HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far

Dster76 writes "Reuters is reporting that the new format wars are showing signs of underwhelming performance, both technically and financially. In fact, according to the article, the new formats are just not selling. Reuters chalks it up to a current lack of interest. They indicate that as more movies and players become available this autumn, sales should improve. Just the same, the current picture is quite sour." From the article: "'Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,' said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. 'High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular,' Dybdahl said. 'Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,' he said."

Comments

maybe, a scan line too far

[yagu]

From the article, a quote: "Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience."

I'm an early adopter, have been for a long time. I have always been willing, even eager to "step up" and pay the premium to get new (and great) technology early. Not so here. Another characteristic for early adopters is they tend to be more aggressive in research (those that aren't buying for status), certainly the case for me. The more I researched DVD both HD and Blu-Ray, the less interested I was. There was a certain promise of amazing high quality video, but NOT ONCE was I able to get anyone to give me a demo where I saw convincing evidence this was true.

Add to that the war of the formats and the fact I have to replace movies I already own at outrageous new prices (yeah, early adopter), but each new format is providing a limited and only slightly overlapping selection... wtf? This was the same early problem with CDs. The difference here is, we already have a very high quality, convenient, inexpensive, long lasting option (regular DVDs), and there's nothing compelling in the new DVDs warranting the hassle, the expense, nor the "convenience" (which is less than existing DVDs).

Then there's the specter of DRM and that it's not entirely obvious or clear to me or other early adopters what the final DRM landscape looks like. If we had to guess, it doesn't look hospitable (sp?).

Here's another telling piece of evidence from the article, again a quote: "Often, it has something to do with source material. Sometimes the film itself is shot in a way that may emphasize a grainy look as opposed to a sharp picture," he said. This almost outright concedes the new "high resolution" exceeds what most media will be capable of providing... or, it's an excuse... neither gives me any warm fuzzies about my return on investment for new DVD formats.

Early adopters like new technology when it's new and improved, and are willing to pay for it. In my opinion, someone(s) in some conference room took this thought and ran with it, not considering the early adopters might be a bit more discerning in their tastes. We're not your cash cow toadies.

Maybe that's what's happened to their mysteriously AWOL early adopters... they're not early marks. Lesson learned (not).

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what the problem is, but I dont belive its the source media's fault. I have a nice HD projector, and movies aired over my cable HD channels are spectacular. I would expect the same from these new formats, if not better because it shouldn't be compressed as much as a cable stream. If its crappy, welp, I won't be buying.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[RsG]

We've seen the same sort of thing happen to computer technology as well.

If you're a gamer when was the last time you upgraded your graphics card? It's probably the newest part of your system, right?

Now, when was the last time you upgraded your sound card? Probably never. Yet I do recall a time when decent sound was a big deal - I can still remember firs playing Doom with the chirping onboard speakers as a kid, and later being blown away when we got a new computer that had an actual sound card installed.

Technology peaks. It happens. And when it does, all the early adopters in the world aren't going to make a difference. We aren't easy marks; we have to think there's something for us in the bargin if we shell out for a better system or part.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Gr8Apes]

I too tend to adopt early. Bought my HDTV at the end of 2000. What did I get for my trouble? A really really sharp TV that doesn't interface with many HD components anymore, as that abomination known as HDMI came out afterwards. But, that aside, DVDs provide pretty darn sharp pictures on this TV, as does HD OTA content. Matter of fact, when watching either, it's hard to discern quality differences without pausing the picture. (Broadcast HD is by far better on stills) Considering that OTA HD is higher quality than what will be on either disc format, what's the point in buying an expensive new format, especially one that's hamstrung with all sorts of DRM requirements. (Speaking of, has there been a determination of whether these new boxes MUST be connected to phone/internet? I haven't bothered following it since then, but it seems that their inactivation policy requires some sort of connection to phone home, something else I'm against if I'm purchasing personal AV hardware)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Important to remember these new HD formats were never about bringing something new and amazing to the consumers. Its simply that the DVD market is saturated and since everyone (who wants one at least) already has one these hardware guys are seeing thier sales drop-off. These new HD formats are just about trying to get people to buy more stuff. They need sales and if everyone already has thier product then nobody buys. So they had to relese a new product and try to convince consumers of why they needed to buy more stuff. They have failed pretty miserably to date on convincing people to give them more money.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[popeye44]

When he speaks of convenience I can't but help think he means broken kicked in the ass and left in the gutter encryption that is on dvd's. No one reasonably geek would have a device that it takes 3 seconds for their 2 year old to kill the only disk they have and be forced to buy another. I backup dvd's religously as I have a 5 and an 8 year old. While they do not fubar my movies much they fubar theirs like mad. "imagine if you will your 5 year old walking into the room with the dvd held correctly in the center by his finger.. and the underside of the dvd having peanut butter and jelly on it.."

I have no desire or intention to pay for anything more than once. Taxes are bad enough at doing that why should I buy a player that only makes it harder for me to escape that idiocy? Better quality? Well I have a 42in plasma.. and yes it looks great with hdmi connections and Hi Def... but there's not enough hi-def content for me to appreciate it fully yet. Dvd's look good and i'm happy with them so far. I still don't have a compelling reason to buy anything incrementally better. I'm not paying for a screwing regardless if your a hooker in Mexicali or Sony in Japan.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[UbuntuDupe]

I'm an early adopter, have been for a long time.

Really? I'd go a step further. I think you're among the people who have adopted it for the *longest* time of all users.

Because that's what "early adopter" means.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[gstoddart]

Important to remember these new HD formats were never about bringing something new and amazing to the consumers. Its simply that the DVD market is saturated and since everyone (who wants one at least) already has one these hardware guys are seeing thier sales drop-off.

I believe you are entirely correct in that assessment.

I was an early adopter of DVD (got mine in '99 as I recall) because at the time it was a huge improvement over VHS, and I couldn't see spending money on any more VHS while I slowly build my home theater.

Here it is 7 years later, and I don't own an HD-TV, and I'm not interested in it just yet. HD DVD brings nothing new or interesting to me.

I think it's absolutely correct they thought they could come out with a new format and people would flock to it. They also decided to make the user experience far worse so they could lock down access to the content even more.

I give them a big 'no thanks' for this round of technology.

Cheers

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Lord Apathy]

Yeap, I think we are in the same boat. You want to hand my that paddle? I bought my HDTV in 2001. I don't regret it for one second, but the best part for me has been the 52" 16:9 picture ratio instead of the HD aspect. Granted my tv is going on 6 years old now and starting to show its age, but I'm not about to replace its not compatable with HD-DVD.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Kjella]

Here's another telling piece of evidence from the article, again a quote: "Often, it has something to do with source material. Sometimes the film itself is shot in a way that may emphasize a grainy look as opposed to a sharp picture," he said. This almost outright concedes the new "high resolution" exceeds what most media will be capable of providing... or, it's an excuse... neither gives me any warm fuzzies about my return on investment for new DVD formats.

Well, I've seen clips shot with a $1200 HDR-HC3 that show more detail at 1440x1080i native (at least under the right conditions) than any DVD I've seen. I guess it's a little chicken-and-egg, why bother with the resolution when noone will see it? I assume that as people get HDTV, they'll start producing much better HDTV as well. Even if film has the resolution, noone would care if it was slightly (as in better-than-NTSC) fuzzy.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Botia]

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm an early adopted, especially with graphics stuff. I had a digital camera back when people didn't know what they were. I had a DVD player back when DVD's came in CD cases. I had been looking forward to the new DVD format but it has been so severly screwed up with DRM's, format wars, pricing, lack of contect, etc. that there's no way I'm going to buy one.

Give me a format that I can copy it to my computer by dragging and dropping. Then let me play it on my XBox 360 over the network. Don't require HDMI with super encryption and a connection to the Internet to disable my player. Let me put it on every TV, DVR, and computer in my house. Let me copy it down to my IPod, my Pocket PC, my phone. Make it easy for me to watch it. That's what I'll buy.

Higher resolution is a plus, but not a strong selling point without the basics. When you take away the basics, the picture quality really doesn't matter much if you aren't able to watch it.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[kid_oliva]

I have to agree with this poster. I'll take it one step further. If they are unable to provide a more visible difference affordablly; this could very easily end up like SACD for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only reason DVD Audio has been doing ok is that you do not have to buy a new player. Go figure.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Pope]

Sounds like you need to give the kids access to an HTPC rather than backing up their DVDs! Rip/compress to had drive, come up with an easy interface and a waterproof keyboard, and blammo, no more sticky discs.

Of course, back when I was a kid, we didn't have VCRs, let alone purchased movies, so I really cannot symapthize ;) I learned very quickly not to use crayon on my books because I simply wasn't getting another one.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[RsG]

Actually, what I was getting at was more that the sound chip was like a VHS tape, and the sound card like a DVD. The general idea being that once you have a mature version of a technology, there is little to be gained from upgrading yet again.

So, I fully agree that these new formats aren't sufficiently better than DVDs to justify their cost and drawbacks. That was my point :-)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[mpathetiq]

You just agreed with the GP's statement. He's saying that sound cards have only had incremental improvements since the early 90s. They peaked then just as DVD/HD-DVD/Blur-Ray has peaked now. Graphics cards have not yet peaked, so people are still buying the latest and greatest...

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[RyoShin]

If the companies are looking to release a new product, they should strive for a better, cheaper stand alone DVD Recorder. These are still fairly expensive when compared to a VCR.

I've also noticed that a lot of the DVD Recorder units are big and bulky. They can also work towards making them smaller.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[ayjay29]

>>each new format is providing a limited and only slightly overlapping selection... wtf? This was the same early problem with CDs.

I was an early adopter with CDs (showing my age here). I bought one of the first Phillips players (I still have it). I got a free CD with it, "The Pure and Perfect Sound of Phillips Compace Disc", and a catalog with all the CDs currently available, three on each page, with a colour photo of the cover, and paragraph review of each album, there's under 100 in the catalog.

When i went to town to buy CDs the first time, you had to ask at the counter, and they would show you a pile of about 20 that they had available.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You don't get it. There's a big difference between your soundcard and his HD-DVDs...

The soundcard was a big improvement over the sound chip built into computers. The studios want people to pay a premium for these new discs that look only a hair better than regular DVDs.

I think you missed the point of the post you're responding to. The point, as I read it, was pretty much what you're saying: people don't want to pay big money for marginal improvements. Like he said, technology peaks; it happened with audio a few years back, and now we're seeing that it may also have happened with video, in the form of DVD's.

Probably the reason for the peak, in this case, is screen size. If someone were playing a DVD vs. a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc on a movie theater screen, you'd be able to tell the difference pretty fast. But as long as people are watching movies on TV's that can fit comfortably inside their houses (or, increasingly, on their computer screens) there is simply no way that any improvement over the current state of the DVD art is going to make a noticeable difference for the average viewer.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[delete]

I was an early adopter of DVD (got mine in '99 as I recall)

Beware, you should now expect a flurry of posts from Slashdot'ers who feel it necessary to inform you that they owned a DVD player several centuries before you.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[grasshoppa]

You don't get it. There's a big difference between your soundcard and his HD-DVDs...

The soundcard was a big improvement over the sound chip built into computers.

Actually, you missed his point. His comparison of chirps to soundcards was analogous to vhs vs dvd. When he said earlier, "When was the last time you upgraded your soundcard?", he was making the point you missed.

DVDs are 90% good enough for even the early adopters.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[twistedsymphony]

are you implying that current DVD and SD displays are the "peak" of home theater technology?

I think even discerning early adopters would disagree with you. Using your example it's like we have a chirping PC speaker now, and they're trying to sell us a sound card but all the sound card is doing is making chirps. They're not using the new tech to it's full potential, but we're still being asked to pay the price as if it was. I've seen TRUE HD content through HD cable as well as through examples of the WM9/VC1 codec on MS's website, I've played them through my HDTV and they look spectacular and I would be more then willing to pay $500 for a player that could bring that spectacular image to my DVD collection, unfortunately it hasn't happened yet, they've told me that's what their players can do but I don't see it yet. Blu-Ray is the worse of the two, it costs more and from the demo's I've seen it doesn't look much better then regular DVD, HD-DVD looks better but it doesn't even seem to be at the quality level of what I can get from a HTPC or HD cable. Then of course both formats have the issues of cost and the threat of not being supported if the alternative becomes the standard.

If this were a game of hold'em it'd be like them asking you to go all in when all you've got in your hand is an Ace and a Two, sure it could go really well but it could also go really poorly. I think even the typical early adopters are holding on to their chips until they have a better idea how things might turn out.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

This almost outright concedes the new "high resolution" exceeds what most media will be capable of providing... or, it's an excuse..

It's an excuse. The resolution is dependant on how good the original print is, and the resolution it's scanned at. Even 16mm would look better in a truly hi-def format than regular DVD. The fact is that to scan it at these higher resolutions requires more cost and sometimes extensive restoration. Something that the owners of small art-house films will be reluctant to pay (because there is at this time little ROI).

If the original computer scans for DVD (probably what they are meaning here) are used, well duh, the new high-resolution medium is going to exceed it.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[garcia]

These new HD formats are just about trying to get people to buy more stuff. They need sales and if everyone already has thier product then nobody buys. So they had to relese a new product and try to convince consumers of why they needed to buy more stuff. They have failed pretty miserably to date on convincing people to give them more money.

I liken these two formats to LaserDiscs. They were out there, they were superior to tapes, but they were large, clunky, and no one really adopted them except those that were techno-freaks. HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is just another holdover technology until someone comes up with something that appeals more to the masses and comes at a time when people are finally ready to re-up their collections.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Omestes]

LaserDisc?

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[RsG]

are you implying that current DVD and SD displays are the "peak" of home theater technology?

For the average user? Yes.

You may very well be correct in your assessment that they aren't using HD to it's full potential yet. If so, there may very well be a market when and if they do. I won't make a prediction either way, as I do not feel qualified.

But for the average user? They jumped wholesale to DVDs, and it wasn't just the picture quality that did it for them. VCRs are an inferior technology on so many levels - from the need to rewind or fast forward if there is a specific part of the movie you want to see, to the noticable degredation of the tape after only a few years of regular use. DVDs were better in every sense of the word, and early adopters flocked to them, with the average users following shortly thereafter. That isn't happening this time.

Now, will it happen if true HD becomes available? I can't say. But even if that does happen, it will not be on par with the shift from VHS to DVD, if only because it's an improvement in the area of picture quality alone, and not overall usability.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

If a film is intentionally grainy and a hi-def transfer reveals this better than a DVD, that does not mean the hi-def transfer is exceeding what the media can provide. In this case the grain is part of the film presentation, and the hi-def transfer is showing it more faithfully. A videophile would appreciate this, and yes, spend more money for it. Other consumers would probably just see the grain and say "that doesn't look so good", and move on.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[altoz]

> Technology peaks. It happens.

Exactly. Remember DVD music discs? They were certainly an improvement over CD but nobody bothered to buy them (despite having 6 channels of sound, etc). The reason? People were happy with the CD.

The executives at these companies have failed to grasp that HD-DVD/BlueRay just isn't that much of an improvement. Going from VHS to DVD or Tapes to CDs, on the other hand, was. We didn't have to deal with scratchy, staticy tapes anymore, but had the same experience with each viewing of DVD or CD. Quality is essentially good enough for the customer at this point. The next improvement has to come in some other form, like say, price, size or more content. To my knowledge, this new technology does none of those.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[shmlco]

Personally, I think one of them should go the other way. Blu-Ray, for example, should forsake the movie market and focus completey on drives for game consoles. If the only drive capable of playing that format was in the console, wasn't available for PCs, and would only play "glass-mastered" discs, they'ed kill off game piracy...

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Hadlock]

1999 is pretty early still for early adoption; I remember learning about Laserdisc AND DVD on the same day in 8th grade at some rich kid's house. That was back in 1997 or so, when 486 laptops still roamed the earth. I never heard of or saw another DVD player until The Matrix came out (1999), and even at that point very few of our parents had heard of the things. Probably half the kids in high school knew of DVD players at that point. My dad, an EE for intel at the time, didn't even purchase a DVD player until they were $130 or so in 2001.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[amuro98]

I think "peak" is the wrong word here. I think of it as "delta", as in the difference in performance between the old version and the new version.

When comparing VHS to DVD, the delta in picture quality and sound was VERY large. Just about everyone could appreciate DVD as the superior medium, and the market migrated accordingly.

However, the delta between DVD and these new formats isn't quite as pronounced. Yeah, I'm sure many here could see the difference, but believe me, not everyone can. Plus throw in the fact you need to own a HDTV, and it's just not going to matter to the majority of the market at this time.

To go back to the soundcard comparison, everyone will agree that a sound card will give you better sound than the PC's onboard speaker. But does that mean that everyone here can appreciate the difference between, say, the SB-AWE32 and AWE64? Or, how about the differences between the first and second generations of the Audigy? Would you bother upgrading your Audigy to the Audigy2 (or whatever it's called)? Probably not. The delta between the two isn't worth the extra money.

Video cards still make pretty large strides each generation. Most probably don't upgrade every day a new card comes out, but can agree jumping every 2 or 3 generations is a good idea if you're serious about cutting edge games.

The only way you're going to get people to upgrade is to convince them that the delta is worth the cash. Otherwise, if they won't buy because their current equipment is "good enough."

Of course, issues like: format war, uncertain DRM, expensive players, sub-standard movies, etc. doesn't help things any. After all, it's usually the early adopters who convince their non-early-adopter friends to go buy the thing after seeing it in action at the early adopter's house :-)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Kadin2048]

Agreed. I think it's a deeper problem than that, though. Filmmakers, from the local guys doing commercials to the big Hollywood releases, have become accustomed to the level of detail that a person can see in an NTSC broadcast, and basically aim for that as their output. (Well that, and 35mm theatrical film.) I'm not talking about just postproduction decisions, but actual artistic/compositional choices. You put the actor a certain distance away from the camera, because you want people to be able to see their expressions clearly in the desired output format. You use certain makeup/costume techniques, because you assume that people can't see it. Etc., etc.

Even if you hand a director a HDTV camera and tell him to shoot the thing in HD, it may well end up that the ultimate product doesn't benefit from the additional resolution, or it could even be worse: you might start seeing visible makeup, or clogged pores, or set issues; because the director is 'thinking' in standard-def, the additional information might end up just being extraneous and confusing. The new output format requires a rethinking of the whole process.

It's not until enough people have HDTVs that the people actually making the content will think in those terms when they're working, but people aren't going to get HDTVs until there's really well-designed content for them to watch.

So you're correct that it's a chicken-and-egg situation, or rather a solution seeking a problem that people don't realize they have and/or don't care too much about. HD content can be pretty amazing when it's done right, but there's really not too much of that out there. The stuff I've seen in HD that's really impressive are mostly recordings of actual events (e.g. sports) where the more detail you have, the better it gets; but that more=better isn't always true with other content, unless that level of detail has been anticipated and planned for through the production process.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

> LaserDisc?

That's pretty funny! But just to be pedantic, laserdiscs aren't digital. Popular misconception because they are optical like CDs and DVDs, but it's true, they're analog!

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[dank zappingly]

I agree completely. It is most certainly not the source media's fault. When HD formats are discussed, uninformed journalists often make the comment that the current picture can't get any better because there is not enough information in the source material or somesuch nonsense. Movies currently are, and always have been created to be shown on a gigantic movie screen. It is at a way higher resolution than even the highest HD displays. Some people might argue that HD is not that much better looking, and they might have an argument, especially on smaller screens, but that is a different argument entirely. Obviously in older movies there may be the issue of damaged film, but as far as I can tell all the movies released are relatively new. It seems pretty obvious that something is being lost between the source media and the end display. Whether it has to do with bad transfers, bad compression, bad players, or crummy televisions is up for debate, but it is most certainly not from the source media. There have also been reports that samsung messed something up with their initial player, which seems to me to be a little more plausible than the original film from a movie made in the last decade or so not being clear enough.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Jesus_666]

True. My brother recently installed a hacked driver that presented his Audigy 1 to the system as an Audigy 4, just so he could get surround sound in Quake 4. The quality is as decent as with any other game.

I'm using an Audigy 2 (which I bought before Creative became evil) and it's everything I'll ever need. Heck, my SoundBlaster Live! Player was everything I ever needed. I got the Audigy back when I still thought that EAX was cool.

Now when I see new sound cards I ask myself why anyone except audiophiles should buy them. EAX4, whose main difference to EAX2 (as far as most users are concerned) is the version number ain't that hot, but you still need it if you want more than stereo sound with some new games. Creative's latest card is supposed to include a chip that magically makes everything you play on it sound better, with some reviewers saying that it reconstructed 128 kbit MP3s to CD quality. Sure.

Actually, considering the quality of some onboard sound cards, my next sound card will have one main purpose: Providing an optical S/PDIF for five speakers. Anything beyond that I don't really care about and everything below that is already provided by my mainboard, if I ever should feel the need to use stereo speakers.
Compared to storage media, my Audigy 2 is a DVD-RW and Creative's latest is a diamond-coated "Supreme Video Quality 8500 Plus UltraSafe" DVD+RW for twenty bucks a pop.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[CRCulver]

Exactly. Remember DVD music discs? They were certainly an improvement over CD but nobody bothered to buy them (despite having 6 channels of sound, etc). The reason? People were happy with the CD.

DVDs and SACDs are still quite popular with classical music fans. BIS, a large independent classical label, has recently started releasing everything on hybrid SACD discs, so you get high-quality sound if you've got the player, but can also listen to the disc in any old CD player.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[CRCulver]

Regardless of the size of the market in comparison with, say, pop music, the point is that it's still profitable to offer your customers a hybrid SACD disc.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[interiot]

Broadcast quality decisions make a big difference too, I think? HDNET quite often looks really good, whereas most of the other HD channels don't usually have quite the punch that HDNET has. Consumer-level HD terminology is confusing enough that I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but I assume it's pretty complicated, and maybe it will take everyone in the production chain a while to get perfect?

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Ucklak]

The way I see it is that there isn't enough HD content yet. There just isn't and it is analogous to color vs. BW or mastered analog recordings to CD or VHS transfer to DVD vs re-mastered DVD for that matter (remember the AAD,ADD,DDD labels on the early CDs?)

When color TV came out, color programming was few and far between. Today, where is the HD content? Is is being cranked out at an impressive rate but really, if you have HD programming, you have less than 20 channels in a pasture of 200+ channels.

So far, the HD DVDs that have been released are all film based films and not HD films. Where is the IMAX or a 100% true HD DVD? How many films have been filmed using HD equipment? Isn't it 2 Star Wars, a Superman, and a Sin City?
We know that they scan film using a 4000dpi process but how good does that look in 1080p?

I will say that the HD programming that does exist is impressive and does make we want more but it'll take years to get there as the current crop of HD DVDs are mediocre and seem to appear that they are only upsampled versions of the standard DVD.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reasons BluRay and HD fail in the "WOW" department is because of film. I'm talking about the film that 99% of movies are shot with. Any movie shot in film will look grainy no matter what kind of TV you happen to be using. This is because when they transfer the original film to hi-def, it's so hi-def that the film looses the "softness" it formally had. This is going to continue to be a problem until movies are shot in hi-def. Don't expect that to happen soon though, because that would require movie companies buying a whole armada of new, expensive, and possible useless equipment. The flip-side of this is CG movies like Ice Age. I saw the Ice Age Blu-Ray on a decent TV and it looked terrific. The only neat thing that most people might see is the new options for menu interfaces. To them, a new menu system isn't worth spending $1800.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[dwandy]

The next improvement has to come in some other form, like say, price,

and since the bulk of the price of either a CD or DVD is copyright-holder charge and retailer markup (i.e. manufacturing costs of each disc is already pennies) a new type of media can't dramatically affect the price...

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[id09542]

Excuse me ... the studio released less than 50 title, wouldn't one think they would pick the ones that would show thr best. What a stupid thing to say that some just don't show well due to the way they are filmed. Maybe in a few years when thousands of titles are out and you find them some in the $5 bin.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[dogbowl]

DVDs were relased back in 1997, so while I guess '99 is close to that its still nothing to brag about. IIRC, DVDs were the fastest accepted new technology at the time making your 2 years later claim even a little more weak.

But anyway, I'm not on the HD-DVD bandwagon either and I am exactly their target audience. For me, its the fear of DRM. (iTunes is too DRM'd out for me to use as well)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[misleb]

If the companies are looking to release a new product, they should strive for a better, cheaper stand alone DVD Recorder. These are still fairly expensive when compared to a VCR.

What is a DVD Recorder good for? For digital recording, PVR/DVR is where it is at. And I think we are well past the point where many people are eager to convert their old VHS collections to DVD. Unless you have a really big collection, you might as well just buy the DVD version rather than pay for a recorder. Bottom line is that there is very little market for it. Companies are looking for mass appeal... not just a niche.

-matthew

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[webrunner]

Someone else has mentioned this but it bears mentioning again -
The biggest jump in overall desirability between VHS and DVD and Tape to CDS wasn't the quality, it was the usability.

DVDs and CDS (generally) don't need to be flipped, don't get all messed up with the tape, aren't wiped out by magnets, are sturdier, last longer, have instant seek instead of being a purely linear format, take up less space in multiples, and don't need to be rewinded.

If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did, I don't think. And what we have now is a higher quality but still on disc. Other than picture and sound quality there is no additional benefit, and this is why people just simply aren't caring about HD DVD and Blu-Ray.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Eravnrekaree]

I disagree with this. The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture. I do think there is a real reason to upgrade.

I think at this point players are just too expensive. And they need to come out with a player that plays both DVDs and HD-DVDs, and which sells for $99. Then it wil take off. Once more movies are released for HD-DVD, we will begin seeing more sales. Also, this stupid format war also is slowing things down. Most people dont want to be stuck with a boat anchor so will wait until one format wins.

I think another application for HD-DVD is computers. When will we see an affordable HD-DVD recordable drive? That will become a popular item.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did, I don't think.

Which is why DVD took off and Digital-VHS didn't.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Chandon Seldon]

There's no reason why beautiful HDTV content can't be created from movie film. It's just an investment with no obvious payoff in the very short term, so few movie companies are doing it. They will in the future, as more people get the gear to watch HDTV content.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[ClosedSource]

That was about the same experience I had with DVDs at first. And forget renting a DVD in those days.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

Well of course you're not going to see a huge difference between HD and SD, you've only got a 42" plasma. You can't really appreciate HD unless you're more up to 60" sitting ten feet away. Plasma usually blows for color reproduction as well.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Ucklak]

When you were a kid, you could purchase scenes from a movie on 8mm and 16mm for your projector. And sound wasn't included.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Jherek Carnelian]

Your sig: "Virii" isn't a word, you frigging morons.

Big deal.

spam
laudromat
blog
quark
prequel
genocide
meritocracy
meme
robotics
infotainment

Just some of the thousands of "not words" that are now words - many of which replaced perfectly good phrases with the same meaning - just as "virii" is used to mean "computer viruses."

If everyone thought like your sig, language would quickly become to unwieldy to be of much use and we would all end up going mute.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[lordmetroid]

In the states the picture quality is enourmously different. In Europe and specially france with the higher number of lines the quality jump isn't as great in my opinion. Hence even less delta for the European consumers. Add to that penalities like DRM and odd format which instead of increasing the delta they decrease the delta.

It is a flawed business model to start with. The old companies like Sony has done this many times in the past and still they don't get it. They keep coming back for more self-abuse. Trying to tell us what we want and selling that product which they have decided we want to a sky-high price... Well obviously someone's missing a few nuts and bolts. Anyone realizes just how obviously flawed this approach is. Why don't they?

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[IWannaBeAnAC]

We know that they scan film using a 4000dpi process but how good does that look in 1080p?

Easy. The film is 35mm wide = 1.38 inches, so the horizontal resolution of the scanned image is then just over 5,500 pixels. I would say that should look just fine in 1080p. Or even higher resolution. Definitely no need for new equipment! Filming something in IMAX format and then transferring it, even to HD-DVD would be total overkill.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[ichigo 2.0]

Virii isn't a word. Viruses is.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Sathias]

Now, when was the last time you upgraded your sound card? Probably never. Yet I do recall a time when decent sound was a big deal - I can still remember firs playing Doom with the chirping onboard speakers as a kid, and later being blown away when we got a new computer that had an actual sound card installed.

Actually, more recently than my video card. I bought a Creative X-Fi Platinum and the difference in sound quality is just incredible, compared to the on-board sound of my motherboard. To test it out we put on a Victor Wooten DVD with my amp (a high quality 20 year old german hi-fi system amp) and PA speakers cranked, and the bass tones were so loud and rich that the windows were shaking, without a hint of distortion. Through my Sennheiser HD-25 headphones the sound is just as good. I do agree about technology peaking, I have been sceptical about Blu-ray and HD-DVD for that reason, but sound cards are not a good example IMHO.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[AmberBlackCat]

Their next step will probably be to make regular DVD's more crappy so you have to buy HD or Blu-Ray to get what you used to get from a DVD.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Caiwyn]

Parent post is one of the best comments I've ever seen on this issue, and something I've argued for a long time now. So many people forget that the convenience factor is so important in driving future technologies. This is the same reason why SACD and DVD-Audio haven't taken off; they do not surpass the convenience factor of the CD, and the improvements in quality aren't particularly noticeable. This comes as a surprise to some people, until you realize that the CD's strength was in the convenience of instant track search, durability, and the lack of needing to rewind.

