raid and keep my data on something useful. Technology just doesn't get any better than this.

Note to providers of stuff: It doesn't matter why your machine can't do what it's even named after(!), it can't. Don't bring us your tired, your poor, ... the wretched refuse of your product lines until they do what they're supposed to do! What a Colossus boner.

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[muyuubyou]

Funny that you mention a couple of technologies that were pioneered by Sony back in the day.

Ibuka and Morita must be spinning in their graves. They could as well power the PS3 by installing dynamo generators in their graves.

How low has Sony fallen since they passed away?

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[noidentity]

10-speed bicycles! (speeds are produced by owner pedaling at various cadences)

Here's the 56K modem version:

* 10th speed not usable due to FCC momentum regulations

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[P2PDaemon]

I'm glad you called it a "Colossus Boner" instead of a...

Wait a minute...

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[monopole]

Next generation units will use bluray as a storage device an play video using UMDs. Best of both worlds!

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[Anonymous Coward]

We could try subjecting them to a limbo test.

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[Jesus_666]

Speaking of the PS3, is it affected? (I don't have time to RTFA to see for myself.) If yes, it'd be hilarious as the PS3 is supposed to drive Blu-Ray adoption...

So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Mycroft_514]

I'll sit on the sidelines a while and wait, thank you.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[shawn(at)fsu]

Appearently your not alone. Infact the side lines will be pretty crowded according to this article here. I'll keep an eye out for you on teh sidelines.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Bonker]

This is really typical of Sony. For the last 30 years Sony has iterated this process over and over again.

1. Develop really nice content format.
2. Promote the hell out of new content format.
3. Artificially CRIPPLE THE FUCK out of new content format.
4. Wonder why people aren't buying new content format.
5. Abandon new content format.

See also: BetaMax, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, UDF, etc...

I should say this is really typical of Sony USA. Things like MiniDisc were really popular in Japan, but the restrictions imposed on the format came from pressures from Sony's U.S. media divisions.

Sony execs and marketing people refuse to learn from their mistakes, so they keep repeating them. They've been doing it over and over again for literally decades now.

As a matter of fact, unless HD-DVD manages to be as easy to uncripple as DVDs (and it appears that it will be), it too will be stillborn.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Mycroft_514]

I got into the VHS vs Beta war early on, and got lucky. I chose VHS almost at random. My whole family followed my lead, simply because I was first and I said, "hey get this and we are compatible". I really don't have enough info on this one, so I don't want to spend the money to go random on it.

But, hey I'll meet you on the sidelines. Better yet, I'll go diving, where I am still using film in my cameras to record things.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be changing my tune in a couple of years, but for right now I've decided that the new formats aren't worth it. I already have way too many DVDs to think about replacing them with BlueRay discs. I've decided to get a nice video scaler (probably around the price of a BlueRay player) that will upconvert DVD to HD rather than buying into the HD media formats.

The difference just seems too small for the price...

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Traiklin]

so who are you blaming?

Sony as a whole (which encompasses more then just the almight world that is the USA)
Sony USA (which has been fucking over the US for quite awhile)

cause there is a big difference in the two, SUSA made a lot of formats die when they really didn't need to (such as MiniDisc), while in other countrys the format(s) took off and flurished.

MiniDisc is the best example, it bombed in the US but just about everywheres else it's still used today. So it makes you wonder just how much influance SUSA has in their global operations now, $600 for the PS3, Blu-Ray drives that don't even play Blu-Ray movies, The Blu-Ray spec isn't even finalized yet cause they haven't decided on a Copy protection scheme to use. Sure their main headquarters is in Japan which is right next to China but the lengths they are going through for copy "protection" is more in tune to the DMCA and stripping rights away from people.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[teutonic_leech]

You forgot the latest addition: UMD ;-)

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[pete6677]

And of course, charge insane licensing fees ensuring that nobody but Sony will support said format, leaving it to wither and die. God, I wish this Blu Ray mess would just go away so people can start buying the more realistic alternative. Who wants a DVD player that is so crippled they can't even watch anything on it?

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[bblboy54]

6. PROFIT!

Oh.. wait

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[Squalish]

Garbage in, garbage out. A scaler's job is "not doing such a crappy job of displaying the signal," but it can't add detail.

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[rbanffy]

Actually it is "6. Try to minimize losses"

Re:So much for Sony in the coming format war!

[modsoul]

all the morons here who have not RTFA do so no now. the dive can play movies . you need 1.hdcp complient graphic card (they already exist) and display some software called windvd8 i think bluray disk.

Next media should be defined by the community.

[Quebec]

Would it be possible to the community to layout the specifications, fabrication methods of the next generation of media?

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[plasmacutter]

yes, it's called matroska with h.264 video, aac audio, and srt subtitles ; )..

it's been the standard with anime groups for the past couple years.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Tumbleweed]

Would it be possible to the community to layout the specifications, fabrication methods of the next generation of media?

Sure, once we know what the next generation of media will BE, we'll get back to you on that.

Fortunately, there's a format that will kill Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and it's already here: DVD.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[DeeDob]

I think that HDDVDs specs were made the DVD consortium that tried to establish a standard, just like they did with the DVD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Forum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD

It's funny to note that the following companies founded the DVD consortium:
Hitachi, Ltd.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Pioneer Electronic Corporation
Royal Philips Electronics N.V.
Sony Corporation
Thomson
Time Warner Inc.
Toshiba Corporation
Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC)

Note the little "Sony".

Then Sony came in with BluRay and offered an alternative to the "standard" that was supposed to be HDDVD. Going against the wishes of the consortium they helped to create in the first place.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[DeeDob]

^^^ sorry. Forgot the point of my post :/

Was just that the DVD consortium might be the closest thing you can have about a "community" to decide the format.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which brings up a question: is there a program out there that can easily rip DVDs right to Matroska format, with subtitles intact? dvd::rip doesn't natively support it yet...

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Anonymous Coward]

A nice thing about the MKV format (at least compared to the last time I looked at the OGM format) is that you can use the vobsub subtitles in it, so you can have everything that the current DVDs are displaying, as opposed to just text. (And when you happen to dump your discs, you don't have to hit the subtitles with OCR and double check).

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, it's been the standard for some. Way too many groups still use XviD video, MP3 audio, and hard-coded subs...

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[SkipRosebaugh]

Does Matroska actually work on any platform but Windows? I know the faq claims it works on Linux, but that's if you can get multimedia working, which I typically can't. My main platform is OS X, and a media format that requires VLC is a non-starter.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[plasmacutter]

VLC, while having it's stability flaws, has by far the best playback quality of all media players to date when it works (60% of the time).

That said.. mplayer will play matroska even in older builds, the cvs however is excellent and uses very few resources.

there is a "for dummies" step by step guide to building mplayer from source here

for reference.. there is still some issue with the makefile detecting opengl on osX.. so i would build it with the disable gl flag.

further.. both mplayer and vlc will default to core video, which even on higher end systems is not necessarily as smooth or bug-reduced as quartz (though it may use less cpu so if you have an old cpu and it drops frames try it with core video and see if it works better).

you can set the video out to quartz, which is older, better supported, and smoother, though more cpu intensive, in vlc using advanced preferencepane options, in mplayer you'll need to start it each time out of the terminal with -vo quartz

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[idonthack]

I've never encoded to Matroska before, but if you're comfortable with the command line it's pretty easy to rip a DVD with mplayer/mencoder. Subtitles can also be dumped easily using the "-dump__sub" options. The manpage can tell you how to dump subs quickly around line 7150. IIRC on a dvd you should use -slang en instead of giving it a source file.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[mako1138]

"Past couple years"? I've only started seeing mkv/h264 this year, and they're mostly hardsub.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Microlith]

He means DVD rip groups, who spit on the creators and legal licensees as vigorously as possible.

Most fansubs use xvid/divx/h.264 and stick it in an AVI container with hardsubs.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[nutshell42]

Basically:

You'll want MkvToolNix. It's gui's called mmg (and is part of the package).

Create an avi with video and audio in dvd::rip, have it extract the vobsub file. Then use mmg to merge the avi and the vobsub file (mmg can split the files too, so don't do it in dvd::rip).

If you're ready to invest more time you might look at how to create a x264 video (if you got the horsepower for playback that is) because it's much better than even XviD.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[jZnat]

Matroska has wide support on Linux. MPlayer and Xine both support it, so that covers a majority of the media players on Linux (most are based on one of the two or at least use their libraries).

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[plasmacutter]

He means DVD rip groups, who spit on the creators and legal licensees as vigorously as possible

if you insist upon referring to them in such derogatory terms then I will balance it.

The north american companies who distribute the anime are by no means the creators.

In fact most of them do such a terrible job mastering it (dubbing, cutting, censoring) that they could best be referred to as the "butchers" of anime. (take "hollywood" mew mew and the official sailor moon series as examples)

By the way, there are many new fansub groups popping up who use soft subs in their fansubs, and encode in h.264 matroska.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[pseudochaotic]

It seems kind of odd to complain about Matroska specifically not working, and then going on to say that you wouldn't know anyway, because you can't get multimedia working. :p

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been pretty standard with hentai groups for about 2 years.

I'm sorry...

[doormat]

Is today April 1? Did I miss a memo?

Re:I'm sorry...

[j00r0m4nc3r]

August 11 is the new April 1.
Get with the times...

They encourage piracy....

[krell]

But won't the player play BD content that has been cracked and then burned onto a BluRay disc in the format that the player will accept?

Re:They encourage piracy....

[brainnolo]

Is sad that it probably would. Media and software companies are doing their best these days to encourage piracy.

Re:They encourage piracy....

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Right you are, and they've created yet another situation where you can only get quality, interoperabe media with *stolen* content; they won't sell it to you at any price.

They *could* compete with free, you know.

DRM is good

[Anonymous Coward]

See this just goes to show that DRM isn't a bad thing.

the demise of the disc

[intrico]

Issues like this are just going to increase the demand for downloadable movies, and hasten the demise of "Disc Media" as the primary means of movie watching.

Re: the demise of the disc

[johnfink]

Issues like this are just going to increase the demand for downloadable movies, and hasten the demise of "Disc Media" as the primary means of movie watching.

Except, even with my not-too-shabby-for-the-US 8mbit/sec cable connection, it'll take about a day to download a 35gig movie. That's assuming, of course, that I can get reasonably close to my own theoretical limit of 8meg down, and whichever (genius) company is sending me the file can push the data that quickly. I can't get that kind of sustained bandwidth from any company I've downloaded anything from, aside from various Linux distros via bittorent. With a very few downloaders, those numbers add up very quickly, and our measly upload rates (384k for me) do not make the bittorrent avenue feasible in my eyes.

I think my point is, before we start looking to get high-def movies via IP, we need to get some bigger trucks to move all these internets through the series of pipes.

Re: the demise of the disc

[slashjames]

I actually think you're on to something. How long before we see movies on cartridges that contain flash drives? Think of a SNES-size cartridge that has a movie on it instead of a game. Make it a WORM drive (write once-read many) and you don't have a problem with the limited number of writes flash memory can take.

Re: the demise of the disc

[timeOday]

Issues like this are just going to increase the demand for downloadable movies

They have a plan for that too: just make sure all the download formats are just as buggy and platform-dependent as the disc formats. Problem solved!

Re: the demise of the disc

[Com2Kid]

Why 35 GB?

A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 2GB. double the resolution, and you end up with at most a 8GB movie, ignoring any improvements in what compression techniques could offer, after all, a large splotch of black is still a large splotch of black, no matter what resolution you are recording it at.

8GB is a reasonable download size.

I really wonder WTF technology these companies are using to make their HD content look so crappy. Any DVD pirate who takes pride in his/her work does a far superior job on encoding than these "professionals" do on their commercial stuff.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Monkelectric]

There's a saying in Computer Science, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tapes".

The subtext of the saying is -- Sometimes the low tech solution is better.

Re: the demise of the disc

[stunt_penguin]

"A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 2GB"

Wrong. A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.

double the resolution, and you end up with at most....

I don't want to double the resolution, I want HD. 1080p video has double the frame rate, a higher colour depth and four times as many pixels as a DVD. With normal MPEG 2 your 8GB DVD becomes more like 64GB. Then factor in your newer compression techniques and we come back down to 30-40GB. You're not going to get a HD movie on a disc for less than 25GB.

Shit, the HD video I shoot with the HDR HC1 isn't even full 1080i res and it comes to 10GB an hour.

Re: the demise of the disc

[DingerX]

I hate to say it, but it's one of the perverse effects of the "open source mentality": dedicated amateurs will always do a better job at technologically-interesting tasks than professionals. Why? Well, you have to hire professionals; the internet, on the other hand, is the great enabler for addicts of all kinds, including those addicted to getting the best data compression out there.

Sure, these guys get the accolades, and see their files copied across the world, but the bug that drives the true nuts isn't mass approval; it's knowing that nobody else can squeeze the bits like they can.

Paying jobs don't give that: neither the big media corps nor the big media pirates need an ace at this job.

so while they disdain the preponderance of brain-dead pirates who benefit most from their work, they take heart in the few cognoscenti who admire their art.

Yes, it's a sick world we live in. What gives me most fear is the notion that the "Open Source Mentality" itself is to blame, rather than an inefficient marketplace.

Re: the demise of the disc

[scottnews]

The really sad part of is that it will drive up the cost for IT people - the economies of scale. People who need to permanently archive data in unlimited quantities to media like BD.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.

See, this is the fundamental difference between normal people (who are quite happy with a 500 meg rip, and consider a 2GB rip brilliant) and snobs. Normal people want to watch the movie, not squint at freeze-frames with a magnifying glass looking for barely-visible compression artefacts.

But hey, far be it from me to dictate how you spend your leisure time!

Re: the demise of the disc

[nuzak]

> How long before we see movies on cartridges that contain flash drives?

Never. In terms of materials, DVD's cost like a dime each.

Re: the demise of the disc

[aiken_d]

Nitpick: HD movies, in both Bluray and HDDVD formats, are encoded at 1080p/24. It would be kind of silly to encode 60FPS when the original film that the DVD is mastered from is 24 FPS.

