Why HD-DVD and Blu-ray Are DOA

mikesd81 writes "Slate has up an article on why both new DVD formats are effectively dead on arrival. Article author Sean Cooper cites internet movie and cable on demand services, the price of new hardware, and the inexpensive cost of newer hard drives as the reasons behind his argument. The article goes on to say buying movies online isn't there yet. Titles in standard-def are few, in hi-def fewer still. With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection. But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast." From the article: "On iTunes an album costs about 10 bucks--as much as $8 less than some CD retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost of getting music to buyers online. Look for the same savings when it comes to downloading movies. And then there's the fact that hard-disk storage capacities are pushing ever upward while size and price drop. In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven." Phil Harrison is already saying the PlayStation 4 won't use discs.

Comments

His prediction is 5 years too early

[Salvance]

I don't see his logic. Americans might demand faster connections and more storage space, but they're not going to get it before the Blu Ray and HD DVD player become mainstream. It's a matter of timing - there's no way the cable and phone companies are going to upgrade everyone from 1.5Mbps (an average connection speed now) to 100Mbps (the minimum required to download a 10-15GB Hi Def movie in under an hour) before the HD players become popular.

No matter how much people might ask for it, there's no way it could possibly happen fast enough. If he was arguing that this next generation of video players will be the last to use physical media, he would have a decent argument, but it will easily take at least 5 years to upgrade our telecommunications infrastructure to the point needed to quickly deliver HD content.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[DocBoss]

Well according to this link we will start seeing 100 mbps downloads much sooner than that.
http://www.isp-planet.com/cplanet/tech/2006/prime_ letter_060703.html

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Qzukk]

there's no way the cable and phone companies are going to upgrade everyone from 1.5Mbps (an average connection speed now) to 100Mbps (the minimum required to download a 10-15GB Hi Def movie in under an hour) before the HD players become popular.

And they're certainly not going to do it unless they're allowed to charge both the user and Apple's store for the same bandwidth. And the movie producer and director. And the lead actors and actresses. And I hear they even want to charge the janitors as well, ever since the janitors started making movies about how they get paid from movie sales.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[falcon5768]

YEs but you also have the fact that people are also not willing to upgrade their TVs, DVD collections, and anything else they need to either.

People tried to upgrade CDs (remember audio DVDs and Minidisk) The market said screw you and jumped to MP3 around 10 years later. I suspect the same will happen

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[drinkypoo]

Just as an aside, if you discount dialup, the average downstream speed is WAY higher than 1.5Mbps. The slowest cable modem services are around 768kbps (not even sure if any of those are still active) and everyone and their mother that's using DOCSIS seems to give you at least 4Mbps now, typically 5Mbps. Satellite is from about 512kbps up to about 1.5Mbps (peak.) DSL is frequently 3Mbps (or more!) now and is pretty much always at least 1Mbps.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[AKAImBatman]

His prediction is 5 years too early

Not really. iTunes television is taking off now. The technology may not have fully emerged yet, but it is being adopted by the public at an incredible rate. (I actually submitted a story about how "The Office" was saved from cancellation by the iTunes sales. Predictably, it was rejected.) Apples does not provide exact numbers on their TV and movie sales, but it's a pretty good bet that iTunes growth is outpacing Bluray and HDDVD adoption. Given that it took about 5 years for DVDs to replace VHS tapes, it wouldn't surprise me at all if online downloads end up being the unexpected competitor in this round.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Splab]

Yeah, the only way to succeed is to make something that seems better than DVD's - the reason I dropped my VHS collection for DVD's was the storage space. The reason people drop CD's for mp3's isn't quality, but ease of use. Blu-ray and HD-DVD has afaik nothing that gives the user any advantage - either in terms of usage or storage. They are doomed...

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I don't see his logic. Americans might demand faster connections and more storage space, but they're not going to get it before the Blu Ray and HD DVD player become mainstream.

Look at ti this way. HD-DVD and Blu-ray provide more space for higher definition video and a few other features. Internet download movies currently provide convenience of acquisition and storage and potentially lower prices. The market is demanding the latter more than the former. Faster connections are becoming much more common, more in other countries than the US, but the trend is clear. I think this will lead to movies via download gaining more acceptance than movies via new disk formats. Really, not that many people are willing to invest so much for such a minor improvement in video quality, but they are wiling to invest in not having to go anywhere or swap out disks.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Skye16]

Slowest around here is 320kbps. Midrange is 3.0mbps/320kbps. Max is 5.0mbps/768kbps. Max is about 70$ a month. Midrange: 40$. Slowest: 30$.

Maybe in urban or suburban areas you're right, but most of the country (area) isn't urban or suburban. Population wise, you'd probably have a majority in those areas, but my guess is you'd still have a sizeable percent who aren't in those areas and don't have those options. DSL is pretty much the same around here, with lowest being 768kbps and highest being 5.0mbps max, but they don't reach that for anywhere except maybe the house directly next door to the switching station. Wi-Max isn't available, and as the area is beset by mountains and valleys, I'm not sure how well it would work to put in any towers. Not having any cell phone service depending on which hill you're on or dell you're in doesn't help.

I wouldn't find it to be much of a stretch that 1.5mbps is the average. Not everyone thinks they need the super fast speeds. Some just check email or sit on IM. I know so many families with the 320kbps/320kbps connection and it truly boggles my mind. But not everyone is willing to spend 70$ on internet on top of the rest of the TV costs and phone costs.

So, that turned out to be exceedingly tangential. My bad.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Satellite is completely useless for downloading. Every satellite provider has an "fair access policy" that will kick your connect to dial up speeds if you go over a certain quota. The quotas are very low, even on the most expensive plans. I was looking into that for a client. After googling for a day, I was unable to find a single review that wasn't negative.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[tilandal]

I do not think video on demand will hit it big anytime soon. By the same token I do not think HD-DVD or Blue ray will take off. At least not like DVD did. With the majority of people still not owning an HDTV hi-def formats do not have the market base DVD did. It could be years before the market expands enough for significant HD-DVD/Blueray penetration. Furthermore HD-DVD/Blueray only offer a picture quality advantage over DVD. DVD killed VHS because of many reasons. 1) It was cheaper to produce. 2) It was Digital, so it did not degrade when playing. 3) You did not have to rewind. 4) You can skip to any part of the movie. 5) It is far more durable. 6) There was extra storage HD-DVD and Blueray only have #6. Many consumers may not see the need to upgrade even if they have an HDTV. For them DVD is good enough. Its cheap, easy to find, and does what they need. In a few years, when HDTV has reached sufficient penetration, who knows what new format may be on the horizon. Advances in CPU power and data compression might make both formats obsolete before they reach the mass market. They may very well be religated to a bridging format like laserdisk and VCD.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[superpulpsicle]