Same goes for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They might offer a better picture than DVD, but there will be a lot of people who can't tell (especially not without buying an expensive display to view it on). With zero improvement in convenience, people aren't going to be championing the format without a noticeable improvement in quality. And even then, there will be a lot of people who don't think the improvement is worth the cash.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that OTA HD is higher quality than what will be on either disc format

What is this bullshit? That's simply not true. You can put ~20 Mbps of MPEG-2 video in an ATSC channel. Compare that to up to 36 Mbps with Blu-ray (although in practice it will probably be limited to the same 20 Mbps). However, you can use the H.264 codec with Blu-ray, which is MUCH better than MPEG-2.

At the very least, the quality will be the same. You can put an identical bitstream on the Blu-ray disc that you can broadcast in OTA HD. The bits are the same, there is no difference.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Tim Browse]

you might start seeing visible makeup

Heh, reminds me of when I went to see Matrix II in IMAX format - you could see that Keanu's 5 o'clock shadow wasn't any such thing, but was actually strategically applied blue make-up :-)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[JackieBrown]

The biggest jump in overall desirability between VHS and DVD and Tape to CDS wasn't the quality, it was the usability

Another example would be when laserdiscs came out. They offered a better picture and they looked kind of cool, but how many people really enjoyed getting up every 45 minutes to flip the disc over.

Convenience goes a long way.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so full of bullshit I don't know where to begin.

Filmmakers' primary target is still the movie theater in its 35mm projection glory. 35mm film contains far more detail than the highest HDTV resolution (well, theoretically, not too obvious to an untrained eye though) that is 1920x1080. If actors' pores were to be a problem, it would be a problem ALREADY because you can ALREADY see more detail in the movie theater than you can see on an HDTV set. I don't remember the exact numbers, but IIRC you could extract meaningful information content from a 35mm film frame at horizontal resolutions of 7k to 8k pixels. Usually films are scanned in at either 2k or 4k (2048x1536 or 4096x3072, respectively) for editing and postproduction. 2k is enough for stuff that ends up in HDTV.

Studio productions which traditionally use TV cameras (soap operas etc.) or film cameras but with a clear end target of standard resolution TV (dramas etc.) are a whole another matter. However, most of them are already being produced at HDTV resolution. It's not a problem. Never has been. Stop talking out of your ass.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using an Audigy 2 (which I bought before Creative became evil) and it's everything I'll ever need. Heck, my SoundBlaster Live! Player was everything I ever needed. I got the Audigy back when I still thought that EAX was cool.

As far as I know, any card starting with or after the Live! series is pretty bad. Their cards make every recent system I've tried to put them into unstable. EAX wouldn't even work correctly with an Audigy 2 in every game I tried it with. Their drivers are also pretty poor and eat up most of the bandwidth on the PCI bus for some stupid reason. They also don't have full driver downloads on their website, only updates. If you lose the driver CD or buy an OEM card, you need to pay them to send a new one. (WTF?)

This is why I use the integrated sound on my motherboard. The Realtek AC97 codec is actually far better than any Creative card I've used. EAX is such a joke too. Creative crushed Aureal and then burried their superior sound technology so they could continue selling their reverb engine (EAX.)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[9Nails]

Quote "I'm not paying for a screwing regardless if your a hooker in Mexicali or Sony in Japan."

That is freakin' poetic my brother! Well said.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Quite a few movies look far better in HD. Take a look at Microsoft's WMV-HD galleries or Apple's Quicktime HD galleries. In my opinion, every single one of those clips look a LOT better than the DVD, especially when I take the time to transcode a 480p comparison clip, even with the best encoding, 480p simply doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of detail.

Unfortunately, something like T2 isn't going to benefit much because it's one of the few popular movies that have pretty poor film stock.

I'm surprised that a crowd that generally seems to demand that games run at UXGA or QUXGA resolution but are fully willing to accept VGA resolution movies.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[GutBomb]

this is uninformed. my 30" tube based HDTV blows away a 27" non-HD tube based TV. on my 30" bedroom tv and my 55" living room tv regular DVDs upconverted to 1080i with my xbox look as good as HBO-HD. i;m not bothered with HD-DVD

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[GutBomb]

film and video are very different and look very different. lots of HD originates in film transfers, but another source is video. film lends itself well to soft focus, and hides a lot of details. look at older porn. when they still shot on film, butt-zits weren't very apparent. on video, they are everpresent. in HD (on video) they are even worse. the people being told to "produce this in HD" are in the TV world, not the film world. People in the film world already think in film terms. but people in the TV world are just getting introduced to the new level of detail.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, most DVDs are now in widescreen format and look really good on an HDTV. There is a slight difference in broadcast HDTV and 16:9 DVD from my couch, but not much. Not enough to care about.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[pimpimpim]

I have a question to you all. Do you think that DVD will still be made or that producers at some point will just jump to HD-only releases to 'help' people to go to the new format?

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture.

That depends on the quality of your other hardware, IMHO.

For example, a few months ago I bought a new TV, and jumped straight from my old 14" CRT to a high quality, 32" flat panel, complete with all the HD toys. I have a serviceable but unexceptional DVD player connected to my exceptional TV.

Since setting up this system, I've rewatched quite a few of the films in my DVD collection. The most striking thing, aside from the fact that the picture is obviously much bigger physically, is how well the TV upscales standard-issue DVD. The CGI ships in sci-fi shows look amazing. The facial close-ups are pin-sharp. The explosions in action flicks are really something.

Now, sure, some things really lend themselves to HD. My other half is quite a fan of travel/nature documentaries, and when things like the BBC's Planet Earth series come out in high definition, I'm sure they'll be much sharper than in SD format, simply because an upscaler can only work with the level of detail that's there already. Things like crowd scenes and panoramic shots of mountain/forest scenery just don't scale up well, because there's too little detail to work with.

But the thing is, those are the minority of scenes, by far. My current set-up already gives me most of the advantages of my TV's higher screen resolution, without paying anything extra for one or two new players, without needing incompatible discs that I can't swap with friends for a while, without all the DRM rubbish, and so on. There is some potential advantage, and if other things were equal then sure, I'd like to have some of my DVD programmes in a hi-def format. But right now, other things are far from equal, and I have nowhere near enough incentive to buy in to either new format.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[JanneM]

I disagree with this. The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture. I do think there is a real reason to upgrade.

Regular TV to HD - yes, absolutely. The quality difference is fairly profound.

But DVD to HD formats? No. The difference, even on a good HDTV setup, just isn't large enough to be interesting for most people. And most people do _not_ have a good setups; they do not calibrate their stuff, adjust the room lighting or think about reflections. For the vast majority of users a progressive-scan DVD player and a HD player will make zero difference.

DVD -> HD is not at all like VHS -> DVD, but much more like getting a new, lower noise VHS format that is expensive and incompatible with your regular VHS player.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[dangitman]

Here's another telling piece of evidence from the article, again a quote: "Often, it has something to do with source material. Sometimes the film itself is shot in a way that may emphasize a grainy look as opposed to a sharp picture," he said. This almost outright concedes the new "high resolution" exceeds what most media will be capable of providing... or, it's an excuse...

Sounds like an excuse to me. Real film grain is a very beautiful thing. It requires very high resolution to reproduce properly. So, the higher resolution would be useful in reproducing film grain, even if the HD video exceeds the "resolution" of the original film. It might be possible for HD to exceed the resolution of 16mm film - but I doubt it can exceed the resolution well-shot fine-grained 35mm film. If you are talking about 70mm film, HD video doesn't even have a chance of coming close.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[TheLinuxSRC]

OK....
*looks around room*
...this must be Slashdot, where HD-TV is defined by accurate representation of butt-zits in pr0n.

I think I need to go out into the real world now....

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[debrain]

Agreed - good post. Maybe an even more appropriate example: when was the last time you upgraded your video card for its 2D capabilities? There's no tangible benefit to the 2D performance of these cards anymore, only the 3D performance capabilities are relevant as it's the only actual way to differentiate the benefit between cards. The 2D capabilities are all roughly equivalent, just like DVD is roughly equivalent in so many ways to these HD formats as to make it an irrelevant distinction.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with this assumption as well, being as and how people (myself included) are still burning single layer DVD's because they are cheaper to buy 100 of them than 5 gallons of gas these days....

Of course, since DVD 4.7's are half the size of their dual layer counterparts, there is a further reduction in quality when one duplicates a DVD from Dual Layer to Single layer... I neither notice nor care about the loss in quality. The price is right and the quality is adequate for my needs.

Yes I'm Joe normal and I probably lack audiophile taste... Yes I have bad perception of the quality difference between single and dual layer DVDs. And yes, I am part of the larger 80 percent of people in the bell curve, that unless they are paying attention, they'd never notice the difference either... I figure most people are the same, since I have never brought over a movie and had someone complain about the choppiness, graininess or what have you from the 'lowered resolution'... We just sat down and enjoyed the show, blissfully ignorant of the fact the picture 'could have been better'.

My guess few but the most irratable twits would wince or moan at having to watch a single layer dvd movie. These people are also prone to rare illnesses, allergies, and can't be out in the sun for more than 7 1/2 minutes at a time.

Simply put, when most people don't care, or cannot perceive a difference without a 'side by side' comparison, you cannot successfully market a 'commodity' product in a way that will only appeal to the outliers of the bell curve... This is simple economics.

You can do that with Ferraris and Lotusses, because they are goods sold on the basis of their exclusivity, (and as a result, the difference is not only in their exclusivity, but the perceived increase in quality one is receiving for investing in such a product). Home equiptment, even of audiophile quality is rarely successfully sold in such a manor, since the required investments in creating the product are just as high, margins are very low, and most people want something that just works and is cheap, versus something that is of little perceivable better quality for a considerably higher expense.. Even with audiophile-quality equipment millions of units are still required to be sold to be considered lucrative enough for the risk in investment, not thousands as in the case of boutique cars).

In addition, Ferarris and Lotuses still use a compatable medium (gasoline) albeit in 'premium' form. Nevertheless the medium is plentiful enough to make the product viable, despite the additional 'premium' on the media, since the 'quality' of the media can be fully appreciated with such a product (premium does nothing in an 8:1 compression normally aspirated Buick, for example). These player's 'premium' media has yet to surface in any way to where the product could be viable...

If I were Sony making a media device, I would start with the disc, and work my way to the player, not the other way around. I would covertly (or at least no hype) make media with multiple layers, with a DVD layer and then layers which only the new player could play... I wouldn't make a big stink about it, I'd just work on making it and refine the process until its cheap. I'd release it to the public and they'd be none the wiser. I could make version revisions if necessary, but the DVD part I sell wouldn't change of course. Once the media is mature production-wise, (ensuring the new media is reliable in both players over a production run of about a year), I'd uneventfully put a new logo on the dvd case and make no mention of it for at least another 6 months or so. The more nondescript a logo, the better.

Then one day, when I was sure the technology of manufacturing the discs was mature, I'd release the player, and say 'Best of all, if you use a Sony player, you can already appreciate the difference using your current dvd's, provided they were a Sony title, and they have a certain logo on the DVD case...

This solves the

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[louisadkins]

I think this would be a big risk for them to take, unless they were very slow and controlled about it. If someone told me that I would not be able to see any more (new) movies unless I paid them $1000+ for decent HW, I guess I would be doing something else with my time and money. I think they would only be able to do this until it was spread that it was a directing tactic, and then (I hope) it would backfire in their face. -- Just My Opinion/Could Be Wrong

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[kmankmankman2001]

Well said. I consider myself an early adopter as well, but only when the new (and the associated cost) is markedly better than the old. I will grant that a really good HD-DVD setup is a little better than a really good regular DVD setup (assuming high-quality display, audio, etc.) but it's not jaw-droppingly better . . . at least not yet. I have yet to see any Blu-Ray though the geek in me wants to like it based on the tech specs of what it is capable of doing. In any case, two competing and higher priced formats that obviously won't both survive long-term that aren't dramatically better than the high-end regular DVD system I've put together now . . . well, I'll spend my $$ elsewhere until they settle the format wars and/or show me a 'gotta have' geegaw.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

I also wonder if to some extent it's the result of flat panel TVs. As the race for bottom price escalates the most admirable performance feature for a great many is light weight. Differentiating performance nuances on the ghost, bleed and streak displays on Best Buy's shelves is near impossible. In a sense the bottom end flat panel displays are the equivalent of hardware video mp3s and take away what HDTV gives.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Gr8Apes]

Well damn, looking up the specs and doing some quick back of the napkin calcs, you could almost put a whole Lord of the Rings episode on a single layer disk in full HD on Blu-ray. So an AC actually had some real value add.

BTW, H.264 is MPEG4, which is about 8-10 times higher compression of the stream than standard MPEG 2 for a set quality. It's still lossy.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[EggyToast]

The funny thing is that it still took both formats over 5 years before they actually surpassed the older format. Huge advantages, and they were still adopted somewhat slowly, given the advances in technology over that time.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Dare nMc]

> Early adopters like new technology when it's new and improved, and are willing to pay for it.
The early adapters (me and those around me) have jumped on the HDTV's, but also things like MythTV, with streaming DivX, or HD-Tivos, etc. (I have the HD tivo, and the streaming DIVX player)

The convenience of the DRM stripped DVD is now out of the box, as you said the new DRM prevents me from simply moving forward from where I am. I have to take 2 steps back, or add another box to my already full shelf. The HDTivo has the content, the nice menu to select it, the expandability of higher capacity (and the breakable DRM if I want it on my PC.) The step from 1080i to 1080p, with the $10 PPV vs $50 HD Disk leave nothing to be desired from this early adapter.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[piper-noiter]

This isn't an argument about HD-TV, it's about the DVD format. Keep in mind that a a regular DVD player with a high quality disk will look crisp and delicious on that HD TV. You don't need a new a new player to get it.

Oh and the laser for BlueRay is completely different from the traditional DVD laser. You'd have a hard time getting a player that does both. I have a HD TV but there's no reason for me to get a new version of my Marx Brothers collection or LotR. The new disk might be HD but just like your TV signal, if the recording is in anyway sub par it's going to be that much more noticeable on a HD disk.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[complete loony]

Nah, their inactivation process works when you insert new movies into the player.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[rikkus-x]

Well, I didn't buy them because: 1. I've never seen any. 2. They won't play in my CD player.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

All very good points. We are reaching the 'limit of resolution' that the human eye can see. We don't really need much more powerful graphics cards than we already have, becuase there is a limit to how much data the eye can see, and especially how much MOVING data the eye can see. Once you get above a certain monitor resolution, the differences are (I would guess) impossible to see in MOVING images - i.e. a game or film - anything other than a static photograph. When I play Painkiller, I run it at 1024 x 768 on a 19" CRT monitor - I don't need to go above that resolution to 1280 x 1024, or 1600 x 1200, because I've tried it, and within a split second of playing I'm completely unaware of the resolution it's at, because I'm too busy processing all the moving data on the screen. Once you get above a certain resolution, that's it - nobody needs any more.

In fact, the REAL reason for the introduction of these new, stupid, dumbass HD TV resolutions is to STOP you from expecting fifty hours of film on ONE PIECE OF MEDIA. The exact same goes for bullshit like 96kHz and even 192kHz recording and playback - nobody can HEAR those frequencies (or 48khz and 96kHz, to be more accurate), so what moron came up with this idea? Somebody who wants to maintain a MYTH that MP3, WMA or OGG just aren't as good quality as CDs, and wants you to fill up your HD-DVD with 192kHz 5.1 channel sound, anything as long as it keeps the DURATION down to one hour.

None of these 'improvements' in resolution IMPROVE the subject matter! Listening to crap music at 96kHz (even though nobody has speakers that can play back those frequencies...) is still listening to crap music. We already have dirt cheap, super high quality music playback - the cheapest MP3 players, CD players, DAB radios, and Hi-Fis, now offer stunning audio playback, compared to the technology available in the 1970s.

As somebody above said, DVD already does what everybody wants - it's convenient, you can back it up (I back up all my DVDs and never play the masters), you can jump to anywhere on the disc, you get extras, the picture is perfect, forever, and the resolution is more than high enough for anybody. Unless you plan on sitting one foot away from a five foot wide plasma screen, DVDs are fine.

The same goes for music - we now all have MP3 players, we know you can get 900 - 1000 tracks on one DVD-R, so who wants to give up all that music for one hour of allegedly 'higher quality', which we can't hear? The benefits of having 1,000 tracks on one DVD-R far outweigh the (impossible to hear) increase in quality of HD-DVD, plus all the shit you have to buy just to playback these 'amazing' higher frequencies.

Most music sounds perfectly fine at 20Hz to 16kHz, so 32kHz recording would be fine.

Blu Ray and HD-DVD deserve to fail - people aren't going to buy DRM encumbered shit like this any more. All PC owners want is a nice 200GB disc to backup our hard drives with - THAT'S where the market is. What will the Jews in the RIAA do then? When you can copy 200GB of MP3s onto a piece of one dollar media - how will they stop that?

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[SynapseLapse]

Now, when was the last time you upgraded your sound card?

3 months ago. I have to say, the quality on the new X-fi Creative Labs card are phenomenal.
And the new OpenAL drivers that newer games (Like Prey) are using sound incredible.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks seem to have forgotten DIVX? There was a format war in the early days of DVD. I don't think that DVD really took off, depite its obvious superiority to VHS, until DIVX bit the dust.

How I think the HD market will progress -- depends more on Joe Six-Pack than Ned Nerd. Sales of HD monitors are being made to watchers of American Football rather than classy movies. However, once folks have HD displays, they will see that (some) HD broadcasts look better than DVD movies. Yes, I know that not all HD broadcasts are truly HD (but, rather, SD upconverted). In the early days of CDs, one had to look at the back to make sure it was DDD versus ADD or AAD.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

> Listening to crap music at 96kHz (even though nobody has speakers that can play back those frequencies...)

Google for "Nyquist limit" or something because you obviously don't understand that you aren't expected to hear 96kHz frequencies - that's the sampling rate, which is a separate issue from the frequency of the signal being sampled.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[msobkow]

Doesn't Lucas theatre digital system have a lower resolution than the HD disk formats? If so, there may be some truth to grainy or blurred image scaling. The same would be true of any older digital media remastered to a higher resolution format.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[nanojath]

Extending this point, in terms of the exceptionally widespread and rapid shift from VHS to DVD - you are looking at a true paradigm shift for the consumer, from magnetic tape to optical disk. And the thing is, we had all already been schooled in the benefits of disk media by CDs and CD-ROM. In a nutshell, no tracking problems, no rewinding, fast indexed navigation of the contents. We already had a firm sense of what the benefits would be. Video quality was a secondary issue - we knew from the CD experience it would be a toss-up, depending on the source material and how well it was transferred. But the other benefits would remain regardless of the picture quality. Tape collections were showing their age, starting to experience mechanical failure and degredation due to magnetic drift. It was a sensible shift, even to the extent of rebuying significant parts of our collections. Even if you had an older TV it made sense, even if picture quality was not the biggest deal (or if a small screen or having to use some sort of converter box made it basically moot) it made sense. This shift only makes sense to the smallest component of geared-out technophiles, and even they have seen enough too-soon format flops in recent years to be leery.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[hob42]

If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well as it did, I don't think.

Which is why I'm the only person I've ever met who was recording TV shows off cable with an S-VHS VCR and used a Hi-8 camcorder for home videos when I was a kid. For regular consumers, the current standard (VHS and 8mm or VHS-C) was good enough, and the other formats didn't offer anything but a little better clarity for a much higher price. In our case, our family had that equipment because we ran a small video production business, and it was stuff we'd replaced in the studio with even higher quality gear.

There's always a market for more-of-the-same-just-higher-quality technology, somewhere, but it's foolish to expect consumers to make the upgrade on each step of the way.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[JCarnellian]

And the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), a mid-1990s Mini-Disk competitor. I've NEVER met anyone who would admit to having owned one of these players...

Both DCC and S-VHS offered 'minor' technical improvements, but made only limted market penetration. And so most pre-recorded media continued to be released in the slightly inferior but much more widely consumed formats of their respective predecessors. (R.I.P.)

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Ucklak]

That's my point, the grain is evident at that level.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Gr8Apes]

that still doesn't explain how though.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Megane]

I liken these two formats to LaserDiscs. They were out there, they were superior to tapes, but they were large, clunky, and no one really adopted them except those that were techno-freaks.

I don't think this is entirely true. I got in to laserdisc in its last couple of years (getting a lot of clearance LDs from Bjorns store), and the problem was more one of price. When you got right down to it, it cost $8 to make a laserdisc. That's manufacturing and distribution cost. This was when there were bins of VHS sell-through tapes for $5 or less. (whereas we now have Wal-Mart's $5.50 Dump Bin) Even with very high economies of scale if LD had become mainstream, the damn things would still be expensive to manufacture. One of the big problems with LD at the start was that the companies behind it hadn't factored in the cost of needing a clean room, which turned out to be essential to get acceptable quality.

But Laserdisc actually started dying as an inverse of the same effect that has left SACD/DVD-A as niche formats, and seems to be on the way to leaving Blu-Ray/HD-DVD as niche formats as well. Just from pre-announcements of DVD, people were selling off laserdisc two years before DVD came out, which was a bit later than it was supposed to because of the extra time to compromise the two competing formats into one. (This is something that was NOT done with HD; thanks Sony for being such an ass.)

Presumably the thought of having a high quality picture that could easily exceed LD was a part of it, but for people to ditch LD in advance, the one absolutely 100% known fact of the CD-size disc must have played a big role. People knew that they could be manufactured at cheaply as VHS, meaning that they had the possibility of going mainstream. There wasn't quite as much of a quality or reliability improvement as from LP to CD, but the convienence factor of LD vs DVD size was even higher, as LDs were twice as thick and maybe three times as heavy as LPs (they were made of acrylic), and longer movies needed two of those discs, which meant you had to get up to change discs in the middle of a movie. Part of the reason for the extra thickness was to get them sturdy enough to remain flat at 12 inches. There were a very few single-sided 8" LDs made using CD-thickness polycarbonate, but the lack of run time made them nothing more than curiousities.

Now I have to wonder if what drove early adopters most was the smaller form factor, the promise of cheaper movies (LD movies sold at about $40, when DVDs were $20 out of the gate AND sold at the same time as VHS movies were rental-only), or the ability to fit 99% of all movies on a single disc so you didn't need a disc swap. Or maybe it was all three. In any case it was a "perfect storm" that was only rivaled by the adoption of CD, and hasn't been seen since.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Moochman]

You're absolutely right, the media purveyors have completely lost touch with the consumers. Sony, unfortunately, has been a lost cause for a longer time than most--consider it took it the entire lifetime of its MiniDisc products (aka up until a few months ago) before it allowed people to copy recordings hassle-free from the player back to their computer--of course the MiniDisc format is for all intensive purposes dead, now, since Sony cared too much about restricting the user in favor of supporting their own overbearingly crippling DRM limitations. With the PlayStation 3 and with BluRay, Sony could have had two winners on their hands, but they've decided to shoot themselves in the foot with every new decision they've made--first overpricing the PS3 instead of being willing to take a greater loss on the hardware, then leaving out HDMI from the low-end version so it's effectively useless for HD content anyway (potentially it's greatest would-be selling point). Sony has a consistent history of creating great technology, then botching it horribly because the interests of the draconian-DRM-obsessed chiefs at the top are more important than the interests of the consumers. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if their decisions manage to single-handedly destroy all adoption of the (technically superior) Blu-Ray technology. Too bad, because they had all the cards in their favor.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Anonymous Coward]

"Add to that the war of the formats and the fact I have to replace movies I already own at outrageous new prices"

For the love of fucking god, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO REPLACE ANYTHING. Blu-ray and HD-DVD players still play regular DVD's just fine. If you want you can keep around your VHS player; neither DVD nor HD-DVD/Blu-ray will force you to replace any VHS tapes you own.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[steve_bryan]

If it was just a higher quality but still on tape, it wouldn't have caught on as well...

Indeed it did not. It has faded from memory but there was a brief time when pre-recorded DAT tapes were available and they had much the same fidelity of CD's minus the convenience and durability. There was also a brief attempt by Philips at a compressed digital audio tape in competition to Sony's minidisc product. Again the minidisc (in the disc vs tape comparison) was a great success by comparison although even it did not do well in the US market.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[steve_bryan]

DVDs were relased back in 1997, so while I guess '99 is close to that its still nothing to brag about. IIRC, DVDs were the fastest accepted new technology at the time ...

But that is the important point about this claim. He was an early adopter of DVD. Eventually DVD took off but it was incredibly slow during its early period. To talk about slow acceptance at this point for next gen DVD is ludicrous in comparison with DVD. Hell, Sony hasn't even introduced its first Blu-ray player making this essentially pre-history for BD. Wait until PS3 is introduced before making even an initial observation.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[complete loony]

Both the Blu-ray and HDCP wiki pages mention the key revocation process.

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[amuro98]

However, most people who DO have HD-capable TVs aren't watching anything that's actually in HD. They see the larger picture, and the improvements you get by using component video cables vs. the single composite cable their old set used, and think "This is HD!" It's a big problem for stores who get barraged by angry customers who suddenly think just because they have a HDTV, that their SD sources (cable, satellite, antenna) will suddenly look as good as the HD demos in the store. They feel "cheated" that they have to buy additional equipment and/or services in order to actually get a HD material.

Granted, as more HDTVs enter the market, cable and satellite providers will step up to make the transition easier and easier for their customers, but the fact remains that most people are just plain ignorant when it comes to A/V technology much less something as new and confusing as HDTV...

As for Divx... Divx might have had a chance IF it had came out before the standard DVD. One of the biggest problems Divx had was that consumers had a choice: Divx, with its myriad of hassles and conditions, or hassle-free, DRM-free, invasion-of-privacy-free DVD. Even then, however, I suspect that Divx would have then been replaced by On-Demand services which would have done away with the whole disc thing all together.

What a shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD was a huge step up from VHS tapes. HDDVD/BR offer nothing truly substantial to make people want to buy them plus most people don't have an HDTV to take advantage of the extra resolution.

Re:What a shocker

[legoburner]

And they take something away in the form of vastly increased DRM (HDMI, disc encryption) and you get to pay the development costs in the price of the products. Yay!

Re:What a shocker

[Chris whatever]

it's just a matter of time,,,tv constructor are making less and less regular t.v., even HDTV. i went to buy a new t.v. because my 15 year old t.v. just died on me and the guy said that Sony is not doing regular t.v. anymore and HDTV is going down the drain to let the plasma and LCD tv come in.

So you have the higher resolution there but again if you dont cough up the cash, you'll get some crapy resolution on a lcd screen. Even if you have a blue-ray or hddvd if your tv cant hold more than a 1000 lines, it doesnt matter if the format can deliver twice that, your still stuck with a 1000 line wicth in any case, is not bad at all.

Re:What a shocker

[cbreaker]

In terms of video quality, a DVD didn't really offer up that much of an improvement over DVD. DVD helped with longer-lasting quality video (10 year old VHS tapes show their age) and better sound, but besides the random-access nature of a DVD (which really, how many times do you jump back and forth during a movie?) I don't find it to be that big a deal over VHS.

Now, HD-DVD/Blu-Whatever, they promise up to 4x the resolution of normal DVD's/VHS, which is damned significant. If you can't tell the difference between HD and SD, you either need a new TV or new Eyes, and you definately didn't notice any difference between VHS and DVD.

Re:What a shocker

[SoCalChris]

Now, HD-DVD/Blu-Whatever, they promise up to 4x the resolution of normal DVD's/VHS, which is damned significant. If you can't tell the difference between HD and SD, you either need a new TV or new Eyes, and you definately didn't notice any difference between VHS and DVD.

Ever think that most people can tell the difference between SD and HD, but simply don't care about the higher definition? There's a lot of things that I'd rather be doing than watching tv, especially if it requires a tv that costs more than a few hundred dollars.

Re:What a shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only was the quality of DVD much better than VHS, you didn't have to rewind the damned things. Personally I think that was the biggest factor that helped lazy American people decide to buy DVD players.

Re:What a shocker

[Hadlock]

Side by side, yes, I can tell a huge difference between HDTV and Standard Def TV. However, when watching TV at home on a good quality SDTV, I can't tell the difference. The only time it becomes an issue is when I hook my laptop up to the TV, and the words are a little blurry @ 800x600 and font 12. I've seen an HDTV demo, and I can tell you now, the quality increase wasn't worth the purchase of the additional infrastructure ($1200 for TV, $500 for HD-DVD, $45 for an HDMI cable, $200 for a reciever that accepted optical audio in, another $24 for an optical cable... almost $2000 after taxes) for what is maybe 20% better image quality (judging by the layman's eye) than is currently avalible? No thanks.
 
When HD-DVD players cost $150 (mine will probably come in the form of a PS3 in 2-3 years), and you can buy a 1080p TV for under $500, I'll consider it. That'll be around 2010, I'd guess.