Yeah, 1080p rocks, and HD quality is far beyond mpeg2 DVD, but your math is a bit off.

Cheers
-b

Re: the demise of the disc

[stunt_penguin]

Meh well i was going a bit high in saying 1080p; yea 1080i is 60/50 fields or 30/25 frames a second.

/resumes dreaming of a 1080p TV and source

Re: the demise of the disc

[JanneM]

All of which ignores one somewhat inconvenient fact: the visual difference isn't very big in practice.

There was a demo set up at a major retailer here in Osaka recently. Two HD televisions, one playing some clip on a modern DVD player, one playing HD content. If I got close - as in one meter kind of close - sure, there was more small detail and the shadowy areas were more "lively" (though that could have been noise, to be frank). But back up to a more normal viewing distance for the screens (42"), and I saw no discernible difference at all, even when I was looking at and comparing the same spots I knew I had seen a difference close up.

For all intents and purposes, the experience I got was identical. And that was with two good HD screens, set up by people who know what they're doing, in a semi-darkened area with black drapes to get rid of incidental light. At home, with an inexpertly tuned screen amd non-optimal lighting (to be kind to myself and to the vast majority of all tv owners) I'm willing to bet that even up close those deficiencies are enough to mask any perceivable improvement.

DVD was a big hit because it overcame some truly glaring deficiencies with VHS tape. You'd had to be blind not to appreciate the difference (or rather, even if blind the sound quality difference is night and day on even a cracked bargain-basement integrated mono speaker on the set). The image quality just didn't compare, unlike a tape the disk never wears down, and you can skip around with abandon instead of tedious winding of the tape.

HD format discs are, I suspect, more like some high-end audio equipment. If you get some serious audio kit your listening experience will indeed improve a lot. But only if you do set it up correctly, only if you then play source material of good enough fidelity to take advantage of that difference and only if you as a listener actually care enough to look for and appreciate the difference. And most people don't. They'll set up the stuff to fit in their living room not fit the audio characteristics; they'll listen to popular music that usually has little fine detail to listen for (since most will listen on low-end equipment it's mixed to make the most of that); they'll sometimes, and increasingly, listen to it encoded on 128bit mp3. A high-end amplifier and serious speakers become mostly a waste of money. Meaning they become low-volume sellers, which means the prices stay high.

For HD players, you have the added headache that the media is different - your normal DVDs will look not one bit better than with a normal, good quality DVD player. Only if you buy the special content (Deutche Gramofon's pressings of classical music anyone?) do you actually get any benefit; that content will however not play in the car for your kids, or at grandma's or, well anywhere since most people have not bought the expensive higher-end equipment you need.

Had they got together on one format they'd have pulled it off; people would have gotten the new equipment on sheer momentum even if they don't get any actual benefits from it. But now that you have to choose from two incompatible formats I think the chances of either becoming mass-market is not that great. I'd not be surprised if one or both stay niche formats, with all movies out on DVD in the foreseeable future, and with only a subset deemed interesting for the niche consumers available on HD. The window for any new physical format is closing and I don't expect either of them to be able to squeeze through in time.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Mad Marlin]

HD disks are already being sold even in Wal-Mart of all places. I figured that I would wait until after this coming Christmas season to decide which format was the winner, and buy that, but if Blue Ray isn't even going to exist, it will definitely lose. I am sure some people will see "HD-DVD" and say "Oh, I have an HDTV, I guess I'll get this one" and try to play it in their normal DVD players. Once they discover the difference, most of them will then decide that they should get an HD-DVD player, just because they have an HDTV. I really doubt that DVD-only players will sell much in five years, just like CD drives are almost impossible to find for computers now.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Deluge]

A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB.

Most of the time that (or less) is what the original DVD's size is. Quite often even less, since extra space gets taken up by extras and alternate audio tracks. If you're ripping 5GB of MPEG2 into 5GB of MPEG4 you're not doing it right.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

1080p video has double the frame rate,

Wrong.
Any film-sourced material is 24fps and even most native 1080p content is 24fps, the industry even has a name for it, they call it "24p" because they have a stupid fixation on their digital content being limited to the same frame rate as film. Smart 1080p encodes at 30fps and 60fps just mark frames to be displayed multiple times, stupid encodes actually waste space by including the same frame multiple times. Most, if not all, 720p broadcast material in the USA uses the stupid encode method.

a higher colour depth

Wrong.
Its 4:2:0 on all consumer-level formats. Recent versions of the HDMI spec include higher depth color, but that's just the protocol on the wire from the decoder/pc to the display. There is no consumer-level content format that takes advantage.

four times as many pixels as a DVD

Wrong.
DVD = 720x480 for NTS and 720x575 for PAL vs 1920x1080 for 1080p.
That works out to 5.8 for NTSC and 5.0 for PAL

A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.

Only if you rip to MPEG2 which nobody who cares about space would do. If you re-encode with h.264 then 2GB will get you a result that is effectively indistinguishable from the original DVD. I watch movies on a 9' screen, have a critical eye and plenty of personal experience with the technology.

I've also watched 1080p material encoded with WM9 (Memento Mori,deluxe edition), which is roughly equivalent to h.264, at 8GB for ~100min and it was top notch. The same for 720p material at 8GB for ~120min (Brothers Grimm,german edition). By top notch, I mean better than 99% of all broadcast HDTV in the US.

I will grant that all other things being equal (codec, transfer, etc) more bits are better. But there is a point at which the law of diminishing returns kicks in and it currently seems to be around the 8GB/movie point.

Re: the demise of the disc

[Gowry]

I agree with HD vs DVD for movies. HD definately looks better but not enough to put up with what the industry is doing with the content. However, I think it's because of mastering. All you have to do is look at the difference in the way sports looks between SD and HD and you can clearly see they're holding out when it comes to movies. Movies played via my Infocus 4805 projector definately don't leave me wanting a HD projector. I look at my HD tv and don't see a huge difference. However, all it takes is a look at a football or basketball game in HD, and I'd much rather watch my tv. I wish more people could get as clear a view of this type of difference when listening to audio--but then again audio mastering sucks except in rare instances like Natalie Merchant and Fiona Apple these days. Pump up the volume seems to be the new creed of sound engineers everywhere. Dynamics? who cares about those? It's sad to think that artists put up with it. Gowry

I think both will fail

[bfwebster]

...because no one is going to be terribly eager to put up with this crap. Here are my own thoughts on the subject. ..bruce..

Re:I think both will fail

[JasonBee]

What are those thoughts again?

I don't see anything else posted in your comment...

Re:I think both will fail

[bfwebster]

Sorry -- they're in the link in my comment. It's a rather lengthy posting I did a few weeks back on Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD and why their failure to agree on a common standard will probably marginalize them. In fact, even if they had agreed on a common standard, I think their market penetration would have been slow at best, because their advantages are not that obvious to the average consumer. ..bruce..

However...

[Anonymous Coward]

a future root kit developed by Sony is expected to fix this problem.

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ... now *that* is FUNNY !!

Re:However...

[Original Cynic]

It sounds like the only thing atat works is the Rootkit.... At least the rootkit will be more successful than Beta.

Is it really worth it, anyway?

[mark0]

I'm looking at a Superbit copy of 5th Element on my Oppo OPDV971H upconverted to 1080i and it looks great. I'm sure Blu-ray would look better, but would it really look so much better that I'd be ready to toss my current DVDs and player for that difference? Especially considering all of the baggage that comes with it?

I'll wait for the price to come way way down and all of the DRM to be cracked... probably when the next format is announced.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Tumbleweed]

Have you tried upconverting to 720p, rather than 1080i, and if so, what did you think? I *cannot stand* interlaced displays, but that's just me. I pick out the dampening wires on aperture grille CRTs immediately, too, whilst most people don't seem to notice them at all, or aren't bothered by them.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[ksattic]

720p looks worse to me than 1080i. 1080i just seems to give a cleaner, brighter image, with no perceivable flickering. I am using a Samsung DVD-HD935 upconverting player. I too notice the dampening wires from a distance on Sony monitors. ;o)

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD is to high-definition what 64 kbps MP3 is to 128 kbps.

- Some people can hear the difference,
- some can't,
- some could but don't because they have crappy headphones,
- some can but don't care.

The same classification holds for high-definition video (replace "crappy headphones" with "crappy TV"). Which group are you in?

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Moofie]

My best friend never forgave me for pointing out the line on Trinitron monitors. The best part is, I almost had him convinced that there was a line on his 36" Wega picture tube. That was fun.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Tim Browse]

On the upside, if you don't spot the line on a Trinitron monitor whenever it shows a large area of white on screen, then your eyesight is probably not good enough to need HD TV anyway :)

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

The general quality scale goes like this although people get impressed by the 1080, it is all about the i vs p.

480i 480p 1080i 720p 1080p

Now if your player cannot deliver 720p and only can do 540p (which is what 1080i if it was progressive) then I can see why it might look better. Although personal perference varies 720p delivers more information per frame than 1080i and does not suffer from all of the problems with interleaving like;

- 30 full frames per second intead of 60
- Jitter in high speed images due to the slight shift from "frame" to "frame"
- Broken or missing lines if they do not appear in both "frames"

More likely than you like 1080i better is that your player does not upconvert well to the higher quality 720p.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[kimvette]

Not quite. DVD is to high resolution as 128kbps MP3 is to 320kbps

Because, see, 64kbps is downright painful to listen to, while 128K is good enough to listen to and enjoy, but its limitations become readily apparant on high-end stereo systems (or good headphones). 320kbps does introduce noticeable artifacts on rare occasions, but is almost close to "good enough" to consider tossing the CDs to the curb. DVDs can be very enjoyable to watch, but view on a GOOD screen the artifacts become readily apparant. Blu-Ray abd HD-DVD are supposed to solve this, but being compressed, they will never quite eliminate all compression artifacts.

64kbps would be more analog to S-VHS, and 48kbps to VHS.

Sorry, I'm being picky because I hate 128kbps MP3s and comparing high definition formats to 128kbps MP3s is an insult to the high definition formats and the engineers who worked on them.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[aiken_d]

You do realize that the difference between 1080i and 1080p is merely a transport difference, right? Any modern display (DLP, LCD, LCOS, most CRT) reassembles the frame in a memory buffer and displays it progressively. Interlacing is only visible as a display artifact, not as a transport.

-b

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you are an audiophile who has never seen HDTV before, which makes you highly biased in favor of audio. 128 kps mp3 being equivalent to HDTV seems pretty fair to me. Both are equally hard to tell apart from perfection.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Mr2001]

Because, see, 64kbps is downright painful to listen to, while 128K is good enough to listen to and enjoy, but its limitations become readily apparant on high-end stereo systems (or good headphones).

And, just like "good headphones", very few people actually own the kind of high-end video equipment you need to appreciate HD movies, so there isn't much incentive to switch away from DVD. HDTV sets are still prohibitively expensive.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[kimvette]

I've seen HDTV, it's just that the content I watch (Stargate, Star Trek (TOS), Futurama, many old shows and movies which predate HDTV) don't improve enough to warrant the expense. The story isn't any more interesting to watch, HDTV doesn't magically transform a bad story into a good story, and I don't care enough to see if Amanda Tapping or Richard Dean Anderson has huge pores or a makeup-covered zit in episode S48E54.

My next television will be HDTV (waiting for the next generation LCD and Plasma models, and it will NOT be a Sony), but mainly for compatibility with everything (PC, etc.). It's just not worth it now for multiple reasons, one of which the content just isn't there and my current crappy old circa 1999 NTSC 36" Sony television is still working just fine. I don't want to turn into a videophile type who stares at Discovery HD fishing shows all day just because there is no other 1080i content on.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Crayon Kid]

I pick out the dampening wires on aperture grille CRTs immediately, too, whilst most people don't seem to notice them at all, or aren't bothered by them. That's cause you're nitpicking, man, seriously now. :) Of course you can see the dampening wires if you look for them. But they're very thin and placed a few millimeters away from the actual tube where the image forms. The slight difference in eyesight focus effectively renders them nearly-invisible. Try placing some text directly under the wire. If you look at the wire you see it; if you look at the text, you see the text.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Don_dumb]

many old shows and movies which predate HDTV

Television standards have nothing to do with the quality of a film recording. I think you will find that old movies while predating HD are filmed on film (35mm I think) I believe film from decades ago is of a higher quality than even 1080, they can certainly improve if shown on HD rather than SD, all it takes is a remastering. Dont forget most films predate DVD but they still look better on DVD than VHS.

Having said that, I do agree that there isn't enough HD content worth upgrading for (especially for the UK, where PAL is generally good enough for most programs). Unless the BBC decides to add to their first HD natural history documentary Planet Earth http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795176/, with perhaps The Blue Planet http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0296310/, which they could as they mostly used film for that, and I would pay *big* money to watch The Blue Planet in HD.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[kimvette]

re: I think you will find that old movies while predating HD are filmed on film (35mm I think) I believe film from decades ago is of a higher quality than even 1080,

degraded film with faded colors and scratches which are not even removed digitally half the time for DVD transfers is better than 1080i? Wow, one learns something new every day! ;) Yes, I know, a lot of it has to do with the restoration and transfer process, but many films have been transferred to DVD with NO touching up at all.

Re:Is it really worth it, anyway?

[Don_dumb]

Point taken,
I guess the industry will itself be to blame if they dont remaster film onto new formats and that prevents a take up of the new format. For DVD they just had to get the film onto disc and people brought it, but for HD they are now going to have to give a reason (better quality) for people to replace their DVD version.
Lawrence of Arabia, should look better on HD if remastered, shouldn't it?

PS3?

[LoverOfJoy]

FTA:

Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections.

So is this a confession that the low-end PS3 won't be able to play commercial Blu Ray DVDs? Or does the low-end PS3 use an HDCP-compliant graphics card without offering DVI or HDMI connections?

Re:PS3?

[Rachel Lucid]

If the PS3 won't play Blu-Ray, then it's useless as a Media console, hence it's ceding ground to the 360 that it really can't afford to cede.