If someone came out with a way to perfectly compress a HD quality movie into 10MB the way mp3s squeezed a 70MB wav file into 5MB, the industry will change overnight.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Digz]

My cable company just sent me a letter telling me that my broadband is being upgraded to 10Mb in the immediate future - with no additional cost. It may not be as far away as you think.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[CastrTroy]

You're right on this. I currently use high-speed light. Which is cable internet that has a speed cap on it. You pay less per month this way, and still get pretty fast internet as long as you're not trying to download movies (meaning divx/dvd, you can still stream apple trailers). It kind of sucks when I want to download a new Linux Distro, but other than that the speed is tollerable. I don't want to pay $50 a month for internet, so this is next best option to dial-up. I know a lot of people who use this.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[pudro]

That would be awesome, but it doesn't change the fact that most people (outside of /.) will still prefer discs to whatever horribly DRMed form of downloadable content that the movie industry decides to use. As long as they can take that BD into the next room or to a friends, thats what they will want to do. If they can't do that, then they would rather just have DVDs. Most people don't want their computer right by their TV, or to have to run cables between rooms from one to the other. And by the way, decent (though maybe not "average") connections of 3-4 Mb/s are good enough for most "rental" scenarios. You just have to decide what to watch the day before and download it overnight. The only problem is with same day decisions to download a movie.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[kefler]

I disagree. I thought the same thing when I saw MP3's for the first time in 1995, using a player on my Pentium 90. I assumed that the whole record industry would shift to that overnight, but of course we all know how that went.. Even 4-5 years after Mp3 was generally available we had Napster come out and make MP3's accessible to all. The industry killed that and it took nearly ANOTHER 5 years for digital music distribution to gain traction.. Overnight? no way.. This prediction is totally wrong about on demand movies, precisely because the industry WON'T change overnight.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[TheRaven64]

It's a matter of timing - there's no way the cable and phone companies are going to upgrade everyone from 1.5Mbps (an average connection speed now) to 100Mbps (the minimum required to download a 10-15GB Hi Def movie in under an hour) before the HD players become popular.

Why do you need 100Mb/s? For reference, the speed of HD-DVDs and BluRay is 30Mb/s. Once you pass this, you can watch a HD movie as easily from somewhere on the Internet as locally. In the UK, cheap home Internet connections are 4-8Mb/s and have been doubling in speed every year for a while. That means they should pass 30Mb/s in 2-3 years.

DVDs took between 3 and 6 years to become established, and they had a lot of advantages that BD/HD-DVD don't over the previous format:

• Better picture quality on existing TVs (very important; you didn't need a new TV to enjoy DVD).
• Much better sound quality (even without going to 5.1).
• No need to rewind.
• Smaller form factor (less storage space required).
• No deterioration as a result of playing.

The new generation give better picture quality (if you buy a new TV) and better sound (if you buy a new sound system). Streamed video also has the advantage that it is completely on-demand. It's possible to offer a service that gives users the option of watching any film or TV show whenever they want to. Hard disk capacity isn't an issue as long as you have a big enough buffer; I don't need to keep copies of films I might watch again in a year because I can just download them again if I want to. Unlike music, very few people watch a film more than 2-3 times, and for a lot of films not even more than once so not having to store them at all is an advantage (why do you think DVD rental by post is so popular?)

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Eccles]

My DSL is 768k. I could get faster, but $15/month is just too nice a price and most of the time the speed is good enough.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[CastrTroy]

My current cable provider has lots of stuff available on video on demand. It's much better than renting stuff. Sure the quality is a little lower, but it's much more convenient than going out to the video store to rent movies. The prices are a little higher than what I like, but no more expensive than renting. I think the only downfall is that they don't push it enough and have many people who don't know how much better it is than going to blockbuster.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[oh_my_080980980]

Insightful you are not.

In Europe and Japan and elsewhere they already have the speeds necessary for movie download. USA is sadly behind.

Noone is clamoring for Blueray or HD-DVD. This gives cable and dsl time to upgrade services which they are already doing genius. Do you honestly think these companies are standing still!

In one form it's already here!! Movies on demand.

You can't stop the future, it's happening fast. Blueray or HD-DVD are dead. Next...

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[elrous0]

Don't know where you live, but I live in an urban area here in the U.S., not even in the boonies, and 1.5 Mbps is probably actually above the average here. When you factor in all the dial-up and DSL-lite (700kbps) customers, it way offsets the ONE way to get anything above 1.5 (the DSL "Xtreme" at 3mbps). There is a 6 mbps DSL service that's been PROMISED for years now, but still hasn't materialized.

Makes me wish I lived in Sweden. Damn those lucky bastards!

-Eric

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing you're using the high speed light... your connection would be much worse if you used the light that's slower.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[novus ordo]

I don't like it. It's basically a vertical integration of their player, music, and video using their proprietary file formats. I don't know about you, but I would rather buy a standard DVD that I can play anywhere. And why should I buy TV shows I already get and can record via cable? It may be taking off, but it still has a long way to go to reach cruising altitude not to mention the destination: my TV.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[OSS_ilation]

Forest thru the tress: I don't know about anyone else, but my On demand movies load almost instantaneously. I haven't bought a DVD in months. Why? Because I only ever really watch a DVD once before it goes on the shelf; On Demand makes more sense and it costs 3.95. Everyone here saying he's 5 years too early is just focusing on digital downloads from iTunes, et al, and not from Comcast or RCN or whatever. Sure, there will still be people who want to horde their loot, but there were also people who clung to records for a long time too.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[jcrash]

itunes will die. Paying by the song is a bad model. It has only been successful because that is the only way to get music on an ipod. Now that other players are as good or better (try the Creative Zen Vision M), people are catching on that paying $15 a month for unlimited downloads is easily the best way to go.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[OakDragon]

My cable company just sent me a letter telling me that my broadband is being upgraded to 10Mb

Is this Insight?