Re:What a shocker

[ATMosby]

People watch their sdtv formated movies in the wrong aspect ration all the time. Ever noticed how 'chubby' folks on tv in a bar look? LOL

Re:What a shocker

[cbreaker]

That's not the argument that's pervasive, at least around here. The argument usually entails someone saying that they can't tell the difference between HDTV and normal TV. Honestly, I don't see how this is possible, unless you're using a really small TV or a really low end HDTV.

If nothing else, all HD programming is in wide-screen, which is perhaps even more important then the jacked up resolution. While it's true that many DVD's come in widescreen mode which will letterbox on your SDTV, television programming does not. HD Programming is more enjoyable to watch because you see more of the scene.

If you don't even like TV, then I don't see how you can even pipe in on this discussion. It would be like me arguing why people don't give a shit if Callaway is better then Ping when I don't even like golf.

Re:What a shocker

[SoCalChris]

I do enjoy tv, just not enough to spend the kind of money on it that these new formats require. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of Americans feel the same about it as I do.

Re:What a shocker

[oggiejnr]

Widescreen can be done perfectly acceptably over SDTV on a widescreen SDTV. Most Freeview channels in the UK broadcast SDTV widescreen streams which work so there is no reason why you have to upgrade to HDTV just to get widescreen.

Re:What a shocker

[cbreaker]

First of all, there's no such thing as a wide-screen SDTV. "SD" is going to be either PAL or NTSC, and neither are wide-screen. However, there exists "EDTV" sets that provide a lower resolution then HD but with widescreen formats. They generally accept an HD signal and/or are able to stretch a standard NTSC signal if it's broadcast in anamorphic pixels - such as a DVD player can do.

The price differences between widescreen "EDTV's" and a 720p HDTV are not great. For only a small percentage more, you can get full HD. To be clear - you can get a 1080i CRT-based set for a very low price these days. While the picture will be generally less stable then a flat-panel or LCD/DLP projector, the picture is awesome. A friend of mine has a 30" CRT HDTV and it looks awesome, but it's not acceptable for using with a computer, for example.

To my knowledge, nothing in the United States is broadcast in wide-screen without also being broadcast in a standard HD format.

The whole point is moot anyways, because I didn't say you HAD to upgrade to a full HD set to view widescreen. It's just a very nice side effect that ALL HD signals are widescreen.

Re:What a shocker

[cbreaker]

"There's a lot of things that I'd rather be doing than watching tv"

That's what you said. Reason would have it that you meant you don't generally enjoy TV. If you meant something else, or if you meant to be more specific, you might have mentioned that.

HDTV is expensive right now. That's NOT in dispute. What is in dispute is that a lot of people claim to ne be able to tell the difference between HDTV and SDTV, and I think that's bullshit. If you have a nice TV and a nice HDTV signal, it will be really impressive, and anyone would love to watch HDTV instead of SD.

I do agree, that because of the costs, for many people they just don't care at this point. The same was true for Color TV. Color sets were way more expensive then B&W, and not a lot of programming was color. Color didn't improve the show, it just made watching the show more enjoyable. I believe the same is true for HDTV. Eventually (and you can see it now) HD prices will drop to what we saw for SDTV's before HD started taking over the store shelves. Even now, you can get a CRT HDTV for a very affordable price, or a lower end plasma for less then $1000. In 2000, I purchased a 32" Sony Trinitron CRT TV for $850. In another year or so, you'll easily be able to beat that price with a similarly sized HDTV.

It's a transition period and the manufacturers are milking it. It doesn't mean HDTV isn't a great technology. It will improve everything from Movies and TV to game systems and computers in the living room.

Re:What a shocker

[Tim Browse]

You also need to shop around for your cables. $45 for an HDMI cable? $24 for an optical cable? What, does it carry famous photons? :-)

Re:What a shocker

[GutBomb]

$400 - 30" Philips tube based widescreen HDTV $150 - xbox with mod chip and component video outputs $10 a month - comcast HD DVR $7 - HDMI cable on ebay (it carries a digital signal, so a cable is a cable is a cable) $16 - Optical audio cable (see HDMI cable info) the xbox upconverts dvds to 1080i and they look incredible, just as good on a tv this size as HBO HD (and don't let anyone tell you that you can't tell a difference between standard and HD on a tv this small, you so can) no need to spend so much money unless you want a larger screen.

Re:What a shocker

[GutBomb]

he;s not talking about the United States. in europe the vast majority of natively widescreen TVs are SDTV which contrary to your post is NOT synonymous with "NTSC/PAL". NTSC/PAL are SDTV but so is 480p (720x480) or 576i(720x576) which in europe are regularly transmitted in anamorphic 16:9. Anamorphic 16:9 is very common in europe, while it;s pretty much unheard of in north america, where we tend to letterbox our 16:9 content into a 4:3 frame.

Re:What a shocker

[Hadlock]

$45 isn't even for a monster brand HDMI cable; that's what they charge at wally world, which while slightly more expensive than Fry's, is well within a standard deviation of the average.

Re:What a shocker

[Hadlock]

The cheapest CRT HDTV I was able to find was $700 (30", i believe) at Fry's, where is this $300 HDTV you speak of? Does it do 1080i/p? You can't even find widescreen CRTs here in north Texas for the most part. Hell, I'd be happy with a widescreen CRT SDTV, to get rid of those damned black bars on my movies.

Component cables aren't digital, unfortunately, so there will always be some signal loss/interference. What does the mod chip on the xbox have to do with anything?

Re:What a shocker

[Znork]

"you either need a new TV or new Eyes"

Unfortunately, the medical profession hasnt gotten that far at non-human eye upgrades.

Human eyes just simply arent very good at appreciating high resolutions on moving pictures. The highest resolution is only available for a few degrees in the middle, and even at best it can barely resolve a bit better than the millimeter range at a meters distance. Try it out, make a chessboard dithered black/white field of one mm pixels on your monitor, and sit a meter from it. Personally, I can see that it's actually pixels for about an inch in the middle, and the rest simply turns grey (interestingly enough, moving away slowly, the pixelization remains for a few seconds before the brain 'forgets' that it was all pixels and just fills in with grey).

So, yes, you can easily tell the difference between HD and SD on a still picture if you're standing up close to a large TV. But on a 32 inch TV, even 720 pixels wide approaches the limits of human visual acuity at a meters distance. Move away to the usual distance people are sitting at, unpause the picture, and you need to be Superman to appreciate HD.

Or, well, maybe not. I recall reading about some HD research that had gone through consumer satisfaction and most really appreciated the much better picture. Of course, not even half of them had actually tuned to the HD channels, so...

Re:What a shocker

[GutBomb]

look harder. you can easily find HDTVs in the $400-500 range, CRT, 30-32". best buy is where i got mine. yes my tv does 1080i.

http://www.outlet.philips.com/b2c_redesign/catalog /categorieInPath.do?page=first&key=0/4190799E9A6F0 08D00000000828BD472/41907ABB9A6F008D00000000828BD4 72&shop=OUTLET

best buy has a 27" 4:3 insignia HDTV for $378 right now and a 30" widescreen for $530.

the xbox needs the mod chip for xbox media center. the regular xbox dvd player doesn't upconvert, but the one in media center does.

the signal loss and interference in component cables in a 6 foot run are not significant.

most movies on dvd that are 2.35 instead if 16:9 will still show black bars even on an HDTV because the picture is still wider than the tv. there are no 2.35 tv's (there are some projectors that will do 2.35 anamorphic)

Re:What a shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can easily find HDTVs in the $400-500 range, CRT, 30-32". best buy is where i got mine. yes my tv does 1080i.

Your "HD-ready" set may accept a 1080i signal, but you are not seeing that resolution on your screen, sorry.

You can argue semantics over whether a lower-resolution CRT displaying an HD-compatible signal is "true HDTV," but the fact is that your $300-$500 HDTV does not display full 1080i resolution. There simply isn't a tube set that can resolve that kind of detail, not at any price!

Re:What a shocker

[GutBomb]

you can believe that if you want, but real world tests shatter that myth.

when i first got the tv i put a 1080i image into it. i recorded something off of NBC on my HD DVR. i set my cable box to output 480p. looked at the picture and saw that it was very clear. then i set the cable box to output 1080i (the tv can;t do 720p, it upconverts it to 1080i) the same scene from the same source material was miles clearer than in 480p on the same tv. I used a scene from My Name is Earl where a newspaper was shown on the screen. the same material at 480p the text on the newspaper was readable in some places, but when it got smaller it got blurry. in 1080i the whole newspaper page was readable.

the difference between HD Ready and HDTV is that a TV set can't really be called an HDTV if it does not include an internal HD tuner. HD-Ready means that you can hook an HDTV source to it. you might be thinking of EDTV which are digital TVs which top out at 480p (which still look great at 30")

how do you explain CRT computer monitors that can display resolutions upwards of 1920x1080? do they not have CRT tubes? you're wrong wrong wrong.

Re:What a shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course when you switch from 480p source to 1080i it's going to be clearer, but it is NOT full 1080i resolution. You can say that your TV "does 1080i" because its 1080i mode is clearer than 480p, but the 1080i signal contains detail you won't see. Your display will resolve probably 600 lines of resolution (in TV terminology, that's alternating black and white lines, so call it 1200 pixels). The best NTSC sources can resolve about 500, so of course your display is sharper.

All CRTs have a shadow mask or aperture grille to direct the electron beams onto the phosphor dots. The display can't resolve anything finer than those dots, it is physically not possible. Even Sony's top-of-the-line "Ultra Fine Pitch" CRTs only have around 1200-1400 slits per horizontal line, far less than the 1920 that the 1080i standard would dictate, and those cost WAY more than $500.

You can't really compare these with computer monitors, though, because although they are CRTs, they use different guns, phosphors, scanning frequencies, etc. That's why I said "no tube set" can resolve that kind of detail, rather than "no CRT." BUT even the highest-resolution computer monitors are a bit fuzzy at 1600x1200 and above.

I'm not wrong; it's just that you're so happy with your TV set that you are willing to buy the sales guy's line that it supports "full 1080i resolution." It will definitely give you a nice picture from a 1080i signal. Hadlock's low-price figure is too high, you got that right, but if he wants true 1080i detail, he won't get it from a CRT.

Disappointing

[neonprimetime]

It was disappointed in the article format. Here's the Printer Friendly version

Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

HA HA! Both HD-DVD & Sony can take their formats that they're trying to shove down our throats, and shove them up their rear instead.

DVDs are plenty good for me, and I suspect they are plenty good enough for the vast majority of users. I don't think that the tv is important enough to most pople to set aside enough money for one that is capable of displaying a movie any better than a regular DVD player can, let alone paying the premium that is currently being charged for the players.

No selling points

[mugnyte]

There's no guarantee that you're decoding to full res, that your player WILL EVER be able to decode to full res, that full res is even WORTH watching, and that you ever really OWN the content you bought.

  Why would anyone buy this stuff? There's few positive selling points about it. Movies are on DVD for as long as anyone can foresee, and computers can record on these formats and play on setops. What are the market-accepted details for the new formats? Nobody can decide.

  Peh, I'd love to see the capacities go up, but DRM fouled both these formats. Nobody's going to wipe the stink off them, and so we must let them die. Perhaps a company will simply go for capacity and format without mucking around with anything else.

Re:No selling points

[Chonine]

I hope the combined media/hardware companies see this as clearly as it is.

They created as advanced and locked down set of DRM as they could, and couldn't reconcile a single format for consumers. This was out of greed and in an effort to protect profits, but it may have cost them an entire market to move in to.

While I would'nt say there would be an HD media player in every household by now, but with a single format for HD DVD without any encumbrances I bet that there would have been significantly more sales in this area for media and hardware by now. The difference between projected and actual sales continues to diverge as time goes on. There are many other factors, but I see this as being a substantial part.

The Mess

[in2mind]

Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience

Yea.Early adopter.They expect them to buy a player each - One to play HD-DVD;Another to play Blu-Ray; And then they will keep the user guessing as to which one will become the standard.

They created the confusion.They are paying for it.Why should consumers too?

Re:The Mess

[interiot]

Maybe lots of early adopters are waiting for a player that will read both formats? (or are waiting for one format to win) I'm not a super-early adopter, but I'd probably buy in the next 12 months if one of these happened.

Re:The Mess

[JCarnellian]

The problem is that the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs themselves need to be backward compatible, not just the players. Then HD-DVDs would play in standard definition on (single standard) Blu-Ray players, and vice versa; and both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs would play on existing players (albeit in standard definition). Plus retailers would not need to stock, e.g., both standard definition and Blu-Ray versions of the same movie.

I have three dvd players and three PCs with dvd drives, in a total of three rooms; there is NO incentive for me to buy one high definition player plus any high definition only dvd discs becuse I will not be able to watch those discs in the other two rooms, or on my laptop in an airport. Without the availability of hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs, I expect I'll wait until I've had to replace at least two dvd players through 'attrition', and all new players playback both high definition formats, before I start buying high definition dvds.

Of course it's obvious why there are no hybrid standard-/high-definition dvd discs: if they existed there would be no incentive for accelerated replacement of existing dvd players with high definition models. But it looks to me that the limited number of hybrid cd/SACD or cd/DVD-Audio discs killed the move to multi-channel audio, so high definition dvd marketers beware!

Re:The Mess

[A Commentor]

Also make sure you already have the two great audio successors to CDs... you already have a Super Audio-CDs (SA-CDs) and a DVD-Audio player, right? Plus if you were an early adopter of rewritable DVDs, you have both and original DVD+R/RW and one that only does DVD-R/RW...

Duplication is so nice for the bank account (the company's bank account).

Re:The Mess

[iamblades]

There ARE HD DVD combo discs which are backwards compatible. They have HD on one side/layer, and SD on the other, and the SD part plays in any dvd player.

These discs are more expensive to produce than standard HD DVDs, so there are only a few of them as of now.

BD cannot do this kind of backwards compatibility, due to the different physical structure of the disc.

Here is the list of the currently available combo discs:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_d/104-9437046-10 41535?url=search-alias%3Ddvd&field-keywords=combo+ HD+DVD&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

Too much confusion

[Russ Nelson]

Consumers have a tendency to stay away from confusing markets. Nobody wants to buy something only to find out that they "got ripped off".

Hybrids may be the only real winner

[elrous0]

If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales, Sony is going to have to back down and start licensing the blu-ray technology to manufacturers of hybrids (Samsung was originally contemplating such a player, but rumor is that Sony refused to licensed blu-ray in a hybrid player, which is already leading to some legal headaches).

Sony are control freaks and absolutely obsessed with their own proprietary formats (no matter how many times this has burned them). But if they don't blink on this one, it could take BOTH formats down.

-Eric

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[cptgrudge]

But if they don't blink on this one, it could take BOTH formats down.

I don't see any problem. Keep your fingers crossed.

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[WillAffleckUW]

If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales, Sony is going to have to back down and start licensing the blu-ray technology to manufacturers of hybrids

They've already been forced to license it in China, due to widescale piracy of the tech. At least, according to Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. Showed up in an interview with the Scottish CEO of Sony and then followup articles in the WSJ.

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[Lord Apathy]

I think sony is going to get handed their ass on this one. Sony doesn't have a good track record when trying to release a competing standard. Betamax vs. VHS anyone? PSP against the Nintendo DS? From what I read most of the DVD manufacturing companies would rather go with HD-DVD than BR. because they don't have to reduce their manufacturing lines. They can just up grade the equipment that they make DVD's on. Where with BR they will have to buy all new equipment, buy it from Sony that is.

Another thing is if Sony is the only one manufacturing BR players that will tend to keep the price high. When the price of a HD-DVD player drops to 300 bucks and BR are still around 500 joe walmart shopper is going to buy the cheaper. As more people buy HD-DVD players the prices will continue to tumble putting HD DVD in the lead. Movie studios will abandon the BR because no one is buying it, opting to go with the cheaper and technically inferior HD-DVD. At least I think its technically inferior.

But anyway it comes right down to Sony sinking a few hundred million into a pig that can't dance. An I really have no problems with that what so ever.

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[Xugumad]

The post's marked funny, but no, seriously, if both formats flop, it isn't a big issue. Upscaled DVDs are just fine for me, thanks, and I imagine a lot of other people too. Not only that, but I'd be amazed if they don't try the launch again a few more years down the line, hopefully with better formats...

Heck, we may never see another format like DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, because we'll all download movies over ultra fast broadband, but I'm a believe it when I see it kinda guy on that front.

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[pete6677]

And if we're really lucky, it might be the end of Sony. I could only wish. What exactly does this company have to offer anymore besides overpriced garbage?

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[Dravik]

Blue Ray is a lot like Betamax. Technically it is slightly better, If I rember right about 6 gigs of additional storage room on the disk. But also, just like Betamax, the difference is small enough to not really matter to 90% of the people out there.

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[0xABADC0DA]

Also they are doing to hold what, 25-50gb? By the time they catch on we'll have finger-sized read/write drives that hold that much. That means the only use for HD-DVD or BlueRay is for one-way distribution of games/movies (music is too small to need more than 5gb of normal dvd).

But who really wants to go out these days and actually get a physical cd? This is the ipod age, where people are ditching read-only physical media in droves in favor of lower quality digital copies. By the time either could pick up steam most places will have enough bandwidth for streaming of DVD-quality movies (even in America where we are behind the speed curve).

Re:Hybrids may be the only real winner

[GutBomb]

2 very good video game systems?

Quoted For Truth

[ip_freely_2000]

"When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD"

The important part: "...doesn't look much better..."

I would be the first to agree that HD does look better. But does it look better enough to toss my current DVD player and TV? Is it worth the headache of the format rivalry and all the DRM connectivity issues that I'm not sure a new set will be compatible with in two years?

No.

I'll continue to sit on the sidelines for a while longer.

Re:Quoted For Truth

[transami]

It's doesn't even matter. (Shameless plug but...) This tells why:

    http://weblands.blogspot.com/2006/08/eulogy-on-dis c.html

Re:Quoted For Truth

[Detritus]

Don't underestimate the ability of a store to screw up a demo. I saw a blu-ray player being demonstrated at a local Best Buy store. It looked terrible, even worse than a well-mastered DVD. Plus, the player appeared to be slow and buggy.

Re:Quoted For Truth

[SanityInAnarchy]

I am sick of hearing people talk about how underwhelming the difference is. Double the framerate, quadruple the resolution. If you've got a good video, it shows.

I do agree with you on one point, though: It is not worth the headache of the DRM.

Tossing out current DVD player and TV: Not a problem, my computer monitor is my TV, and it already makes high def look damn good. Format rivalry: Not a problem in the long run. This will eventually become irrelevant, either in the VHS/Betamax sense (one dies), or in the DVD-R/DVD+R sense (both are well supported by everything, so no one knows the difference or cares). So, they would seem to be on the right track here.

But the DRM is the real problem. They have set this up so that they have an insane amount of power and control over any high def living room. There are entirely too many things that they could do, which they should not be able to do -- blacklisting comes to mind.

And for the record, I would not have been an early adopter for DVD, either -- unskippable ads are a deal-breaker for me. I would still not be buying or renting DVDs if it wasn't for DVD Jon.

Re:Quoted For Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html.

To me, the difference is not that big. It will not make a bad movie (on dvd) to be good (on hd), nor a good movie (hd) bad (dvd).

Besides, superbit(tm) would improve the DVD too. Hopefully this will become standard.

Re:Quoted For Truth

[SanityInAnarchy]

It will not make a bad movie (on dvd) to be good (on hd), nor a good movie (hd) bad (dvd).

That's true. But that doesn't happen anyway -- Star Wars Kid would not be any better in HD than it is in horribly compressed mpeg. The actual Star Wars movies (if you like them), while they are significantly worse at very low bitrate/resolution, they are still good.

But, all else considered, I much prefer a DVD to a 700 meg mpeg. And, all things considered, without DVD Jon, it would be either the 700 meg mpeg or nothing. And that's not about piracy, that's about control -- I'd really rather not be forced to sit through unskippable previews, logos, menu animations, and so on.

Besides, superbit(tm) would improve the DVD too. Hopefully this will become standard.

I would hope superbit becomes standard for existing DVDs. After all, I only ever watch maybe 10-20% of the special features, and most of it just isn't that interesting. Since many DVDs use a separate disc for that anyway, superbit makes sense, if it is what I think it is.

However, even h.264 at the same resolution and bitrate is noticeably better. If it weren't for the DRM, I'd probably be buying a blu-ray drive right now.

still confusing

[johnnyringo]

It's still too confusing to decide which format will be supported by the most releases, what tvs/monitors display the content best, and where to find current content... how many movies are out now anyway? 3? I am still miffed they are confusing consumers with 480, 720 and 1080 both "i" and "p." let alone tv resolutions vary in between each and up and down scale. I wish I was getting off-topic, but it is all so closely related it's frustrating. ug!

I wonder how this is going to effect the PS3 as well. It's all a bit nutty.

I guess it's back to watching Anchorman in regular-def dvd for the weekend.

"Mr, burgundy, you have a massive erection"
"It's the pleats."

Re:forget movies, I want cheap fast data backup

[The MAZZTer]

It's called buying another hard-drive. Get an external one for best portability-ness. Then you can just drag and drop, or use a backup tool to do the work for you. Windows Live OneCare includes such a tool even has explicit support for automatic backup to an external drive... although I've never tested it and I don't usually use backup tools thus I don't know how it stacks up.

Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Maxo-Texas]

I can't imagine why folks are not rushing to this.

DVD's look great on screens up to 55".
DVD's can be backed up and are very cheap.
DVD players are dirt cheap.

HD/Blu ray are
1) expensive
2) heavily drm'd
3) havn't chosen the best movies to start with.
4) Not that much better on the screens joe average can buy.
5) DO NOT EVEN WORK CORRECTLY on HD MONITORS if they are more than about 7 months old (downsample if the player doesn't detect a secure connection to the monitor)

I can't imagine why consumers are not flocking to these--

Diminishing Returns

[JBHarris]

Simple demand/supply says that you will not need an infinite supply of anything, and that also applies to technology. Diminishing returns says that sooner or later, people will have enough technology (Blu-Ray, XBox360s, Laptops, etc) and they will not want or need any more. Upgrades are in the same boat.

Re:Diminishing Returns

[amRadioHed]

Damn straight. DVD's do a damn fine job of letting me watch movies, i don't see myself ever needing to upgrade formats. Get back to me when 3D holographic displays are under $200. Then maybe I'll reconsider.

Talk about whining.

[caldroun]

The formats just came out, and the players are still expensive. Did they think that we would all run out and buy our movies again? Much less a player for $1000. Pfft. While we are still getting announcements like "Sony releases 2 more movie titles for Blue-Ray" tells me that they shouldn't be concerned about underwhelming performance yet...it is still NEW! Give me a reason to replace my ubiquitous DVD players.

Re:Talk about whining.

[posterlogo]

I think the point is that when DVD players came out, even if you were an early adopter you ended up very satisfied (as I did), compared to VHS, in many respects. COMPARATIVELY, the new formats have severely disappointed. It is painfully evident that while DVDs were a great thing for the consumers, these HD formats seem to be made for fleecing consumers. Also, early DVD players were not nearly as expensive, and worked with pretty much any TV.

Display requirements

[binaryDigit]

When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,'

They don't mention exactly what they watched it on. If it wasn't some 1080p wonderdisplay, then it brings out what I think the major failing of these hd formats will be (at least this first gen). The great thing about dvd was that you saw immediate benefits both from the medium and the content on your _standard_tv_. You didn't need the latest lcd/dlp/plasma display to appreciate what you were getting. The jump from tape -> dvd was massive, both in quantity and quality of content and the convenience of the medium itself, and it was available to anyone. Now we have only an incremental increated in the convenience of the medium (saves having multi-disk sets) which really doesn't mean much for most viewers and the improvements in quality only applies to a much smaller audience.

Re:Display requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that we don't even have an incremental increase in convienence infact we have step backwards in convienince thanks to the heavy DRM, and only a very small increase in image quality and that's only if you have a $1000+ tv to watch it on. Honestly you'd have to be an idiot to buy this junk. Sony's screwed around with it's customers too much, it's time for it to go away and die.

Re:Display requirements

[loraksus]

They don't mention exactly what they watched it on. If it wasn't some 1080p wonderdisplay,
Even with an awesome display - HD sometimes isn't terribly impressive.
You have to account for the source image. Yeah, we all know about the "oh, it's film" argument, but even stuff shot in 24p on the latest digital cameras has problems because of optics or poor camera work. I've been watching a fair bit of high def content lately - and I have a display that runs at 2048x1536 which lets me watch the stuff without resizing - and there are scenes where the focus is off by a couple of inches, or the image is blurry because of the low light - things that are barely noticable on DVD, but become really obvious when you get used to an HD image. If your TV/DVD player doesn't deinterlace well (and very few do a good job of it), you'll have a less enjoyable experience.

Good for screen cappers...maybe

[ben there...]

I rent DVDs from NetFlix and take screen captures and short clips for one of my sites, and would love to use HD movies instead. For the same subscription price, I'd be getting 1920x1080 images instead of ~640x480 or 852x480, a huge difference for stills.

But then again, I don't even know if I'd be able to take screen captures from a computer, with all the DRM they have.

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[sfeinstein]

Sit tight, the MPAA agents are on their way. They are your friends. Let them in when they ask politely.

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[ben there...]

Strange how all these other high profile sites do the same thing with no problems.

I suppose I should have put a disclaimer that I was already aware of issues with fair use, editorial use, the percentage of a work that qualifies as fair use, etc.

The only real problem is whether DRM prevents using them with programs that are capable of screen captures, or even with computers at all.

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[hansamurai]

Good news!

Print screen works!

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[Blakey Rat]

Unfortunately, not until VLC or some other open source player figures out the format and how to play it.

What bothers me is that the "screencap" protection has actually gotten worse. In MacOS 9, you could take a screencap with a DVD playing and the DVD image would just be blanked out. In OS X, you can't take a screencap at all without quitting DVD Player. Which is a royal PITA when I want to take a screencap of something in World of Warcraft and I happen to have a DVD playing on the other monitor. Thanks, Apple!

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[ben there...]

Thanks for the tip. That is good news. It's not quite as convenient as VirtualDub's or Quicktime's capture functions, but it's better than nothing.

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[ben there...]

Wow, that's pretty rough. Windows is similar by default: with hardware acceleration enabled that part of the screencap is just black. But if you disable hardware acceleration for video, it works fine. Or use a different program besides WMP/WinDVD.

Maybe Apple uses similar hardware acceleration for DVDs?

Re:Good for screen cappers...maybe

[annenk38]

alt.binaries.hdtv

Early adopters aren't stupid

[Overzeetop]

Oh, sure we're an impulsive crowd, but most are educated and realize when we've been snookered before.

Did nobody in either camp stop and look at how they had royally screwed every early adopter of HDTV? The promise of content that never occured. The delayed, and delayed, and delayed rollout of OTA. The jumble of formats that caused event the best CE to falter under the load of options. The incompatibilities between components. The ubiquitous component interface that every early adopter had on their display sets which are now utterly obsolete due to the need for "content protection" - a perfectly good $7000 50RP set which may be relegated to 480p at the whim of the broadcaster. The promise of 20Mb HD that got chopped into subchannels to rerun Andy Griffith and the Golden Girls in SD simultaneously, at the expense of HD. The iron fist approach to preventing transferring DVDs to Media Servers.

No, the industry has drawn a line, and the early adopters are on the other side. We're the ones who are most adversely affected by the content protection and market jockying. Don't come to me with your hand out for your improved shovel right after you run over my dog. The industry has, through their anti-piracy efforts, significantly alienated a large portion of their first-run consumers. They've managed to eliminate the initial cash infusion that covers the R&D part of the CE process, and now they're stuck with trying to add enough volume to get every household to buy the product just to cover the engineering costs.

The early adopters want to buy this stuff, but we want to play with our new toys, not see how womebody else want us to play with them. Give us back our control, and we'll open our wallets. 'Til then, go fuck yourselves.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[HTMLSpinnr]

I'm in the camp that got burned too - my Toshiba 34" CRT HDTV Monitor I bought only a few years back is useless w/ newer technology as it lacks any sort of digital input. I'm not anti-DRM, but I'm not going to spend alot for an inferior performance.

Before I sink any money into either format, I'd want to see a clear winner, and something that wouldn't require me to upgrade my TV every 2 years to keep up with.

Until then, my older Panasonic RP-82 works just fine w/ regular (or SuperBit) DVDs. I already get full resolution HD from my cable company.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[Darth Maul]

Excellent summary of my thoughts, too. I'm an early adopter. Bought a $1K DVD player when they first came out (still works, btw). But now my 34" CRT Sony HDTV (lacking HDMI input) will not play nicely with a new HD DVD / Blu-ray formats just because The Man is already assuming I'm an evil pirate? And I'm supposed to give them money for that "feature"?

It is obvious that this new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray market is only to serve the media companies. They want two things 1) control over the content, and 2) consumers to buy all their movies all over again. Ok, so they're getting those two things with this new format. But what do we, the actual customers, get out of it? Nothing worth upgrading for.