I think it's actually trying to entice MORE users to the PS3 because Sony is trying to claim that by then the problems will be fixed.

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

as if either can really be called a "media" anything.

the 360 has severe restrictions on the media you can store on it, it refuses to even take mp3's onto the hard drive without hacking.

neither of these even comes close to the now long-in-the-tooth xbox media center.

as far as format support and true media capacity goes, the 360 is a joke.

Re:PS3?

[drinkypoo]

Looks like as long as you don't want HD, the original Xbox is still the best media player available. At least you can get progressive scan out of it, and you can play anything you like on it - if XBMC won't do the trick for some reason, there's always linux.

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

xbmc does to an excellent job, but with the advent of h.264 AVC it's processor is no longer fully up to scratch.

then there is the whole hd thing.

the point is that these people are claiming a "media center" when all it really is is at best a "token effort"

Re:PS3?

[MooseMuffin]

Is this true? Can someone point me to a review or critique of the 360 from a media center standpoint? I think I remember a few from when it launched, but has anything changed with software updates?

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

it's all over forums like xbox scene, and i couldnt believe it when i read the thread on "how to trick your 360 into accepting mp3's".. I mean mp3 is such a standard that even car stereos play mp3 cds..

I learned about this stuff while I was looking over news regarding progress to a full modchip (for an upgraded XBMC with beefier processing power).

So far, only the illegitimate activity of pirating games has been cracked open, leaving the poor legitimate homebrew runners like me out to dry =(

Re:PS3?

[Saige]

My 360 has replaced my CD changer completely. But I don't put the music on there, I have it on my computer, and use WMC to access it. It's a heck of a lot easier storing my music on my PC instead, as there are much better methods to manage it there.

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

so you clog your lan with traffic instead?

brilliant!

further, you have to.. wait for it.. buy windows MCE to interoperate optimally with the 360.. last i checked that kind of tie-in was illegal activity under antitrust laws.

If microsoft really were earnest in adding media capacity to it they would offer greater hard drive capacity or a consumer level kit to upgrade it and a fully featured file manager to "offer better methods of managing it".

they could have even avoided the labor of building even the tiny fragment of media features they offered if they simply included a flashable area on the internal disk on which people could install and keep updated the actual xbmc software.

What I see is microsoft stumbling on xbox media center and realizing it was a winning strategy, but in usual microsoft fashion they only put in token efforts to try to fool end users into believing the mod is not necessary.

Re:PS3?

[Jthon]

Seeing as how the premium PS3 supports HDCP over its HDMI connecter I don't think this is a problem at all. Plus all the first gen blu-ray titles don't enable HDCP or content protection as they wouldn't work on most of the current hi-def TV's.

So even in that case you should be able to play blu-ray movies until studios start setting the HDCP flag. Even then it will play blu-ray movies they just get downsampled to normal content (sucks I know).

I do wish the big content providers would stop being so paranoid and just make it easy for people to watch legally purchased films.

Re:PS3?

[fimbulvetr]

You can find XBMC versions with h.264 support and they play just fine. I use it for h.264 a half a dozen times a month or so.

Re:PS3?

[paraax]

Exactly what does the average person do with their LAN anyways that it can't take the 128kbps from an average mp3? Perhaps on a larger scale network that would add up, but 100mbps is enough that streaming files on demand from one central location is not a problem and can indeed be very convenient.

Other than that, I agree that a product with a capable hard drive shouldn't be striving to artificially limit its ability to play from its hard drive.

Re:PS3?

[JFitzsimmons]

Yes, because that 100 megabits switching ethernet is just downright CLOGGED with all the traffic involved in sending 320K per second to the 360. Unfortunately, the 97.5% of the remaining theoretical maximum available bandwidth just isn't enough for all the other applications on the lan.

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

It's been my experience that any streaming done over a lan, professionally maintained or personal, results in skipping and degredation on videos and occasionally even on audio.

i'm not sure where the inefficiency is rooted, but it's been true on every platform i've used (linux, windows, and mac).

Re:PS3?

[ChronoReverse]

Might want to check those connections then. On my 100MBit LAN, it's possible to watch videos using RDP much less just streaming it directly.

Re:PS3?

[plasmacutter]

I heard something about how it can only play 300px high at best (with all pp turned off).

It could have been bettered by update though, so thanks for the tip.. i might go get a more recent cvs build and see how it works.

Re:PS3?

[kimvette]

So even in that case you should be able to play blu-ray movies until studios start setting the HDCP flag. Even then it will play blu-ray movies they just get downsampled to normal content (sucks I know).

I do wish the big content providers would stop being so paranoid and just make it easy for people to watch legally purchased films.

That only introduces a defense against lawsuits from MPAA members.

"Ma'am, did you download Pirates of the Caribbean Part 4"

"Yes sir, I did. You see, Disney enabled HDCP and my high definition television does not support HDCP, so it will only play low-definition video. Therefore, the only way to watch it is to, argh, "pirate" the movie, me matey. Disney, Sony, and the MPAA at large is actively encouraging piracy because only legitimate paying customers are affected by copy protection. Yar!"

Re:PS3?

[Saige]

I'm using a wireless network, and I've never had any problems with my audio at all.

Re:PS3?

[evolseven]

dont know what network you have been using, maybe its your switch even.. but i get pretty close to the theoretical maximum on a 100mbit lan.. about 11 MB(thats byte not bit)/Second, which is well beyond what is needed to stream video.. my DVR records at about 2.5mb/sec and I could probably push that out to each one of my computers.. 3 hard wired and both laptops and still have bandwidth to download from the internet at full speed.. never tried it, I may have to try it though.

Re:PS3?

[ceoyoyo]

Maybe on the professionally maintained ones.

This guy's LAN probably doesn't do anything while he's listening to music on his XBox. Or maybe he surfs the web while he's listening.

Re:PS3?

[rts008]

If that is clogging your LAN, then you might want to do a little troubleshooting and fix it.
I've got a fileserver with all of our movies and music on it, and the other 4 PC's can play movies or music ( or combo of the two) at the same time with no problems.

If streaming a 128kb/s audio file is clogging yer tubes, then yer tubes have problems.
Call Roto Rooter maybe?

Re:PS3?

[jimicus]

This is the MPAA we're talking about here.

"Ma'am, did you download Pirates of the Caribbean Part 4"

"Yes sir, I did. You see...."

"Just answer the question please, Ma'am. Are you aware of what HDCP is?"

"Yes sir, I am, my television..."

"Just answer the question please, ma'am. Are you aware that using a technical means to bypass copy protection mechanisms such as HDCP is illegal under the DMCA?"

"Yes sir, I understand that, however.... "

Re:PS3?

[toriver]

"Ma'am, did you download Pirates of the Caribbean Part 4"

"Yes sir, I did. You see...."

"Just answer the question please, Ma'am.

*Judge slams club*

"I must remind the lawyer that the defendant as witness was asked to tell 'the whole truth' - so please don't interrupt the witness."

Yeah, as if that ever happens... *sigh*

Bittorrent has already won this war.

[plasmacutter]

All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

go to torrentspy or any other large site and search "hr hdtv"..

blu-ray and hd-dvd are overhyped and already obsolete.

h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things.

and what's with this.. they expect pc owners to accept the kind of draconian superuser control over their pcs which are specified in their AACS restrictions? Give me a break, it'll never happen.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[ichigo 2.0]

h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things.

On this I disagree, because AFAIK both of the next-gen DVD formats support h.264 encoding. I think this first batch of movies uses MPEG-2, but when the movies start using h.264 they will definitely look better than 600 mb h.264 files. Looking forward to DVD-sized h.264 rips of bluray/hddvd movies so that I can go out and buy the Philips DVD player that supports h.264; this way I get the best of both worlds. :)

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[plasmacutter]

but when the movies start using h.264 they will definitely look better than 600 mb h.264 files

I don't think this will be likely.

The amature ripping groups do a better job of processing the footage than their supposedly "professional" counterparts.

i've seen several rips released for series I own on dvd which have higher quality than the source dvds themselves because of those superior mastering techniques.

I think the bitrate overload will simply encourage laziness on the part of release companies, resulting in the same trashy noisy and oscillating ouput seen on dvd's.. only in higher resolution so you notice it more ; )

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[InsaneGeek]

There is no possible way for someone to take missing data and put it back in. With mplayer and it's post processing filters I can make any dvd that has more data than your rip, look better. With a RIP I have less data, no if ands or buts about it, I can make it look better than the original media if I post process the rip but not the original; but I *can't* make it look better than the original if I post process the original as well.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[geobeck]

...and what's with this.. they expect pc owners to accept the kind of draconian superuser control over their pcs which are specified in their AACS restrictions? Give me a break, it'll never happen.

* Starts a countdown waiting for the average sheep^H^H^H^user to let it happen... and I don't think I have to use all of my digits--or even all of my limbs--for this countdown.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[Anonymous Coward]

how can a lossy compression of a movie be of higher quality than the source DVD? Unless they had access to the uncompressed digitial video stream that was used to create the MPEG-2 found on the DVD, what you describe isn't possible.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[EvilIdler]

They rip from HDTV, which sometimes IS better than DVD.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[Trixter]

"h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things."

That's the third time I've read that in this thread and it's just now starting to piss me off. No, h.264 @ 600MB/hr does not equal HD-DVD in terms of quality. You don't have to be a broadcast engineer to see it (which I am). Also, you need 2GHz just to play 720p @ 24fps, and if you want 720p @ 60fps, no PC under 3.2GHz is even an option.

Did you know that you can encode HD material as MPEG-2? And that playback requirements of MPEG-2 are less than half of H.264? And because of that, most HDV systems use MPEG-2 transport streams as their transport mechanism? Space is cheaper than processor power.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[plasmacutter]

You don't have to be a broadcast engineer to see it (which I am). Also, you need 2GHz just to play 720p @ 24fps, and if you want 720p @ 60fps, no PC under 3.2GHz is even an option.

apparently you haven't seen the coreavc decoder or recent progress by the ffmpeg project.

further broadcast engineer != computer/program engineer.

you don't need 60 fps, 25-30 fps is enough even for fast motion if youve mastered it properly.

as for the processor range.. i can currently decode 720p h264 with 25% of my cpu power (12.5% for each 2.7 ghz cpu).

And because of that, most HDV systems use MPEG-2 transport streams as their transport mechanism
no, they use mpeg2 as their transport mechanism because building components with the kind of throughput needed to carry completely raw and uncompressed HD signals is friggin expensive.. so they feed it to an on-the-fly mpg2 decoder as soon as possible, and convert it to raw as late as possible.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[InsaneGeek]

HDTV by definition has to be better than DVD, again you have more source data. What you are saying there is comparing apples to oranges. Again, from the same source a rip can be made to look better than the original, but the original can *always* be made to look better than any rip using post processing as well.

Re:Bittorrent has already won this war.

[Jherek Carnelian]

No, h.264 @ 600MB/hr does not equal HD-DVD in terms of quality.

It can, when there are other limitations involved.
For example, if all you have is an SDTV display, then both formats will be effectively equal in quality. That may also be true for higher-resolution displays, particularly ones with lower contrast and restricted color gamuts.
Or, if the source material is poorly mastered, the 600MB/hr data-rate may be sufficient to capture all of useful information there is in the original, making the higher data-rate of HD-DVD superflous.
Or, if the viewer is extremely near-sighted.
So, there are lots of situations in which the original statement could be true.

But clearly, the best possible quality out of HD-DVD is going to exceed the best possible quality out of the 600MB/hr stuff.

And it won't WHAT???

[himurabattousai]

So, you're telling me that the biggest reason to buy the player--to watch the movies on discs that offer something supposedly better than the DVD experience--doesn't even apply??? Hold on one second...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

I couldn't make "stuff" up as unintentionally hilarious as this. Seriously....

HD is overrated

[MaineCoon]

At least for movies.

It looks nice, but unless I'm TRYING to look for the extra detail, I generally don't notice it.

I've watched a few high def movies; compared Lawrence of Arabia in HD format to SD format, and yes the detail is much crisper - that is, the leaves on the trees in the opening scene are discernable. I also watched Fifth Element in HD, but I've seen it several times before and the being HD didn't really look any different.

Re:HD is overrated

[RingDev]

I wonder how much of that has to deal with the filming though. I mean, you could take an old silver screen real and "re-master" it into a HD format, but it's still going to have the quality of a crappy old film. For the Fifth Element, did they actually remaster the move from 30mm film? Or did they just take the existing digital format, blow it up, and run some filters over it to make it look a little more crisp?

-Rick

Re:HD is overrated

[MaineCoon]

Lawerence of Arabia was actually shot in 70mm. It was fairly amazing quality. But I stil stand by my original statement that once you're really into the movie you don't really notice it that much, and I didn't "enjoy" the movie any more because of the quality of the picture, over standard definition. It was a very enjoyable movie anyways.

Fifth Element was Super 35mm. Don't know what they might have done otherwise.

Re:HD is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi-def porn, on the other hand, is great! Definitely better.

http://www.stilemedia.com/?v=ws-hd2.wmv - click through the first ad. Alternately go to http://www.stileproject.com/ and search the page for "vid 2". (It's just regular porn in hi-def, nothing weird, if you're worried.)

Re:HD is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

I can honestly say that I find the same thing happens with games as well; and not just higher-resolutions but also with better graphics. The truth is that when I'm playing a game I usually only notice the Higher Resolution or Lack of Jaggies for the first few minutes and then I'm too involved in what I'm doing to care about it; new graphical effects I only really notice when they're used the first time and then the novely wears off. I don't think it has to be this way, you could (for example) allow people to see around corners with environmental reflective surfaces, but 99% of the time graphical improvements do not make a difference to gameplay.

About the only time I apprieciate HDTV is when I'm watching sports; the wide-screen allows you to see more of the action while you can read player names for yourself (if you'd choose to).

Re:HD is overrated

[uradu]

The main difference it can make in home viewing is to allow a larger picture at the same seating distance. I'm thinking here primarily projectors, where zooming the picture up while still being seated 12 ft from the screen won't reveal ugly pixels. Other than that, I don't think the benefits justify the current prices just yet.