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[kittenjoy]

When encoding video with the AVC/H.264 codec bitrates of 7-8mbps are recommended for 1080p (in my experiance this is more than enough). So in reality downloading an HD movie would take about 5 times the movies length at speeds of 1.5mbps. Of course, with AVC/H.264 you can already fit every single West Wing episode on to a 2.5 inch 80GB laptop hard drive and still have room for an installation of Windows XP/Mac OS X, any BSD, or any reasonable Linux distro. And now we have 200GB 2.5inch laptop hard drives, which are about the same size as a deck of cards. So really, this era of HD downloads should already be upon us. The reality is that film studios are holding things up. They aren't very receptive to putting all their content on the web. I say, screw movie theatres. As soon as the movie is finished editing, encode it with x.264 into some 8mbps 1080p quality HD video. If they need DRM to make the switch then personally I welcome DRMed version of AVC/H.264 as long as it's open source and can be adapted to any hardware regardless of special connections and what not. Granted, no such DRM solution exists to my knowledge. I'd like to see something utilising public-key cryptography (like something RSA based with less overhead a la PGP) so that only someone with your specific key can decrypt and play the movie.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[recharged95]

"download a 10-15GB"

Why do I have to download a movie before I watch it? At 100Mbits/s and a high QoS connection, I can stream it (watch it and into a cache)--just like the cable companies do today. Sure the old paadigms didn't work back in the 90's, but come on, it's wasn't a bad paradigm, just bad immature hardware.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[doctor_no]

Not only are downloads speeds an issue, even if 100Mbs speeds were available to every single household, imagine running a server & network that is going to serve 10-15GB movies at 100Mbs to tens of thousands of households and only charge $10-15 per movie. For a 10GB HD movie, you will need 10 terabytes of bandwidth for every 1,000 people downloading. Now imagine a big release that expects sales in hundreds of thousands or in the millions in the first week.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[eno2001]

Overnight is spot on. The MPAA would lobby to make it a crime punishable by death to use or distribute files in that format via any medium or form of electronic communication. They'd get the law passed and then they'd execute a bunch of old ladies on the Whitehouse lawn to prove the point. They'd also probably eat a few babies as well to make doubly sure that the message comes across loud and clear.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[StingRay02]

More than that, I think people just don't want to convert all the time. I overhear people in Wal-Mart asking for cassettes on a regular basis. What's more, they get upset when they're told the store hasn't carried cassettes in years. Wal-Mart was also one of the last major holdouts for VHS. They finally phased out VHS tapes within the past year, joing the rest of the industry in effectively forcing people to finally make the switch. Blu-DVD is going to go the way of the laser disc and the mini-disc. It's an arbitrary, minor change that's being pushed far too early.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Moofie]

"I currently use high-speed light."

Every physics teacher in the universe suddenly cried out in horror...

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[bizard]

Right now I have a 6Mbit connection. I have purchased a few movies from the iTunes store and begun watching them about 1 minute after pressing the buy button. The files are betweeen 1 and 1.5 GB. So yes, rental scenarious are good enough right now _and_ you don't have to decide what to watch the night before, you can watch as it downloads.

That being said, I believe that it has been taking roughly 45-50 minutes to download the entire movie. I could essentially handle double the file size and still watch immediately but 10 times the file size would mean waiting.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[tenton]

itunes will die. Paying by the song is a bad model. It has only been successful because that is the only way to get music on an ipod. Now that other players are as good or better (try the Creative Zen Vision M), people are catching on that paying $15 a month for unlimited downloads is easily the best way to go.

That's funny. I take it you've never used iTunes or even have an iPod? Only way to get music on an iPod? My CD collection disagrees with you. You do realize the iPod existed before there was an iTunes store, right? You do realize you can load MP3s and a variety of other non encrypted file formats on to it, right? And that others have written programs that can load songs onto the iPod, without even having to have iTunes (the program).

The single song paying model is brilliant and is exactly what people want. It's the record companies that doesn't want that. They'd rather you buy the whole album, even if you just want one song. They want you to spend $13-$20 even if you just want one song.

And, since you've apparently have no clue how it works, you can buy albums off the iTunes music store (single albums run usually $9.99).

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[mikeydb]

Just for the record, here in the uk, a typical cable connection is around 2Mbps , if you need more then you start paying increased tariffs, iterestingly the upstream is only 256kbps, or 384kbps on the highest 10Mbps tariff. If you don't have access to cable, quite a lot of people don't, even in urban areas, the cable co around here missed lots of places out, then your only option is ADSL with varying speeds although they typically crawl around 750kbps increasing if you live within a mile of the exchange.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Achra]

Unfortunately, most of the USA doesn't have broadband. Once you get out of a city (any city - be it a city in the seattle metro area, or a city in TN) DSL becomes a non-option. Cable also becomes a non-option. What does this leave? Effectively: ISDN, Satellite, & Dial-up. ISDN is a non-option in most states, because of its prohibitively high price for what amounts to 15kb/s of total datarate. Satellite is even more inferior, for issues that have been discussed elsewhere - but can boil down to: Horrificly slow upload speads, downstream caps, & high latency. For joe sixpack in most places in this country, dial-up is still his only real option.

Btw, on a personal note, I lived in TN for 5 years recently and I was on ISDN. I recommend it to anyone that can not receive cable or DSL.. It's really not that bad. :) Of course, in TN, there was a class-action suit, and ISDN is affordable there, but I digress.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[AnomaliesAndrew]

I think the infrastructure is already in place.

When I order a HD movie "OnDemand" through Comcast, it streams and starts right away.

For only $10/mo on top of their base cable modem costs, my downstream speed is increased by 2Mbps (and upstream doubled to 768Kbps), and I have hit sustained download rates of 750KB/s actual data (6Mbps not counting network overhead) while fetching 3GB of data from 40 users on a bit torrent network. I don't know how much HD MPEG4 requires, but that should be enough... it is for the cable box, which is just a cable modem with a video card and a tv tuner.

I live in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere, and everybody I know has Cable or DSL.

-@

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Mister Whirly]

"In Europe and Japan and elsewhere they already have the speeds necessary for movie download. USA is sadly behind."

Hello, my name a Borat and I have one high-speed internet in my home country of Kazakhstan. It is much faster than connection in US and A. High Five! It is nice. Please don't download my movie, or I will be execute by MPAA.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[jmorris42]

> Well according to this link we will start seeing 100 mbps downloads much sooner than that.

Well reality says otherwise. I have 3Mbps ADSL now, can soon get 6. Period end of story. BellSouth won't be upgrading their plant here in the forseeable future. They only installed DSL because the State told them to make it available in every parish seat. Outside those towns it doesn't exist, even when towns are bigger than some parish seats. Cities do pretty much all have DSL. We also have cable modems as an option and they have at least made a big show of installing fiber around town. Pointless because they are bottlenecked at the exit to a fractional T3 from BellSouth to get out of town.

Moore's Law doesn't apply to connect speeds in the US because the limit isn't tech, it is AT&T's renewed monopoly.

Now with that reality in mind, BlueRay or HD-DVD will find a ready market because Netflix over USPS will have a better throughput than the fastest bitrate IPTV over DSL or Cable are likely to provide the average home in the next decade.

And as for the article positing hard drives for delivery thst is just daft and show someone with no knowledge of how the industry actually works. Take his example of The West Wing. 45 DVDs can be pressed and boxed for less than $30. HD-DVD is a contender for the reason it doesn't cost any more to make, only a few more patent royalties to pay. BlueRay DOES cost a little more now but won't in another year or two when it will matter, but assume it would cost $50 to put the whole series on. Exactly when will hard drives drop down to that pricepoint?