I'm usually first in line to buy new technology, but I'm completely skipping this round. Come back to me when I can download a movie for a few bucks, play it on my component-input HDTV, and keep the movie file around as long as I want to. Right now the pendulum is swinging way too far to the side of company greed, so I'll wait.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[Ryan C.]

Amen brother! Testify!

Early adopters to industry: "We are not regular consumers with more money. We want to hook up your new technology to our blender, toaster, and the Internet simultaneously just to see if we can. If you take that away, good luck selling your first gen. product to Joe Sixpack at WalMart."

I'd like to see your last two sentences on a banner at a trade show.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[Lord Apathy]

Damn straight. Someone give this man a chair, make sure it's not the one plugged in.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[neural cooker]

Give us back our control, and we'll open our wallets. 'Til then, go fuck yourselves.

Amen. I'm with you on this one. DRM is main reason why I don't want to go HDTV, etc. Sure the picture is better, but God damn that's a lot of money (and time) to spend on something that wants to control the way I use it, when I can just use a perfectly good proven technology to watch what I want and how I want to watch it. Screw that.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[GutBomb]

funny. i see all this about DRM, i guess i just haven't been drinking the kool-ade but if you're not planning on copying the stuff why are you worried about DRM? besides, as long as the component outputs are enabled on your HD reciever/dvd player (and there are HD-DVD players with component output) you won;t have any DRM problems.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[failedlogic]

I'm wondering in a way if the media companies don't really want this anyways. Consider: 1) There's a huge amount of convergence in the industry 2) Cable/Satellite companies are the largest 'consumers' of movies via PPV selling.

I worked in sales for a cable company. PPV makes a huge part of the revenue. Now that some are releasing video-on-demand, consider this: if they are broadcast in HDTV with some form of copy protection and you now don't buy the movie but 'download it' ... if you want to watch the same movie over, you end up having to pay for it again. Lets say the PPV is $5. Say 1/2 goes to producer, 1/2 to cable. A DVD sells for what $15 in stores. Say (generously) $7 goes to retailer, $2.5 to wholesaler, $2.5 to producer. How are the profit margins not better for the studios. Time Warner is a producer and a cable company. Confilict of intererst? Yep.

The profits, I'm speculating on, but I'll bet there's probably more profit in PPV video on demand type service to Hollywood then they'll ever be on buying DVDs. And its all about control anyways.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[fm6]

If you're not stupid, why are you an early adopter?

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[Mr2001]

i see all this about DRM, i guess i just haven't been drinking the kool-ade but if you're not planning on copying the stuff why are you worried about DRM?

Not all copying is illegal, you know. Remember fair use? DRM makes it difficult (and illegal, under the DMCA) to exercise your rights for format shifting, criticism/parody, educational materials, personal backups, etc.

besides, as long as the component outputs are enabled on your HD reciever/dvd player (and there are HD-DVD players with component output) you won;t have any DRM problems.

Ah, of course, because the studios say they won't use the "image constraint token" for a few years. We can trust them, right? And in a few years, why, we can all just spend another $2000 for a TV that supports the latest DRM handshakes.

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[GutBomb]

ok fine, the fair use argument. so what do you plan on using HDTV footage for then besides watching it? or recording it? because you can do that with D-VHS. I can also hook my laptop to my HDTV reciever with firewire and capture anything.

what is the DRM keeping you from doing? anything? ok yeah, not now, but in the future.

please point me in the direction of your criticism/parody/educational material.

I didn't think you could.

you people bitch about DRM just so you have something to bitch about.

my HDCP compliant TV cost $400, not $2000

Re:Early adopters aren't stupid

[Mr2001]

please point me in the direction of your criticism/parody/educational material.

I didn't think you could.

You're right, I'm not personally doing anything with HD content (not even watching it). Your argument falls apart, however, because there are plenty of people who do want to exercise their fair use rights for HD content. For example, someone who wants to make a backup of that brand new kids' movie instead of letting his kids ruin the original by sticking it in the toaster, or someone who wants to post a video review (complete with excerpts) of some new movie or show on his web site.

Your argument boils down to "I'm not using my fair use rights anyway, so I won't miss them." You can forfeit your own rights, but you sure as hell can't forfeit everyone else's.

you people bitch about DRM just so you have something to bitch about.

I bitch about DRM because even when it isn't limiting what I actually want to do right now, it's limiting what I can potentially do tomorrow or next year. Maybe you're happy to short-sightedly give up your future options in order to get something shiny today, but I'm not.

Good greif. All 3 player support the same codecs

[acomj]

This is nonsense. Both Blu-ray and HDVDVD support the same codecs Mpeg2, mpeg 4 (h.264) and VC1 (Windows Media). For some reason Blu-ray creation software didn't support the other codecs initially, but the player does.

Well, duh

[svunt]

Wow, the Sony demo looked great, but when Joe Sixpack discovers he needs a $3,000 TV (Plasma, or LCD, by the way?) to take any advantage of his $1500 player (which may or may not still be around in three years, depending on which format wins) which will play a handful of titles, maybe three of which were ever recorded at the resolution he'll be watching at. There's a shock.

Re:Well, duh

[Hadlock]

The prices are starting to drop. 65" high end 1080p TVs are in the $2500s and many 40-60" are in the $1800-2200 range. Heck, $1200 still buys you the envy of everyone in your apartment building. BluRay players are supposed to be $1200 or so, but HDDVD is supposed to be in the $500 range, allowing you to walk out the door of Fry's for $2000 or so. Regardless, I'll probably end up with a player (PS3) long before I upgrade from my current SD TV. Probably upgrade to an HDTV in 2010 or so, if I don't go with a projector.
 
Between LCD and Plasma, DLP is the way to go.

Just like old times

[slashdotet]

This reminds me of when Beta and VHS were fighting

I think i'll wite this one out

Don't want to end up with a Beta!

Where's the software?

[Megajim]

This keeps being compared to the VHS-Beta conflict. We've already been through that and, as consumers, we learned from it. When CDs came out, there weren't competing formats. There were also no competing formats for DVDs (unless you consider DIVX more than a blip). The VHS-Beta conflict was fueled by the fact that you could adequately use either format to record. Where's the fuel for HDDVD/BR? A smattering of random titles? I'm sorry, but it's not worth $500-1000 for me to see and HD version of "Serenity". If there were more titles available at launch ("Lord of the Rings"), then I would consider diving in. This is just like trying to decide which gaming platform I'm going to buy - they are all superior to my old system, so it comes down to the games. Given the current array of weak HD titles, why would anyone bother (unless you really love "Serenity" that much)?

Re:Where's the software?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right on the nose. I would buy it if they go back and rerelease movies that matter-- movies like "The Matrix". And why the hell aren't they releasing every single new DVD movie on HD-DVD if its so great? If the movie studios aren't convinced, why would anyone buy it?

I adopt new video technology once I see the industry is willing to support it. As you said, Serenity isn't a bad movie, but its nothing to write home about and certain wouldn't be something I would buy again to see in High definition. Hell, Starship Troopers would be a better high-def title than Serenity.

Where is Battlestar Galactica Seasons 1 and 2 high definition? They won't even release the tv series that were recorded in high def to begin with. Its kind of like a music player that only plays Journey music...they are a great group, but you're only going to sell as many players as there are hard core Journey fans.

Re:Where's the software?

[loraksus]

Where is Battlestar Galactica Seasons 1 and 2 high definition?

Ironically enough, both seasons are on usenet in the hd groups in 1080i.

WTF were they thinking anyways?

[theneb]

Although the dvd has been around for a while, its only in the past 5-6 years, its been picked up well by most of the society (meaning its much more affordable). If you now throw something that might be superior in quality (not everyone has plasmas or lcds to make use of it yet) but high is price, its not really going to fly, even the big-spenders are not going to want to buy something now as the movies collection in these formats are not high yet. I will give it another 5-10 years, when and if these survive, to be an integral part of the family entertainment system. Also one should consider that most of asia is still operation on vcds and some (mostly pirated) dvds. Slapping a price tag that is equivalent to a significant portion of someone salary for a month on hd-dvd or blu-ray is not going to work. Which is one of the reason, legal dvds arent popular in these places.

So, what's the end result?

[maynard]

"Both Blu-ray and HDVDVD support the same codecs Mpeg2, mpeg 4 (h.264) and VC1 (Windows Media). For some reason Blu-ray creation software didn't support the other codecs initially, but the player does."

That's correct. However, the end result is the same. Films released on Blu-Ray format in mpeg2 look noticably worse than films released in mpeg4 or VC1 on HD-DVD. I was shocked at the difference in image quality between the two. So, perhaps blu-ray players do support modern codecs (avsforum has had a good deal of discussion on this matter at their blu-ray forum) - but the upshot is that blu-ray releases look terrible compared to HD-DVD. And Blu-Ray drives cost twice as much.

What would *you* buy? (well, *I* would buy neither - and wait for the format war to finish).

Re:So, what's the end result?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your information IS FUD AND OLD. There are several new Blu-ray releases that have very good picture quality. And that is with old Mpeg2 codec. BUT what is most important, is that lots of releases are coming in few months that have either VC-1 or AVC(Mpeg4) used as a codec. In addition, there are several movies coming that are 50 GB DL Blu-ray releases.

Re:So, what's the end result?

[maynard]

Can you not see the utter absurdity of these two statements:

"Your information IS FUD AND OLD."

vs.

- There are several new Blu-ray releases that have very good picture quality.

- is that lots of releases are coming in few months that have either VC-1 or AVC(Mpeg4)

- there are several movies coming that are 50 GB DL Blu-ray releases.

So... how can my information be "FUD AND OLD" when it is -- in fact -- current? When Sony and its industry partners release material with modern codecs and press dual layer discs, perhaps then you'll have a point. Until then, I would say you simply have a vested interest in promoting Blu-Ray. The funny thing is that if you look through my comment history, you'll see that I was particularly excited about Blu-Ray until I actually saw a demonstration comparing it to HD-DVD. Oh, I'm sorry, I'll just have to close my lying eyes - clearly, they're FUD eyes.

Re:So, what's the end result?

[Trixter]

"Films released on Blu-Ray format in mpeg2 look noticably worse than films released in mpeg4 or VC1 on HD-DVD"

I call BS. Where is the proof/citation for this? What did they do, use the same bitrate for HD as they do for SD?

Re:So, what's the end result?

[maynard]

It's a combination of two factors: Blu-Ray specifies non-lossy 7.1 audio which consumes significant space; mpeg2 is much less efficient at compression than mpeg4 or VC1. Dual layer HD-DVD affords 30GB, plus compressed audio, plus the better codecs, while Blu-Ray is currently only shipping single layer discs (at 25GB). Hence, blu-Ray discs are currently overcompressed due to space constraints.

As the responder to my top post noted, the use of mpeg2 for blu-ray is a function of the rendering software available to content producers. Presumably, that will be resolved in the future. Further, dual layer blu-ray discs are ~50GB a pop - which also lightens the space squeeze. But the current situation is that HD-DVD discs look significantly better than their blu-ray counterparts. It's *very* noticable. Finally, blu-ray drives are twice the price of HD-DVD. Lesser quality, twice the price: that's no way to compete with a product introduction.

I point you to the Blu-Ray forum at avsforum for details. There's no end of bitching about it over there...

To summarize...

[dch24]

• Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)
• There are only a few titles in each format, and no guarantee that all titles will become available in one format (until the format war is over)
• The AACS DRM offers features like remotely blacklisting your player, which will immediately brick it when you play that new movie. Why would I buy this? No, I'm not a pirate; this feature is not a feature at all.
• Demos at the store have been disappointing at best. The improvement over DVD is pretty slim.
• I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players. I know that a 60Hz 1080i can play a 24fps 1080p movie. But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie? See point above about your computer being better than your DVD player for this.
• This article points out that your computer will probably out-perform any DVD player you can buy
• BD-R and HD-DVD-R are available but still pretty expensive. This might not seem like a factor at first, but remember that the big pirating outfits are not using recordable media. The early adopters will. Case in point: I work with an independent movie studio and they want to show their previews in HD when they travel. What they do right now is bring a nice powerful laptop with the movie on the hard disk. How is a player going to compete with that?

Re:To summarize...

[zerocool^]

(Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)

I'll go one further. Unless your HDMI input and your TV and your cable and your output support HDCP encryption, you get nothing, and must down-convert to Analog.

Re:To summarize...

[Wesley Felter]

I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players. I know that a 60Hz 1080i can play a 24fps 1080p movie. But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie?

Blu-ray and HD DVD do not allow 1080p60; it would require the decoder chips to be twice as powerful.

This article points out that your computer will probably out-perform any DVD player you can buy

Not in HD, where PC playback is being held back by the DRM morass.

Re:To summarize...

[cheinonen]

Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)

Quick, name one player that uses ICT? Anyone? That's because the studios agreed to not use it for quite a while (2010 or 2011 I believe), and even then they still may not. If you were an early adopter with only component inputs, but then you'll probably have something new with HDMI inputs, but this isn't a valid reason since it's not being used.

I'd rather wait for the price to drop on 1080p players.

Few TV's can accept 1080p (though I bought one that can), and unless you have a very poor quality deinterlacer in your system, you can deinterlace that signal just as well as the player can. Currently BluRay sends you 1080p, but really they are feeding 1080i, then a seperate chip deinterlaces that to 1080p, just like your TV would, it's not a native signal. This might be more important for games in the future where you might have 60 distinct frames per second, but when the source is 24 fps, you can get the exact same image if your TV deinterlaces correctly (and most do).

Re:To summarize...

[tenton]

HDMI is a signal that it does support HDCP. If you have a DVI input (like I do), that may or may not support HDCP (my TV does, my monitor/TV doesn't). HDMI pretty much ensures HDCP (I haven't seen any HDMI ports that don't, but I suppose there could be a rogue one out there).

Re:To summarize...

[dch24]

Blu-ray and HD DVD do not allow 1080p60

Yes, currently they do not. But the PC does, so it's only a matter of time before the players will too. Do you want to replace your $3000 HDTV at that point?

Not in HD, where PC playback is being held back by the DRM morass.

Sure, but there is content that is not DRM'd. To shoot 1080p60 requires an expensive camera, but I was thinking of CGI, where impossibly fast action and detail are commonplace.

Still, your point is valid. The technology isn't there yet. For me, that means I will wait until it's ready, because I think 1080p60 will be worth it.

Re:To summarize...

[dch24]

Quick, name one player that uses ICT? Anyone? That's because the studios agreed to not use it

You misspelled "disk." The player is required to support ICT as a part of the AACS spec. If the studios want to release a few unimportant disks with ICT turned off to sucker us in, they might find we will not buy in.

but when the source is 24 fps

Cable and broadcast HDTV already support 60fps. I would think you would understand, since you own a 1080p HDTV. If you already own a player, fine. I'm going to wait for one that can decode 1080p60. Your computer can already do that.

Re:To summarize...

[Jugalator]

Due to the Image Constraint Token (ICT) your new HD player will not play your movies at full resolution. (Because the HDTVs sold to date mostly have component inputs, and no HDMI input)

Most current TV's sold have a HDMI input, and often even two.
HDMI is also not required in all cases, because during this early transition period, many discs won't have the ICT enabled.

Demos at the store have been disappointing at best. The improvement over DVD is pretty slim.

Yes, although the DRM is evil and surely hurting sales, or the initial will to move to this tech for new users, I think this is what the big masses cares for after all.

I also won't purchase these things because the technology is very much in movement both as for TV's and players. Sure, tech always moves forward, but I feel still even in the immature stages here with *very* rapid evolution with older stuff getting incompatible unusually quickly, major technology changes etc. It's like when a new processor line using a vastly different architecture has been introduced. Often the very first few processors may run on a slower bus or have unusual disadvantages compared to the upcoming 10 when the tech has matured.

Re:To summarize...

[Wesley Felter]

But the PC does (support 1080p60), so it's only a matter of time before the players will too. Do you want to replace your $3000 HDTV at that point?

Not gonna happen; the HD DVD and Blu-ray resolutions are set in stone and will not be changed. (When was the last time the DVD spec was upgraded? Never.) I suspect HD will be replaced with something like 4K around 2017, but that will be one big jump, not an incremental step like 1080p60.

Anyway, the Westinghouse HDTVs available today support 1080p60, so I think they're a safe buy.

Re:To summarize...

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie?

You'll have to wait for someone to make one. Movies are shot in 24 frames per second. And there's basically no reason to change that. In fact, the consensus of opinion among movie watchers given a choice between 24 fps and higher frame rates is that 24 fps looks better. Witness the utter failure of the "IMAX HD" format which recorded and projected at 48 frames per second. Those who saw the one-and-only "IMAX HD" film reported that it looked cheap, like it was shot on hand-held video, despite the larger negative.

There's one and only one practical application for non-24-fps content: live broadcast. Most live broadcast content these days is shot in either 60 Hz interlaced or 60 fps progressive. But even this is changing, as 24 fps D-cinema equipment becomes more cost-effective. See the almost universal adoption of CineAlta equipment for in-studio cameras in the past three years.

Re:To summarize...

[Ucklak]

Trying to clarfy some tech specs here, the following may be wrong.

According to Wikipedia, 1080p30 is the highest for broadcast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080p#Broadcasting_st andards

Wasn't this the reason for satellite vs. cable debate a while ago? Currently both put out 1080i but as DirecTV upgrades their satellites to MPEG4, they'll be able to send 1080p60 signals before cable is able to?

Re:To summarize...

[zerocool^]

From what I've heard (and read, for example in this month's maximum PC piece on home theater PC's), most TV's more than about 8 months old that have an HDMI port won't support the proper encryption.

Your mileage may vary. You know how rumors and wild speculation get at a new product launch.

Re:To summarize...

[GutBomb]

directv will never put out 1080p. they don't even put out 1080i. all 1080i channels distributed by DirecTV are 1440x1080 or 1280x1080. even HDNet and HDNet Movies right now, to conserve bandwidth. the mpeg 4 upgrades won't up the resolution. they will merely give them enough room to carry local channels in HD for cities all over the nation.

Re:To summarize...

[TheLinuxSRC]

1).HDMI is also not required in all cases, because during this early transition period, many discs won't have the ICT enabled.
2).Yes, although the DRM is evil and surely hurting sales....
3). I also won't purchase these things because the technology is very much in movement both as for TV's and players.

Dude, where I come from we call that a "Hat Trick" ;)

Re:To summarize...

[jZnat]

The only "expensive" part of shooting in 1080p60 is the 60 fps part. A 35mm camera can easily surpass 1080p in resolution, for example.

Adoption will be very slow before 2010

[WillAffleckUW]

There is very little incentive for all but the most rabid consumer to adopt either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray formats before widescale HDTV adoption at a reasonable price, which won't happen until one year AFTER 2009. When the price of reasonable quality HDTV is below the $300 price point, you can expect consumers to start choosing - but the reality is that most movies they want to play - at a price they want to pay for - will be on DVD and work perfectly fine.

People still anecdotaly remember being burned in the VHS versus Beta wars - I was on the winning side of that, bought one of the first very expensive VHS VCRs from RCA, but I worked shift and made more than I do even now.

Re:Adoption will be very slow before 2010

[9Nails]

I absolutely agree with this. I traditionally look at a major local electronics store weekend sales ads each friday, and I've watched HD "Capable" TV's creep down from the low 5 digit price to a low 4 digit price. But I'm still not ready to finance a television set! I'm very happy with my 3 year old 50" RP TV and 200+ DVD titles. I can see many more years use from it allowing me to wait until the price point breaks to "affordable." (Meaning that I do not have to finance the TV set to own it!) Or around $500 - $300 for a similar sized and quality set. In fact, I can see a disk array / media server as my next purchase way before I ever decide on which of these two formats I'll adopt. At this point, none of the above will like be my option if nothing changes.

Neither HD nor BD has that "coolness" factor worthy of adoption. Instead give me a lossless high-def downloadable video that I can put on a media server. One that allows me to shift to DVD format for backwards compatibility or allows me to play it on my phone, PDA, or some other ridiculous location that I pick. I'm just not interested in a disc which may be hyper-sensitive to scratches and contain more restrictions than iTunes.

What do you expect?

[sdo1]

What exactly do you expect when a huge percentage of people who have HDTVs either aren't using them with high-def sources and/or they aren't but they THINK they are? Yea, HD is great. I have a 50" first-generation DLP (720p). The picture is really good and regular DVDs can look great. But I have no desire to drop a grand (or even half that) on an HD video player right now, especially when I'd be buying movies for a second time (some a third time when I upgraded from VHS). Furthermore, the discs are locked down with DRM that isn't yet breakable. I'm not going to buy a new movie on an HD format if I can't down-convert it and burn it to DVD so I can watch on DVD players elsewhere in the house. Sorry. Those are my rules. If the content isn't portable, I'm not buying. Period.

-S

No Shit?

[Lord Apathy]

I've been saying that for 2 years. I was able to put a HD movie and a DVD side by side back then. I could barely tell a difference and that was only when I looked. Granted there are some programs that are breath taking in HD. Some of the PBS nature shows are like looking through a window. But I have yet to see a HD movie or TV show that has that level of effect.

Only sueful for data right now...

[JAB Creations]

Those discs are only good for storing data right now. Sure you can buy a 4GB flash drive to store in your pocket but they aren't big enough to back up audio and video work for example. The capacities they are talking about are better suited for backing up data and that is where they should be pushing to sell these large capacity DVDs. Besides there are not many good movies coming out of Hollywood to justify high-definition viewing.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[msaulters]

I think there's one more factor people are leaving out.
They took WAY too long to get to market. If the players
had been available somewhere around 2000 to 2003, they
could have sold to MANY people who were going DVD for the
first time as most people were finally abandoning VHS.
IF they had been priced reasonably, I believe many people
would have bought HD-DVD as 'better' given the choice
between that and regular DVD for their first player.

These guys are going to have to wait another couple of
years until all the DVD players bought in the last 3 or
4 years begin to wear out or break. I think it will
build, as more titles are available, and more people
adopt HD screens.

32 bit Vista & HD Content

[in2mind]

Not to forget this:

The media companies asked us to do this and said they don't want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this

Covered earlier in slashdot

Re:32 bit Vista & HD Content

[_Shorty-dammit]

MS already replied to this report, saying it's BS and 32-bit versions of Vista will be fine.

Re:32 bit Vista & HD Content

[Mr2001]

MS already replied to this report, saying it's BS and 32-bit versions of Vista will be fine.

Not exactly... they passed the buck. Windows Media Player won't go out of its way to block HD playback on 32-bit systems, but the HD decryption software can still use Vista's features to detect unsigned drivers and refuse to play. And they may just choose not to sign any drivers if they don't think 32-bit Windows provides enough "protection" against "malware" that people might use to, you know, gain access to the content they paid for.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[Nahooda]

Perhaps Sony might learn a lesson from this?

No, they won't! They'll blame it on somebody else.

Fill the blanks

[kirun]

Dear [electronics manufacturer],

Wonder why [new format with uncertain future] isn't selling?

Remember [format that flopped]? We do.

Signed, the buying public.

Re:Fill the blanks

[vistic]

Dear Timex,
Wonder why Blu-Ray isn't selling?
Remember RCA SelectaVision videodisks? We do.
Signed, the buying public.

What...? no one remembers SelectaVision anymore?
I curse your form!

Re:Fill the blanks

[kirun]

Dear vistic,

We haven't been looking at Blu-Ray sales. Nobody knew they were out - we lost all track of time as our watches broke.

Signed, Timex.

Re:Fill the blanks

[dangitman]

Dear Cyberdyne Systems Corporation,

Wonder why your Advanced Prototype Terminator Infiltrator Series 1 Model 1A Type 1000 isn't selling?
Remember Skynet? We do.

Signed,

Sarah Connor

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[brunascle]

DO NOT EVEN WORK CORRECTLY on HD MONITORS if they are more than about 7 months old

oh that's nothing. just wait til they start making your wear HDCP glasses to view the infrared-encrypted signal sent from your monitor.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[maynard]

"hey took WAY too long to get to market. If the players had been available somewhere around 2000 to 2003[...]"

Mass manufacturing the blue laser required by both systems wasn't available in '02-'03 time span. In fact, recent reports of a blue laser shortage may limit Blu-ray and HD-DVD manufacturing for the near future. Also, the adoption of HDTV back in '02 was very slim - who would have bought that high definition content? One could argue they're still too early to be pushing HD media sales... --M

History will repeat itself?

[Etnie]

Porn will lead the way!

Re:History will repeat itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn will lead the way!

Do you really want to see the bad skin and pancake makeup in even high res? There's a reason 160x160 webcam captures are so popular on piratebay...

Re:History will repeat itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Does anyone really want to see Ron Jeremy in that kind of detail. Pron is sometimes better when it's fuzzy.

Re:History will repeat itself?

[gstoddart]

Porn will lead the way!

I know this is a joke and all ... but except for the big production houses like Vivid, a huge amount of porn is being done by lower-budget places. They don't have the level of production which would benefit from HD, and they don't want to spend the money to change their video equipment, cause they're using lower-cost digital video and the like.

I suspect this is an area in which the porn industry doesn't help drive the adoption of a new technology. At least not sufficient to be a tipping-point influence on it.

Cheers

Re:History will repeat itself?

[HappyEngineer]

Porn will lead the way!

Who the hell still buys porn on media? For the price of one DVD of porn you can get a one month subscription to a site that'll let you download thousands of porn videos.

Porn isn't going to lead the way this time.

Re:History will repeat itself?

[MemoryDragon]

In this case not anymore. Porn can be obtained everywhere and most of the times cheaper. This is not a system seller anymore. In fact it was not a big pusher on the DVD as well. VHS yes, but after the internet, Porn has become a commodity.

Re:History will repeat itself?

[loraksus]

Interestingly enough, there are very few pornos in HD. Sometimes lower resolution is a good thing. Consider it a "airbrush" effect that is easily applied to the whole video. Cleans up stray hairs, etc.
And dear god, if talking heads look bad in HD with makeup, imagine how bad crappy makeup in pornos would look in HD.

The tactile changes are missing

[grapeape]

One of the things that really separated DVD from VHS was size and look. The DVD was futuristic to many, durability and very obvious image quality were bonus reasons to move to the new platform. It was similar to the move from Cassette tape to CD's, it was an obvious and cool transition, no more switching tapes for long movies, no more tapes stretching or wearing out and dvd's dont eat tapes like cassette decks. Dont forget there was also the early promise that the media would eventually be cheaper (even though it never happened)

The only obvious benefit from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is image quality, it doesnt really look different, its no more durable, and for most it just seems like a scam to get people to buy their movies over again.

Increased resolution is a benefit but most people still dont have HD tv's and probably more than half that do only have them because there are very few tv's that arent HD for sale anymore. You can further reduce the total by subtracting the ones that dont know how to hook it up properly and arent recieving HD anyway most of them are now disillusioned by HD through their own stupidity. That leaves a very tiny fragment of a market that actually sees any advantage to HD formated DVD's. I do think eventually one of the formats will stick but they would be better off doing hyrid disks with one format on one side and standard dvd on the other that way they can snag the replacement buyers not just rely on folks willing to make an upgrade most see as not necessary.

Re:The tactile changes are missing

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more to them than just improved video quality, although to a lot of people that seems to be the most important selling point. Other features will include vastly improved user interaction (e.g. menus overlaying the video so that you can turn on/off sub titles without going out to the top menu, which is an ugly interface). The new movies will be far more interactive, and in fact BD supports Java Xlets (MHP on things like cable boxes already does this). There is also the potential for online interaction. This is like Interactual on steroids, baked in to the set top box.

Re:The tactile changes are missing

[grapeape]

Well that benefits the anime and foreign film crowd and the folks that get into all the extra crap shoveled on the disk with their movies...but what else is there for the other 99% of dvd viewers. Seriously better menus? who flippin cares...I have 2 movies I have ever bothered to enable subtitles on the extra button push in hindsight wasnt that inconvenient. The interactivity thing I guess would be ok, maybe im atypical but other than digging through the lord of the rings documentaries and the occasional blooper reel the last "extra" I remember caring about was Jim Lovell's commentary track on Apollo 13. Have you ever tried to play one of those dvd games that have been popping up on movies lately? The problem isnt the level of interactivity the problem is the freakin remote...buttons are usually jammed to close together and since all of them are different figuring out the right buttons can be the most challenging part of the game.

Re:The tactile changes are missing

[filterban]

One of the things that really separated DVD from VHS was size and look. The DVD was futuristic to many, durability and very obvious image quality were bonus reasons to move to the new platform.

Honestly, you're right. Additionally, DVD offers many benefits over VHS in usability - no rewinding, no fast forwarding, and no picture degradation with use.

To me, the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is just a rehash of Beta vs VHS except with one additional factor - nobody really cares.

The PS3 will help drive Blu-Ray adoption, but who really has enough cash to drop on a player and a 1080p TV? Very, very few people.

