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

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.

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?

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.