And why would they be insane enough to popularize such a format? Think about it from their POV, they don't want a format to have too much capacity, lest customers expect it to be used. The second you ship an entire series on one piece of media who will buy a season set and not realize most of the space is blank. And a series set won't be able to be sold for nearly as much as the sum of the season boxes, especially if it comes on the same single piece of media in the same small DVD case.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Steve001]

falcon5768 wrote:

YEs but you also have the fact that people are also not willing to upgrade their TVs, DVD collections, and anything else they need to either.

People tried to upgrade CDs (remember audio DVDs and Minidisk) The market said screw you and jumped to MP3 around 10 years later. I suspect the same will happen

I think another factor causing people not to upgrade to the new format is that for most people DVD is a good enough video format. Also, I think all future formats are going to be so locked down by DRM that they won't allow the relatively free use that current DVDs have.

DRM lockdown is a reason that I think that both DVD-Audio and SACD will not succeed in the marketplace. I do think they will end up occupying a niche in the market, similar to the place that open-reel tape decks occupied during the LP era. In order for these formats to succeed they are going to have to be as readily available and usable as CD is right now. Like with DVD, I suspect that for most people the CD format is good enough.

I think there were many factors which led to the lack of success of the minidisc format, including:

• The very high cost of the recorders: When I first looked for a recorder (about a year after the format was introduced) the lowest cost home deck I could find cost $1,000. At the same time I found a DCC deck for $400 and so I chose that format.
• The introduction of recordable CDs, non-skipping portable CD players, and the MP3 format: These three factors together allowed you to store much more music on a CD and take it with you. Minidisc was limited to 80 minutes of compressed audio on a disc and I think the introduction of HD-minidisc was too late for the format.

I think a mistake that was made with the attempt to introduce a successor to the CD format is that it was not done as part of the DVD format. If the audio industry had got together when the DVD standard was being established, and established a single audio format as part of the standard that could be played on all DVD players it might have succeeded.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Neil Hodges]

And plus, if you want to use OGG and FLAC, you can still use the nice iPod hardware, but with other firmwares and different formats. Even without that, you can use the Apple Lossless codec if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless audio, through iTunes, with having nothing to do with the music store; I did that at a time, before switching to RockBox.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Monkeyboy4]

And the English teachers smiled because he spelled the word 'lite' correctly.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Urza9814]

Unless you're gonna buy a business package, the fastest internet service you can get where I live is 2.4Mbps cable. And I know a lot of people who don't even get cable. It's not that they're too far away...some aren't more than 20 feet away from the nearest cable line...it's just that the cable company won't run a line more than 3 feet if they aren't gonna get another 5 houses from it. Hell, there are areas in the middle of the town that don't have any cable service. Yea, it's a small town, but it's not THAT small. 15,000 as of 2000 according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing that doesn't include the college students.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[contrapunctus]

Unfortunately, most of the USA doesn't have broadband. Once you get out of a city (any city - be it a city in the seattle metro area, or a city in TN) DSL becomes a non-option. Cable also becomes a non-option.

I live in a town of 5,000 people in Iowa and I have the option of dsl or cable so maybe you're out of date a little bit?

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[jZnat]

~700 MB (fit on a single CD, can play that in your DivX/DVD player) is the current sweet spot for movies usually. Uncompressed video data is enormous and is never actually distributed digitally. Even DVDs, BDs, and HD-DVDs all use compression, although the compression is typically set at a rate so high that the video is nearly lossless.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[jZnat]

We in the urban and suburban areas pay out the ass for a shit connection as well, apparently to subsidise the costs for giving the rural areas even crappier connections. I'm speaking as a person from Chicago, but I can't imagine it's any better in LA, NYC, or any of the smaller major cities in the US.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[smaddox]

It doesn't really matter how fast internet connections are. They will never scale as fast as the storage medium, because without a storage medium large/fast enough the fast internet connection is useless. Physical movement of a physical storage medium will be faster and cheaper than transfer over the internet (assuming decently large quantities) for many many many years.

I would also be willing to bet that optical (or in the future, holographic) will be used for movies/etc for many many years, because they are cheap and have a high capacity. If you think we will not need more capacity, you need to review some computer history. There will always be a need for more and more capacity.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[pudro]

Congratulations, genius. We are talking about files ten times the size. The whole point of next-gen media is HD, and at about 5.5 GB / hour you get an 11 GB file for a two hour movie, and as I mentioned before, even 4 Mb/s connections are better than your average broadband. Otherwise the message would be the inane "DVD is Dead" and /. hopefully wouldn't be that myopic to post an article about it.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Achra]

The operative part of your message is that you live _in_ this town. Ask your neighbors that live 5 miles outside town if they have broadband availability.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[contrapunctus]

You're right. At first, I thought your message was about anywhere outside a big city but when I look at it again, I see that I misunderstood. Sorry.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[om3ga]

Where I am in North Queensland, Australia, ADSL is the broadband service provided, still with a minimum of 256k, and a maximum of 1.5mbit. Although, a new ISP started here recently offering plans for ADSL2+ up to 20mbit, the coverage is still quite minimal at the moment. Ofcourse in major cities in Australia, there is the option of cable aswell, which has a much higher downstream rate. Although the ADSL2+ is a major improvement, I don't think we will be getting anything faster anytime soon!

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Chemical]

Not only is bandwidth a problem, but processor speed is also a consideration. For example, I downloaded some h.264 encoded video that was 1280x720. My 2 year old Athlon desktop system choked, incapable of playing the files. My Core Duo notebook played them okay, but used 40% of the processor while doing so, or 80% of one core. I'm not even sure if my notebook, which is only a couple months old, could play back 1920x1080 h.264 encoded video. Technology is going to have to catch up before HiDef downloads become popular.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[dangitman]

Most people don't want their computer right by their TV, or to have to run cables between rooms from one to the other.

So, you use a wireless video-streaming set-top box, like the upcoming iTV. No more fiddling with discs or getting them scratched, and a simple TV-oriented interface with remote.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[dangitman]

, although the compression is typically set at a rate so high that the video is nearly lossless.

Uhh, no. It's nowhere near lossless.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[les_c_gulde]

How big would a lossless movie be? (Assuming it's 90 minutes and 1080p)

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[GNious]

I click a few buttons on my remote and my TV+Inet provider is streaming me an MPEG2/4 stream that gets displayed immediately on my telly. HDTV? Coming this december.

Pay-per-view already lets me rent stuff without waiting, so outside of "owning" the stuff (which you can forget all about if living in the US-of-DRMed-A), there is no need for HiDef disks.

....and I'm gonna buy they PS3 + BluRay movies when available!