Human Limitations

[LoTechDave]

The limits of humans' ability to perceive sensor information is fixed and while the DVD isn't perfect, the lackluster response of the HD-DVD & Blu-Ray in the marketplace is an indication that diminishing returns for entertainment-based technology are here. I think underpinning this issue is an unexcited general public that has been underwhelmed by the quality of recent movies. If a movie is crap, then seeing it in HD might allow you to say "I think he ate corn"

Re:Human Limitations

[radtea]

The limits of humans' ability to perceive sensor information is fixed and while the DVD isn't perfect, the lackluster response of the HD-DVD & Blu-Ray in the marketplace is an indication that diminishing returns for entertainment-based technology are here.

Not only are we limited, our houses are limited. What's the point of having a 100" screen if you can only be eight or ten feet away from it in a room that has all kinds of stray light from windows etc?

Regular DVDs are already of sufficient quality that your viewing experience is generally limited by the venue rather than the technology, so the market for higher-end products is relatively limited. But the high-end videophile is also exactly the sort of person who is going to be most concerned/pissed-off by the big stinking heap of DRM piled on these disks, so the market is really restricted to people who care enough to want hi-def but don't care enough to not want DRM.

That's a pretty narrow band.

Unsurprising

[LParks]

The lack of sales of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is unsurprising.

What does surprise me is that it seems both sides are mostly selling these products on higher quality video, rather than capacity.

I look at the early releases for these two and only see movies.

I can't really tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray or HD-DVD in terms of video quality, but I can easily tell something quantifiable like having one piece of media for a whole season of a TV show vs. 4 or 5 DVDs. That convenience is why I like single DVD games over 5 CD games for my PC.

Re:Unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

But if they put the whole season on one disk, how would they charge you five times for it?

The war is over.

[FatherOfONe]

Blu Ray won. There hasn't been 50k HD-DVD players sold and there probably won't be by the end of the year. Now there will be 4 Million Blu Ray players out by the end of the year. The war is over come November. By March of 2007 it will probably be 6 million to 70k (being generous here to HD DVD). Manufacturing will only get cheaper with producing 6 million units vs 70k so the price of a player only will come down. Toshiba won't want to keep loosing money forever and they will eventually stop. Microsoft will hate it, but in the end they will have to live with Java and Blu Ray. They will have to wait another day to try and gain control of the living room.

The only thing that "might" change the war is "if" Microsoft wanted to give away full blown HD-DVD players. I doubt the government would allow that though... so they won't and only a small portion of 360 owners will buy their new HD DVD unit to "watch" movies.

I would say that Sony has little to worry about now, and Microsoft on the gaming front should be prepared to release the 720 a few years early. That will hurt Sony, but I wonder how many XBOX/360 fans will start to feel like Sega fans?

Re:The war is over.

[DesertBlade]

Were did you get these figures. Are you counting the PS3 as a blu-ray player?

HD-DVDs are can be backwards compatable with standard DVDs so currently there are I don't know 1 billion players that can play HD-DVDs.

http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD/ stats: HD DVD can offer both the current DVD and HD DVD formats on one disc. Can blu-ra do that?

Re:The war is over.

[Churla]

You're making a couple big assumtions here champ...

First that the PS3 will be a sell out huge success. Whereas it will sell a lot of units, many people are predicting that it will not be that great, and in fact could cause Sony to really scuttle itself.

Second, you're treating all those PS3's like they're being used as Blu-ray players, when in fact all they will really be capitalizing on is the storage capacity. Most of those PS3's are NOT going to be hooked up to anything doing HD video of any kind. They will be on TV's in gameroom, and in kids rooms. This is not adoption of a new video standard, it's adoption of a high capacity storage disc for games. And since you will never buy the same disc to play on a Xbox as a PS3 having the same media format for both is a moot point. If people don't realize they're buying a blu-ray drive and only think they're upgrading their kids gaming setup it's not a win.

The PS2 did great thing for DVD adoption but that was because there wasn't really any competition, and DVD was a significant upgrade from VHS. There's competition here.

Re:The war is over.

[caffeinatedOnline]

I am getting so tired of Sony fanbois pointing to the PS3 and proclaiming that Blu-Ray has won the format war. Without arguing the point that the PS3 is looking to not quite be the smashing success that you wish it to be, the average person is not going to buy a game machine to watch his/her movies on. They are going to buy a dedicated player. Walk into just about any house in the nation, and how many of those houses do you figure are watching their DVD's on a playstation/xbox?

Re:The war is over.

[Zanth_]

Those buying PS3's are not going to be playing BRD's on them at least not in the numbers you are indicating. In fact, many times, when folks have very HD TV's, the tv is in a family room separate from the gaming tv. When parents are able to drop 700 on a console, more often than not, the kids have their own setup and the parents have their own. Sure, 6 million or whatever will be out there, but they won't be there for movies, they'll be there for games. HD DVD has a better chance of surviving when all new DVD players are HD DVD and they are 100% backward compatible with all old DVD's. So when ma and pa Jones go to their local Walmart to replace their $50 DVD player, they will be sold an HD DVD player. It still says DVD but it is "improved!" They won't know the difference but they will own an HD DVD player and sooner than later, all new releases will be HD DVD...and again they won't know the difference. They do however understand the Blue Ray =! DVD and the name alone will kill it off from widespread acceptance. The war is far from won, but HD DVD has a far better chance worldwide of succeeding, that is, if either format has a chance at all.

Re:The war is over.

[SideshowBob]

Actually it sounded like he was making the point that manufacturing the Blu Ray drive mechanism will get cheaper due to economies of scale.

Re:The war is over.

[FatherOfONe]

Yes, I am counting the PS3 as a blu-ray player.

Yes you "can" put a standard DVD format on a HD-DVD as you mentioned, but who cares? The people that buy these want HD.

So, to make the math simple.
6 million blu ray players that can play 1080P content.
70k HD-DVD players that can play 1080P content.

Again, the war is over.

Re:The war is over.

[FatherOfONe]

NOBODY except Microsoft and Nintendo fanboys believes Sony won't sell all 6 million units. Now after that is when it gets interesting.

"Second, you're treating all those PS3's like they're being used as Blu-ray players"

Yes I am. You know why? How many PS3 owners will have a HDTV? Care to guess the percentage? It is a HUGE percentage. The PS3 and HDTV are in the exact same market and Sony knows this. The people that drop $500+ on a "game system" generally have HD. To say that the PS3 will be hooked up in a "kids room" on a crappy old tv would be true if the PS3 was around the same cost as the Wii. It isn't, and they are in two different markets. Now a ton of those people will want to "try" a new high definition DVD. They will go to blockbuster and get one, and that will be a blu-ray.

Just go in to any EB and wait around a few minutes. You will see someone come in and try and pre-order a PS3, and ask them if they have HD. Now I am not saying that a vast majority have 1080P sets, but a ton have 720P and 1080i. This coupled with the fact that you can now get 720P sets for under a grand just adds fuel to the fire.

Again the war is over. HD-DVD lost, heck it didn't even get started.

Re:The war is over.

[FatherOfONe]

You miss the main point. Those that spend >$500 on a console will hook it up to a HDTV. A vast majority of those people will then go out and rent a movie to try the new platform out. They will already own a Blu-Ray player and thus the chicken and egg problem is solved.

Now the problem with HD-DVD? Nobody will buy one. That is already being shown now.

Re:The war is over.

[FatherOfONe]

"the average person is not going to buy a game machine to watch his/her movies on."

Not initially, but two things will happen. The first is that they will eventually try a movie out, and the second is that the cost of blu-ray goes WAY WAY WAY down .

So in short most of the content providers are behind Blu-Ray.
BR will have significantly more users. I and a lot of people say by a factor of 10 to 1.
BR has more capacity and thus will need less compression and at the end of the day, that will provide a better quality image.
Even Dell is going to standardize on BR. HP will support both. So even with Microsoft strong-arming the OEM's they couldn't get the largest computer maker to switch to their standard.

What more do you need? Oh yeah, cost. The cost will be the same for both, except the manufacturing of BR will go down much quicker than HD-DVD.

This could have been a battle if Microosft would have shipped the 360 with a HD player, but they didn't and thus this war is over. Heck, even if they did, HD-DVD still would have lost, but it would have made the war more interesting. Microsoft will just have to regroup and figure out how to try and win another war.

Re:The war is over.

[SpecBear]

Translation: Mission Accomplished.

Re:The war is over.

[caffeinatedOnline]

Just curious as to where you are coming up with these figures? Your assumptions (and you know what they say about assuming) that Blu-Ray prices are going to 'go way way down' is based on what? And you end your statement once again with the assumption that console systems are going to have a huge impact on what format prospers. I have looked back on your post history, and any article with PS3 or Blu-Ray mentioned in it you spout out this same rhetoric.

Re:The war is over.

[MemoryDragon]

Ahem DVD already was a well established format when Sony entered the scene with the PS/2 and it was a step up. All Sony did was to add it to a console as first player in the game, but DVD was adopted way before the PS2 came out because people were eager to get rid of their tapes.

Re:The war is over.

[caffeinatedOnline]

I think that you miss a point... read the rest of the posts in this article. Almost all of them are pointing to the fact that either they don't have a HD TV, and are not interested in HD DVD, or have a HD TV and don't care about the new formats, their current player works fine. I would say if anything, the war is over, both failed and Sony is stuck with a high priced game system that won't play normal DVD's.

Re:The war is over.

[DesertBlade]

The intial switch from the manufacturing standpoint is MUCH cheaper to go HD-DVD than blue ray. Again from Wikipedia: "DVD disc replication companies can continue using their current production equipment with only minor alterations when changing over to the format of HD DVD replication" Blu-ray may be better overall but I think HD-DVD will win in the end. Sony has a great track record Beta, MiniDisk and the latest UMD...... All those won their respective format wars, ight?

Re:The war is over.

[DesertBlade]

Good point. That is why IMHO that HD-DVD will prevail. I will have HD someday and if I can play HD-DVD on a normal DVD player I would purchase it.

Re:The war is over.

[caffeinatedOnline]

I could be mistaken, but I think that you mean if you could play DVD on a HD-DVD you would purchase it?

Re:The war is over.

[DesertBlade]

If I could play HD-DVD DISC on a normal DVD player I would purchase the disc, even though I don't have HD yet.

Re:The war is over.

[MrBandersnatch]

Actually Sony recently revised its production estimates to 2 million by years end. Some analysts are starting to wake up and question if even this is a realistic target given the number of technical issues they are having with the cell processor and the blue diode shortage. Theres even the very real possibility of the PS3 being delayed even further due to manufacturing delays/problems (remember they only starting making them things in the last few days) so dont count your chickens.

Oh your coment regarding the 720 is quite insiteful. Im fully expecting the 360 to have a short shelf life (3-4 years) and MS to try and nail the PS3 just as the machine starts to be profitable for Sony.

Re:The war is over.

[caffeinatedOnline]

Doh! My Bad, that too!

Re:The war is over.

[loraksus]

Yeah, just like the ps2 was a great dvd player... Ha. Ha.

Re:The war is over.

[GutBomb]

the ps3 market and HDTV market are the same? how so? the HUGE majority of PS3s will be sold for playing games on a standard definition tv.

Re:The war is over.

[Jesus_666]

Note that the USA aren't the only market for the PS3. There's also Europe, which generally doesn't care about HDTV much. In fact, most of the people who really care about HDTV are gaming enthusiasts who want their games to look pretty. However, the cost of a PS3 plus that of a compatible TV is pretty prohibitive.

Of course now that there actually are programs being broadcast in 720p (provided that you receive digital television) and HD movie discs are less than two years away there might be people who actually have any benefit from owning an HDTV. We'll see.

HD, bah

[alucinor]

HD makes no visible difference for me. I don't keep my glasses clean enough of spots for HD to matter. And I like big tapestries on my walls more than big screens. Watching DVDs on my 19" PC monitor is enough screen for me for the rest of my life.

Re:HD, bah

[MrPerfekt]

HD makes no visible difference for me. I don't keep my glasses clean enough of spots for HD to matter. And I like big tapestries on my walls more than big screens. Watching DVDs on my 19" PC monitor is enough screen for me for the rest of my life.

And what are you doing here on Slashdot?

Same applies to 360 and PS3 consoles

[ianscot]

The great thing about dvd was that you saw immediate benefits both from the medium and the content on your _standard_tv_. You didn't need the latest lcd/dlp/plasma display to appreciate what you were getting... Now we have only an incremental increase in the convenience of the medium (saves having multi-disk sets) which really doesn't mean much for most viewers and the improvements in quality only applies to a much smaller audience.

When it comes to the new consoles, both MS and Sony have bet the bank on the television market being saturated with big HD sets that would justify an "investment" in a game console that would display in HD on them. In a few ways -- cost of game development, size of their potential market as you say here -- both companies appear to have lost track of the market, or to have projected it wrongly. Market penetration of huge HD screens just isn't there yet. Maybe it will be during the lifespan of these consoles, maybe not.

Meanwhile a competitor that tries to jazz up the game experience on "your _standard_tv_" is out there, phrasing its admittedly not-cutting-edge technology in ways that DO mean something to most game players.

Re:Same applies to 360 and PS3 consoles

[nnn0]

yeah everybody buy Wii ! :)

Re:Same applies to 360 and PS3 consoles

[Jesus_666]

Very true. Over here in Germany most new TVs are "HD-ready". "HD-ready" is an European campaign they launched in order to get anyone to buy HDTVs. It means that the TV fulfills any part of the HDTV spec, which usually means 720p50, as 1080*-compatible TVs tend to be too expensive to be attractive to most people (remember, Germany is a country where a 30" TV counts as pretty big). Considering HDTV adoption we're at least a decade behind you guys as nobody gives a shit about it.

Except for the performance-oriented gamers who are considering buying "HD-ready" TVs so they can properly play their X360/PS3, even if it means they'll have to spend 700+ Eurobucks on their console/TV combination. Everyone else (including more budget-conscious gamers) still doesn't give a shit about HDTV.

Re:Same applies to 360 and PS3 consoles

[Cannelbrae]

Weird, my 360 works just fine on my non-HD TV.

HD or not really doesn't impact dev times/team size/budgets significantly. Gamer expectations, driven by the experience/art quality possible on a console with more resources, has a much larger impact.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[Milican]

DVDs were just being adopted in masse in 1999 - 2000 area. The technology to do HD would not have been possible for a reasonable price as the DVDs were still a few hundred dollars.

JOhn

not priced for target

[gsn]

I don't think these guys realize that a large number of people who buy dvds are in college or recent graduates with student loans. I can't afford a 1000 buck player and a 1500 buck minimum HDTV and then the actual discs (the electronics would be more than a months stipend right there). The prices will eventually come down and this format war will resolve itself. Even then I will think hard about paying so much for to watch TV and movies and I will probably resist and dismiss it as too much of a luxury. I spent that much after saving for around a year and a half to get a very nice gaming rig but a PC does a lot more than a HDTV and HD player. Even if I did buy the HD equipment I'm certainly not replacing my dvds - they are good enough, and if DVDs remain significantly cheaper than HD content I will probably buy the DVDs instead.

EVD standard

[alucinor]

I personally think China's EVD standard will become dominant -- not because consumer's will flock to it, though, but manufacturers. There is no copyright or other licensing to use it, and it's a freely published standard for high-def. No royalities, and it's codecs can even be implemented in Linux without legal issues.

Re: EVD standard

[gstoddart]

I personally think China's EVD standard will become dominant -- not because consumer's will flock to it, though, but manufacturers. There is no copyright or other licensing to use it, and it's a freely published standard for high-def. No royalities, and it's codecs can even be implemented in Linux without legal issues.

And, for that exact reason, it will never be allowed to be successful in North America.

The content lobbyists will introduce a tarriff on foreign players. Then they'll say that even with the tarriff those players need to be outlawed since they probably encourage piracy by people. Afetr all, if it will play anything, then it will probably play pirated versions.

It would simply be impossible for an unencumbered product, not championed by someone who is paying law-makers and lobbyists to be either distributed or become successful in the current climate.

And, that makes me sad. Because (even though I'm not familiar with it) the product you describe may well be technologically superior -- or at least superior to standard TV stuff without the liminations of the newest stuff that Sony wants us to buy.

Cheers

Re: EVD standard

[boristdog]

You are 100% correct.

And if China partners with Philips on this, then there is almost no way EVD can lose.

Re: EVD standard

[Xymor]

The problem are studios that require DRM to sell their products(aka FOX) and studios that have major marketshares and think they can tell us what to do or buy(aka Sony). Sadly, without the mpaa endorsement, I don't think any format, no matter how good, open or advanced will succeed.

Re: EVD standard

[PCM2]

This is an interesting possibility, but history leans toward no. VCDs became the de facto replacement for VHS in Asia even while DVD took off among people who wanted higher-quality formats. VCD never went anywhere in the U.S., however, despite the fact that there are a lot of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. with thriving Asian communities where retailers do trade in VCDs. The download community is accustomed to the VCD format, but not retail consumers.

Technologies like this just don't seem to cross-pollinate from Asian markets into Western markets. Presumably this has to do with the Western media companies' loathing and distrust for Asian technologies, given the Asian markets' traditional indifference toward Western intellectual property standards.

It seems likely that some format similar to EVD will emerge, however ... either that, or enough college kids with access to downloaded EVD images will drive some kind of market for DVD players that support the format (similar to how there is now a trickle of players appearing that support MPEG-4).

P.S. This seems like a pretty good FAQ on the various available formats, including EVD and FVD.

Re: EVD standard

[bigbigbison]

I don't know much about the EVD format. It may not be much more than vaporware (Didn't China attempt to make their own DVD standard as well and their own chip? I may be wrong, but they didn't really seem to materialize).
However, if it were to catch on in China, it would almost certainly appear on some of the cheaper HDDVD or BlueRay players since so many of them are made in China. Just as the cheap DVD players often have features midpriced ones lack (such as easilly changeable region codes or removable macrovision), I can see the inevitable cheaper higher def players sneak in new features more mainstream manufacturers will be slower to include. (Of coures whether there is any officially released Hollywood EVD content is another story)

Re: EVD standard

[LParks]

So there's a possibility that downloading videos might spark interest in a standard that isn't ridiculously expensive and overprotective?

I'll do my part and download some EVD movies tonight.

Re: EVD standard

[Lord Apathy]

I don't know much about the EVD format but I do know something about the HD-DVd and BR formats. The reason that BR and HD disks need so much space for a HD movie is they are using mpeg-2 for the video format. If they where using a modern format like mpeg-4 they wouldn't need such a big ass disk.

Doing some math I figure if they did use mpeg-4 they could fit a HD movie into about 7 to 8GB.

Re: EVD standard

[droopycom]

And theres probably no content either, at least not from major US studios. It might work for the chinese market.

Re: EVD standard

[Lonewolf666]

EVD is similar to DVD, the main difference is that the Chinese did not want to license CSS. Thus the format is incompatible to the DVD's DRM system.
And I don't think it will make a big difference in the west. Even with the license fee for CSS, DVD burners can be bought for 50 euros these days. Last time I checked, EVD players were more expensive. So EVD will not magically take over as cheap backup medium.
On the content side, the movie studios can simply refuse to release on EVD. Not that it much will help to protect their films, as CSS has ben cracked long ago ;-)

Re: EVD standard

[Anonymous Coward]

"It would simply be impossible for an unencumbered product, not championed by someone who is paying law-makers and lobbyists..."

And we call that someone "China". Casual shortsightedness sometimes makes us forget China is very, very, very big in comparison to the dick-link rodents running Hollywood. Once again the irony of words "no copyright or other licensing", "freely published", "without legal issues" and "unencumbered" being used to contrast communist China with what corporations in concert with politicians have made of the Land of Free.

Re: EVD standard

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as EVD media - it's just a method of putting HD content onto DVD discs (at the expense of lower running time, although not as much as you'd think because of better encoding). EVD is to DVD as SVCD is to VCD.

As for players, most mid-range and higher DVD players here (I'm in China) can handle EVD. Most players can handle a range of codecs such as DivX, XVid, MP4 etc, and EVD is just considered the same as one of those. If you buy a Chinese DVD player that can play AVI files, it will probably be able to play EVD as well.

Having said that, in the 12 months I've been living here I've never seen a single EVD disc on sale. Part of that is probably due to the lack of HD content, but even when I've bought HD material it's been in the form of AVI/MP4 files. Possibly the legal HD discs are EVD, but I don't know anyone who buys legal DVDs that I could ask ;)

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[ILikeRed]

But they have DRM, and DRM, and... encrypted DRM in the cables, and uh... DRM!

Everybody should want one!

still too early

[Randall311]

I don't need to point out to anyone here that it is still way to early to invest in a new HD format just yet. The majority of people out there still don't have an HDTV, and as such are not interrested in any type of HD media format at the moment. The early adopters are not buying because the new formats fail to deliver the WOW affect that was promised to people who see the demo playing at the store. It's just not as dramatic as the difference was between VHS and DVD. As far as the whole "format war" is concerend, whichever format does a better job of penetrating the market first will most likely win, regardless of any technical features etc. That being said, the most obvious "winner" will be Blu-ray since it's being pushed in the Blusta-- er I mean Playstation 3. It is still much too early for these formats to really be taking off.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[gabebear]

I've seen both and I thought Blu-Ray looked better; I've seen a bit of the Borne Supremacy from HD-DVD and Chicken Little on Blu-Ray. It shouldn't matter which codec was used as long as the video wasn't over-compressed. I think the difference I saw was just that one was much better suited to HD.

The biggest problem I see with the High-Def right now is that the players suck; $500+ for a player that takes several minutes to turn on. There really isn't any excuse for the boot-times on these players. My computer boots in about 30 seconds(MacBook) and a single-use device should definitely power on faster than that. Once a players drop into the $300 range I think we will see one of these formats take off.

Travel back to 1973...

[dpbsmith]

Records: Handel in Quad; John Rockwell; The New York Times February 19, 1973, p. 29

'Music for Royal Fireworks' Sounded Better in an Early Stereo Version

Whatever its ultimate artistic and technological merits may be, quadraphonic sound understandable has the classical-record business rubbing its collective hands together with glee. The classical repertory has its limits, after all, and the standard pieces have been recorded to death in stereo. Now, at long last, a new gimmick is at hand.

Not only it is presumed that the American public will spend millions on equipment, but all the hoary old warhorses and hi-fi spectaculars can be done over again in four-channel sound....

---
Truth in advertising... Rockwell acknowledges he was listening to the new release in "plain old stereo." A March 12, 1972 review by an audio reviewer, Don Heckman, listening in quad is, however, only slightly more encouraging:

"Just what was there to hear on all this gleaming new electronic exotica? Ah, there's the rub. Until just a few months ago, quadraphonic disks were dominated by the sound effects of falling trees, puffing choo-choos and gurgling whirlpools... [now there are more and] in some cases the rewards can be quite spectacular... a room-filling, near-concert-hall effect.... Pop music programs like Joan Baez... [and] Barbra Streisand are straightforward presentations in which one is less aware of a four-dimensional effect than of a kind of opening up of the sound.... [In one track on a Vanguard demonstration disk] the organ sound is quite extraordinary.... Switched-On Bach will probably have its sales surge as listeners discover that it sounds even more fascinating when these weirdly-distorted and re-timbred snippets of Bach go whipping around four, rather than two speakers."

Re:Travel back to 1973...

[DannyO152]

I was in high school at the time and my best friend, who was working for his parents' business and had plenty of disposable cash, fancied himself a bit of an audiophile. He got a quad system and man, it did sound great, if you sat in the right diamond-shaped zone. I think there were two competing formats: SQ (RCA, IIRC) and the other one (probably Columbia -- all pre-1980 radio/recording technologies had an RCA vs. Columbia duality).

He had the Vanguard demo disk (I think he recorded it onto a 4-track reel-to-reel) and it endeared me forever to Joan Baez singing Dylan's "Love is Just a Four Letter Word." The Who also released Quadrophenia in quad (yes it was bald-facedly a gimmick) and my friend bought that disk, but it wasn't noticeably better-sounding relative to what one heard on the radio. According to the soundtrack liner notes, the band thought the original mixes were muddy and so when it came time to mix for the movie, Entwistle supervised remixes. In the later days when I was a dj at a college radio station, I preferred to pull the soundtrack when I wanted to play "Bellboy" or "5:15." Back to 1973, in Southern California, some of the radio stations had quad broadcast hours (in the evening, generally), but these were the rockers: KMET and KLOS and reception was always a tad bit dicey in the coastal town to the north where we lived.

I suppose the ultimate quad joke would have been a quad release of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; still unavailable in CD.

Psst

[dch24]

Hey, don't tell anyone, but...

Dont forget there was also the early promise that the media would eventually be cheaper (even though it never happened)

That will happen in just a few years when these HD DVD players start gaining popularity. Then hopefully you will be able to get new release DVD's for $5. Keep your fingers crossed, and don't tell the media execs you're waiting for it, or it will never happen...

This is going to be a long slow battle...

[Name Anonymous]

First there was:

• VHS versus Betamax took a noticeable amount of time before one format won out.
• With 12" video discs there were 3 competing formats. The Pioneer 12" Laserdisc won that and fairly quickly. DVDs killed the 12" Laserdisc.
• CDs pretty much killed all but killed off vinyl record, but it took time.
• DVDs killed VHS.

Now we have the battle of the HD formats. This will probably be in length of time much like the VHS versus Betamax battle. And add to that the fact that not everyone will be jumping right out to buy a new TV. I keep looking at how nice the plasma screens are, but I can't justify the price yet. When my current TV dies I will end up with a plasma scrren. However with all the changes, including the HDMI connector, I'm glad I haven't bought one yet.

However, one thing that I know is that a bunch of people have stopped buying as many DVDs as they used to. Why buy a DVD now and then want to replace it next year with a high def version? of course if enough people do that, movie sales will drop even more and then the MPAA will start screaming piracy since their sales fell off. Maybe everybody should boycott buying movies until their is only one new format?

Re:This is going to be a long slow battle...

[zestymonkey]

Here's a good point. Blu-Ray and HD DVD's successes depend on enough consumers buying HDTVs in the first place. DVDs were able to destroy the VHS market because it required no external upgrades.

And... even when one buys an HDTV, one might not be in a rush to buy a Blu-Ray or HD DVD player. An early adopter, credit card junkie, or frivolous spender might purchase them in a heartbeat, but a consumer on a budget who is sick to death of his or her gigantic ugly CRT will be patient. After all, who's eager to buy into either format if one of them is doomed to irrelevance?

Oh, and I must insert the obligatory "cost of living, cost of fuel" comment.

Re:This is going to be a long slow battle...

[zestymonkey]

I meant, "There's a good point." I'm not terribly proud of what I write here.

Just thinking the same thing.

[cjkeeme]

I was just thinking this the over night when I was ripping DVDs to my Media Center PC so I could have access to them on my XBox without having to load DVDs all the time. It's obvious that this format war can be looked at more as a cat fight. Fun to watch, but having no lasting effect.

Well, that and they're HD

[PCM2]

Its simply that the DVD market is saturated and since everyone (who wants one at least) already has one these hardware guys are seeing thier sales drop-off.

Well, true, but it's also a significant point that these are HD formats. The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you. The government is actually fuelling this fire with the promise that, sooner or later, everybody will be forced to upgrade to a set that does HDTV. The problem is, of the people who are buying these sets, most of them aren't using them for HDTV. It's just not "there" for most markets and, you guessed it, the only format available for film buffs (the types of people who buy home theater equipment) is standard DVD.

To me, it totally stands to reason that the consumer electronics manufacturers would be falling all over themselves to release an HD format for home movies. You do the math -- it sounds like there's a huge market brewing out there. I think the problems are simply threefold: One, that the manufacturers have really shot themselves in the foot with this ongoing and very public standards battle that has left everyone leery of the first-generation equipment; Two, the first-generation equipment is widely perceived as too expensive, with a Blu-Ray player costing ten times what an acceptable-quality DVD player costs; and Three, the studios haven't shown any kind of commitment to the new formats, releasing bullshit recent movies that nobody cares about and not investing in restoring the quality of the video sources so that they pop your eyes out the way they were promised to do. Until the movie and electronics industries correct two out of three of these problems, whatever market there is will lie fallow.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[Trepalium]

I don't think there are quite enough HD capable sets out there for it to hit the mass market right now, either. TV sets tend to have an extremely long life relative to most other consumer electronics. Plenty of people run 10 year old sets, only replacing them when they finally die. Add to this the fact that your average Walmart probably sells far more SDTV sets than HDTV sets. Suppose for a moment that you're an average Joe on the street, and faced the choice between a nice-looking 27" SDTV at something like $399, versus a 27" HDTV for $599, which would you choose? Would you get the HDTV one which is probably showing the same video source as the SDTV one in the store (both of which would've gone through way too many cheap video repeaters), or would you spend the money you would've used on the HDTV set and get a 32" SDTV set instead?

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[Omestes]

There is a hug difference from "keeping your eye on" and actually purchasing. I DO have my eye on a nice huge LCD (meh to plasma) television, a $4000 gaming rig, a nice new stereo, a new car, etc ect... How many of these will I purchase in the next year, probably none of them, since most of them are just status items, and don't serve for much more than to impress my neighbors in the "See my shiny bling!" way. Perhaps if our economy returned to Clinton Era (mid 90's) levels, then these gadgets will switch from eye candy to actual goods.