Re:HD is overrated

[Jugalator]

I think it's one of those things you see quite a difference with when comparing DVD/HD movies on a store as you walk up close. But I have to wonder how much difference, even on a sizable screen, you see when sitting and watching it from a sofa. Here's a DVD/HD quality comparison at AnandTech by the way (click for larger pictures). I see a difference in color clarity and sharpness especially in the first one, and the photos are admittedly not really doing the displays justice. But I think they do give at least a hint of the quality difference.

Re:HD is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what kind of person is masochistic enough to suffer through The Fifth Element more than once?!

Re:HD is overrated

[MaineCoon]

I never denied a quality difference.

I'm saying, once I get into a movie, I don't notice the difference, and it hasn't made movies any more enjoyable.

Still frames, sure, looks great. Nature shows, look awesome generally. But movies and TV shows? Yeah, it's more detailed if I look, but I'm usually paying attention to the show itself, not the details.

So in that respect, I find it to be overrated.

Re:HD is overrated

[iluvcapra]

Funny you ask, we recently had a special edition of The Natural in the shop...

For picture, the best you can get is either an interpositive (which is just one generation down from the camera negative), or the camera negative itself. The camera neg is often in not great shape, though, since it's been cut and A-B rolled. Also dust on the interpositive looks black, whereas dust on the cam neg looks white, and camera neg doesn't have the printer lights from timing I recall (I'm a sound guy, if someone at a lab is reading, please correct me). Interpositives are low-contrast prints of the camera negative, on one strip, and they're usually only run thru a printer a few times, once to strike the IP itself, and once to strike a few internegatives (these are what release prints are struck from).

For sound, the sound optical is usually contact printed onto the IP, but we almost always go back to the original Dialogue/Music/FX stems, which are recorded on 35mm magnetic film. 35mm mag film actually has quite high fidelity, nearly 70dB dynamic range and at least 15 kHz on the high end, so often the the mag sounds a bit better than what is on the optical. As well, the stems will have the discrete speaker channels (particularly the center speaker and surround), which are derived from the optical but do not actually exist on it, so we can "widen" the original mix from it's original format (either 4-channel Dolby Stereo or less) into a true 5.1.

If the filmmaker is still alive, he/she'll often sit thru the mix (my end of it) and have some new sound FX cut to modernize the sound, and maybe even try to rearrange some dialogue he didn't like or tweak the music levels (since we have separated stems, he can change either DIA, MX or FX without affecting the other two.) The Superman DVD WB has out right now is a good example of this from a sound point of view (also a great movie).

Coincidentally, The Natural was released and is owned by TriStar Pictures, which was bought in the late 80s by Columbia, which was itself bought in the early 1990s by... Sony. (fair disclosure: Sony PIctures Entertainment is my current employer).

Re:HD is overrated

[Tweekster]

Um well considering film has a much higher resolution than anything "high def" high def is a joke compared to film quality.

Re:HD is overrated

[DumbSwede]

HD is for BIG Screens and on them it looks great. Trust me as I have an HD setup with an 8 foot wide screen. Your picture shows two monitors with less than 600 pixels for each screen shown side by side in a 1400 wide jpg taken with a digital camera. There are so many loss steps on the way to showing the final image the mind boggles. To show the actual difference you would need to compare the image of a good 1920 x 1080 jpg vs a 720 x 480 jpg at full size -- the first to the HD, the other to the DVD. If you can't see the difference then you are blind.

I've never understood why people expect good quality when the view a film in the theater, then don't care if it looks like shit at home. Now granted DVD isn't shit, but VERY BIG SCREENS will be the rule in the very near future and they look best with a good HD feed.

Re:HD is overrated

[NeMon'ess]

Thanks for the info. Why will the dust changing from white to black make a difference? If the scan is done on the original negative, the colors will later be digitally inverted anyway, including the dust.

Does Super 35 only occupy what had been the optical audio, and not the magnetic audio?

Lastly, what's up with Panasonic mastering Blu-ray with MPEG-4 before Sony?

Re:HD is overrated

[iluvcapra]

Why will the dust changing from white to black make a difference?

A defect on the film itself is always black, regardless of what kind of film it is (we're talking about stuff that happens to the film after it's been removed from the camera). If you have a black defect on the neg, and then reverse it, it goes white. A positive doesn't have to be reversed, so the dust on it stays black. Think about it: take a photo with your lens cap on, and then sprinkle some dust on the negative, and then print it. The negative is clear, and the dust effectively dodges the positive. Meanwhile, sprinkling dust on the positive has zero effect, since the positive already has 100% density.

Does Super 35 only occupy what had been the optical audio, and not the magnetic audio?

Couple things: first, there are no magnetic 35mm processes in current circulation. The only (theatrical) processes that used magnetic 35mm film (like Fox CinemaScope) exposed full aperture and it was very trouble-prone (oxide would flake off prints, prints could only be made at real-time, etc.) 70mm always used magnetic tracks on the print, but the existing number of 70mm projection booths is probably in the bare hundreds at this point, and these all presently use the Dolby Digital or DTS. When I say 35mm mag, I mean a piece of audio tape, 35mm wide with some perfs so that it can travel through a film mechanism. Such was the gold standard audio recording format from 1950 until 1998 or so (we still make mag film for archival, but our first choice when storing the mixes is MO disks, DLT, AIT, LTO, pick your poison).

Second: Super 35 is a camera format, or really a family of camera formats, which is to say, film exposed with a Super 35 aperture is not meant to be delivered on a release print. Again if memory serves, Super 35 is full aperture, and then matted, optically printed and anamorphosed to fit in the space on the release print allotted to image. There are really only two kinds of prints in theaters, "FLAT" (which is 1.85, spherical, matted to fit) and "SCOPE" (which is 2.35-2.4, anamorphic). Super 35, Vistavision, Cinemascope etc. all get the squeeze. I am not a DP, and I'm getting this all from my old ASC manual, so take it with a grain of salt.

Super 35 is a silent format; film exposed Super 35 cannot hold an analogue optical sound track, so it gets matted/squeezed into a format that can. Theoretically, you could ship prints without an analogue track and just have Dolby Digital (between the perfs) and SDDS (another one of those pesky Sony formats that started strong but faded in the stretch). But, most of the theaters on Earth can only show analogue optical sound, Dolby SR at best, so the optical track is retained for compatibility.

Lastly, what's up with Panasonic mastering Blu-ray with MPEG-4 before Sony?

It's a very big company, and the people who work for SPE really have zero interaction with the people from SCE, so I couldn't tell you. I would observe that Sony Pictures always has this independent feel -- it's much more Columbia Pictures than a division of Sony, just as Warners is very much it's own thing, and not a subsidiary of a magazine-internet service company. FWIW, I have a Quad G5 under my desk (just like all sound designers, regardless of their studio), and not a Vaio (as all the corporate employees seem to).

I would also observe that Panasonic/Matsushita does not (or no longer does) own a movie studio (they had controlling interest in Universal thru the 90s). Since the consumer electronics div isn't afraid of goring any oxes in a media division, and isn't still trying to sell the ATRACS coder (the basis of MiniDisk, true, but also the basis of SDDS), they may have more freedom to maneuver. Just an observation.

Re:HD is overrated

[Chandon Seldon]

Have you seen Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith?

There's a shot in the initial space battle where the camera zooms in on Anakin's fighter. Way in, far too close for the flow of the scene in the theater. That shot was for small screen SDTVs.

In filming for SDTV, there's a filming style that minimizes the effect of the low screen resolution - never have more than a couple characters on the screen at once doing important stuff, zoom way in on faces when people talk, etc.

Obviously when you watch content shot in that style on a HDTV, you won't notice much of a difference. All the extra detail you're seeing is detail that the director expected not to be there - you get to see pores and nosehairs on the actor, and there's no plot-relevent details that aren't taking up half the screen anyway.

For a better comparison, you'd need to watch a movie that suffered in the conversion from theater to pan & scan SDTV. Try a high buget war movie like Saving Private Ryan.

The problem is - those movies haven't been released on HD media yet, because there is no mature HD disk format yet. In fact, the only significant HDTV content is broadcast television - which is simultaniously broadcast as SDTV, so it's filmed for SDTV.

In conclusion, HDTV will be amazing once content is widely availble that takes proper advantage of it. The personal electronics companies really need to remind the media content companies who's really important, and get them to release functional HDTV content rather than screwing around and costing the hardware companies billions of dollars by stalling.

Re:HD is overrated

[Chandon Seldon]

Uhh... assuming that you're at the optmal view distance, what other possible advantage could an image quality jump produce?

Re:HD is overrated

[Chandon Seldon]

Because you can definately compare a resultion difference by scaling both of them down to a smaller resolution than either source image...

Next thing you'll have 16 color VGA screenshots to prove that a $100 and a $500 video card have the same image quality.

Re:HD is overrated

[uradu]

Depends entirely on what you mean by optimal viewing distance. The THX recommendation is a 36 degree viewing angle. At DVD resolution it's kind of hard to achieve that without seeing pixels.

Re:HD is overrated

[NeMon'ess]

Thanks again for the additional info.

I understood from the start why the dust changes from black to white. I was asking why you mentioned it at all. On re-reading it, I see, you're just illustrating the difference between the neg and the interpositive.

I should have read wikipedia's page on "Movie projector" a long time ago. What you wrote surprised me and got me over to it. A decade ago I'd read how DTS used an optical disc and I made the assumption that SDDS and Dolby Digital did too. I had no idea they have the data stored optically between or outside the perfs.

Marketing 101

[pianoben]

Don't advertise a product that doesn't work as advertised! ...And Sony wonders why they've been doing so poorly lately...

Down with Optical Media

[TheRequiem13]

Seriously- it's past its prime.
We should just be using PCs with TV outputs. I use that at school, and it looks great. Mind you, it's S-Video to a non-HD TV, but I assume with would be equally pretty with DVI to HDTV.

Why are will still using 30 year old damage prone media?

I smell class action

[ip_freely_2000]

You just know that Joe and Jane Consumer will walk into Best Buy and NOT buy something they think they are getting. You have to think that even companies like Best Buy are going to be pissed having to deal with upset customers and spending time restocking stuff.

But we have to remember this is Sony, so you can't expect something smart or fair for the consumer.

Re:I smell class action

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, when I went to buy my iPod Shuffle, they were all out, so I asked what else they had. The guy pointed me to some SanDisk models, which he said were pretty good. He also mentioned that they had some Sony models, and then pointed to the returns shelf where they had a pile of them. He said that most of the Sony products get returned, and that people generally hate them. Based on the fact that I was upgrading from NetMD, I knew what he was talking about. A really good product, bogged down by crappy software and DRM. I see blu-ray (and HD-DVD) ending up the same way.

Obligatory: "But, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln...

[dpbsmith]

...how did you like the play?"

The manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves trying to bring flawed, faulty, and generally unfinished products to market... presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences.

I do believe Blu-Ray and HDDVD are well on their way to becoming the quadraphonic sound of the new millennium.

Wow

[MrSquirrel]

So it can't play high-def movies (except the ones I already own in another format that I port over) and it holds less (a lot less) per dollar than a hard drive. ...I think I'll just get a hard drive. Thanks for NOTHING Sony -- this is your format, yet due to "copy protection issues" it won't even play your movies. Garbage... I expected a lot better from a company that's trying to push this as a viable high definition media format.

Re:Wow

[real_b0fh]

and it holds less (a lot less) per dollar than a hard drive.

what? a blu-ray disc (not player, the DISC) is more expensive-per-byte than a hard disk?

this cannot be right.

Re:Wow

[MrSquirrel]

1 GB per dollar - Memorex Blu-Ray write-once disc: $25, 25 GB
http://focuscamera.com/sc/froogle-lead-1.asp?id=96 4669100&rf=froogle&dfdate=08_10_2006&sid=362233316

2.9 GB per dollar - Samsung Spinpoint: $55, 160 GB harddrive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822152020

And that is just the blu-ray disc, not the drive.

Re:Wow

[Renegrade]

Expected better from Beta-toting Sony?

I dunno, this seems like par for the course for me. Like MiniDisc. Or Universal Media Disc. Or the Telescreen series of the Trinitron. Or the Sony(TM) Special(R) Super(C) Magic(R)(TM)(C) RootKit Deluxe(R)(C)(TM)(Patents Pending)(Lawsuits Pending)(Library Books Need to be Returned Pending).

Or how they had to recall every PS3 a week after launch, since none of them could play anything BUT pirated games.

Oh wait, that last bit hasn't happened yet, forget I said it.

Also, I sort of spent history class snoozing.. I can't remember if that Telescreen thing happened before or after 2006..

Re:Wow

[itlurksbeneath]

Well, to be fair, when writable DVD's came out, the media surpassed 1 GB per dollar, but now they are down to about 0.07 cents per GB. It's all about availability and market demand. Once one of the formats catches on, the drive prices will drop (remember when DVD writers were 500 or 600 bucks a pop?) and the media prices will drop too.

Re:Wow

[monopole]

If this format catches on. If it doesn't the media price rises as availability drops. DAT, MiniDisc, UMD...

Re:Wow

[PlasticArmyMan]

$60 a month for a reasonable internet connection and some company who eventually releases decent quality movies over the internet:

Priceless.

Re:Wow

[itlurksbeneath]

True. One of them will catch on, though. It's inevetable. People are interested in HD. The government is pushing the deployment and adoption of HD whether we like it or not. One of these formats will win, that's a guarantee. Which one, however, is the $419,834.20 question ($64,000 in 1958 taking in to account inflation).

Re:Wow

[BoberFett]

The government is pushing the deployment and adoption of HD whether we like it or not.

No. They. Are. Not.

How many times can this misinformation be strewn about? The US government is pushing broadcasts to digital. Not high definition.

Re:Wow

[wileyAU]

Comparing magnetic hard drive to optical disks isn't exactly fair. Optical disks are an archival format and hard drives aren't. Compare blu-ray to hd-dvd, dvd, and cd-r in price/gb.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Optical disks are an archival format and hard drives aren't.