/G

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[redcane]

Yeah, because having an XBOX360 is so much different to having a PC next to your TV...... Especially if your PC is like an EPIA fanless thing inside a mini-itx case...... Especially when the XBOX is sucking down 100Watts plus of energy, and blowing fans to deal with that.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[philipgar]

almost a terabyte.

Each frame is 1080*1920*3 bytes
* 29.97 frames/sec
* 60 sec/min
*90 min
=937GB

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[thedletterman]

People have been demanding 100mbit ethernet to home connections for 10 years. His idea that because people want a service, they're going to get it and get it fast holds absolutely no substational understanding of industry or history. Like the giants they are, they walk slowly and clumsily, often destroying whatever loomed in their paths. Their heads in the clouds, they only distantly hear the cries of the people below them. The movie studios all make quite a significant fortune on distribution. They're not going to voluntarily give up this kingdom until they can replace it with a more profitable model for themselves. The author knew this was the case, yet rang so optimistic about their cooperation with cable industry to sound the demise of the optical disc. It's clearly the rantings of a fanboy at work. Lastly, there are many things that a packaged product like the optical disc offers consumers that blazing fast internet downloads do not. For starters, the user isn't required to pay a hefty monthly service fee for an outrageously fast connection required to download the movies even in 48 hours, and there is no technology in sight that can beam the movies to my television, faster than I can walk to blockbuster or HMV and rent/buy the movie myself. So when I decide after a long day of work that I want to spend the evening at home with the missus and curl up on a couch with that movie I've heard about that is playing on that movie channel that I don't subscribe to.. The user lastly attempts to convey how much less expensive all these subscription services are in comparison to the dreaded optical disc.. well even saving $10 a disc (which the studios would not allow to happen even in ten years) there's still little money to be saved when it might requires an additional $80 of monthly premium subscriptions over a standard service. You would have to be purchasing 100 movies a year to achieve a marginal savings of $40.. and we all know there isn't 100 movies a year worth buying.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Yvan256]

To be fair, he did ask how much would an uncompressed movie be.

Each frame is 1920*1080*3 bytes
* 24 frames/sec
* 60 sec/min
*90 min
806 215 680 000 bytes, or 750GB

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[talasian]

wow...must be nice to live where you do...
here the average is 256k because there are still a LOT of users using dial-up... (Alaska)
i know this from having worked for two of the three big ISPs up here...
the most used speeds on dsl/cable are the lowest out there because they don't cost extra beyond the cost of the tv/phone (128k speeds)...we have one company that has just recently got speeds above 1Mb and that is the cable company.
well...technically, one of the phone companies has 8/16Mb service, but that is only if you are using their digital tv service as well which eats up most of that bandwidth (aprox 3Mb per set top box, with an 8Mb connection getting 2 set top boxes)

the prices on this...well, to give you an example, my 1Mb service with one phone company was $90 per month. with the company with the dtv (assuming i got the tv as well...) $50. my 3Mb cable modem, $70. guess which one i'm going with...

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Vanye1]

In my area, Charter communications has a 384 k connection or a 3 meg connection, for 24.95 or $45.99 a month.
Nothing in between. Upload was a crappy 256k

I'm currently paying $24.95/month for my 3 meg AT&T/SBC DSL with 512k upload.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[Extide]

HD MPEG 4 could probably be done on 750KB a sec, but Comcast uses MPEG2, and their HD streams are anywhere from ~18-35 Mbit. If you have a newer Comcast DVR box with firewire you can rip the streams right off the box and it will tell you the resolution and exact data rate.

Re:His prediction is 5 years too early

[pudro]

Are you trying to say that an entertainment device centered around videogames is the same as a PC? You should tell everyone you know. All of your PC needs met for $400 at most! No wonder almost every house in America has a 360!

Umm

[ReidMaynard]

In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing..

Oh God...make it stop...

Re:Umm

[ettlz]

In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing..
Oh God...make it stop...

Look at it this way. By then the scenes will be so bloody dark you won't be able to watch it any way.

Re:Umm

[RobertLTux]

okay substitute every episode of B5 or SG1 the point is having BIGNUM of movies in your pocket (think GenX.5 Ipod)

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing..

Oh God...make it stop...

This is Slashdot. All independent-minded free-thinkers are supposed to appreciate programs like Left Wing.

Vongo

[eldavojohn]

The article goes on to say buying movies online isn't there yet.

I whole heartedly agree with that.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried online videos through iTunes or any other service but I am a user of Netflix.

I was watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for Vongo. It almost seemed too good to be true. And it was.

The commercial lead me to believe that I was going to open an account on a site and that I would be able to pay $10/month and download any movie I wanted to my hard drive. What a naïve idiot I was.

The problems I had with Vongo:

• They needed my e-mail address just so I could download the client. So even if I didn't like it or join their service, they still had contact info.
• You'll notice their site is in complete Flash--so is their client. And, much to my chagrin, all the movies are viewed through Flash & it's required. I had problems accessing the site with mozilla.
• Not only are the files encrypted (this was expected) but they're of Flash quality meaning that they're bulky and low quality.
• You don't get any movie you want, you get to pick from a selected list. But be careful, only some of those titles are free.
• Of those select titles, the only one I wanted to see was The Devil & Danial Johnston. But when I wanted to download it, Vongo wanted $4 USD for it.
• Two hours later, after D&DJ was finally on my laptop, I tried to watch it only to have a warning pop up informing me that once I started playing it, I had 24 hours to watch it before it deleted itself.

I could continue bitching but I think you get the idea. I was dissatisfied with Vongo & and heavily recommend everyone to stay away from it. The fact that I have to read the fine print in order to understand how their service works should have been a big warning sign. But in my opinion, the free 14 day trial isn't even worth it.

Oh, and one more thing, there was a freaking client application that was set to default start when Windows starts as a service on my laptop. Annoying and invasive.

Re:Vongo

[nametaken]

Wow, your experience was much worse than mine. I thought the client was fine, price was reasonable, service was easy to use.

My biggest problem was selection. I ended up just doing Netflix as well, and I haven't looked back. Oh, that and canceling your Vongo account is painful. Not AOL painful, but not straightforward.

Re:Vongo

[double07]

I feel for you man... but I've recently signed with a couple of online movie stores once called http://thepiratebay.com/ and the other called http://isohunt.com./ Both of these stores are fantastic, not only was the sign up free but I can download all of their movies for free also! Choices? often I can decide if I want the high quality DVD version or a small version they seem to call a "Rip". They also don't have any DRM and I'm free to put it on my phone or iPod if I choose. Recommended: 10/10

Micro-microwave ovens?

[HTH NE1]

"In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven."

Where can one find these microwave ovens that are only 3" x 7.5" x 11" (the dimensions of The West Wing complete series boxset)?