Right now though... I can't excuse myself to buy a new DVD player when this one isn't broken, nor do I really feel like switching over to a whole new format. I'm still hunting for a couple movies on DVD that I only have on VHS. DVD is good enough, whereas VHS sucked, HD-blah isn't too much of an improvement to the non-pathological videophile like me, at least not enough of an improvement to warrent much money being spent. I like to think, and pray, that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be like mini-disks were, vast selections of limited media rotting in the aisles of your nearest store, forgotten. I hope they don't catch on, since there is no need for them except for mindless technophilia, and this I would lose some respect for the average American consumer. They aren't addressing a need, only some odd lust for more consumer goods, and corporate manipulations. Same thing with the odd goverment enforcement of HD technology, I don't like the government forcing me to subsidize television manufacturers and cable companies by making me upgrade to something pointless. Wow, now I can watch law and order in letterbox!

Sorry for the rant. For some reason this technology pisses me off, I don't want to be forced to upgrade again, once in 10 years is enough. I wish I could wait until there is something as revolutionary as DVD and CD were.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

If they thought everybody was buying up new TVs because they are HD, I think they TOTAL misread the situation. I don't think most people could care less if the TV was HD or not they just love the new flat models (HD or not) that you can even hang on a wall if you want to. Its all plasma, LCD, DLP, etc which are making people want new TVs not HD.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[EastCoastSurfer]

TV sets tend to have an extremely long life relative to most other consumer electronics. Plenty of people run 10 year old sets, only replacing them when they finally die.

I agree. I have a Hitachi 32 inch that was 'new' in '95. I bought it used from a friend of mine in 2000. To this day it still has one of the best tube pictures that I've ever seen. I've looked at getting a new TV a few times, but to match the picture I currently have I would have to spend way more money than I would want to. Especially since my TV still works great. Now when my TV finally goes kaput, 42 inch LCD here I come :)

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[PCM2]

I agree. I have a Hitachi 32 inch that was 'new' in '95. I bought it used from a friend of mine in 2000. To this day it still has one of the best tube pictures that I've ever seen.

Full disclosure: I'm still running on a Panasonic 32 inch tube TV that I bought in maybe 1996 or 1997. The catch is that, if you use the component inputs, my ser does 480p anamorphic. So my picture quality is pretty darned good. Those flat screens are still attractive to me, though...

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[Ucklak]

I have a 21 year old NEC 25" monitor that is a professional studio monitor I acquired through a studio downsizing. It has 2 composite inputs, 1 VTR input, speaker out terminals, and monitor out outputs. Well before composite connectors were included on the front of televisions, I had this one.
Played many hours of Sega Genesis, Turbografx, SuperNES and N64 on it as hookup was pretty damn easy.

The colors are still good but the black is starting to get a little light so I've decided to jump on the bandwagon and get an HD set.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[letxa2000]

Perhaps if our economy returned to Clinton Era (mid 90's) levels, then these gadgets will switch from eye candy to actual goods.

You mean late 90's, and it wasn't the Clinton Era economy, it was the Y2K/dot-com bubble. And we pretty much ended up paying for that when the bubble burst, the Clinton tax hikes caught up with us, and we were given the Clinton recession just about the time he was leaving office. Good effort on the subtle revisionm, though, you slid it in there real slick-like.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[Omestes]

Poltical agenda overpower much? I didn't sing a single praise to Clinton, nor did I even make it seem that he was responsible for the economy, I stated it as a title for a strech of time, such as Bush era, or Reagon era. Clinton had very little to do with the strength of the economy, I agree, but nor did he have much to do with its weaknesses.

Calm down, take a deep breath, and realize that some people aren't talking politics, or attacking you special point-of-view.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[LordVader717]

You can't compare them to minidiscs because they were intended as a digital replacement for cassettes (quite a good one too), wheras HD DVDs are for media distribution.

And although I won't be too eager to jump aboard too soon, I know that HDTV is the future, and in ten years we will all look back and shudder at the days without it.
And so that the video market isn't dominated by DRM-crippled Hard-Drive-Internet-Distribution, I think that it is necessary to have some kind of HD-Media.

BTW, governments aren't enforcing HD, but digital television, as switching to digital would free up a large part of the radio spectrum that is now used for analog TV Broadcast, and auction it off for billions.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[letxa2000]

Clinton had very little to do with the strength of the economy, I agree, but nor did he have much to do with its weaknesses.

Mammoth tax hikes does tend to contribute to the weakness of an economy.

Re:Well, that and they're HD

[steve_bryan]

Its all plasma, LCD, DLP, etc which are making people want new TVs not HD.

Have you seen a regular NTSC signal on a really big screen? It's not a pretty sight. I remember seeing big screen sets before the era of DVD and HDTV. Even a good laserdisc signal on one of those sets did not exactly inspire much more than a shrug. People may not say much about DVD or HDTV but sales of new plasma, LCD sets are fueled by the higher definition pictures that are available.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[787style]

To be clear, DVD's look pretty good on my 110" tv.

Interoperability?

[rueger]

Hah - I won't buy one of these HD DVD players until it will interface with my HD Radio!

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[aiken_d]

Argh, I hate misinformation. If you don't know what you're talking about, why post?

There are plenty of reasons not to buy HDDVD/Bluray. But you're way off base here, with the exception of DRM, which is as much a philosophical argument as anything. Let me count the ways that you have erred:

1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me, would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"?

2) HDVD players are under $500. Sure, that's expensive compared to $39 Kmart DVD players, but comprable to or cheaper than a videophile DVD player. Again, if you can't see the difference, you're not the target market.

3) The average joe can buy a fine 720p screen, which is all you need for the difference to be very apparent. My local Walmart has a crappy but functional 720p 55" screen for $700.

4) Your last point is the most misinformed. Neither HDDVD nor Bluray downsample for non-HDCP displays. To get educated so you can stop spouting misinformation, search for "image constraint token" on google. Short version: the technical capacity is there, but studios have agreed not to use it until at least 2010. At which point you can whine that these technologies downsample on displays older than 4 years, which is still a valid point but a little different than what you've erroneously claimed.

Lest people think I'm a fanboy, let me list the *legitimate* reasons for waiting on HD formats:

- The format war means that any investment in players and/or media has some liklihood of being wasted money

- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)

- Neither format has real buy-in from CE manufacturers who don't have a vested interest

- The early players available for both formats have many quirks and annoyances (an HDDVD player takes almost a minute to eject a disk when in the "off" state)

For the record, I bought a $500 HDDVD player. My rationale: I use netflix, so I'm not investing in media that may be worthless later. And even if HDDVD or both formats bomb, I'm sure I can get at least a couple of hundred dollars for it on ebay. So I'm paying maybe $300 for a year or two of a fantastic upconverting standard DVD player, with the bonus of getting to enjoy some HD stuff.

-b

They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[markdj]

There are two reasons for this: DVD quality and HDMI. The first has been expounded on at length. The picture quality is not that much greater than regular DVD. But no one seems to be talking about the HDMI problem. You need an HD TV to take advantage of the higher resolution, but few people have them and those that do have only one or no HDMI input. Because the studios are worried about copying they won't allow HD signals to be output over composite video. Only HDMI has the encryption to keep copying from happening. Many early HDTV adopters have no HDMI port and are not going to spend $thousands to buy another TV for marginal picture improvement. Those that do have an HDMI port have only one and that is being used by the cable or satellite box. HDMI switch boxes cost $300+ and have no remote! That's my situation. Only in 2006 have HDTVs with 2 HDMI ports become widely available and those are only the more expensive ones. So these new HD/Blu Ray DVDs are for new TV buyers and those TVs are still too expensive to kickstart the market.

Re:They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[evilviper]

The picture quality is not that much greater than regular DVD.

Right... 6X higher resolution isn't that much...

(1920*1080) / (720*480) = 6.00

You need an HD TV to take advantage of the higher resolution, but few people have them

And you needed S-video and 5.1 channel surround-sounce recievers to take advantage of the quality improvements of DVDs, but few people had them when DVDs were first comming out.

Many TVs had no S-Video port and people were not going to spend $hundreds to buy another TV for marginal picture improvement. Those that did have an S-Video port have only one and that was being used by the VCR, cable or satellite box.

Re:They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[putaro]

And you needed S-video and 5.1 channel surround-sounce recievers to take advantage of the quality improvements of DVDs, but few people had them when DVDs were first comming out.

As many others have pointed out, DVDs offered a number of features besides higher resolution that made them attractive to consumers. Convenience, durability, menus and extras were all big advantages that DVDs had over VHS. Psychologically, purchasing a DVD disc seemed much more reasonable than purchasing a VHS tape, probably because we'd all been through cassettes and CD's.

HD discs are only offering higher resolution so it really needs to shine there all the time.

Re:They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[evilviper]

HD discs are only offering higher resolution

...and scratch-resistant coatings (added durability), and far more advanced menus, and more extras, and...

Re:They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[putaro]

Well, when they start flying off the shelves we'll know that you were right. At the moment, though, it would seem that most consumers and even early adopters just don't see the value proposition.

Re:They just don't get it - Need HDMI to see in HD

[evilviper]

Those are still advantages, whether or not the formats sell.

Saying they aren't worth it is vastly different than saying the benefits don't exist.

What a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

HDDVD/BluRay are both doomed to fail. It is BetaMax/VHS and LaserDisc all rolled up into one massive nightmare. Like laserdisc, noone is going to invest into new technology that does not provide something substantial over the previous generation. Like BetaMax/VHS, noone is going to invest into two competing formats with an unknown future. In the end, there will be very little demand for these products and costs will remain prohibitively high. Next year will always be seen as the year "HD takes over regular DVD" and only fools with too much money will plunker down cash for it and boast to their friends about superior picture. This will continue until finally something comes along and kills all these technologies and puts these companies out of their misery.

Hugely expensive Blu-ray/HDDVD pointless

[Frenchman113]

These new media are unnessecary for HD movies as with any halfway decent MPEG-4 scheme, you can easily fit an HD movie onto a single-layer disc. So, why are we still using MPEG-2? After all, with either option, the consumer has to buy a new DVD player... wouldn't cheaper MPEG-4 discs sell better?

Re:Hugely expensive Blu-ray/HDDVD pointless

[loraksus]

Can vouch for this. I've seen Saw 2 in 720p compressed to 4.5 gigs using mpeg4 (xvid iirc). Looked great. The hardware reqs for the HD and BR players are pretty beefy, so there isn't much cost savings...

Re:Hugely expensive Blu-ray/HDDVD pointless

[Jeremy Erwin]

hd-dvd and bluray support 1920*1080 resolution. 720p is only 720*1280. Granted, 1080p sets cost more than 720p sets.

(yes, yes, there's this old crt hdtv standard called 1080i, but interlacing is annoying)

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[maynard]

A single layer blu-ray disc has ~25GB of capacity, of which almost 15% is used for uncompressed audio. This avsforum thread on the Samsung BDP-1000 is particularly illuminating on the issue of space constraints due to the mix of single layer discs with mpeg2 as the codec. --M

MiniDisc vs DCC

[Midnight Thunder]

Does anyone remember the format war between DCC and MiniDisc? While each did get their adopters neither really faired well in the overall market, since nobody saw real reasons to adopt them.

When people talk about BluRay vs HD-DVD and compare it to VHS vs BetaMax, I am not so sure, since at least video tapes had a reasons to be taken up. I really believe it is like MiniDisc vs DCC, since few people really care. Drop the DRM and the region encoding and I will be willing to consider them.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[evilviper]

Does anyone remember the format war between DCC and MiniDisc? While each did get their adopters neither really faired well in the overall market, since nobody saw real reasons to adopt them.

Why do people always tout audio as examples?

99% of people CAN'T HEAR any sound improvements over what CDs can produce. It's at the upper limit of your ears. Your eyes, however, have a LONG, LONG way to go.

MiniDisc and DCC, in particular, were no worse sounding that CDs, AT BEST. Their quality was actually lower than CDs, not higher. That would be like introducing SVHS now that DVDs have caught on, and asking whether it will catch-on.

Drop the DRM and the region encoding and I will be willing to consider them.

Funny, I bet you have plenty of DVDs, despite their DRM and region encoding. Have you forgotten about the /. boycott already?

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[bnenning]

Funny, I bet you have plenty of DVDs, despite their DRM and region encoding.

Which are trivially defeatable. I don't buy a lot of DVDs, but I would buy exactly zero if I couldn't rip them. Likewise, if Blu-ray or HD-DVD gets cracked as fully as DVD, I'll consider them.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there's a LOT more that can be heard, it's just that to get there, we're going to need a major change in technology. As nice as hi-res multichannel sound is, it is still artificial and nobody is going to be fooled that they are actually in a concert hall. Changes to frequency response, s/n ratios, greater sampling ratios are not enough. It's gonna require a new kind of transducer.

DCC failed because the heads were a disaster to manufacture. It was a technological white elephant.

The HDDVD/BR war is most analogous to the SACD/DVD-A format war. Both formats will lose because the incremental improvements, lack of a clear direction, and technological complexities will kill them both.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[evilviper]

I don't buy a lot of DVDs, but I would buy exactly zero if I couldn't rip them.

So you're saying you didn't buy a single DVD until after October 6, 1999?

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[MemoryDragon]

The hearing is an excellent analogy, DVDs give a picture quality good enough, now once you are over 30 you have a high chance of not being able to see perfectly....

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[Night Goat]

So you're saying you didn't buy a single DVD until after October 6, 1999?

I am in the same boat as the GP and I think I can explain what he means. Now that we have DVDs that have broken copy protection, life's great. We can do what we want with our DVDs. Why go from that to a format that restricts us once again? We'd rather just keep buying DVDs that work how we want them to.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[evilviper]

DVDs give a picture quality good enough,

Do you have your computer monitor set at 640x480?
Or is that not "good enough" for you?

Would 1920x1024 be more to your liking?
Me too.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[evilviper]

Why go from that to a format that restricts us once again?

"once again" being the key part. If copy protection is actually such a big deal, why didn't everyone boycott DVDs, and stick with VHS?

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[smash]

Yes.

In fact, I didn't own a DVD player of any form until 2000.

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[MemoryDragon]

Not if I give up my freedom for that...

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[evilviper]

Not if I give up my freedom for that...

You happily gave up your freedom for DVDs, but won't do it again for HD-DVD/Blu-ray?

Re:MiniDisc vs DCC

[Night Goat]

"once again" being the key part. If copy protection is actually such a big deal, why didn't everyone boycott DVDs, and stick with VHS?

Well, this time I can only give you my reason for not boycotting DVDs. DVDs were worth the sacrifice because they were much, much cooler and more convenient than VHS. There was a real benefit to be had by getting DVDs. I'm just not seeing it with Blu-ray & HD-DVD. Those are a little better, but not so much better that I'm willing to sacrifice the convenience I already have. I imagine a lot of people agree with me on this. The tech-minded people I have spoken with in person about this have all said they'd rather stick with DVDs.

Checklist

[tomstdenis]

1. Comes on the same SIZE MEDIA as before [check]
    - no media advantage like VHS vs DVD ... hmm
2. Comes with new added value DRM that makes hardware incompatible with one another? [check]
3. Are nowhere close to being compatible with one another [check]
4. Are only different so they can vendor lockin consumers [check]
5. Are fundamentally no better than before [check]
6. Still hold the same shitty two-bit plot movies [check]
7. Players are expensive [check]
    - DVD players cost like 50$ now. And if you run Linux they're free
8. The terminology is confusing for most and awkward [check]
    - What the hell is progressive scan? interlaced? HDCP? is blu-ray HD? What the hell is HD-DVD then? What is HDMI? etc

Tips

1. Merge the damn standards or deprecate one of them
2. Drop the DRM crap
3. Pay your actors less and your writers more
4. Host a website like "hdfacts.org" where people can learn about the tech in a vendor neutral environment
5. Give up the proprietary crap already

Tom

Popular Mechanics

[_Shorty-dammit]

Page 32 of the August 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics has a small story about comparing HD-DVD to standard DVD. Their three test subjects said that the picture from the standard (upconverting) DVD player was almost as good as the real HD-DVD player, but cost $420 less. If the picture's almost as good, why would they want to buy the HD-DVD player? Then I read it again and noticed that the test used a 42" plasma screen that was only 720p. Why even bother doing a comparison if you're not going to use a 1080i/p screen? You're just stacking the deck in favour of putting HD-DVD in a poor light. Standard DVD gets you 345,600 pixels. 720p gets you 921,600 pixels, 2 and 2/3 more pixels. A big step up, to be sure. Perhaps at a regular viewing distance it might not look *that* much better, and maybe that's what happened for the test subjects. But at 1080 you get 2,073,600 pixels! A full SIX times as many pixels as standard def. DVD gives you, and still 2.25 times as many pixels as 720p!! Why, oh why on earth would you do a test with a 720p rig?!? It won't tell you anywhere near the whole story. If you want to see how good HD-DVD is capable of being you need to be looking at the entire picture, not one that has been cutback in resolution by more than half. Seeing stuff like this, especially in something like Popular Mechanics, just aggravates me. It is going to make HD-DVD/Blu-ray that much harder to gain acceptance and start driving prices down. And that's bad for everyone.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[interiot]

Most people so far are purchasing 720p-native screens. And if they're purchasing 1080-native screens, most can only input 1080i. Comparing in 720p seems like the most sensible comparison... (though obviously 1080p IS available, so it'd be nice to see that statistics for that too)

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Harry Coin]

It is going to make HD-DVD/Blu-ray that much harder to gain acceptance and start driving prices down. And that's bad for everyone.

Oh god no! We have to keep those prices shored up, or my precious Blu-ray player will no longer be a status symbol! If I don't pay >$1000 for it, it must not be any good.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Detritus]

Interlaced and progressive scan displays are not directly comparable. See Why Do We Interlace?. Using the numbers in that article, 1080i is equivalent to 648p. That's why many people prefer 720p to 1080i. There's no free lunch.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Detritus]

Correction: That should read "1080i is equivalent to 864p".

effective-resolution = lines-per-field + lines-per-field * 0.6

Re:Popular Mechanics

[evilviper]

Most people so far are purchasing 720p-native screens.

Source? I have a very hard time believing that. Even the smallest CRT HDTVs are 1080i.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[evilviper]

Using the numbers in that article, 1080i is equivalent to 648p.

You can't use a simple number to adequately compare interlaced and progressive material, no matter what that number happens to be.

During low-motion scenes, interlaced 1080i video will look just as good as a progressive 1080p picture, minus a few possible artifacts of spacial aliasing.

During very fast motion, 1080i can potentially look as bad as half the (vertical) resolution, although it will still look as if it is double the frame-rate (540p60) due to the interlacing. That's the reason why 1080i is most popular, even when progressive modes are available, and 1080p30 would use somewhat less bandwidth.

That's why many people prefer 720p to 1080i.

720p also happens to be 60fps, twice the frame-rate of 1080. The smoother motion, and lack of aliasing due to interlacing has more to do with it than resolution.

In fact, you go back and say the number is actually 864p, which is higher res than 720p, so I can't see how you can support this statement at all.

Your comparison is rather one-sided. Interlacing will affect the vertical resolution, but not the horizontal. Calling it 648p (or 864p) makes it sound as if 720p is almost as high-res, when in fact, the width is still 50% larger than 720p, making even 648p higher res than 720p.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[interiot]

See here. Of the 737 models listed there, only 100 are capable of displaying 1024 lines or more, and 79 are capable of 1080 lines. That site doesn't have a way to quickly show which ones can only input 1080i and not 1080p, but there's quite a few sets that can display 1080 lines but still can't input 1080p.

Also, sets with a display less than 1000 lines are obviously noticably less expensive, so consumers are more likely to buy them as well.

In short, at most 10.7% of the market is capable of 1080i.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[interiot]

Damn, I wish I could fix posts. That's 10.7% of the market that are capable of displaying 1080 lines.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[_Shorty-dammit]

You're using the number of available models as your measuring stick? That makes no sense whatsoever. That's not "the market" in any way, shape, or form. That's the catalog. What sells from the catalog is entirely different from what's in the catalog. The fact that 10.7% of the TVs are 1080 line models doesn't mean they have 10.7% of the market. That's crazy talk. Do you honestly think that as more and more new musicians/groups are signed and release CDs that it means less people are going to be buying Britney Spears? Because now there are more bands to buy CDs from?

Re:Popular Mechanics

[interiot]

Umm.... I think it's entirely reasonable that, given the price difference between 1080-line sets and ~720-line sets, given that quite a few 1080-line sets can't input 1080p, and given my empirical observations at Best Buy of the availability of 1080p (or even 1080-line) sets, that 10% is a very reasonable upper bound on 1080p sets. I'd guestimate that it's less than 5%, but the GP asked for a source, so I wasn't going to speculate too much.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Anonymous Coward]

Shorty-Dammit ia ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.

I didn't think 1080p was worth it mainly because I expected a lot of source to be of the "the dynamic range of this media tends to reveal limitations of the source" persuasion.

But then I saw a Westinghouse 1080p showing the same source as 1366x768 of the same size and *higher* price... and boy, the difference from 720p to 1080i/p was MUCH larger than I thought it would be.

Saved my ass from buying anything less, it did. Now I await the 37 to 43" version of the Dell 24" 16x9 -- feature packed, decent quality, competitive price.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[evilviper]

Of the 737 models listed there, only 100 are capable of displaying 1024 lines or more,

Which models of HDTVs are most popular at a specific store (particularly a virtual store) is completely and utterly irrelevent.

And those results don't say what number of people have bought which sets, so you can't make any sort of statistical analysis from the "popular" list... even *if* Cnet was typical of the public at large (which is unbelievably laughable in itself).

In short, at most 10.7% of the market is capable of 1080i.

Junk in, junk out.

Your numbers are pure bullshit. "The market" isn't made-up entirely of what people are able to buy through Cnet Shopper.

Find some REAL numbers, not something you've made up, and get back to me.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[nattt]

Well, had a 720p and 1080p Plasma in the office, comparing some 4k video downscaled to 1080p, playback from uncompressed DPX over HDSDI. Simple fact was, you had to stand pretty close to the monitors to see the extra resolution of the 1080p, and overall, the 720p had better contrast and an overall better picture. There's no point in more resolution unless you do it right.

With regards to Blu Ray - saw an instore demo, and it looked so awful, I'd prefer to watch a normal DVD. There were more compression artifacts than I've had hot dinners, and really looked bit-starved. What a crappy demo for a crappy format. Yuck.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Jesus_666]

Why, oh why on earth would you do a test with a 720p rig?!?

Because 1080* rigs are more expensive and most people are going to buy 720? Just an idea.

Re:Popular Mechanics

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why everyone makes such a big deal about 1080i/p over 720p. looking at the pixel rate 720p is not that far behind 1080i and way ahead of 1080p. (1080p24 is whats used for movies).

720p60 = 921600 Pixels 60 Times a second = 5529600 pix/sec
1080i60 = 1036800 Pixels 60 Times a Second = 62208000 pix/sec
1080p24 = 2073600 Pixels 24 Times a Second = 29766400 pix/sec

I'll wait till the DRM is cracked

[Fefe]

I'm not going to invest in technology where it's not clear that my investment is safe.

And I am an early adopter, I just sunk 2000 Euros in a brand new graphics card, a 1920x1200 monitor, and a dual core CPU. So I can watch HD content. OK, and play some HD games :-)

They expect me to pay $1000 for a player that they can shut down remotely? They have GOT to be kidding me. No way in hell.

Oh, and they are targeting 40-50 Euros for a blank medium.

No. Thanks, but no thanks. Go try to butt fuck someone else, content mafia. I'll wait till you go bankrupt and then we'll see reasonably priced HD content.

I mean, they can't be THAT stupid, can they? What kind of value proposition is that? You can probably get HD content for $10 per month from the warez doods, without DRM, and without downscaling. This business model will be their downfall. And the people who say that if they fail, there will be no HD content, are wrong: every major cable TV provider has to offer HD channels these days. All the content will be there. So not even the pity argument counts.

The frame rate is too low

[Animats]

One big problem with HDTV is now becoming apparent - the frame rate of movies is too low. 24FPS at 1080p with the screen in front of your face looks awful when the camera is panning.

Sports, especially football, compress badly. Football is almost the worst case for motion compression - the camera is moving relative to the background, the players are all moving in different directions, their body parts are all in motion, there's lots of detail that's important to the viewer, and there's no central character that dominates the scene. Viewers are likely to rerun parts of the game in slow motion, which brings out all the compression artifacts. When you have a 50-inch screen in front of you, all those problems really stand out.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[Anonymous Coward]

that's some seriously fucked-up moderation, dude!

I'm surprised the studios are pushing for this

[srs232]

Recently hollywood has been releasing movies without any redeaming content besides eyecandy. I don't understand why they would want to introduce a format to the home consumer which can outdo the CGI showing how bad it really is. I'm going to stay with my DVD, in some cases blurry is better.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[brunascle]

Neither HDDVD nor Bluray downsample for non-HDCP displays.

there's an article in this month's maximum pc about trying to get HD-DVD/Bluray (dont remember which one) to work on the PC, and IIRC, the movie wouldnt play until they plugged in a brand new monitor. InterVideo would freeze up after 4 seconds and display an error message. there's a photo of the error message in the mag.

anyone have the mag on hand? mine's at home

yeah but

[aexiphixion]

wait until you can backup all that porn on one 50GB disk! score -1 redundant

What? You don't like DRM? But . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

But our marketing department did surveys at BDSM conventions, and everybody there *LOVED* being micromanaged by our DRM schemes - isn't everybody a masochistic pervert? The BDSM people did have a few suggestions, which we plan to adopt for BluRay and HD-DVD - namely the USB ball-gag and nipple electrodes (mandatory for viewing fill resolution HD content).

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[jedidiah]

> 1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really
> believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of
> compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me,
> would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why
> do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"?

You're on crack.

        Standard DVD's look quite repectable on 55" screens. It helps if it's an HDTV that
runs at 720p or better and not some ancient CRT projector. However, DVD's are quite
respectable on moderately priced players on GOOD TVs.

        The display device matters.

        Now HD-DVD or BlueRay is going to be just more of the same or an even higher
level of compression. So the "compression" argument really makes 0.0 sense here.

        Now, I could likely tell the difference with some well done 720p or 1080p
content. However, it would take a very good conversion. I am not exactly blind.
I am actually pretty demanding. I am certainly far more demanding that most
consumers out there.

        I can notice the difference. I just am not convinced that it's enough of
a gain for the cost involved in HD formats for a meagre 55" screen. I can't
really see the average consumer being all to impressed either.

        480p on a good set 60" or better is likely all best people can even percieve.
Nevermind whether or not they think it's worth the minimum $1100 conversion cost.

Re:To summarize...MOD PARENT UP

[eggoeater]

I'm going to get the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox360 sometime soon after it's released.
Amazingly, the 360 does not have DVI or HDMI outputs.
So, from your post above, are you saying I CAN get 1080i from my component outputs?

I've been trying to find something definitive online around this but cant find anything.
Also, do you know of a web site that shows what resolution different HD-DVD movies are mastered in?
e.g. I want to find out if Serinity on HD-DVD is 720p or 1080i.

Thanks.

Step up!

[spun]

Oh, the arrogance! You early adopter's actually want something useful for your money? It's your job as professional consumers to purchase the latest crap, no matter what. The economy is counting on you. The country is counting on you. The fat lazy shareholders who don't want to do an honest days work for their millions are counting on you. The CEO needs a new island in the Bahamas, his daughter needs a new nose and his mistress needs some new tits. So quit your whining, get of your asses, go out and do your job. Step up!

5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[G3ckoG33k]

5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?! I chose 130W per channel for 5.1 or 90 per channel for 6.1 a few years ago. I chose the 5.1 system, which I have never regretted.

What is the 5.1 vs 6.1+7.1 DVD ratio? Has it changed over the last four years?

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[LearnToSpell]

I'm not much of a movie buff, but I rent a few once in a while. I have a 6.1 setup, and the only movie I've seen in 6.1 was Saw. For me, the selling point is actually with music. Stereo CDs sound a lot better (to me) with that extra rear channel. With a 5.1 source, the rear center just mixes the two surrounds, so there's not a whole lot of difference.

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Umm, what rear center? 5.1 has front left, front center, front right, rear left, rear right, and a subwoofer.

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[LearnToSpell]

5.1 source, like on a DVD -> 6.1 system, with a rear center.

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Ahh sorry, I misread your post. But then, stereo CD's are only 2 channels, how does the 6+1 system distribute them? And even more so, for 2 a channel source how does it avoid having the rear center just mix the left/right rear, as happens for a 5+1 source?

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[louisadkins]

A friend of mine upgraded to a 7.1 system (card and speakers) and ran the demo disk that had the audio tracks recorded to such - the difference was astounding. I think it falls back to there not being enough of a market for a 7.1 disc to be produced, though. And people won't really even consider adopting until they are provided with a decent quality and selection of media. Catch 22, or would that be 2.2 ... -- **Just My Opinion/Could Be Wrong**

Re:5.1 sound yes, but 6.1 or 7.1?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, what rear center?