After like half of my Philips CD-Rs, bought about 5 years ago and stored in a cool, dark place, became unreadable (some of them can't even be recognised by a LITE-ON drive now), and took all the pr0n stored on them down, I don't entrust anything important to be archived on optical disks (and I hoped that they will really last as promised). Surprisingly, my 11 years old 300MB HD is still working just fine when I power an old 486 box to see how it feels.

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I can shake the bluray media and not have to worry about the read/write heads breaking.

Re:Wow

[MrSquirrel]

If you wanted to shake media, CD-R's would still be a better GB/$ deal:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=929365&Sku=K51-1060&SRCCO DE=GOOGLEBASE&CMP=OTC-GOOGLEBASE 200 CD-R's x 700 MB = 140,000 MB ~ 140 GB. $30. 140 GB / $30 = 4.6 GB/$. Blu-Ray was 1 GB/$.

Why would you want to shake it anyways?

New Feature Set

[Phraghg]

The funny thing will be if this "feature" makes it onto the Playstation 3.

Great, a $600 machine that's "not a games machine" but can't play movies. Just what I needed!

Not unheard of...

[cthellis]

(didn't many initial DVD drives on the PC do this as well?) ...but still retarded in this day and age.

Messing up a huge business opportunity *again*

[viking2000]

The movie and music industy are tiny in economic contribution compared to the hardware industry.

The total income if the whole world were to buy new HDTVs, HD Entertainment systems and players, as well as a buch of HD DVDs is an order of magnitude higher than what hollywood and RIAA stands to loose if you make it all easy and user friendly.

Instead they mess this huge opportunity up with copy protection BS.

I have no problem buying a few hundred HD DVDs for $20 each over a few years *even* if I can get a copy from a neighbour for free. The $20 gives me a nice full color case and DVD, and a nice looking collection.

Re:Messing up a huge business opportunity *again*

[Anonymous Coward]

It is too bad that the hardware companies dont just say "FUCK YOU" we will tell you what you are gonna implement or no one will make a player for you.

The content industries are insignificant compared to most industries. Why does anyone bother to listen to them.

They should come up with a new storage format and say "this is what you are gonna use, and how you are gonna use it"

Re:Messing up a huge business opportunity *again*

[cdrguru]

You are more interested in the pretty case than the movie?

OK, the rest of the world wants the movie and doesn't want to pay $20 for it. They want to pay $0 and will build up a huge collection they can loan out to their friend, neighbors and anyone else on the Internet just so they can show everyone their HUGE collection.

While there might be some people perfectly willing to pay $20 for a nice case, the folks that want the movie for $0 are far in the majority. Piracy is here to stay and unless the media companies take draconian action to protect their products, they will sell ONE copy to the first guy who can rip it. The rest of the world - except for you - gets it for free after that.

Re:Messing up a huge business opportunity *again*

[trdrstv]

Nope.

People will buy a product if it is what they want, reasonably priced and readily available. iTMS is a good example of this. Did you know Warner Bros Pictures has the lowest rate of movies pirated? They also have the most DVD's available for $10 or less.

Re:Messing up a huge business opportunity *again*

[bnenning]

Piracy is here to stay

Correct.

unless the media companies take draconian action to protect their products, they will sell ONE copy to the first guy who can rip it.

Both parts of this are just wrong. First, CDs and DVDs are easily copyable, yet they continue to sell. Second, "draconian" DRM will likely hurt the media companies more than it helps. Eliminating piracy is impossible; even if they come up with DRM that actually works (which among other things would require mandating "trusted" computing everywhere), all it takes is one guy willing to point a decent camera at a monitor. Furthermore, the more obnoxious the DRM, the better a pirated copy is in comparison. I'll pay for DVDs because I know I can easily rip them for more convenient access. If I couldn't, I'd either do without or acquire the content through less legal means.

Re:Obligatory: "But, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln

[StressGuy]

"The manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves trying to bring flawed, faulty, and generally unfinished products to market... presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences."

I bet this is why Longhorn is taking so long.....

{...ducks....}

It's all but official: Sony is backing HD-DVD

[exley]

Seriously, with as piss-poor of a job as Sony has done on Blu-Ray, one might start thinking they want it to fail. As far as this particular drive goes I'm sure it will be a huge hit, as oh-so-many consumers are willing to drop a ton of jack so that they can have something that is "useful as a "storage device.""

In other news...

[brainnolo]

rumors say that the first Blu-ray player won't even have a laser, because they want to introduce the technology gradually.

The wonders of lock-in development

[franksands]

This is really fantastic:

commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections.

Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that's bundled with Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook

So if I bought a blu-ray film tomorrow, the only way to watch a movie I legally bought is either buy a new TV that supports HDCP, which obviously won't be cheap, or I will have to buy a new computer that actually can play the damned thing. And they still can't fathom why there are so much piracy. Why on earth would I buy something that I can only play in one specific device? Will I have to "activate" my movie if I buy a new player? This is the only reason to support DRM: to lock the customer in a specific hardware.

Remove copy protection and make more money overall

[ksattic]

Am I the only one who strongly believes that if they remove all content protection from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, the drive and software manufacturers will stand to make more money, even after factoring in rampant piracy, than with the current mess they have? So what idiot decided to spend all this money developing content protection that restricts the format to virtual unusability, giving it a dreadful image in the process? Moreso, what idiot thought that this would be a good way to increase profits?

Ironic

[dasunst3r]

They reveal this during the "Experience More 2006" event, and yet users are NOT going to experience more with this restriction. I wish I could tag this "DUMBA**" like they do on fark.com. The "IRONIC" tag might work too.

But then again, suppose users are going to "experience more" headaches and nazi-like DRM.

You think that's bad...

[TheOldSchooler]

I heard the first few batches of PS3's, while not being able to handle games on DVD or Blu-Ray, will still make a heckuva martini.

Sheer moronitude

[Dachannien]

Sony Electronics: Well, we're ready to sell the first Blu-Ray players, but there's this little unfinished DRM issue preventing us from getting started before HD-DVD makes any headway.
Sony Pictures Entertainment: Sorry, we need our DRM.
Sony Electronics: We could be selling these players and achieving market dominance, though.
Sony Pictures Entertainment: DRM.
Sony Electronics: You could also be selling tons of brand new Blu-Ray discs now.
Sony Pictures Entertainment: Hello? DRM?
Sony Electronics: Our players could be in homes across America and around the world in time for the winter holiday season this year, and you'd be selling high def movies like hotcakes.
Sony Pictures Entertainment: What part of "DRM" don't you understand?
Sony Electronics: Fine, DRM, whatever. I just hope we don't become laughing stocks when we go to Australia this summer.

Re:Sheer moronitude

[geobeck]

Sony Pictures Entertainment: What part of "DRM" don't you understand?

Hilarious. Only one thing missing: Sony Pictures Entertainment (America) saying "But if we don't have our DRM, the terrorists win!!"

Re:Sheer moronitude

[slittle]

Sony Electronics: Fine, DRM, whatever. I just hope we don't become laughing stocks when we go to Australia this summer.

If you think it's summer in the southern hemisphere, you're already laughing stocks.

Re:Sheer moronitude

[mjwx]

In Australia, Its summer in about 4 months.

There seems to be some kind of time dilatation field (TDF) surrounding Australia that affects new products. This TDF seems to push the release date for most movies, music, games and technology products back by several years.

This means that in Australia we'll be laughing about Sony's last failure this summer rather than expecting their latest failure.

Also

[DysenteryInTheRanks]

"Sony also unveiled a 120-inch plasma screen television limited to black-and-white programming; a version of the PlayStation that only plays games toggled in on the front panel in assembler; and the 'BurnMan,' a silicon-over-plexiglass contraption that scans in and verifies $100 bills before slowly igniting them for your viewing pleasure, one at a time."

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

simply wonderful :)

Re:Also

[rts008]

I just spewed beer over my monitor, you insensitive clod!

LOL! Thanks for a good laugh, but I'm worried you may be more right than wrong.
Sony seems determined to self destruct in a most spectacular way.

Oh sweet, sweet irony!

[1cebird]

Ahhhhhh.

Firmware Upgradeable?

[wwiiol_toofless]

When the software dev un-lags, assuming the hardware is capable, couldn't they release a firmware patch to correct the injustice?

It reminds me of many MMOGs initial releases:

"You can buy Game-X now!, you just won't be able to login to the server and play for 2-3 weeks. l33t!"

Re:Firmware Upgradeable?

[Stripe7]

Nope, it requires chips with encryption keys burnt into them to function. If those chips are not there, it will never work. If they put in eeproms that can have the keys downloaded into them, pirates will have those all over the net within days.

Great Idea!

[the jerk store]

...and says that despite not being able to play commercial content, the drive is still useful as a "storage device", .... The Sony BWU100A has a write speed of 2x and will be available this month for AU$1399.

I'm a little short on storage space in my house. I think I'll go buy a new Range Rover, put it on blocks on my driveway and fill it with junk from the attic.

Re:Great Idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

You own buddy. Nice analogy. Thanks for the laugh!

Re:Great Idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll go buy a new Range Rover, put it on blocks on my driveway and fill it with junk from the attic.

Are you going to put all that junk inside your trunk?

Re:Great Idea!

[Overzeetop]

Of course not. The engine isn't hooked up to the transmission or the gas line, so you can just take it out and store extra stuff under the hood. It's a special feature of the "first edition".

You for got 4.5!

[Dr. Eggman]

4.5 Blame Pirates.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Bonker]

That's kinda given for Sony, so I didn't bother.

"Hmm... Earthquake today."

"ITS TEH PIRATS THEYS IN OUR BASE STEALIN OUR DVDS"

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Keith Russell]

The devil in the details is Sony's split personality:

1. Consumer Electronics division develops really nice content format.
2. CE division promotes the hell out of new content format.
3. Big Media division catches wind of new content format, and demands DRM shackles.
4. Accountants see how much more profit Big Media division brings in, and forces CE division to comply.
5. New content format lands with a thud in the marketplace.
6. One division or the other abandons new content format.

I say "one division or the other" because it varies. CE will hang on to formats that are useful outside of Big Media's influence. Beta lived on in professional circles, MiniDisc found new life in NetMD, and Memory Stick is still their preferred camera memory format. UMD looks like it's dead to both sides. (PSP : UMD movies :: chicken : egg) Looks like CE is already losing interest in Blu-Ray, with this non-Big-Media-compliant drive.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[stunt_penguin]

It seems that it's not that the drive won't play the movies, it's that there are no HDCP-enabled (crippled) graphics cards out there that will decode the video according to the DRM spec.

After the fiasco with Blu-ray and the required DRM allegedly being a big contributor to the PS3's delays, this is Sony embarrassing themselves with their DRM once again. Situations liek this just give more time for HD-DVD to gain market share while the Japanese giant flounders.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[mabhatter654]

of the two players this round Blu-ray is better from the political point of view. HD-DVD is heavily tied to Microsoft formats the encoding, the menu programing, and the encryption, ensureing they embrace, extend, extinguish yet another market. Blu-Ray is at least using Open formats like Java and h.264 so that they aren't positioning themselves as an abusive monopoly.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're only better if your politics could be understood by a drooling idiot. Fortunately for you guys, it doesn't take much to train morons to chant "M$ EVIL"

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Chowderbags]

Well at least we know that they can't blame pirates for global warming!

Re:You for got 4.5!

[theLOUDroom]

MiniDisc found new life in NetMD

Nope. I'm not sure where you're getting your information from but NetMD was too little, too late.

MiniDisc should have been the next floppy disc, but Sony royally fucked themselves on that one.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[jasonwc]

Bluray and HD-DVD both support MPEG-2, Microsoft's VC1 codec, and H.264. Currently, most released HD-DVD movies were encoded in VC1 and most if not all Bluray titles were encoded in MPEG-2. This doesn't mean that one or both will begin using H.264 in the future, which is clearly the superior format in terms of quality. As both formats support all three formats, I don't see why you believe that HD-DVD is tied to VC1?

What I can't understand is why in the hell Bluray movies are being encoded in MPEG-2. They're currently using single layer 25 GB disks because the technology to mass produce dual-layer disks just isn't operational yet. With this limited amount of space (for HD content) it makes no sense to use a bitrate hungry format like MPEG-2. They would be far better off using H.264 of VC1. The use of VC1 and the 5 GB space advantage has given HD-DVD the edge in video quality. Numerous reviews have stated that HD-DVD movies are incredible in detail and clarity while Bluray is generally disappointing.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Anonymous Coward]

PSP : UMD movies :: chicken : egg

Hm, so you're saying all I have to do to get a cheap PSP is to buy a UMD movie and hatch it?

Re:You for got 4.5!

[dalleboy]

Perhaps if they will convert to Pastafarianism.

Re:You for got 4.5!

[strikethree]

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't their hardware divisions produce vastly more cash than their media division/s?

strike

Re:You for got 4.5!

[Chowderbags]

I have been touched by his noodley appendage! (not that one, you sickos!)

Adios, HDTV

[supabeast!]

"If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"

This kind of crap is why I still don't own and HDTV, and doubt I ever will. Given all the fighting over media formats and DRM systems, I doubt that HDTV will make it as a standard. By the time the manufacturers and content creators get all this crap worked out, something new will have come along, the porn industry will be on board, and HDTV will go quietly into the night, with old sets serving as a reminder of why manufacturers need to stop bickering over control and just get the damned formats done up front.

Re:Adios, HDTV

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care about Blu-Ray movies OR HD-DVD movies really. I want a high-capacity optical disc thats cheap ($1 per disc is cheap to me) that can hold 30GB to 50GB so I can use it for backing up my computers. Even better, sell them as 100 disc changer writers for backup purposes. The technology is already there with CD changers, why can't they make burner changers while they're at it and use a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive to read the discs? The fact of the matter is that consumer backup technology has simply not kept up with hard drive technology so I have no affordable way to backup 500GB of data every week or so and store it offsite without resorting to using an external hard drive that I swap around. Sorry, but IMHO hard drives are NOT backups, tapes or optical media are backups. Try finding an affordable tape drive that will hold 50 GB on a reasonably priced tape. Now figure you need 10 of those to do a full backup and it gets to be a pain in the ass.