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[Lumpy]

How about the fact that I can deliver you the same full set of DVD's on a laptop hard drive SMALLER than a deck of cards right now and have room left over for a few other feature movies

Mpeg4/Xvid/Divx can do it now. You cant buy it legitimate because those formats don't have 600 pounds of DRM encryption on them but the technology is here right now and better than what he "envisions" maybe he should get out and actually look at what people are doing right now.

Cripes I have well over 300 movies in DVD quality and 10 full TV series on my Media portal box right now (Yes series the size of Babylon5 and the Simpsons) and still have room for way more.

His tommorow was here yesterday... it's the idiots at the movie companies and record companies that are keeping out of the hands of joe sixpack.

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[MS-06FZ]

Oh, getting a small microwave oven is easy. The only question is, what do you put in it?

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, getting a small microwave oven is easy. The only question is, what do you put in it?

Ooh, I know! How about The West Wing series box set?

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[Alzheimers]

Obviously, boxed sets of the West Wing!

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[onkelonkel]

Popcorn!

One kernel at a time.

Re:Micro-microwave ovens?

[MS-06FZ]

Ooh, I know! How about The West Wing series box set?

Nah, when you release a whole series on DVD like that in a single package, the box for it winds up just being staggeringly large, what with DVD being so technologically behind the curve and all.

(Great response, BTW..)

Portability

[forrestf]

One word for this guy: Portability

Re: Portability

[HTH NE1]

One word for this guy: Portability

"Why would I want to drink my videos?"

"That's potability, Caboose!"

Re:Portability

[DocBoss]

Well by then we will have huge flash sticks that can carry all that data. Much easier to carry around a complete TV serries on a keychain than lug around the boxset.

Re:Portability

[forrestf]

What would AOL Send us then, Read-Only Flash drives?

Re:Portability

[Meatloaf Surprise]

You guys must really want to take your West Wing boxsets everywhere you go...

Re:Portability

[Al Dimond]

You won't be able to carry the "Genuine" data (in the Microsoftian sense) around on your flash stick. Or, perhaps you will, but you won't be able to play it anywhere but your own computer. Most of the files we get from mainstream media (such as TV series) will be encrypted with DRM. Unless they start selling us special flash sticks that somehow implement copy protection, perhaps by an HDCP-like scheme (whereby the drive will refuse to give up its data without the entire playback stack authenticating with it).

Re:Portability

[dangitman]

But if the flash sticks are so huge, how are you going to fit them on your keychain? Or are we talking about really big keychains, too, like jail wardens on TV have? I'm not sure the market is willing to upgrade to dungeon-master level keychains.

Look at previous trends...

[linuxg0d]

I think this is rubbish.

Personally, I used to work in a video store when DVD hit the shelves. What did my bosses say, "Who is going to move to this? VHS is where it's at."

Were they wrong? I would definately re-affirm that yes, they were oh-so-wrong.

Anyone who believes that new formats aren't going to fly are crazy being as they haven't studied previous market trends, have they? I mean, everyone jumps on everything, DOA or not. It's more of a relevance issue. Will they be DOA? Maybe, will they sell and sell and sell? Yes.

How many people here believed the PSP movies wouldn't fly? Funny, now every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be buying in.

We're not talking Laser Disc here... we're talking mainstream media here people.

Picture Tube -> LCD -> Plasma...

Man, that said, and HD TV's becoming crazily affordable, why would an HD format be considered DOA?

Uninformed opinion, in my uninformed opinion.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow! are you stupid or what?

Re:Look at previous trends...

[AKAImBatman]

How many people here believed the PSP movies wouldn't fly? Funny, now every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be buying in.

You do realize that UMD Movies have been effectively discontinued, don't you?

Story: Sony PSP UMD movie sales not so hot

Re:Look at previous trends...

[vapspwi]

What sort of video store bosses were predicting VHS over DVD? Smaller, no rewinding, better picture quality, won't degrade under normal use...yeah, VHS had a chance...

(Aren't PSP movies pretty much dead at this point?)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are DOA, but they definitely have some things to overcome. The benefits of DVD over VHS were fairly obvious and easy to take advantage of. The benefits of the new formats (which still look, media-wise, just like a DVD) are a little more esoteric (and mostly of interest to "videophiles"), and require a lot more hardware (expensive player, fancy new TV - and the world of HDTV resolutions and display technologies is still incomprehensible to 75% of the world) to take advantage of.

JRjr

Re:Look at previous trends...

[peragrin]

so how many DVD-audios, and SCD's do you have? How about Minidisc's?

what don't you remember those formats. Of them all the only good one was minidisc, but since Sony did weird shit with formatting on them they never took off.

Not every new format gains acceptance, even good ones. I guess you never studied history or reality.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

so how many DVD-audios, and SCD's do you have? How about Minidisc's?

what don't you remember those formats. Of them all the only good one was minidisc, but since Sony did weird shit with formatting on them they never took off.

Not every new format gains acceptance, even good ones. I guess you never studied history or reality.

There's just so much wrong with this post, it's hard to know where to start.

First of all, let's get the grammar Nazi stuff out of the way. Plurals are not made in English by simply adding 's to any word you feel like. In fact, ZERO English plurals are made in this way.

It's SACD, not SCD.

I have no idea what you think the problem with minidisc was, but it sure wasn't formatting. Minidisc was meant to replace audio cassettes and nothing more. It was never, ever intended to replace audio CDs. Their small space (remember, minidiscs pre-date MP3 players) was, at the beginning, a selling point. At first, minidiscs only stored data in ATRAC format, which limited their storage capacity to something similar to CD-Rs. I have some 74 and some 80 minute minidiscs. Minidisc never took off because Sony didn't explain very well that it wasn't supposed to replace audio CDs.

As far as DVD-Audio and SACD discs go, you do have a point. Both are great formats. However, Sony botched SACD by failing to make hybrid discs which would play in regular CD audio players. In fact, they at one time insisted that such discs couldn't be made, while classical music and jazz labels were actually producing hybrid discs with no problems. DVD-Audio isn't compatible with CD audio players, although the Dolby tracks can be ripped and converted to CD audio pretty easily. In fact, yesterday I listened on my way to work to an audio CD I made from a DVD-Audio of Nena (remember "99 Luftballons"?) in concert that I picked up in Germany. SACD is still alive in Europe for pop music, although it's pretty much dead for that in the USA. DVD-Audio and SACD both survive for classical labels in the USA. Next Tuesday, the Beatles are relasing a limited edition of their _Love_ soundtrack with an audio CD and a DVD-Audio disc and the Doors are also releasing a box set with a bunch of DVD-Audio discs, so both formats are still alive.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[quintesse]

You and all the ones responding to you must be really young to forget the utter disaster called Laser Disc. God I feel old now ;-)

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Anonymous Coward]

are you's sure's?

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Anonymous Coward]

One word for you: Betamax

Re:Look at previous trends...