Umm, he was talking about 6.1. Umm, why don't you read the post more carefully before, umm, posting some dumb-ass remark? And umm, isn't annoying when someone uses condescending "umms," especially when what follows doesn't live up to the condescension?

Waiting for a combo player

[scharkalvin]

I predict that nothing will happen until the first dual format players come
out. This will settle the format wars the same way that the DVD+/-R(W)
drives finally settled the DVD recordable format war, both sides won!

To those that say it is impossible to make such a player, I will answer
BULLSHIT! There is already a technology out there involving a difraction
grating lens that solves the problem with the different depth of focus between
the two formats. Both formats use the same wavelength laser.

When a combo player that does BOTH HDDVD, Blue-ray, and DVD-CD is available
at a price point of maybe 2X the current DVD players, I'll think about it.
I predict I won't have more than a year and a half to wait.

Dear Hollywood... In case you STILL dont get it...

[JustNiz]

STOP TREATING US LIKE WE'RE STUPID. WE DON'T WANT YOUR DRM.

>>> Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience," said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's.

Way to go, Sony

[bockelboy]

I, for one, welcome our underwhelming high-definition overlords!

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Maxo-Texas]

LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better. To most people I know, the quality difference worth about $50 bucks.

2) $500 is very expensive. A person making a great living pulls in about $4k after taxes. So there went 1/8 of your monthly income for a player (vs 3 hours). If you are making a managerial or doctor's salary then cool. I also don't drive around a dodge viper (only about 3x a normal car price in its day) or wear armani suits (about 7x a decent suit). And HD/blu ray are no where near better a DVD than a dodge viper/armani suit are than their counterparts.

3)I paid about $1,200 for a phillips 57" HD monitor with tuner. It is a great monitor. When I can get a bluray or hd player for $99, then I'm there. I agree, average joe can get a crappy monitor for less. I agree videophile can get an EXCELLENT monitor for about $2800 (plus 600 service plan plus 340 taxes plus 120 delivery and setup or about $4000 total with misc cables and crap). I looked long and hard at the $2800 level which IS better (and DVD's look great on that format). I love the look and form-factor of 57" LCD screens. But I don't want to eat dog-food when I retire to have one. And I think they will drop by over $1000 in the next 12 months to a more reasonable $1,800 for the same quality.

4) As the other person already pointed out- businesses make promises all the time that they do not keep- the capability IS there. They will use it before 2010 if they can get away with it.

I agree with all your other points about why no one wants it.

---

There is NO point in being a first adopter these days. Used to be, that gave you a BIG edge over everyone else. You might be 12 to 24 months ahead of them and be "cool" for a long time. These days- if something is going to be successful it is probably ubiquous within 6 months. Why keep paying a 10x premium? I purchased 80% of my dvd library for about $5 to $7.50. As a result, I have 99% of what my friend's have AND then I have a bunch of stuff they can't afford because they are all paying $20.00. (Why pay $80 per xfiles season when THIS week you can now pay $20 per season! ($180 total)).

There is such a huge glut of entertainment now- I can't possibly watch or keep up with it. So I fell behind and noticed how much money it was saving me to be just 3-4 months off the leading edge. So then I pushed it to 6 months and the savings were even bigger. Now i push it to 6 months + next major holiday nad the savings are almost always 60% or more vs what my bleeding edge buds pay.

It would be *different* if HD/BLU was NIGHT and DAY, hands down, fabulous, life changing, emotion wringing, bud attracting (hey let's all go over to Maxo's house- he has HD/BLU!) better. But it is not.

It's a teensy bit better for normal people and MUCH more expensive AND heavily laden-- no CRIPPLED-- with DRM format which was stupid and gives us 50/50 odds of picking the format which will have the movies we want.

There isn't just ONE reason to crush the sellers on this- we need to crush them so bad, their entire departments will be fired and they will have to leave their respective countries in shame.

That's true if you're late to the party...

[PRMan]

I still have Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on my HDTiVo from PPV and I can tell you that it is STUNNING how big the difference is. Of course, this is from over 2 years ago. In the last couple years DirecTV routinely downsamples every 1080i channel to 1280x1080 and apparently runs a blur filter and a color-reduction filter over it to reduce bandwidth even more.

The reality is, if you've had HD less than 2 years, you have probably never seen true HD...

Re:That's true if you're late to the party...

[Lord Apathy]

Well that blows mule ass. I never heard that before. Come to think of it the real HD that I've been stunned with is from the local PBS HD channel coming over the air. There has been a couple of times I've thought about canceling my HD subscription to Directv.

When I first subscribed to it, it was to get Discovery HD and I was very impressed with it. But then they where running a lot of space and nature shows. Stuff that I'm interested in. Lately is been nothing but Big, monster garage and that chopper show. Shit I don't care for in any definition.

For the record too the shows that I compared where Hunt for Red October in HD off of showtime and the DVD. Looks like my method was flawed. Oh well, live and learn.

Quality Concerns

[HaMMeReD3]

Although I know that both formats are technically superior to dvd, and I have seen content in hd-dvd and blu-ray, my only real concern is that it looks like the studios are just hacking together the movies. Blu-ray does look nice, but most the movies that have been released show all kinds of compression artifacts and such, they just dont look to be even up to broadcast hdtv standards.

Maybe with time the studios will learn how to properly telecine hd content onto these discs, but for now it looks somewhat like an upsampled dvd in most available movies.

Personally I think that bluray will have the competitive advantage when it's released with the ps3, as I personally believe the storage is priceless in game development, you often commonly hear that it'll prevent games from spanning across more then 1 dvd, but it's more then that, because for example, a 5 dvd game, on all 5 dvd's there will have to be repeat content of all the basic elements of the game, sounds, textures, game logic, etc, that really only leaves maybe a few gigs free for extra data on each disc of the game. By storing all content on one disc, you can have a much more varied and high resolution experience throughout the game.

What if both lose?

[Ullteppe]

I think people are missing the mark in this case, this is not like the VHS-Beta battle, rather it is like SACD-DVD Audio battle. My money is on both formats losing. DVD will survive. Upconverting DVD is good enough for Joe Sixpack (personally, I think a well-coded DVD looks swell on my 37" LCD). There is a benefit to HD, but not enough to justify $500+ players, the DRM, the HDMI hassle and rebuying all the content.

What happened in audio? CD was good enough for the majority of people, and people actually went DOWN in quality (MP3) to win in convenience.

Forget Beta/VHS, remember that before this no viable video format existed.

When DVD took over, there was one format that had massive quality improvement on VHS, as well as more convenience, not less as in the HD-DVD/Blueray case.

So who will win? Probably downloadable HD video, which is most probably a better idea anyway, and will have a field day in a few years when people have the bandwidth. Adoption will be easier with disk-based competition gone down the drain. In the meantime, there is always bit-torrent...

Two thoughts from an AC

[Anonymous Coward]

First, HD-DVD is DVD 1.5, or SP1 if you wish. It's an improvement, but not a groundbreaking major change. With it comes harsher copy protection. Consumer-hostile DRM. And you have to buy all new hardware to get that extra 10% improvement in quality..But it's only a step ahead, not a leap.

Next, with all of the DRM, 'bricking' and hostility, I think I'd wait for a couple years, until somebody hacks firmware of some players to prevent 'bricking' and eliminate the DRM hostility.

For those of you that are indignant about HD-DVD being worlds better... realize that you are, and are buying in to the fanboyistic audio/video-phile zealousy. It's only a fscking movie, folks. Most of the world ain't going to give a hang about formats and 1000.1 sound or whatever. They can't afford to buy all the home theater schlitz.

My 2 cents

[ObjetDart]

Well, for what it's worth to anyone, here is my 2 cents.

2 years ago I set up my first a home theater, with a front DLP projector and the standard 5.1 speaker setup. The only hardware driving it is a high-end HTPC and a surround receiver. We use this setup to watch DVDs and they look great. Well, at first they looked great, because I was used to watching them on a standard def TV before that. The 96" diagonal image helps, too.

Then maybe a year or so ago I downloaded my first HD clip from the internet. I was blown away. The quality of a true HD broadcast is immediately, obviously superior to a DVD, even on my 1024x768 which can't even do native 720p. My first thought was...when can we get movies in this format? (Yes I know I can get them on some HD cable/satellite channels, but I refuse to pay $60/month for that.) Then I heard about the upcoming HD DVD formats and said good, that makes sense, those of us with HD or similar displays need this to get the full potential out of our systems.

The June issue of Sound & Vision (a magazine whose opinion I trust) has a detailed review of Toshiba's first HD DVD player. They declare in no uncertain terms that the image quality of the new HD DVDs blows DVDs out of the water. BUT - and here is the catch I think - to get that quality, you must hook the player up to a native 1080 display. They hooked the player up to a 720p display, and in that case they said "the image could easily be mistaken for a regular DVD, or worse." This is because the onboard scalers in the first generation players are crap. To get good quality at 720p out of a HD DVD right now, you must use a quality outboard scaler. I think that issue right there explains why so many people are puzzled when they see HD DVD for the first time, because it really doesn't look any better than DVD unless the display is 1080p, which it usually isn't.

So now I'm thinking that hopefully, the hardware manufacturers will wise up and include much improved scalers for downconverting to 720p in the second generation players. Then I think more people will begin to appreciate what HD DVD has to offer.

So my adoption of HD DVD is still a ways off...although I am intrigued by the fact that Netflix is already offering movies in both HD DVD and Blue Ray format. I'm much more interested in being able to rent new movies in HD than repurchasing the old ones that I already bought on DVD. If I could buy a single player now that could play both HD DVD and Blue Ray, and which had a quality scalar in it so that the movies look good on my projector, I would be in all the way. Better yet, if I could just buy a HD DVD/Blue Ray combo drive for my HTPC that would play movies, it would be a done deal.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[monopole]

I've got a home built 90" projector and DVD looks just fine with interpolation.

When the $5 DVD bin at WalMart empties...

[tillerman35]

...is when I'll buy one of these.  In fact, I believe that when the $5 video tape bin at WalMart emptied was the exact point at which I decided to get a DVD player.  I still call them "tapes," and probably will for the rest of my life.  Shiny round flat tapes.  I can't wait until the next generation of shiny round flat tapes comes out.  I'll buy one when the bin of current-generation shiny round flat tapes gets empty.

/now where was I?  Oh yeah.  Big Babomb level on SuperMario 64.  Nintendo rocks!

5 minutes into the movie you won't care.

[guidryp]

The problem is we are incredibly adaptable and we forget quickly. 5 minutes into the movie it won't register wether you are watching a DVD or and HD/BD.

It may be cool for wowing your friends, but once into the movie you probably won't notice. This is my experience watching HD Dish and DVD. When you switch from one to the other, there is a momentary blip where you really notice the change in resolution and it is quickly forgotten. We are a very adaptable/forgetfull species.

Once you realize this, you start to recognize that you would have to have more money than brains to shell out heaps of cash for hardware, just to pay more money for more restrictive content.

DVD had a better picture than VHS, but it also had a VASTLY superior form factor and that is really what sold it. It could have had the same picture quality and that probably wouldn't have slowed down adoption.

This is really a fight to get more content protection into our homes and most of us just are not interested. That and hopes that we will re-buy our collections. Ha!

Re:5 minutes into the movie you won't care.

[interiot]

I don't know, there are a few HD-Net scenes that make my jaw drop out of the blue because they're amazingly detailed (scenic landscapes, sweaty athletes). Of course, it goes the other way too, when you get distracted from the entertainment that's on because the cameraman is struggling to get the focus correct, or when an actress's skin ends up looking less than perfect on HD.

Too much to invest and too little in return

[AnalogDiehard]

The new players won't display their full resolution unless they detect the new secure screens. You have to replace the player AND your screen. Deal killer #1

The discs are heavily DRM'd, attempts to circumvent = violation of DMCA. Deal killer #2.

No facility to back up discs to minimize damage from the little ones. Deal killer #3.

I have to replace my DVDs, most of which have not been or never will be released on the new format. Deal killer #4.

Like DVD, Hollywood has an even tighter iron grip on who licenses the format. Deal Killer #5.

Who the hell trust Sony anymore after the root kit fiasco? Deal Killer #6.

I see no profit in the new formats for me. Small wonder why they haven't been adopted.

Re:Too much to invest and too little in return

[MarcoAtWork]

The new players won't display their full resolution unless they detect the new secure screens.

not only that, the tv must support 1080p over HDMI, where unfortunately nowadays most TVs support only 1080i (and yes, HDMI 1.0 supports 1080p/60 over HDMI, it's just that since there was basically no demand most manufacturers chose to implement only 1080i/720p)

I am really glad that 4 years ago when I had to get a new TV I decided to stay with a nice SDTV until the dust settled, otherwise I'd have been bitten by the first generation plasma blues (or lack of) and burnin, then by hdmi, then by first generation DLPs rainbows, then by 1080p-friendly hdmi and by the current cablecard changes. I guess another couple of years and then finally it will be reasonably safe to buy an HDTV tv finally, my sincere thanks to you early adopters!

Football looks great in HD

[PRMan]

A lot of football is at 720p, which is 60(!) frames per second. When football is done at 720p with full frame rate (around 17Mbps), it looks terrific. Even CBS' 1080i broadcasts look outstanding, although they do suffer some artifacts and tearing during heavy motion (close up of the action at real speed). But, since the typical camera angle is far away, this rarely happens either.

Tell me, have you actually WATCHED a football game in HD? Your post seems to say no (or that you have some offbrand cable company as your provider).

Re:Football looks great in HD

[Megane]

Tell me, have you actually WATCHED a football game in HD? Your post seems to say no (or that you have some offbrand cable company as your provider).

That's actually an important point. Cable companies are very likely to re-compress the network HD signal to a lower bit rate than you would get with from the over-the-air signal with an antenna on the roof. And even then, there are some over-the-air stations that want to broadcast secondary channels, but it's usually only a single weather/radar channel, so it doesn't take all that much from the main channel.

I will keep my VHS

[fmoliveira]

So, I dont have problems with scratched disks, I can record TV programs to see when I want, and the quality is not so bad. I dont need these shiny disks.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Have Blue]

The technical capacity is still there. I'm not buying one until it isn't. Same with the remote-bricking commands.

Because they're all waiting for a PS3

[BroadbandBradley]

there's not too many HD movies out yet, and why put out $1000 for a stand alone player when PS3 will do so much more for $600. Normally you'd have no idea what a new Bluray player would cost in 6 months but PS3 being a video game console they have already released price info way ahead of launch. Also, not too many sets support real 1080p inputs yet so it's not like people have had a real 1080p set sitting around for a year just waiting for a standalone HD movie player.

Re:Because they're all waiting for a PS3

[loraksus]

I find it funny that a couple days ago, Sony announced the PS3 won't be shipping with a HDMI cable.
Wonder how much monster paid them to do that...

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)

Both of the new formats are backward compatible with DVDs and both employ the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC1) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

Strange they seem to have the identical compression technology support to me.

I love examples like this...

[Evil Shabazz]

The power of the consumer. These companys shilling DRM out like we can't live without their technology... treating everyone like pirates just because their sales drop off by a quarter of a percent... It's beautiful to see the consumer body avoiding crap like this because of the potential hassles. Power to the people! :)

Wow.

[brywalker]

A lot of FUD here.

Well I took the plunge. I looked at Blu-Ray. Player is $1000 (retail), backed by Sony - whom of which I despise due to their recent business practices. I wasn't impressed with the video quality, as everything is encoded in MPEG2 on 25gb discs and there is noticible compression.

Then I looked at HD DVD. Backed by Toshiba, which brought me DVD - I know I like that. My first DVD player was a Toshiba, bought about a month after they came out for around $700 (from AMEX, got points deal and whatnot). The video quality was excellent, 30GB discs, but encoded in VC-1. No compression artifacts to be seen. Player was $500 (retail), that sealed the deal. Toshiba HD-A1.

I brought it home and was BLOWN away. I have it going over HDMI which looks just *slightly* better than component out. The player outputs at 1080i, but the display does the deinterlacing (as opposed to the BR player which *does* the deinterlacing - doesn't output true 1080p). Outputting Dolby TrueHD 5.1 is something to be heard.

So naturally at this point I hope that HD DVD wins. Sony does the whole "we can do 2 - 4 layer discs" and other promises they won't / can't keep.

Oh, and this thing upscans DVDs to the best quality I have ever seen. Not as good as HD, but it looks great. I have always been an early adopter. I know if HD DVD fails, I still have a kick ass player that will last me for years to come.

Well consumer != cash cows ready to slaugther

[MemoryDragon]

And once I am glad about that. The entire behavior of both camps HD-DVD and Blue ray was like a famous quote of John Romero. First they added enforced revokable DRM so that your player can be disabled by the next purchase. Secondly now that the pesky hydra of being copyable is removed, they tried to keep up the region codes for price hiking and added substancially higher prices to the movies, which then did not add much value. And thought this thing would sell like hotcakes just because it is in the stores. I hope the PS3 will go down burning in flames for the same reasons!

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray

[rice_burners_suck]

Next thing you know, there will be a war between HD-DVD and HD+DVD, Blu-Ray and Blu+Ray, HD+/-DVD and Blu+/-Ray, HD+/-Ray, Blu+/-DVD, and a zillion other formats. And then the recordable media aisle will be even bigger and more confusing.

Couldn't they at least wait until christmas?

[Vexorian]

Well I would like both formats to lose absurdly. But I guess that there are 2 things required for a consumer to actually buy one of these players:
- Get money for the HD tv.
- Get money for the player
- Get time to inform yourself about them.
- Wait until enough reviews are out so at least you have a clue which format is better.

There are rather few comparissions out there and most of them didn't really use a good TV or are not fair or anything. The money is rather an important issue here cause you would have to get a player and a TV and both are not the cheapest items in the store. I would wait for christmas buying season before actually judging success, although I hope that both formats die.

And then..

[eieken]

Slashdot collectively exclaims a highly technical "TOLD YOU SO!" to HDDVD and Bluray manufacturers the world over.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[mihalis]

If you don't know what you're talking about, why post?

You're new around here, aren't you?

Are you missing the point?

[AP2k]

You will not notice a difference between the two new formats and DVD until the master copies are filmed with HD cameras. This isnt about old HD not working with new tech or new tech failing to deliver. Its about not having any movies that have enough detail.

And this negative karma is pissing me off. You know Real has spyware in its player and you are a moron if you dont think they are going to try to package it with Firefox.

Re:Only useful for data right now...

[Lord Apathy]

Actually when you think about it they aren't really good for backing up data. BR and HD disk store what, 35 to 50 GB right now? The smallest drive in my system is 300GB. I have 600 GB a RAID array and 300 GB on my data array. And that is only on one system. These drives cost 500+ bucks for a burner and the disks are 50 bucks each?

For that price and a little more, maybe, I can buy a couple of external drives to back up with. They will be faster and I can reuse them.

Common misconception...

[Optic7]

The government deadline that we keep hearing about is not to convert to HDTV - it is just for conversion from analog to digital broadcasts. Most over the air TV broadcasters already have this up to speed, and from what I understand, most of them are using their bandwidth to broadcast something like 4 standard definition channels over the same space of 1 HD channel (this is a choice they have and apparently only a few are choosing to broadcast HD).

In other words, all that is needed is a digital TV tuner set top box, not a whole new HDTV.

This is an interesting story of a guy's experience setting up a Tivo to record over the air digital broadcasts:

Digital TV Without The Subscription

Re:Common misconception...

[steve_bryan]

most of them are using their bandwidth to broadcast something like 4 standard definition channels over the same space of 1 HD channel

Where did you pull this statistic from? In the Twin Cities market we have the usual networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, PBS and the new UPN/WB hybrid) which all offer HDTV (either 720p or 1080i). There is some limited use of a secondary channel for 24 hour weather but the only true use of multiplexed channels is by PBS to offer 5 channels of SD programming over one channel. A second channel is used by PBS to deliver true HD. In others words basically all the channels have chosen to offer HDTV. There is even one affiliate with local news in HD. Of course you can still view any HDTV picture with a settop box that downconverts to NTSC on your old set (has anyone purchased one of these?). On the other hand for about $100 you can get a receiver for you PC or Mac to view and record full HDTV on your computer monitor. The picture and sound is better than a DVD and the cost is $0 per month.

It may not have been guaranteed by legislation or the FCC but competitive pressure has made a transition to HDTV, not just digital TV, a reality.

History Doesn't Always Repeat

[Nom du Keyboard]

Just goes to show that even large masses of people can learn. Beta/VHS, remember that?

History doesn't always repeat, at least not in the same lifetime.

The "Format War"

[courtarro]

I've noticed that many people in this thread mention waiting for the "format war" to end before they make any decision regarding an upgrade to either BluRay or HD-DVD. I'm tickled by the idea because no one is fighting this war! It's like Sony and Toshiba have both said "soldiers, charge!" but there is no movement. Each side has big missles, bombs, and fighters that they advertise to the other side with leaflets, but the soldiers (early adopters) just sit there on both sides of the battlefield, waiting for the war to fight itself.

If early adopters don't even charge into battle (as is usually the case), the war will never happen. Both sides will die of starvation before a single bomb is lobbed. That's your "format war" - a glaring contest between two camps of megacorporations who each have no followers.

Re:To summarize...MOD PARENT UP

[cheinonen]

The HD-DVD drive should do 1080i over component unless the disc uses the ICT, which no disc will for quite a few years probably. For information on what format it is on the disc, check out here: http://www.highdefdigest.com/. Most likely, if it's on HD-DVD, it's in 1080p using the VC-1 codec. The HD-DVD drive should either interlace that for 1080i or scale it for 720p, depending on your output preferences.

Re:60fps?

[rduke15]

I agree with your points, but just for the leasure of nitpicking:

But what if I want to watch a 60fps 1080p movie?

There is no such thing as 60fps progressive in finished movies. It exists in theory, but not in practice. HD movies are shot in 24/25 p or sometimes 50/60 interlaced.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Lord Apathy]

>> 1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really >> believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of >> compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me, >> would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why >> do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"? >You're on crack.

I think in addition the decoder might have something to do with it too. When I first hooked up my 52" HDTV to a walmart directv decoder I was disappointed too. The picture was blocky and looked like crap. Then I bought a $800 sony HD decoder, Yeah, I paid to much, and the SD channels look great.

Hell the signal coming off the cheap ass tivo i bought looks great in SD.

Exactly!

[sheldon]

I'm a later earlier adopter. I have a 51" HDTV from Sony I bought back in 2002. It's an older style rear-projection model, but I love it and DVDs look awesome on it.

Only problem is, there is no HDMI.

I have no plans to buy a new television until that sucker dies. Since I use it only for playing movies, that's probably a good 5-10 years out.

So sorry, Sony, better luck next time.

$30 per disk

[rholland356]

Yes, $30 per disk IS too much to ask.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Keeper]

He's not on crack. Speaking as a new owner of a 50" display, there is a HUGE difference between DVD video and a hidef signal. If you sit 16' away from the tv, there is no discernable difference. 8' away, and there is a significant difference.

If you want to argue about it, go right ahead. Nothing you say will change what my own eyes can plainly see.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[CityZen]

You wrote:

"1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me, would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"?"

You can call people blind all you want, but the fact is that standard DVDs give generally pretty good picture quality, yes, even on large screens. Sure, you can point out examples where the bit rate just isn't up to it. That doesn't change the fact that it usually looks pretty good. (And if you're enjoying the movie, you're probably not busy looking for the artifacts.)

Your comparison with a computer monitor is not really valid at all. The fact is that nearly all the video data you do see on your computer monitor is indeed from a 640x480 or lower source. You don't run the monitor at 640x480 for the same reason you don't run your HDTV at 480i or 480p: it looks better when you properly interpolate to the higher resolution that the device is capable of.

(And don't give us any BS about comparing desktop resolution for computer applications to movie resolutions: they are completely different types of content. You're not reading fine print detail in your movies (except perhaps in the credits), and movies are highly antialiased in time and space, very much decreasing the need for higher resolution. Even video games could look decent at 640x480 if you maxed out the antialiasing - with the exception of the imagery that was designed for high detail.)

Remember: you are just one data point. What matters to the market are the masses, and most of them are not like you. They don't see (or don't care about) the visual difference, and they do care about the price difference (and the convenience difference).

Until your neighborhood video store starts renting new releases in HD formats, the masses will avoid it.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Keeper]

LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better. To most people I know, the quality difference worth about $50 bucks.

I'm NOT a videophile, and there is a substantial difference between DVDs and hi-def content on my 50" display. If you're watching on a 36" LCD or something, yeah, not much of a difference. But get much larger than that and you WILL notice. I won't go as far to say that DVD's look like crap on their own, but they do in comparison to a hi-def movie.

Now, the value of that difference may very well be $50. But, then again, most people would tell you the same thing when comparing a VHS tape to a DVD.

Native is 1920 x 1080i/p

[flyinglp]

If it was good at 1440 it will be even better a 1920 where the horizontal isn't up sampled.

I could give a shit, so could most americans

[hellfire]

Page 32 of the August 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics has a small story about comparing HD-DVD to standard DVD. Their three test subjects said that the picture from the standard (upconverting) DVD player was almost as good as the real HD-DVD player, but cost $420 less. If the picture's almost as good, why would they want to buy the HD-DVD player? Then I read it again and noticed that the test used a 42" plasma screen that was only 720p. Why even bother doing a comparison if you're not going to use a 1080i/p screen?

Because most americans don't give a flying fuck. This is a great example of an electronics company trying to shove shit down everyone's throats hoping they'll buy it at exhorbitant prices. Mainstream america isn't ready for this. Sure there are plenty of videophiles, but I have to buy a $2000 TV and an $800 to see this far superior quality, when my $250 TV and $50 DVD player work just fine. A TV used to be about how many inches you got. Not you worry about the resolution, plasma vs LCD, 720p, 1080i, ABCXYZ... The american public by and large is barely ready for hi def TV even years after it's being pushed, you really think they are ready for super hi def DVDs?

The great thing about DVDs is they last longer, look better, and the players have more conveniences than VCRs. Recorders are getting cheap to. Quality was important, but not that important.

I continue to maintain that if you want a good movie viewing experience, pay the $10 for you to go to the movies. Even at $10 a trip if you go once a week you are at $520 which is far less than the TV and high def DVD you paid for. And if you are worried about popcorn muck, move out of the hellhole you live in and move to a real part of the country. The large cineplexes I go to don't have that problem. If you are worried about people talking, grow a backbone and learn to tell them to shut up or suck it up.

Re:I could give a shit, so could most americans

[smash]

I continue to maintain that if you want a good movie viewing experience, pay the $10 for you to go to the movies. Even at $10 a trip if you go once a week you are at $520 which is far less than the TV and high def DVD you paid for. And if you are worried about popcorn muck, move out of the hellhole you live in and move to a real part of the country. The large cineplexes I go to don't have that problem. If you are worried about people talking, grow a backbone and learn to tell them to shut up or suck it up.

Well actually the cinema isn't all that rosy.

Don't know about you, but i typically watch movies with friends.

The true cost is about $25+ per head (in australia, $15 movie ticket, plus over-priced drinks/food), per movie viewing - if there's only 2 of you that's $50 - and that's not even counting the costs in transport to get there.

So now we're talking say $50+ per week, or $2.5k (AU admittedly, but x0.75 for US figures I'm guessing - roughly) per year.

And you've still got to deal with ass-clowns on their mobile phones and screaming kids.

No thanks.

DVD+R / DVD-R

[paulevans]

Just like the above situation, I'm not going to buy until a solution comes up between the two formats. Period.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[nasch]

And even if HDDVD or both formats bomb, I'm sure I can get at least a couple of hundred dollars for it on ebay.

Why would anybody pay a couple of hundred dollars for a player that plays a failed format?

Lucky enough not to care - my DVDs are near HD

[rmu2867]

Thanks to my local cable company I have seen lots of HD content and movies on my 50" HDTV (Pan. 500U). I tried an up-converter DVD player through HDMI and a regular prog. scan DVD player and got lousy results with each, lots of blur and bad pixel averaging. Oddly enough the original xbox had incredible playback. Now I have the xbox360 and it's even better. Closest to HD I've seen and in fact close enough that I could care less about getting the HD-DVD add-on that Microsoft has announced. Maybe it's the right "fit" for my TV because I've seen contrary comments to my results from other HDTV owners. But, I am glad to have no need to re-buy my favorite movies in HD or worry about which new format they are. When dual format HD players and HD discs come down to current regular DVD price levels, maybe I'll change my mind. For now I am lucky enough to be satisfied with what I have. Perhaps I am not alone based on this article.

Many, many reasons

[Opportunist]

The primary reason is most likely that you'd have to replace pretty much your complete home theatre setup to really benefit from the HD content. Yes, you can hook your player up to your old TV, but you don't benefit from it. Why bother getting a HD player if it offers no difference to your old one? And player + HDTV can reach around 2000 bucks, a sum that few people spend carelessly.

Then there's the format war. You pay 1000 for a player that's possibly outdated next year.

Then there's DRM, and nobody really knows yet (and the studios certainly don't help there) what this REALLY means. Rumors fly low, up to the point where people claim it won't be possible to rent movies anymore.

And finally, the quality difference is not big enough.