Who are they marketing to?

[beoba]

Who, exactly, would buy this? Is Sony *trying* to lose?

Oh, Lordy...

[PateraSilk]

To think I was actually excited about blue-laser media a couple of years ago. Well, I'll see the first actual workable products around 2011.

HD

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care anymore abot HD. I am legally blinf and slowly loosing my vision. By the time they get something that works if ever, it wont matter to me. I have been waiting for pices to drop and for a 1080p 50" Plasma, SED etc. that I can afford for so long. I don't think it will happen for me. I just hope I can keep my job for long enough to retire.

the real hold up for the Sony drive is the built in root kit system.

what a dork!

[nxs212]

"If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"
If you want HD content on your TV, get a DirectTV HD Tivo.
If you want to watch blu ray discs, buy a stand-alone drive for $1000 and watch those 3 or 5 blu movies.
If you want to watch HD movies on your tv/plasma/lcd/projector screen using your pc w/ blu ray drive as the source - don't!
For $1000 you can buy TWO terabytes of storage, dump it on your pc and watch HD content for the next 3 or 5 years without upgrading anything. bittorrent and newsgroups should be more than enough. If you are still on a dial-up...well, then you probably can't afford that blu ray to begin with nor the expensive blanks.

Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[Travoltus]

Corporations should be the ones who decide media specifications and the role of consumers is to choose which corporate offering is best.

When corporations decide for consumers what to choose, that is capitalism, when consumers force corporations to make what consumers really want, that is called communism and America will not tolerate communism!!!

[libertarian parody off]

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

You Commie.

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

When corporations decide for consumers what to choose, that is capitalism, when consumers force corporations to make what consumers really want, that is called communism and America will not tolerate communism!!!

and what is your opinion of open source software?

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[Travoltus]

Open source? It damages corporations' ability to make a profit. All code should be copyrighted DRM'd, patented and assigned a market value. Darned communists bypassing the market, don't they know that the market is God?!

[parody off]

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[RoadDoggFL]

The [parody] tags are too subtle for the average /.er...

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[danielk1982]

Open Source works within the realm of copyright law. It is not forced by government or regulation.

I doubt any libertarians have ideological problems with it.

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

A/S/L ?

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[vijayiyer]

If consumers really wanted a high density, DRMless, data storage medium, movie format, they'd get it. But consumers are ignorant, and really don't care. There's no force involved here.

Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Fair!

[Buran]

Or perhaps it's no longer a parody but the actual truth. Corporations will do quite a bit to force us to give them money.

Re:Obligatory: "But, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln

[grasshoppa]

presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences.

I predict that soon, because of these observations, consumers will have to file an NDA before purchasing one of these systems. They will be forbidden from taking pictures of these things, or speaking about them outside of their family ( don't want to be draconian now, do we? ).

Serious men in serious black suits will be checking up on you to make sure you don't tell your friends how crappy your new bluray/hddvd is.

Take gun, point at foot, pull trigger......

[8127972]

..... and you have yet another example of the brillant marketing geniuses of Sony at work.

Mod parent down... GENIIUUUSSSSS!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... Mod parent down for the must useless and off topic comment ever.
Nobody cares how obscure your music is, or what you listen to while you play some game.

The music is quite relevant

[Travoltus]

Since it describes the state of affairs of Sony's BD drive.

Not that it matters to Sony execs with mod points...

Like a reallllly stupid spider

[McGiraf]

... they are caught in their own web. PATHETIC.

Industrial sabutage

[edwardpickman]

But won't the player play BD content that has been cracked and then burned onto a BluRay disc in the format that the player will accept?

No but for so bizarre reason it will play HD disks just fine.

More Products

[shoma-san]

Does this remind anyone of other Sony products like lets say "Star Wars Galaxies" that didn't work quite as well as promised? Remember installing the software with glee and logging in for the first time? You bought the collectors edition and were wearing your way to cool exclusive sunglasses when the servers crashed? And then you didn't jump on your land speeder or climb into your Xwing fighter, did you? No, you tried to kill a butterfly with your stupid melee knife and got killed.

Well, you can't trick me again Sony. Fuck Sony and all your crapy products that aren't worth a damn because I'm not going to buy them!

In other news today, the author previewed Windows Vista that didn't work quite as well as promised... As he began to install the software with glee...

Re:More Products

[PateraSilk]

And then you didn't jump on your land speeder or climb into your Xwing fighter, did you? No, you tried to kill a butterfly with your stupid melee knife and got killed.

Hahaha. My roommates did all those things and more. I remember watching them play once and being amazed at how boring it was. I've now seen WOW level-grinding and it still boggles my mind at how bad SWG was.

My favorite memory was coming up to one roommate playing Enemy Territory on one computer while another made bleeping noises as his SWG character sat and kinda twitched. He was running a macro to level and it was going to take a couple of hours.

Re:More Products

[shoma-san]

I bought the game when it first came out and alot of the features you mention werenit in the game yet. The expansion fixed this but not after thousands of players quit.

Is today April 1

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to cater for the worldwide demand that Microsoft Vista be delivered this year the International community, led by the United Nations, has agreed to Microsoft's request that each month this year be duplicated. This is retrospective.

A Microsoft spokesman siad "As the whole world economy is dependant on Microsoft Windows, this move is essential in order to remove the threat of the collapse of civilisation as we know it should Vista's release be delayed to the year 2007. This change, while giving a slight inconvenience to a few, will allow Microsoft to produce a superior product in the extra 14 months that this move allows."

A Microsoft patch is available to produce the correct calendar for 2006 to Windows XP users with the WGA from the Microsoft site by April(2) 15th.

While you may think that this is the eighth month, it has now been declared as the second fourth month, so it is indeed April, as was last month.

sony's new theme song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear idiots, it's a song but it does well in describing sony's blu-ray DVD failures.

Could be worse.

[Mike the Mac Geek]

You cut be cut, dried, and microwaved.

Fellow Pitchshifter fan here. Had to interject.

Awesome

[joshier]

I couldn't have asked for a better start.

Wait, what?.. It doesn't play blue-ray dvd's, that's fu**** sh**!

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

fucking shit?

what is your problem, moron?

*cough* *cough*

[Cynonamous Anoward]

a little tip - www.divx.com - DivX 6.1 Supports 720p. plans for 1080i and even 1080p in the works, all with advanced MPEG-4 encoding features, to preserve high quality at extremely low bitrates. DVD players should be out in time for Xmas, at price points only slightly above current SD DVD players. DivX 6 can squish a full length HD movie onto a single DVD, including multiple audio and subtitle tracks. screw new discs, new hardware, new DRM, and new high prices. kthnx.

Re:*cough* *cough*

[teutonic_leech]

eXactly!! HD-DVD is not going to kill BlueRay - it's going to be DivX, XVid, H.264, etc.. Why bother creating these huge disks that nobody needs? Besides, the rest of the world (outside U.S.) is steadily increasing bandwidth while decreasing the cost to the consumer. People in Japan and Korea already download entire movies in a matter of minutes... I guess we might have that over here in the U.S. maybe by 2015, but I wouldn't bet my house on any of those storage standards/devices. The network is the computer - never was more true than today.

Re:*cough* *cough*

[Slaimus]

Why does DivX even need to "support" a specific resolution? What is keeping you from creating 2160p content in DivX? It is just a codec right?

Re:*cough* *cough*

[khellendros1984]

I think the parent is referring to high-res output to television, using a DVD player that supports decoding from divx/xvid.

Re:*cough* *cough*

[Cynonamous Anoward]

Not really, and it kind of misses the bigger point. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to go into much detail about how cool it's really going to get. See, as you might have guessed, I know all this because I work for DivX, I am an engineer here, I am in the office right now, and I am staring at a large pile of very cool toys, which I helped make. DivX has just filed for IPO, and we are in the quiet period, so I have to be careful what info I give out. All I can give you is a bunch of published, but not well known info. So to give you the general idea: DivX 6 does tons of things which vastly improve quality, while squashing the files down even futher. Technically, nothing prevents you from doing what you describe, it is simply the quality profiles that we use to certify DVD players as meeting our interoperability standards. These profiles are guidelines only, and the encoder CAN encode outside of them (although new versions will warn you). But we make no guarantees about the ability of hardware decoders to play such files. The profiles are to help you make sure that you are buying devices, and making or downloading movies, which will all play nice together. The other reason for the profiles is the emergence of hardware encoding devices. There is an emerging market for DivX capable recorders, digital cameras, and hybrid devices, like linux based net appliances. These devices need stricter encoding contstraints in order to produce files that will play back on whatever player you stick them in. In other words, yes, you COULD encode a huge resolution with any DivX codec, but you would be hard pressed to find a DVD player that could play it on a TV, in NTSC, let alone 720 or 1080. You'd also have trouble finding codec settings that struck a good balance between quality and file size. A 2 hour DivX 5.0 file, even in 720p, would be a long download, and only play on a fairly hefty PC. Oh yeah, and only the DivX 6 HD profile supports non-square pixels, so if you used anything older, you'd get the typical blocky scaling artifacts. But even that misses my real point from the original post. See, even if you got past all of that, you would still just have an avi file right? it's just a plain old movie, even if it's a really nice looking movie. No menus, no multiple audio languages, no subtitles, no chaptering, and no bonus "making of" movies. So, what would you say if I told you that I have a 2 hour, 720p movie on my hard drive? What if I told you that it had full DVD-style menus, 8 audio tracks, 8 subtitle tracks, 50 chapter points, and a making-of documentary? And if I told you that the encoding was so good you could barely tell it was encoded, even on an HDTV? Cool, no? So what if I told you that the entire file is under 4 GB? Now, how about I tell you that I'm sitting here, right now, watching a $200 DVD player PLAYING that file, off a standard DVD-R, at full resolution, on an HDTV? That you don't NEED a blue laser? That you don't have to pay $1500? That you never needed more storage space in the first place? That's the point. It's one thing to encode a huge video. It's another thing to fit the entire movie, bonus features and all, on a normal DVD, completely bypassing the need for expensive new technology. It kind of highlights the fact that the piracy-fearing tatics of companies like sony, are putting a strangle hold on innovation in digital video, does it not? There IS a better way, a cheaper way, an easier way, and a more environmentally friendly way, to watch a movie. And DivX is going to try and give it to you. I'll let you in on a secret, that will tell you exactly what the MPAA's mentality has done to the industry. We have a half-finished piece of software in house here. It can rip entire DVD's into DivX files, bonus features and everything. Entirely automated. A few mouse clicks, and your whole DVD collection is faithfully reproduced on your hard drive, as easy as ripping it with DVD decrypter, but with 1/8 the hard drive space. But it's likely that you will never see DivX release such software. Why

Re:*cough* *cough*

[Cynonamous Anoward]

whoa...wtf??? what happened to all my formatting? oh well.. sorry for the big blob of text.

Re:*cough* *cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to use DivX ;-)®© ? Just use a generic MPEG-4 part 2 ASP encoder and get the same quality without the stupid name, Gator ads, or shitty proprietary software.

Better yet, use MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264) and get vastly better quality. Oh wait! Support for that is already included in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players! Well, how about that!

Re:*cough* *cough*

[Xesdeeni]

DivX 6.1 Supports 720p. plans for 1080i and even 1080p in the works

Stay away from the standard profiles and you can do 1080p (that's 1920x1080@24p), which covers 95%+ of all movies.

DVD players should be out in time for Xmas, at price points only slightly above current SD DVD players.

A number of players that support DiVX HD (as well as WMV HD, and some that support MPEG-4 HD) have been available for well over a year.

screw new discs, new hardware, new DRM, and new high prices.

Hear! Hear!

Xesdeeni

Drives potentially OK, everything else NOT...

[posterlogo]

FTA: "Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.

The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet". Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that's bundled with Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook. The AR18GP also offers an HDCP-compliant HDMI connector, which makes it capable of playing commercial movies without issue."

This makes me think the drive may be OK in the future if (1) The PC has the appropriate HDCP compliance, and (2) The software to decrypt the HDCP becomes available. Apparently, the Sony laptop already has both these capabilities, so the title of this post "First Blu-ray Drives Won't Play Blu-ray Movies" is factually incorrect. It is not the first blu-ray drive, and the drive itself is not the issue.

That said, I'll get to my second point: FUCK SONY! Their rootkits, their proprietary bullshit formats, and now their heavily encumbered yet inferior HD format. FUCK THEM UP THEIR STUPID ASSES. Come on people, stop buying ANYTHING Sony and tell your friends.

mod parent up please

[Travoltus]

He meant that in this case, DRM has proven itself impractical and in fact harmful to a product, thus undermining its own credibility.

Sony and its massive 30 caliber shoot-itself-in-the-foot cannon is our friend in the war against DRM. They do more damage to DRM than any EFF lawsuit could ever hope to.

Re:mod parent up please

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope you're right. Because using a similar analogy: Microsoft is already shooting themselves in the foot for decades with an endless series of severe security vulnerabilities. Sadly, the public just appears to swallow shit if pushed hard enough in their throat. I fear it's gonna be the same with DRM. People just want to watch television and surf the Net. So, the manufacturers will first make everyone buy HD-ready television sets and after the incubation period, the true virus (content) will attack their victim (customer). I think we're already screwed.

Disclaimer: I own Apple stock, but strongly oppose their DRM that get applied after iTMS downloads with iTunes. That's why I use SharpMusique only. I think this is me being realistic. I don't believe in revolutions. It will not happen. Just making a few bucks from the stupid public who doesn't realize they're digging their own consumer grave. It just amazes me that almost nobody knows what DRM is and what its dangers are ... Consumer rights are like democracy: you deserve what the majority votes for (or what they pay for in the economy).