[91degrees]

First of all, let's get the grammar Nazi stuff out of the way. Plurals are not made in English by simply adding 's to any word you feel like. In fact, ZERO English plurals are made in this way.

Not strictly true. Older style guides would recommend adding an apostrophe when pluralising an acronym or certain abbrevations. This was more common when abbreviations were rare, and more likely to be mixed case, for example referrign to more than one Batchelor of Science, or very important person, one might find BSC's or VIP's clearer than BScs or VIPs. These days, we tend to see fully capitalised acronyms, so a lower case s is less likely to confuse, and is more consistent. However, pluralising a single letter, for example in the phrase "Mind your p's and q's", one may well choose to use an apostrophe to clarify the separation.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Ogive17]

How many people here believed the PSP movies wouldn't fly? Funny, now every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be buying in.

I don't know anyone who has or has any intention of buying a PSP.... and I have a lot of friends who are very into gaming. Just today I was wasting part of my lunch hour in the local EB Games and they had a pile of used PSPs they were trying to sell. At least in my area, PSP has been a flop. I still don't see the appeal of watching a movie on a screen that small.

We're not talking Laser Disc here... we're talking mainstream media here people.

So if I go ask the average person off the street about which format they'd prefer, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, they'd know what I was talking about? These new formats are not mainstream. If they do end up taking off, it won't be for a few more years. I don't think the quality improvement for these formats is great enough for there to be a large early adoption.

Personally, I will wait at least 2-3 years before investing in the next step after DVD. I want to make sure the formats won't be abandoned (like what happened to laser disc).

Re:Look at previous trends...

[j0sephlew1s]

Both DVD-Audio and SACD are bombs. Sure iTune downloads account for fewer sales than a CD, however iTune album sales a killing both DVD-Audio and SACD. Yes, the quality is of the music is lower in an AAC file, but that could be changed by the provider (all Apple has to do is provide better compression), would I have to buy a new player, no my iPod and iTunes will support this with a software fix. The thing is the consumer market has spoken and they prefer the convenience of digital music.

Now let's shift to video. The quality of a movie from iTune is not that bad, it's not DVD quality, but could be.

So lets think out of the box for a minute. How many people subscribe to a service like Netflix? I know quite a few people, so what if someone (are you listening Apple) offer a service similar to Netflix for movies, but instead of receiving them in the mail in a couple of days, you receive it over night via a download. The customer could actually pick when they want the download to happen, maybe at night, maybe during the day, whenever their traffic would be low.

I have over 100 DVDs and about 5000 CDs and I really don't have the room for them anymore, so digital storage would be great. I also do not like the idea of going out and buying yet another piece of hardware or updating movies to the latest format, but imagine if in the future for small fee and proof of purchase I was able to update all of my 1089i content to the next best thing the same way I update software.

Of course Hollywood won't like this, but how many times can they expect us to buy the same movie (or worst a recut version with new commentary from the janitor who swept the floors during production!).

Re:Look at previous trends...

[LionMage]

Being someone who owns a Denon hybrid player so I can play HDCD, SACD and DVD-A discs, let me clear up at least one glaring error in this post...

However, Sony botched SACD by failing to make hybrid discs which would play in regular CD audio players. In fact, they at one time insisted that such discs couldn't be made, while classical music and jazz labels were actually producing hybrid discs with no problems.

This is just flat-out wrong. SACD was touted from the beginning as being capable of packing both a Red Book CDDA layer and a SACD/DSD layer on the same side of a disc, and in fact, Sony promoted this feature as beneficial to retailers -- this way, retailers in the U.S. like Best Buy could stock a single hybrid disc instead of multiple SKUs for different versions of the same album. One of the biggest shots-in-the-arm for SACD was the series of stealth hybrid releases several years ago of classic rock albums, including the entire re-release of the Rolling Stones back catalog.

It's true that Sony initially held off on releasing hybrid discs because of the manufacturing challenges of bonding the layers together. The early years of video DVD had similar challenges -- many early movie releases on DVD were so-called "flipper" discs because many companies were reluctant to release dual-layer discs, instead opting to put a single layer on each side. Consumer choice won out in the end, so flippers are pretty rare except for discs with episodic content (e.g., the Spawn animated series), and discs that have the widescreen version of a film on one side, and the full-screen version on the other side. It's also true that the first SACD players were stereo-only, so many early SACD discs lacked a surround version of the program material.

I have several hybrid SACD discs in my collection. In the U.S., the packaging was designed to clearly indicate which discs could play on CD players and which discs could play only on SACD players.

You are correct that pop music is almost dead on SACD, although there are boutique releases of non-classical albums in SACD format all the time. (e.g., Classic Rock, and even Industrial -- I have the SACD special edition of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The discs are hybrid, I believe, so that even fans without SACD players could still enjoy the 2-disc set.) Similar things can be said for DVD-Audio.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who believes that new formats aren't going to fly are crazy being as they haven't studied previous market trends, have they? I mean, everyone jumps on everything, DOA or not. It's more of a relevance issue. Will they be DOA? Maybe, will they sell and sell and sell? Yes.

How many people here believed the PSP movies wouldn't fly? Funny, now every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be buying in.

Um, wrong. Completely wrong in fact. PSP movies, while initially selling well, have stopped selling at all. Target already dropped them from their latest store layout. Most other retailers are following suit early next year. In fact, the feeling at retail is that this will be the last holiday season for the PSP. The system itself is just not successful and takes up too much room at retail. UMD is almost officially dead.

That aside, the other holes in your arguement are easy. Beta for one. Mini-DV as another. Laserdisc, though mentioned by you, is the best comparison in my mind to HD-DVD and BluRay. Minor improvements in video quality is not a driving force for consumers, even those with HD TVs.

I have a 56" DLP and I have no urge to buy either format anytime soon. I have a Samsung DVD player that upsamples to 720p and movies look great on it. Thehigher retail on HD versions ($30 for new releases) that was urged by the MPAA members since they hated the $10 price point stops me as well. Throw in the fact that I buy a lot of TV collections that won't look any better on HDDVD or Bluray, and any compelling purchase reason is gone. The average consumer wants a $50 DVD player with $10 movies, until the prices rival DVD (which will be a direct competitor) mainstream adoption will not occur.

Though movies will not drive adoption of the new formats, like beta, the formats won't completely die. The one that wins will most likely be the one that is most useful with computers and video editing. Consumer use may or may not follow that, it will all depend on future pricing.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[JebusIsLord]

The reason these formats are dead is that they offer ONE semi-compelling feature (multi-channel) that is just never used really in the recording studio to begin with. On top of that they offer one EXTREMELY ANNOYING drawback - the inability to copy to your iPod. This is why no one cares about the "high-def" audio formats.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[HTH NE1]

Minidisc was meant to replace audio cassettes and nothing more. It was never, ever intended to replace audio CDs.