From VCR to DVD, the step was a revelation. Instead of decreasing picture quality over time, you get a crisp clear picture every time you play it. With many different language tracks (a feature not to be ignored, especially if you're either a non-native English speaker or a fan of anime) and bonus goodies. No rewinding and the ability to step to your favorite scene at a fingertip. That's a bonus to be considered.

Another problem: You won't sell all the old movies again people bought when they upgraded from VCR to DVD. When you got the Star Wars VCRs, you maybe also bought the DVDs. As mentioned above, the benefits are huge. No ff and rev to find the trench run. No picture degradation. With HDDVD you get... zip. How do you improve picture quality when you are already at the quality of the original material?

Oh, right, it could be "remastered". Ever bought a "remastered" DVD? I did. No difference to the "old" VCR tapes (provided they're in good quality and not played beyond recognition).

Many of the features people wanted are already present in DVDs. And "better picture" (which, subjectively, doesn't really exist IMO) is no argument to shell out 2000 bucks.

As a backup storage media, there is a future

[ClubMaster]

• Optical disks are free of the (unreliable) mechanics of hard disk storage
• Optical media is designed to be produced efficiently, unit costs are low (not necessarily low/space, but low/unit)
• Standards for capacity increases have so far been predictable

I think that the future of optical disk is to compete with backup tape in their niche market. It is a niche market in the sense of user base, but cost-effective backup is certainly an important business problem for years to come.

The lesson of the iPod

[RevMike]

are you implying that current DVD and SD displays are the "peak" of home theater technology?

For the average user? Yes.

You may very well be correct in your assessment that they aren't using HD to it's full potential yet. If so, there may very well be a market when and if they do. I won't make a prediction either way, as I do not feel qualified.

But for the average user? They jumped wholesale to DVDs, and it wasn't just the picture quality that did it for them. VCRs are an inferior technology on so many levels - from the need to rewind or fast forward if there is a specific part of the movie you want to see, to the noticable degredation of the tape after only a few years of regular use. DVDs were better in every sense of the word, and early adopters flocked to them, with the average users following shortly thereafter. That isn't happening this time.

Now, will it happen if true HD becomes available? I can't say. But even if that does happen, it will not be on par with the shift from VHS to DVD, if only because it's an improvement in the area of picture quality alone, and not overall usability.

This is "the lesson of the iPod" all over again.

Digital music, in the formats and sample rates that the vast majority of people use, is far inferior to best recorded sources, and inferior to the basic and ubiquitous CD. Digital music is successful because it is convenient to carry around an entire record collection. The iPod is the most successful digital music player line because it is easy to use, especially coupled with iTunes and the iTunes store.

Cable TV offered the convenience of more channels and not having to struggle with an antenna. Cell phones offered the convenience of making and receiving call anywhere. People buy laptops now because they can carry them around their house rather than sit at a desk.

In the end HD and all its accoutrements won't be rapidly adopted because they don't offer any increase in convenience. If people cared about quality, we'd still have big movie theatres playing 75mm films, but people preferred more choices and more show times.

HD IS better

[fodder69]

Since I have yet to see a comment that actually praises any hd format, I'll have a go.

I bought a Panasonic AE900U Projector (720p) projecting on a screen that is 10 feet wide, do any of you guys really think that a DVD looks as good as HD on that?

HD blows it away and really spoils you for watching DVDs again. At 10 feet wide DVDs look soft as heck and the lack of resolution makes a huge difference. Sure on my 42 inch plasma it's not that big of a difference, but at 10 feet it sure as heck is. Watching Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, you can read every single newspaper article as they go by, not just the headlines. Watching Unforgiven, you can see every detail in the landscape. When done right, the picture literally looks 3D, as opposed to the flat picture a dvd gives you at that size.

And while I do have HDMI on my projector, guess what? Even if I didn't, every HD-DVD I own would look just as good because there is not one disc released yet that implements that crappy ICT. Yeah it sucks, but I think the studios did listen at least a little and have not used it (yet).

So while quite a few of the gripes here are valid, bottom line is I am very happy with my Toshiba player and the quality of the picture it produces. Now I would like to see more titles out for it, but I can't afford to buy them all anyway and since Netflix lets me rent the crappier titles, I have no regrets being an early adopter in this case.

Another possible outcome

[Lonewolf666]

If the PS3 fails to ignite blu-ray sales (and HD-TV does somewhat better), other manufactures might not bother with blu-ray anymore. Because at that point, it would be obvious that blu-ray is losing the format war. Why pay license fees for a loser format??

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better.

That's just crap. I own a cheapshit 27" LCD HDTV (Syntax Olevia, 720p native resolution, 16x9, $500). DVDs look good on it, but I wouldn't say that they look "great". Compared to content from my PC (H.264 trailers from Apple's movie trailer page), the sharpness and detail is simply not there. No amount of sharpening or noise reduction is going to make what's essentially a very low resolution format (720x480) look decent.

Go download a 1080p trailer from Apple's site. Play it on your monitor. Then go play a DVD. Even on a 17" LCD at 1280x1024 it's extremely noticable. Now imagine this blown up to 55".

Rear-Projection CRT TVs have problems. Particularly cheap rear-projection CRT TVs. Of course you're not going to be able to tell the difference on a crappy 55" TV. Or, for that matter, on an EDTV plasma display. Even a direct-view CRT television will mask the differences. But when you view HD content on an LCD TV, an HD Plasma display, or on a microdisplay-based projection TV (DLP or LCD), there is a very distinct and noticable difference.

You know what? Most people wouldn't know picture quality if it hit them in the face. The Comcast box at our local Circuit City (which was being used to demo HD Cable) had its output set to 480i. No one had bothered to change the menu option to make it output 1080i or 720p. The HD-DVD demo at our Best Buy was running in 480p.

Am I going to buy an HD-DVD player? No. Not for $500. But once they cost $100 and there's plenty of content, I'm going to make the jump.

As for the "evil" DRM, it's going to be cracked. DVDs have DRM too, of course. I frankly don't see how the DRM affects me - DVDs aren't going away anytime soon, so if you want to rip your movies to XVID or something it's still going to be possible. You'll be able to rip them in HD as well, of course, once HD-DVD is cracked.

Just a point of order...

[default luser]

I'm using an Audigy 2 (which I bought before Creative became evil)

Creative has been evil since they bought Ensoniq in 1998.

How Creative killed Ensoniq:

Creative bought Ensoniq because they themselves couldn't come up with a PCI sound solution with DOS compatibility. Ensoniq HAD come up with an excellent DOS-compatible chipset (the Audio PCI) and driver, and Creative reached out and snatched it.

Creative took the current and next generation of products Ensoniq was slated to release, and sold them as the Soundblaster PCI 64 (same as the old Ensoniq AudioPCI) and 128. They renamed a cut-down version of the chipset to Ensoniq AudioPCI and relegated it to the bargain bin. They then applied the compatibility features of the Ensoniq line to their work-in-progress, the Live!

How Creative killed Aureal:

Shortly after the purchase of Ensoniq, Creative released EAX to compete with A3D. They paid through the nose to get major titles like Half-Life to include support.

Hey, I'll bet you didn't know: unlike A3D, EAX 1.0 was a mostly software solution (and it sure sounded like it). Creative released drivers for my old Ensoniq AudioPCI which "upgraded" it to a Soundblaster PCI 64, and gave it EAX support! All this without having to buy one of those overpriced Soundblaster Live! cards. The point of this was to overnight give them a huge installed base for EAX, and to sell the gaming industry on it. The funny thing? A year later, once it was certain that Aureal would lose to the Creative juggernaut, Creative pulled the EAX drivers for all but the Live! series and pretended that you had to have Live! to have EAX. They can hide it all they want, but I didn't imagine myself playing Half-Life with EAX turned on.

Re:Just a point of order...

[Jesus_666]

Okay, as openly evil as today.

Re:To summarize...MOD PARENT UP

[eggoeater]

Thanks for the info. It's very much appreciated.

It's the movies, stupid!

[payndz]

Seriously. Who the fuck would be rushing out to spend thousands of dollars just so they could watch HD versions of shite like Hitch, Firewall, 50 First Dates, The Dukes Of Hazzard, Van Helsing, and Basic Instinct 2?

Right now, all the HD content producers - HD-DVD and Blu-Ray alike - are taking the same attitude as Paramount did when DVD first came along. Paramount was the last studio to adopt DVD - they didn't want to touch it. They were terrified that if they put "major" titles out on DVD, it would destroy their then-profitable VHS retail and DVD rental markets for those same movies. Same thing here. Where's the 'killer disc' that would have people begging to get an HD system?

Not that I care - I wouldn't mind if both BR and HD-DVD died a miserable, painful death. The whole thing has come out of the insane Wall Street demand that just being consistently profitable isn't enough - you have to increase your profits every quarter, without fail, or you're doomed. DVD is consistently profitable - unfortunately, the market is also saturated. Therefore the public must be forced to buy everything all over again in order to increase profits. Fuck that. I'll upgrade when I want to, not when some cartel says I must.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all reasons why I havn't and won't be upgrading my regular 27" Standard Def Televisions anytime soon ;) I have enough headaches and stretchmarks around my anus already.

It's the DRM, stupid!

[Distan]

It's already been written over and over on the interweb, and several other posters have said it here. No DRM crippled format is going to sell, until it has been demonstrated that the DRM does not interfere with the traditional things consumers do with their media - INCLUDING making back-up copies.

Bonus corollary: Whichever of the new HD DVD formats is the first to have the DRM cracked, will be the format that succeeds in the marketplace.

No buy-in from movie rentals

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone points to the format war or the price of the player. I don't think either of these are the real issue. Keep in mind, the format war between VHS and BetaMax did not cause any major slow down on the sale of VCRs. And several people I know spend at least $500 on home entertainment (cable subscription, DVD purchases, DVD rentals, TV purchase, audio system, etc). A one time payment of $600 or $800 for a player that is going to be used on a frequent basis isn't that bad.

But then there is the real problem of how frequently is someone going to use the player. Most people I know usually rent the majority of their DVDs, buy some DVDs used and only a small amount of their budget goes towards brand new DVDs.

So, how does the spending habits of the average DVD user translate over to either HD-DVD or BluRay?

Std. DVD -
Local Rental Store - Yes, Medium selection
Online Rental Store - Yes, Huge selection
Available Local Used - Yes, Medium selection for around $5-$12
Available Local New - Yes, Medium selection for around $15
Available Online Used - Yes, Huge selection for around $3-$12
Available Online New - Yes, Huge selection for around $10-15

HD-DVD/BluRay Media -
Local Rental Store - No
Player Rental - No
Online Rental Store - No
Available Local Used - No
Available Local New - Yes, very limited selection for $25
Available Online Used - No
Available Online New - Yes, very limited selection for $20-25

Also, compare this to the original release of PS2 or Xbox360:

PlayStation 2 Media (during first roll out) -

Local Rental Store - Yes
Player Rental - Yes
Online Rental Store - Yes
Available Local Used - No
Available Local New - Yes
Available Online Used - Yes, very limited
Available Online New - Yes

Xbox360 Media (during first roll out) -

Local Rental Store - Yes
Player Rental - No
Online Rental Store - Yes
Available Local Used - No
Available Local New - Yes
Available Online Used - Yes, very limited
Available Online New - Yes

I think history has shown that successful adoption of a media requires the on-going support of the rental industry. For cases where the media is not adopted or looses favor with the rental industry (BetaMax, 8mm, UMD movies, HD-DVD, BluRay, etc) the mainstream adoption or continued use dies.

Give Me A Break

[the eric conspiracy]

I heard the same stories when DVD's came out. Who would want a tech like DVDs -

1. Players cost $1000.
2. Unlike VHS you cant record with them.
3. Picture is good but you need an expensive new TV with component video to get best results.
4. No software.
5. Disks are heavily copy protected.
6. All your old software has to be rebought.

It will just take a while. Be patient.

"HD vs SD quality? Who cares!", says the wife

[jchenx]

In the end HD and all its accoutrements won't be rapidly adopted because they don't offer any increase in convenience. If people cared about quality, we'd still have big movie theatres playing 75mm films, but people preferred more choices and more show times.

I have to grudgingly agree with you. When I got the new HDTV and programming, I was stoked. For a long time, all I would watch were shows in HDTV, because of the amazing clarity. I bragged about it to all my co-workers and friends, and it was always the guys that were in envy.

Of course, my wife barely even notices the difference between HD and SD. It basically looks the same to her. And that's quite amazing, because SDTV on an HDTV looks even crappier than normal. Our old SDTV upstairs still gets a lot of use, because it's more than good enough for her.

Now, try getting her to notice the difference between regular DVD and a high-def DVD (Blu-ray or HD-DVD)? Might as well give up now. Or she may notice a small difference and just not care.

However, what she DOES love is the DVR functionality we got a few years ago. That's definately a sign that convenience > quality for many folks.

Re:"HD vs SD quality? Who cares!", says the wife

[jZnat]

That almost sounds like the penis size argument! Whoa.

Re:"HD vs SD quality? Who cares!", says the wife

[jambarama]

convenience > quality for many folks.

Mod parent up, this is absolutely right, and has been forever. We went from Vinyl to Cassettes despite a noticeable drop in quality and obvious sound degradation after a few months of playing. Why? It was more convenient to carry a tape in your pocket than a record.

Same reason VHS won out - betamax required swapping tapes in most cases. Who cares that beta looked better? It was a pain in the neck.

I think this is the reason many people own movies. I only watch most movies once, and going to the theater (once) is cheaper than buying a VHS deck (in the 80s/90s) or a DVD player (in the 90s/00s) and the accompanying movies. Yet I still own a lot of movies. Why? It is more convenient to pick up a movie at walmart than to go to a theater, even though the theater gives a higher quality product.

Same for CDs and DVDs beating out cassettes and VHS. Luckily in this case the quality was better too so it was win/win. Anywho, enough beating a dead horse, convenience trumps quality, it always has (player piano v. musician), it is right now (tivo) and it will into the future (dvd vs. HD disc).

1080i or p?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't ever fail to mention whether you mean "i" or "p". 720p is comparable to 1080i in quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Resolution_char t.png

Guess what ...

[e_AltF4]

.. the average customer will get when buying into HD now - just what you see in the shops.

Re:HD-DVD is the winner

[Tim Browse]

They'll blame it on somebody else.

Of course. As pointed out on /. only a week or so ago, that's step 4.5 in Sony's tried-and-tested New Media Format Launch Plan: "Blame it on the pirates".

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[TFloore]

- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)

Both of the new formats are backward compatible with DVDs and both employ the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC1) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

This is one of those "only makes sense with the backstory" comments.

The original software Sony released for mastering BluRay movies only supported the MPEG2 codec at a bitrate that made a 2-hour movie take all the space available on the disc, and still look slightly less good than the HDDVD version in H.264.

Sony released an updated version of this mastering software in... early/mid August, that included support for H.264, so future movie releases should no longer have this limitation. But the first set of movies released for BluRay didn't show the format to its full potential because of this.

That where this comment came from.

The sales people didn't see much difference

[AbRASiON]

No surprise here!

To really see the difference you need at least a 60 if not 70" Television and a damned good quality one at that.
On top of that, you'll be needing a blu-ray or hd-dvd which was preferably created from a decent source and you're going to need them to chose a good codec to compress it (blu-ray morons are currently using high bitrate mpg2)

These formats WILL be a failure, I've made a similar post before in this regard - essentially blu-ray or hd-dvd can't offer that much more over DVD.

VHS -> DVD had huge huge changes, instant ff / rewind, smaller, sleeker looking, obvious visual upgrades, 5.1 audio, multiple audio tracks, menus etc.

DVD -> BD or HD is basically just higher resolution and more space - whoop de doo, no one cares that much.

Also a well made DVD on a nice television, with nice cabling and a good DVD player is going to look pretty damned good anyhow.

Finally, this might sound a little bitter but MOST of the good movies (in my opinion) are from the 50's -> late 1990's, after then movies have been just shovelware garbage (besides a few gems) - so to be honest, you can watch 2 fast 2 furious in ultra high def all you like, it'll still be a shit movie, the only movie filmed in digital or with great quality film masters available to rip from are probably modern rubbish.

I'm sticking with DVD

Nope. Nobody has an HDTV.

[Foerstner]

The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you.

The Wikipedia article on HDTV says that by the end of this year, 10% of US TVs will be HDTVs.

Ten percent. Real soon now.

When VHS and DVD launched, everybody had an SDTV. But Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have nothing to appeal to 90% of potential (US) customers. And they have to split the potential market they do have between two incompatible formats.

You do the math.

Why people aren't buying it...

[cr0sh]

People aren't buying into this because of several reasons, which I will summarize:

• For most people and their equipment, DVDs are "good enough"
• Most people have plain-jane TVs, and don't have the money to get an HD set
• What is point of "Will and Grace" in HD?
• What is the point of most television in HD?
• Overall, cable TV sucks
• You mean I have to re-buy all of my movies - AGAIN?
• When choosing between energy costs and entertainment, energy will ALWAYS win
• Credit is maxed out, both on cards and on mortgages

There isn't much more to say - HD content on a standard-def TV makes no sense, most people aren't buying HD sets because they can't afford it (because of being overextended on credit and energy costs), those that do have HD sets may buy it, but they are facing the same issues (plus the content on HD disks currently isn't compelling), etc, etc.

When will we know when HD content disks have "arrived" - when you can buy porn on them, and not a moment before.

six times more

[abhi_beckert]

"It doesn't look much better than a standard DVD" Who cares about that! I just want my shoot 'em ups to be six times more shoot 'em upier!

Blame the pirates!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait for it. Sooner or later someone will play the pirate card. Because it's all their fault, anyway. I mean, who else can you blame for:

1) Crappy remakes of 60s and 70s hits, endless sequels, video game licenses...
2) Tightening competition from video games and other forms of entertainment
3) Users demanding less control over their use of purchased content
4) Overpriced and underperforming technology

What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

So people don't want to by one of two crippled, overpriced products with a 50/50 chance of becoming obsolete in the next year, when there is already a cheap, not quite as badly crippled and for most practical purposes identical (especially on joe average's 5 year old magnetbox tv) product on the market? Wow, isn't that just amazing!

New formats adoption

[Z00L00K]

is really also depending on the ease of use. Two issues remains here: The format war, which makes it hard for users to select and the question of the DRM castrating the usability of the formats.

What all those DRM lobbyists don't realize is that they effectively CREATES a market for pirate copies by imposing the DRM. If it is overly complicated to circumvents then it is also worth some money investment to circumvent. Compare this to the alcohol legislation in the US during the 20s. It created a market for bootleggers and smugglers which fueled the organized crime.

And as I see it, DVD:s are sufficient for the majority of films that are produced. Only a very few films will actually benefit from a better format, but then we still need a better display than the ordinary flat panel we use. I'm not thinking about HDTV 1080p, but IMAX instead.

What I really want a better format than DVD for is actually file backups. With storage capacities in the terabyte range it's not good to make backups on DVD:s, and tapes aren't really god either since they are cumbersome to operate when restoring a specific file. So essentially - the HD-DVD and Blue-ray formats seems to be a blind alley like the laserdisc, Betamax and 8-track tapes.

When so-what tech meets maxed-out Visas

[Zhe Mappel]

Who needs more rez when it means expensively replacing hardware and DVDs? Fanboys of Hollywood product are already swimming in big DVD libraries. They've spent the last few years tricking out their home theaters, too. The target market is saturated.

And in other news, welcome to the start of the housing bubble bust. Maxed out on credit with their "home ATMs" drained and adjustable rate mortgages rising, McMansionland isn't going to be amassing new tech purchases any time soon. They need to save what they have for the foreclosure attorneys.

I am only start to buy DVDs

[Pecisk]

I am only now start to buy and create my DVD collection......err...for what sake I need HD-DVD and Blueray, again?

Peter.

Some tvs scale 1080 to 720 badly!!!

[cheekyboy]

Ok dude, you are correct, but did you know that some cheap tvs scale the 1080i/p signal very badly.

About as good as IE6 does with image scaling!!

They cheat, because their CPUs suck, they take 1080p or i, and use only half, ie they just take every ODD line, ie 540p then
resample upto 720, its just like getting windows Paint and resizing 1080p to 540p then back to 720p, it will look crap.

You need to test with a proper test mpeg that will show these short cuts.

Re:Some tvs scale 1080 to 720 badly!!!

[nattt]

But this was an expensive 1080p plasmas being fed a native 1080p signal..... We're video professionals and do have a good idea what we're doing. Fact is that the quality of the TV and associated circuitry more than outweighs any 720p / 1080p difference. But you're right- a lot of TVs cheat, and suck. IT's tough for us when we're trying to vastly improve the image, and then you see it on a TV that destroys your hard work.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[aiken_d]

You do realize that sheer volume of words doesn't equate to a sensible opinion, right?

Your very first sentence gives you away. DVD's on a 55" monitor look no different at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, unless you are using an upscaler. DVD's themselves are encoded at very low bitrate 640x480, and the display resolution can only enlarge that -- much like playing a 640x480 game on a 1280x1024 monitor. Increasing the display resolution has no bearing on the source resolution.

DVD's have terrible artifacts. MPEG-2 is more or less better than VHS, but if you have ever actually watched a standard DVD on a 55" display, you are either blind or you have noticed the arifacts. They're there in every frame of a standard DVD, but if you aren't used to actually paying attention to video quality, start with the credits of a movie -- a lot of them are totally unreadable on DVD. The source material was fine in the theatre, but DVD simply can't reproduce the level of detail needed to display small text. Now, nobody cares about small text per se, but the same lack of detail you see there (I hope!) is reflected in every other frame of the movie.

It may be that you just don't care about video quality; I know plenty of people who can't tell the difference between stereo and mono audio, and a few people who are so tone deaf that they can't tell whether a melody is going up or down. I'm sure that the same issues apply to video as well; physiological and experiential differnece no doubt cause differences to vary in their obviousness.

Anyways, if you really think that standard DVD is fine on a 55" display, stick with it. There are plenty of people watching movies in stereo because surround sound doesn't add anything they can notice. And you're right -- why spend money on something you're not paying enough attention to notice?

-b

Everything I've heard so far..

[iamblades]

..says that the HD DVD players are selling just as fast as DVD was in the same point in it's life. Which is impressive to me, as DVD had no competition, and you didn't need a special TV to use it, and it didn't have to deal with massive component shortages iirc.

Reports of HD DVD players selling out as shipments as soon as they come in are common.

Notice how the article has no hard numbers, just one guy from one specialty store in San Antonio saying sales were disappointing. That is hardly conclusive evidence of anything.

HD formats will likely be a niche product for a while, but this article is pure BS and proves nothing. In fact it kind of smells like BD FUD to slow the momentum of HD DVD.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD obselete soon?

[MtViewGuy]

I think one thing that could unnerve the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps is the fact thanks to dramatic reductions in the cost of the technology, the so-called Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) that can store 500 to 1,000 gigabytes on a single disc could make both current high-definition disc formats obselete before their time.

At that level of storage capacity, imagine fitting the ENTIRE Extended Editions of the three Lord of the Rings movies in H.264-compressed 1080p format--including all the supplemental discs!--onto a single 1,000 GB HVD disc. Or imagine all ten seasons of Friends in ten or less HVD discs.

We'll probably not see HVD's reach the market until the latter half of 2007 or early 2008 for consumer use, but once it reaches the market the advantages of 10 to 16.7 times the storage capacity of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray even in 500 GB form will be quite obvious.

Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

... why would I want to

- change to new technology that is increasing data bulk,
- that causes me to buy new drive, media, AND much faster processing power,
- that causes worry all around in terms of stuff not running because they are locking it so they
    can sell me the same movie 3 or 5 times? (it's bad enough they did region coding on DVDs)
- and all that just so I can consume the same old dribble that's been boring me really already on DVD?

There's been no single movie worthwhile watching since 6 months and clock ticking.

So if anything, I'd want movies written and filmed for little game console screen sizes, such as 320 x 240 sized screens :-)

Get me 3d, without the glasses

[slysithesuperspy]

That will be much better than uppipng the resolution a bit. 10 years on from DVDs release what do we have? Twice the resoultion or something? Not very progressive.

S-VHS

[Ardipithecus]

To confirm your comment, the S-VHS "Super-VHS" format was a higher quality improvement over regular VHS; look where it is now.

(Where?!)

Re:S-VHS

[hob42]

True, just about nowhere now, since even your average PC comes with at least mediocre digital nonlinear editing capabilities... However, S-VHS /was/ popular in cable stations and small video production studios for A-B editing since you could make 2-3 generations of copies before the signal degraded below "TV quality" but it wasn't as expensive as 3/4". And that's where it was marketed.

But that's the point. There's always a niche market for incremental improvements in media, you just can't expect everyone to jump on the $1000 bandwagon.

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

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Check out some HD-DVD direct from disc images...

[elimablonde]

Interesting thread. For those that dont know, www.hidef.com is featuring some images straight from HD-DVD discs if you want to see them... Below is stuff from The Last Samurai.. http://www.hidef.com/hd-screenshots...st-samurai.h tml Here is link to everything they have up: http://www.hidef.com/hd-screenshots-media/ -Elimablonde

Re:Hmmm. 1% better, heavy DRM and too $$$$

[Maxo-Texas]

Hmmm.

The irony of a post saying lots of people want something...

in a thread about an article talking about how NO ONE BLOODY WANTS IT.

HD is better- but DVD rocks. When HD is $100, and HD movies are $15-- we'll buy it.

Meanwhile in India..

[Anonymous Coward]

In India (and most of SE Asia) VCDs became the medium of choice during the early years of the DVD. It offered the same crappy A/V quality as VHS, but had the convenience of a DVD. Well, atleast in India, VCDs still outsell DVDs by a huuuge margin. Most people dont upgrade to DVDs as the additional perceived benefit is not much.
Of course, the fact that most households in India have small TVs might also be a factor.

Providers differ on quality

[PRMan]

Exactly.

• DirecTV: All 1080i broadcasts are resampled from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080. Apparently they use some slight color reduction and blur filters for further bandwidth savings.
• Dish: Some of their 1080i channels are resampled to 1280x1080, but most are still at 1920.
• Comcast: Does not recompress in most markets. Corporate goal is to not recompress at all.
• Time Warner: Does not recompress in most markets. No stated corporate goal.
• Other providers tend to differ more per market.

No surprises here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they're not selling well! Why on Earth is this news surprising to anyone?

New technology does not become adopted instantly just because it's slightly better than the previous generation. If it doesn't offer a drastically new set of functions for the end user, there's no reason for them to invest in the upgrade. Hell, I'm not even *slightly* inclined to bother with with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray right now, because what's the point?

Look at the previous generations of media storage devices. People upgraded from cassette tape to CD because it was orders of magnitude better. You could skip to any track you wanted, instantly. The sound quality was much better. You could make copies without losing information. There's no wonder it became the new standard faster than you could eject a tape, turn it over to side B, and hit play again. Equally, DVDs replaced VHS tapes for the same reason. The picture quality was much higher, and you could skip to anywhere on the disc without having to wait for "fast forward" to do its job. The fact that you never had to rewind anything was revolutionary in itself.

Now... why the heck would anyone rush out and buy a HD-DVD player when there's hardly any noticable benefits to the end user? Wow, you can fit a few movies on the same disc. So what? Nobody watches several movies in a row, so it's not a problem to throw a different disc into the machine whenever you want to watch a different movie. The quality is fine in current DVDs, and nobody is going to breathe a sigh of releif when they see picture of marginally better quality.

These new formats are just silly when it comes to family entertainment. Now, on the other hand, I can appreciate their usefullness for data storage. I'd love to be able to backup my entire system drive on a single disc, or transfer dozens of gigabytes of data between computers in a single operation. But even then, it doesn't really affect the majority of users. Backup systems are already much larger than that, and they're mostly re-usable (like tapes). Transferring data is quicker if you have a network cable, and if the destination computer is too far away for that, just use a laptop or something as an intermediate storage device.

I just see no reason for these new formats, and I am TOTALLY not surprised that the majority of people out there feel the same way. They don't offer anything new, and a simple increase in data storage isn't enough to convert people from the tried-and-true DVD format.

This is why Blu-Ray will win ...

[willtsmith]

Everyone likes to talk about the "early lead" of HD-DVD. But what they fail to realize is that neither of these formats will make any real penetration in the video market. It's too soon after DVD and there simply are not enough HDTV TVs out there to justify them.

Where the "format war" will be fought and won is in archival storage. Here, Blu-Ray has the clear advantage. And despite Sony's poor execution on PS3, this will also vault Blu-Ray ahead as the gamers who do buy PS3 will be using Blu-Ray by necessity. HD-DVD is merely an option for X-Box 360 so 360 games will never ship on HD-DVD rather than DVD.

Barely anyone will notice for years to come ... but Blu-Ray will win.

Get on with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowing I only had a few years left on my standard definition television, I never bought a DVD player. Now, I've got my new HDTV and I'm getting impatient while the Blu-ray machine makers skim the market. I wish some of you suckers would buy a few so the manufacturers can use the money to produce the next generation of improved and low cost machines.

Let's get on with it already; VHS is getting really hard to find.