Personality disorder

[aussersterne]

Sony:

"We are not going to settle for 'profitability' like some cheap whore. Either we want ALL of the money, or you can keep your f@#($@*^%# money, god damn it."

Bah! All this new stuff...

[LuckyStarr]

All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

We had HD all along! Try Super 8 with good film. :) Gives you better resolution than 1080i.

Re:Remove copy protection and make more money over

[flooey]

Am I the only one who strongly believes that if they remove all content protection from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, the drive and software manufacturers will stand to make more money, even after factoring in rampant piracy, than with the current mess they have?

I'm sure a lot of people believe that. But would you be willing to lay several billion dollars on the line because of it?

Sony knows what it's getting with content protection. For better or for worse, they've done content protection. That's what they're comfortable with. Risking their current empire on what some people believe will work is unsettling for them.

If that kind of change is going to come, I think it will need to come from someone new, without a lot to lose. Something like an independent film distributor making $10-$15 million movies and distributing them digitally. Throw a couple hits in there so they have some money to play with, and they could really change the nature of the system. I can't see Sony or other big media companies doing that, though.

DRM

[ichigo 2.0]

The really silly thing with the HDCP requirement is that eventually the bluray format will be cracked, and then people will be able to watch bluray movies with this player on a pc that hasn't got any kind of hdcp support. So in the end it's the legal bluray viewers that end up buying new monitors, videocards and bluray drives to satisfy the hdcp requirement, while the pirates can watch them with whatever hardware they want. The media publishing industry has to be full of retards, there really isn't any other explanation.

Re:DRM

[lightversusdark]

So in the end it's the legal bluray viewers that end up buying new monitors, videocards and bluray drives to satisfy the hdcp requirement, while the pirates can watch them with whatever hardware they want.

Yes. Those people who are prepared to spend money will have to spend money. Those who won't spend money, won't.

Re:DRM

[idonthack]

I don't really know if they're retards. They could be asshole geniuses, because they're milking thousands of dollars out of anyone who buys anything.

Re:DRM

[Chandon Seldon]

I an assure you that pirate spend money - they just spend it on worthwhile things instead of replacing perfectly good computer monitors with crappier ones just because a couple corporations have conspired to try to force people to use defective software.

Re:DRM

[Midnight Thunder]

The other crazy thing, is that their copy protection is so dranconian and limiting that it gives more people a reason to want to break it.

For myself DVD provides the right balance of advantages, it is cracked today and you can buy $50 multi-region DVD players. So nothing really is appealing to me in these new formats.

Re:DRM

[swelke]

The media publishing industry has to be full of retards, there really isn't any other explanation.

No, the media publishers aren't dumb. They just underestimate the honesty of the average person. My observation has been that most people are more willing to pay for content (movies, music, etc.) than they are to spend the effort required to pirate it. The difference comes when, like with music, it actually becomes more convenient (less mental effort, less time invested) to download the content illegally than it was to just go out and buy it. I think that's why iTunes has been so successful: they've made it so that pirating a song and downloading it legally are about the same amount of work again.

That's not to say that some folks won't pirate just because they can. Most people, however, actually prefer to pay.

A product of Libertarian education?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You, sir, are in idiot."

LOL...

It was love! LOVE was the "fifth element"!

[captainjaroslav]

All along, the answer was right under their noses: "love." Too bad no encoding methods, disc formats, screen resolutions or anything else could fix the incredible cheesiness of that movie. I suppose you could edit out the God-awful theme song, that would be a step in the right direction.

YOU are a dork

[Anonymous Coward]

dude
do not talk about the newsgroups.
Most people (including many "nerds" who think they "know about teh int4rw3bs") are just plain unable to use them anyway.
this is a GOOD THING.
NOT because it's "l33t" or underground or any gay shit like that but because THE LESS YOU FUCKING TALK ABOUT IT THE LESS ATTENTION IT WILL GET FROM THE SHITBAGS WHO RUIN EVERYTHING.
GOT IT?
good.

Re:YOU are a dork

[Stringer Bell]

...THE LESS YOU FUCKING TALK ABOUT IT THE LESS ATTENTION IT WILL GET FROM THE SHITBAGS WHO RUIN EVERYTHING...

Hello. I am one of the shitbags who ruins everything. Thanks to your shouting, newsgroups as a piracy vector has come to our attention. MPAA goons are on their way to your front door. Remain where you are. Good day.

Worst. Sales Pitch. Evar.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format."

Surely I can create BluRay content WITHOUT buying a Sony Camcorder. Then again, this is Sony we are talking about.

Quit while you can!

[Anonymous Coward]

If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

Just FYI, if you quit watching TV cold turkey, that "desperate craving" goes away in a couple of months.

At this point, I no longer care who wins this round of standards fights; I've found other things to do with my time.

Do they even want to sell media?

[djrogers]

All this hullabaloo is making me think that Big Entertainment(tm) is really not interested in selling media anymore. Does it REALLY make sense that the only way for 99% of us to view HD movies is to pay the cable/sat provider for HBO-HD? Does it REALLY make sense that we needed 2 new media types and players for HD video when we all know that a 2 hour H.264 encoded HD movie would fit nicely on an old fashioned DVD? No, all that this proving is that BE(tm) wants to make purchasing HD movies difficult for us, and delay it for so long, that we'll accept their 'rental' models...

Frankly, I'm sick of it... I'upgrade my sat reciever to watch NFL in HD this fall, but I have very little desire to waste money on HD movies these days. Back when I was an HT geek I probably woulda considered it, but these days I'm far closer to being joe-sixpack than an HT geek. About the only thing that'll get me to start buying HD movies is when the ITMS starts selling them and I can store them indefinitely on my mini, take them with me on my powerbook, and re-encode them to carry on my vPod. Yeah, guess that make me one of the sheeple...

Nice quote - but not quite

[MerlynEmrys67]

-- A more elegant weapon FROM a more civilized time

Or are you saying that Linux is all ready too dated to move forward?
Time to duck and cover now

Uhm...

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

How is the philosophy of community-produced products at odds with lassez-faire capitalism? "Leave it alone" means just that - the market is free to say "effyall, I'll make my own." Taking a "hands on" approach to prevent that could be characterized as many things, but lassez-faire isn't one of them.

Voluntary, self-organized community production makes capitalism much stronger (and purer) than corporate competition alone could. Now if it's *involuntary* community production you're talking about, well then that *is* communism, at which point it has little to do with what consumers really want anymore.

Re:Uhm...

[plasmacutter]

this is true.. the problem is it's already been tampered with (see DMCA, regulations, patents, other artificial entry barriers and laws to the advantage of incumbents)..

so yeah.. "leave it alone" would work well.. once you removed all the other walls you've already assembled.

Re:Uhm...

[Travoltus]

Actually, your point is well said. I'm just making fun of neo clowns and RIAA shills who feel that they need to defend corporate efforts to control what consumers buy and what consumers do. :) My post was making fun of those who think America is a nation of, by and for the corporate elite.

BTW, Lizzy Fair would say that when the market says "I'll make my own", that's PIRACY and patent/copyright infringement. Or, "Every time you copy a DVD you bought to play on another one of your systems, you are importing COMMUNISM-er, Al Qaeda'ism, or something evil."

I should, like, blog this or something...

Think back to 1955

[popsicle67]

What if record companies all made their own players in 1955? What if they all acted like sony is now? There would be no rock and roll period! It is time to put DRM where it belongs, I just hope there's enough vaseline to stuff it all in there.

Re:Think back to 1955

[BoberFett]

Are you kidding? We'd still have rock and roll. What we would NOT have is Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. The death of the big media conglomerates may be just what we need.

and lagging software development

[ModernGeek]

and lagging software development This means that Sony is pissed off because Windows/Mac OS X and the PC Industry aren't picking up Trusted Computing by storm.

well

[JW.Axelsen.Sr.]

I thought there may have been some opinion-changing information in the full article...but after reading it, I think I understand why people do drugs, now.

They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[Inominate]

I give it a week tops between release and when the first hacks start circulating. I wouldn't be surprised if they're available before the drive.

Re:They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[Xugumad]

Disagree. There just isn't enough momentum for people to be bothered hacking these, IMHO.

Re:They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[jonnythan]

You don't even need a hack.

The two reasons were:

1) Lack of OEM PCs with HDCP-compliant video outputs.

2) Lack of commercial software supporting Blu-Ray decryption.

Solutions:

1) There are aftermarket video cards that support HDCP.

2) There are OEM versions of WinDVD that support Blu-Ray (ships with a Sony Blu-Ray notebook)

Re:They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[Section_Ei8ht]

> Disagree. There just isn't enough momentum for people to be bothered hacking these, IMHO.

I disagree with your disagree. Jon Lech Johansen of DeCSS fame is guaranteed to try hack the blu-ray/hd-dvd encryption. His goal is for a Winter 2006-2007 release of DeAACS. And you must remember, DVD Jon is not some one time hacker, as you can see by his long list of credentials

Re:They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[Nogami_Saeko]

I'd rather he didn't - at least not yet...

Wait until there is LOTS of blu-ray hardware and software out, as well as hundreds (thousands?) of movies released in the format. THEN hack it - then it will be too late for the companies to start making major changes to the hardware and software without impacting huge numbers of consumers (and risking a huge backlash).

If you hack it early, the media empirs will just make modifications to break the hack again, and if it's done early enough, they'll be able to do it without stirring up the masses

N.

Re:They WILL play blu-ray movies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't he move to America? If he tries that sort of thing there, he'd be locked up (at best). We're going to have to look elsewhere this time.

Great

[senor_meow]

Not only did Sony find a way for me to by the same movie three times (dvd,psp,blu-ray) but now I have to by the same hardware twice. Keep up the good work, I have lots of money to keep buying your (same) products.

Oh, BURN!

[Anonymous Coward]

You showed him. Libertarians sure know how to construct a cogent argument.

Just think, even as I write this, people all over the world are laughing about what morons libertarians are. And you know what? Those people are right to laugh. Why don't you get back to us when liberatarianism manages to do anything worthwhile? I mean, that's the great thing about an ideology that never gets put into practice: in theory, it's perfect. Too bad the real world didn't get the memo explaining how it should act. I really hope you fools do manage to get a state of your own somewhere, so we can watch you slowly starve to death as your ideology implodes under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

Re:Oh, BURN!

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope you fools do manage to get a state of your own somewhere, so we can watch you slowly starve to death as your ideology implodes under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

They DO have a state of their own. It's called Somalia. Think about it: No taxes, no gun control, no prohibition, no government interference in private enterprise. All you need to go into business is some guys and some guns and some place to start making drugs. It's exactly what they say they want, but they won't move there; they'd rather bring Somalia here. I'm not sure why, but I have noticed that some libertarians are uncomfortable around black people. That might have something to do with it.

crave?

[spazoid12]

"All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"

Honestly I don't crave it and don't see why any one would care. I'm just feeling kinda "done" with media. I can't watch almost anything on TV anymore without going insane and see so few movies since so many just suck now days. Why would I care to upgrade all my crap just to watch bad movies with a little more visual detail? You know what, maybe if they want to convince me to watch any of the crap they'll have to send me some free equipment and some money for my time.

Re:crave?

[rts008]

But think of that 20 minutes of commercials each hour your missing- they're soooo much better in HD!
Really, the Geico Gecko never looked so good.

All joking aside, i agree 100% with you. Trying to watch TV also drives me insane. (see above)

I was spoiled in the old days when commercials were only at 15 minute intervals (one interruption for a half hour show), then it became every 10 minutes, now- forget it.

And yes, the ratio of good movies to total # of movies is way, way low.

Thanks to my love of reading, I can still keep myself entertained. BTW, if you are into sci-fi and fantasy, try Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/). Good stuff there! Jim Baen has the best idea yet for distributing media in this age that I've seen. Eric Flint (one of the authors featured in the library) has a good right up of the "method to the madness" of the Baen Free Library that makes for informative/insightful reading.

so wait....

[SQLz]

The Blueray player can't play offical movies because of the copy protection...only pirated movies. Thats awesome.

Misleading..

[zeeroj]

This whole slashdot article is misleading. The drive itself is 100 percent capable of playing movies. It's Windows and PC hardware that aren't ready for HD movies. Keep in mind people, HD-DVD uses the same DRM, right down to every last line of code. So when PCs have HDMI outputs and software that'll playback BD movies, commercial movies will be just fine. Nothing to see here, move along

I'll finish that for you

[Anonymous Coward]

and like shitty music.

step 7

[ronanbear]

Short sighted Sony accountant decides that since Big Media division continues to make pile of money and CE division keeps screwing up the Big Media division should get more prominence within company.

Dear slashdot,

[Mongoose]

Bluray isn't just Sony anymore than OpenGL Kronos/ARB is just Nvidia. I just want to remind all you preteens that post here, before you go off on MySpace and PS3 jokes. This is just another meme I, like other older posters, don't like. At least get your facts correct. ( Also Sony is very important for OpenGL, so I guess you can protest OpenGL by not using your mac ha ha. )

Thanks,
Older and Wiser

What if...

[cnerd2025]

...I wanted to protect my intellectual property by using copy protection for my DVDs? If the Almighty RIAA (hallowed be Thy name) wills it, "Artists' Rights" must be protected! War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

HD formats

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope both formats fail.

I work in the pro video industry, and I regularaly use a consumer DVD player for a source, and run it through a quality real time scaler (such as Folsom's ImagePRO) to get it to HD for viewing on a native HD flat panel. What's really intersting to me is that for 99% of content that you find in movies, a good quality scaler can make standard def DVD look just as good as HD.

Now, most consumers have never seen a good quality scaler, as the stuff the put in most TV sets is junk. But, the price on the chips that make good scalers are dropping like rocks, so I don't imagine it'll be long before you can get decently priced pro quality scaling boxes at home.

The simple truth is that for most real life video sources, the jump from SD to HD is minimal enough that a good scaling algorithm can create a result that looks good enough at HD.

That being the case, why do I want to carry around the baggage of all that extra storage space on my media server?

Re:HD formats

[Chandon Seldon]

Yup. Having an algorithim make up 75% of your pixels is definately just as good as having all the real pixels to begin with.

But less is more!

[Jugalator]

Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday

In Sony World, less is truly more.

Reality Check.

[HornWumpus]

A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.

A raw copy of a DVD is often less then 4.5 gig. Very few actually fill both layers, many are single layer from the factory. Your definition of high quality is factory compressed plus some. You can choose whatever definition you like but that's one I'm going to have to disagree with.

With normal MPEG 2 your 8GB DVD becomes more like 64GB.

Again you argue from a false premise of a typical DVD being 8GB. Scale all numbers as appropriate.

Then factor in your newer compression techniques and we come back down to

Again we delve into judgement calls. IMO Divx does OK getting a typical 4.5 GB movie down to CD capacity (it was a target why back when). That's a MPEG2/Divx ratio of about 6. Which puts HD content within range of going onto a 4.5GB single layer DVD?R (assuming we're collectivly doing better and that the CPUcycle/FramePixle ratio goes up with moores law, switch to HD equal to about 8 years). 4.5GB will be a target size for HD movie downloads. A HDTV capable DVD player with loads of CODECS preinstalled will no-doubt sell like hotcakes.

Shit, the HD video I shoot with the HDR HC1 isn't even full 1080i res and it comes to 10GB an hour.

What kind of encoding is built into that? Not really relavent to the discussion when you can basically 'spend' all the CPU you need to on encoding.

Re:Reality Check.

[modecx]

I don't know what crack you're smoking, but just about every DVD from a major studio I've played is in fact double layer, and most of that space is used. This is even true of very old discs!

The bargin bin movies you find at Wal-Mart are usually single layer and fill the 4.5GB, true... However, saying that very few DVDs are both double layer, and use the full space alloted is complete BS. It's more like most, or close to nearly all as the situation is today.

Sony's pissed? That makes us even

[defender_champion]

>This means that Sony is pissed off because
>Windows/Mac OS X and the PC Industry aren't
>picking up Trusted Computing by storm.

Yeah, I really want to give Sony tools to write an even BETTER rootkit with hardware enforcement.
I'm pissed off at Sony. Since I'm not buying their products (electronics OR content), what they do with Blue-Ray doesn't matter to me.

Born Losers

[gwiner]

Gee, big surprise, another Sony product format DOA. I would swear sometimes they are DETERMINED to lose. I can't think of any other CE company that has such a lousy track record with failed formats. This must be a new record though - they're putting themselves out of the market before they even launch.

Re:Sony's pissed? That makes us even

[Anonymous Coward]

HERE HERE!!!

More sony execs with mod points?

[Travoltus]

Maybe they'll run out chasing me down for calling their Blu-Ray systems 'dysfunctional'? :)

This is great

[Mr. Freeman]

Their own copy protection shit is finally screwing them over. They can't figure out how to correctly institute a copy protection scheme that really does nothing but make them more money, and in turn they can't release a product that actually works. I'd like to see how many people adopt this new standard when they realise that they can't watch blu ray movies on their blu ray drive.

Target market?

[volpanic]

It looks like this is aimed precisely at the segment of the consumer population where pirates and people wanting to make HD amateur porn intersects. Next thing you know the rootkit kicks in and a nondescript white van is parked across the street. Dun dun dunnn.

Re:Do I smell...

[Dunbal]

What ever happened to "guarantee of merchantability" and "works as advertised"?

      Oh the little disk fits in the slot, and the disk spins ok. It ejects when you want it to. So it works as advertised. The fact that you can't PLAY anything is actually a software problem, and we all know that software has never been guaranteed to actually work as advertized...

Copy 100 movies then get back to me.

[HornWumpus]

You don't routinely copy disks do you?

If you did you would notice a good percent don't even trigger DVD shrinks recompression pass. I'm talking about rental disks. The most recent example IIRC was 'The Aristocrats' (granted not an action flick).

Even the disks that fill both layers do so by including extranious BS that would'nt need to be included in downloads. The most glaring example is the uncompressable filler Disney likes to pad their disks with (specifically to mess with DVDshrink).

So let me ammend my arguement. The actual movie content of DVDs is usually closer to 4.5 then 8GB. Much closer. Basing an arguement on 8GB movies coming off DVD is denying reality.

I still expect recompressed HD movies to fit on a single layer DVD quite nicely.

Re:Copy 100 movies then get back to me.

[modecx]

You don't routinely copy disks do you?

Yes, I do, in fact. Out of the 50 or so movies I've copied in the last year, maybe three were under 4.5G total disc size (all old Jackie Chan movies, IIRC), and they didn't need to be recompressed or edited to fit on a single layer DVD-R. Sure, like you say most DVDs include filler and extras that don't merit copying, but the vast majority of disks I have still require recompression even after you strip all of that crap and any secondary languages, menus, even intro scenes, the works.

Maybe you've had good luck picking movies that don't need the second layer, but most mainstream movies that I have aren't as compressed as some of the earlier disks were... Most are 5-7.5 GB in size, with the extra languages stripped, which only buys 300-400MB per Dolby Digital 5.1 language anyway (if there's a DTS track, I keep it), maybe 200MB for plain old stereo.. They probably do it because it incontinences rippers just a teeny bit more than it would otherwise, or they really are trying to make the movies look a bit better. I can certainly tell the difference between a rip and the original if it needed even a bit of extra compression, but I do it because I'd rather have friends and family tear up the copy instead, so it works out.

Re:Copy 100 movies then get back to me.

[jasonwc]

This is correct. From my own experience backing up the movies I've purchased, most dual-layer disks only use 5-6 GB for the actual movie, if that. You generally can get away with 15-25% compression after removing the extras, trailers, useless warnings and other crap. Oh, and btw, DVDShrink doesn't actually remove this crap. It just replaces each frame with one of your choice. CloneDVD2, Vobblanker, and DVD Remake on the other hand will allow you to save even more space by actually removing the crap and replacing them with a single black frame. I prefer to play my backup copies, because after removing the trailers, warnings, and studio logos that start up before the menu on standard DVDs as well as the protected user operations, region coding and other annoyances, I find I have a more enjoyable experience and less need to sit through crap.

Anyways, I can verify the truth of the parent's comment as to Disney DVDs. "Finding Nemo" took up about 7.5 GB on its dual-layer pressed DVD, however, after removing extras, warnings, trailers, and 30 MINUTES OF BLACK FRAMES, I got it down to 4.3 GB, small enough to fit onto a DVD-R without any compression. The blank frames took up nearly 1 GB of space! I've also ran into this annoying issue on other films. Rather than add the blank frames as extras, the studio embeds them in the menu structure, so most dvd backup won't touch it. DVDShrink will allow you to selectively remove these titles but very few people would know to check. I can see no other reason for 30 minutes of black frames other than an attempt to thwart copying (and a futile attempt at that).

Difficult choice..

[Frightening]

So now I can either:

a) Buy a blu-ray player that won't play it's own format discs(until a rootkit is developed).
or
b) Buy a HD-DVD player that will.

That's a rough sort of position to put a consumer in. I think I'm going to have a break, get some coffee or something, and think about this really slowly. Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:Difficult choice..

[WilliamSChips]

That the HD-DVD players without a game system cost more than the Blu-Ray players with one?

Re:Difficult choice..

[Frightening]

Usually people see it as buying a PS3 with a blu-ray player included, not vice-versa. And if you will go for the ps3 package, please note that you will not be able to store it in your PC's case.

But I am not a blind fanboy. It's just that "blu-ray" sounds so 14-year-old-ish, and this thing about DRM making you unable to play your own purchased discs. Ouch.

Sony just doesn't learn

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

How many times is Sony going to try and fail to put forward a proprietary technology as a standard before they figure out that it's not a winning business strategy?

Blue-Ray: It's like UMD only more pathetic

[Bushido Hacks]

As if the UMD format's failure for the PSP wasn't bad enough, SONY goes and FUBARs itself again. HD-DVD has won by technical fault. This is just another fine mess Sony has got itself into.

I don't mean to sound like a troll-ish nay-sayer, but the more Sony delays a product or forbids homebrew development of their devices, the more money Sony loses. It is these expoits (both good and bad) that allow people to explore the problems or to fix the problems or to create new products for Sony to create.

If Sony could be a person it would be one of those whiny little emo kids who like to try to kill themselves but never do because they don't have the guts to either complete their self disposal or to get out of its fake melancholy by cheering up and stop trying to cut itself. The thing Sony is using to kill itself with, or aleast to cut itself open is a razor blade known as Digital Rights Managment.

If anything, someone needs to send Sony a can of emo-b-gone and tell them to stop trying to kill themselves by wrecking their company with unneccessary delays that only create lost in revenue.

tired of it

[ultramrw21]

Im sick of hearing stuff about blu-ray, why? because none of the news is good. Its a crappy form of storage thats going to go the way of beta. I really dont understand some of the stuff the happens with blu-ray. Some of the things theyve done with it are selfish and paranoid, while everything else is just plain bad business. Just wonderin, does stuff like this happen with every new format that comes out? I was a youngin when cds and dvds got big. my two cents

Dear Older and Wiser

[MagusSlurpy]

The Blu-ray Disk Association (as a whole) did not make this player. SONY made this hardware. SONY made the bad choice. Therefore, we make fun of SONY, not the BDA. Bad, bad Sony. Thanks, The Oldest and Wisest

Re:Dear Older and Wiser

[Mongoose]

That's not the topic I was addressing, so please learn to read for context.

Thanks,
Native English Speaker

Your answers

[__aailob1448]

Yes it's worth it. Yes you're an idiot for even asking. Thank you and good bye.

If you have HD capable TV

[Anonymous Coward]

submitter says "All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!"

If you have purchased a HD capable (720 1080 etc) TV, you will be surprised how NTSC/PAL (dubbed SD) even with enhancements like 480p stinks :)

You will go out and buy HD camcorder. You can already afford a HD TV so you don't have money problem. What will you do with the content of HD camera? If you burn it to DVD, you downgrade the quality and it is mud again.

Putting HD content on a DVD

[Animats]

You can put HD content on a DVD, just not as much of it. This is useful if you create animation work. Is there anything consumer-grade that can play that out into a 1080p monitor?

You can put about 20 minutes of DVD-formatted content on a CD-ROM, and most PCs will happily play it. Putting one of those disks in a consumer DVD player, though, generally has disappointing results. Some players will play such things, winding the disk up to an unusually high speed. Most will fail to play it. Some will crash. One crashed so badly that it had to be power cycled twice. It's the cheap players with PC-type drives that usually work.

get some perspective

[cas2000]

If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

huh? i don't get this. it's only TV - which means that even at its best it is brain-dead rubbish made for the majority (i.e. the stupidest people) in the country.

how can you 'desperately crave' any kind of content on your TV? sure, it might be nice to have slightly better quality than current DVD or DVB quality but it's not actually going to change your life significantly if/when you get it.

if you desperately crave this stuff, then you really need to get a life - and desperately need to be de-programmed from your mindless-consumption cult.

Re:Obligatory: "But, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln

[cas2000]

The manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves trying to bring flawed, faulty, and generally unfinished products to market... presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences.

actually, they are fully aware of the fact that the first kid on the block wont go around bad-mouthing their product because they wont want to look like a complete fool for buying it. most of them will either shut up or will go around saying how fantastic it is.

this is the same principle that con-men rely on - e.g. nigerian 419 scammers get more and more money from their victims because they don't want to admit (even to themselves) that they've been suckered....so they keep on coughing up more money for the "fees" and "taxes" that keep cropping up before they can get their millions.

the most devout converts to a product or service are often those who have been suckered and know it (or at least have a dreadful suspicion).

Games

[Zantetsuken]

I'm not exactly the guy to watch many movies in the first place, let alone HD movies, so honestly - even if BD-ROM flops as a medium/+format for movies, will I care that much? what I want out of it is more kick ass RPG's from Squaresoft (I still consider them Squaresoft, not Squenix) FPS, and the Ace Combat series from Namco with super-photorealistic graphics

The only reason I could really care for BDROM succeeding as a movie medium is it would make it more widely accepted for gaming...

It's the networking, stupid

[heroine]

The Blu-Ray player plays Blu-Ray disks just fine, you can rest assured. The problem is BD-J and home networking. That 66% of the BD spec is a bitch to get compliant.

American Education Strikes!

[RossumsChild]

If I got close - as in one meter kind of close - sure, there was more small detail . . .

But back up to a more normal viewing distance for the screens (42"), and I saw no discernible difference at all,

Well I'm definetly going to avoid this new fangled HD stuff, if it suffers a massive degradation in quality in the 2.6 inch span between a meter and 42 inches. . .

Stick to the English system, or LEARN the metric system, don't try and randomly throw them together because you feel it makes you sound more erudite.

Re:American Education Strikes!

[gander666]

I would be willing to bet that he was referring to "screen size" rather than the viewing distance.

Geoff

Re:American Education Strikes!

[JanneM]

As gander666 points out, I was referring to the panel size, which is conventionally given in inches. If you want to think of it as an 107cm panel you're free to do so, of course.

Re:American Education Strikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot.

topic is wrong...

[AnXa]

There are writing/reading blueray drives for pcs which are able to play blueray movies... If Sony's first one isn't one, then get funk out of elsewhere.

So, this is basically...

[jrothwell97]

...VHS vs. Betamax, except with added copy protection and blue-screening! Already I can see Sony's profits booming!!!!

Vote against Blu-Ray and HD-DVD with your $$$

[Xesdeeni]

I agree with the OP. Neither side deserves to win. But what's the alternative? How about HD on one of today's red laser DVD±R/Ws? Well, DivX, WMV, and even MPEG-4 can fit, but it's not practical if you have to have a PC to play it.

But there are a number of Sigma-Designs based DVD players that can play HD content available TODAY . Even better, they can also play HDV content recorded with today's HD camcorders. And they are networkable (some include wireless), so you can preview your HD masterpiece on your TV via network from you PC, while you are editing!

Prices range from $250-$400. Let's tell both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps to take a hike!

Xesdeeni