Doubly stupid then. Audio CDs replaced both vinyl and audio cassettes, especially once CD-Rs became plentiful and cheap.

Post up anyone who buys RIAA-tariffed Music CD-R media.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[HTH NE1]

I'll do you one better. I have a VideoDisc player and three movies for it (it was the vinyl version of LaserDisc). Never used it as I received it in a non-working state (dead motor).

Re:Look at previous trends...

[HTH NE1]

I still don't see the appeal of watching a movie on a screen that small.

No one wants to hold even a small device to their face for the duration of a long-format video. Even a 22-minute sitcom is pushing people's endurance. Maybe you could endure a 10-minute Adult Swim cartoon. If UMDs had been re-recordable by the end user, kids would be playing clips back for each other.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[dangitman]

We're not talking Laser Disc here... we're talking mainstream media here people.

More like Mini Disc or DVD-Audio. There are huge practical advantages to DVD over VHS - the biggest one being no rewinding, following by more compact size, and increased durability. No more chewed tapes. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don't offer any improvements except resolution. They don't offer the features that people really care about. Well, they offer them, but so does a regular DVD, so there's no compelling reason to upgrade.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[dangitman]

Minidisc was meant to replace audio cassettes and nothing more. It was never, ever intended to replace audio CDs.

So, why did they try to sell pre-recorded titles on Minidisc, then?

Re:Look at previous trends...

[Kremmy]

Probably for the same reason that they sold pre-recorded titles on audio cassettes.

Re:Look at previous trends...

[tehcyder]

I guess you never studied history or reality.

That sort of intellectual snobbery won't wash on slashdot.

How soon they forget.

[Rob T Firefly]

an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection.

Doesn't anyone else remember marking a slew of downloads from a BBS, FTP, Usenet, or even the old Napster back in the day? You'd start your dialup modem chugging away and go off to school, work, or sleep while it ran. Same crap, different scale.

Re:How soon they forget.

[eldavojohn]

Doesn't anyone else remember marking a slew of downloads from a BBS, FTP, Usenet, or even the old Napster back in the day? You'd start your dialup modem chugging away and go off to school, work, or sleep while it ran. Same crap, different scale.

Not only do I remember that but I still use BitTorrent in the same fashion. I don't gobble up bandwidth and I'm fine with getting a fairly high quality video of unlicensed anime in about a day or two. It's kind of the same crap except it's much nicer to the rest of the internet community in how big a bandwidth hog I am.

Re:How soon they forget.

[MeanderingMind]

A lot of people have long forgotten the days when it took 6 hours worth of time to download a 5mb shareware game. Even more were never there, and have no conception that these things could take time.

Go out and ask someone what they would think if to use the internet they had to tie up their phone line. You'd be surprised the kind of responses you'd get.

Re:How soon they forget.

[westlake]

Same crap, different scale.

a very different scale, when you begin talking about 18 to 50 GB per disk.

and a very different market. the trend in HDTV sales is to very large screen projection and theatrical digital sound even at entry level.

Re:How soon they forget.

[Malc]

For a small number of people. We're not talking niche markets here. We're talking mainstream. When you make it effortless and require no technical understanding, then it might be accepted by the mainstream. I'm technical, but I can't be arsed to go through the effort it takes to get movie downloads on to my TV in the living room. Setting it up is one thing. Finding the media is another - I've stopped downloading music because it's generally too crap or too much effort for me. Oh, and I'm not giving iTunes my money either as it doesn't work with my portable device. I've got better things to do with my life these days.

Re:How soon they forget.

[0100010001010011]

I don't know where your math is coming from, but according to google:

(50 GB) / (3 (Mb / s)) = 1.58024691 days
(750 MB) / (28.8 (Kb / s)) = 2.4691358 days

I lived in the country so it was rare if I even saw 26.4.

Over that lil modem that could, I got: OS 8, OS 9, 10.0 Beta, Sims, both Carmageddons, more than 1/2 of my 25 GB mp3 collection plus at least 3x that that I'm forgetting about.

The difference is people want things NOW. Back then I just knew to wait. Even now with MLNet, it could be up to a month before I get what I'm looking for (MLNet is reserved for rare stuff that torrents don't have anymore) I set it and forget it, when it comes it comes.

Milton Friedman dead at 94

[Anonymous Coward]

Just heard the news on talk radio. Milton Friedman has died. There were no further details. Regardless of whether you agreed with his politics, there is no denying his contribution to the national debt via his knee-jerk defense of all conservative spending.

Re:Milton Friedman dead at 94

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I thought this was the birth of a new troll. But no, it's for real.

Re:Milton Friedman dead at 94

[Anonymous Coward]

his knee-jerk defense of all conservative spending.

There's so many things flat-out wrong with that phrase I don't know where to begin. You clearly have no understanding of what Friedman stood for (let's start with "freedom" in the original sense of the word, and economic freedom as a precondition of political freedom). Go read Capitalism and Freedom at a bare minimum before you start passing judgement on his ideas.

HDs vs Optical Disks

[TubeSteak]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't
Which is more reliable?

That said, the summary is a bit misleading.
Here's the full quote:

"In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven. If you think that sounds far-fetched, consider that shortly after releasing a comprehensive, eight-DVD New Yorker collection (since updated to nine discs), the magazine released the same collection on an (admittedly expensive) iPod-sized hard drive. Which would you rather have, especially once the price of hard drives sinks even lower?"

By "admittedly expensive" they mean $299 for an 80GB drive + all the New Yorker issues... compared to $59.99 for 9 DVDs. I could buy the DVDs, buy a portable hard drive and still have ~$150 to spare.

Why would content providers ever bring the price of a HD based product anywhere close to that of a comparable bundle of optical discs? My answer: They wouldn't. It'll always be a premium product, even as the prices of HD-DVD/BlueRay & HDs drop.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[LunaticTippy]

Hard drives are hermetically sealed.
Optical discs get chewed on by pets and children, and left out on scratchy coffeetables.

I have a whole bag of unreadable otical discs. Still looking for a way to recycle them.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[HTH NE1]

I could buy the DVDs, buy a portable hard drive and still have ~$150 to spare.

I've considered retrofitting a DVD player whose drive failed with a removable hard drive bay, formatted to look like a very high capacity DVD, containing ripped tracks from an entire series accessible through remastered menus.

Are there any rippers that can deconstruct a DVD into a DVD Studio Pro project file and assets?

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[zippthorne]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't
Which is more reliable?

well the disk itself has fewer moving parts, but surprisingly, hard drives are more reliable. But I don't think HDDs or optical disks are the future of transportable storage.

It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to manufacture USB stick with permanent contents for cheaper than flash memory. I mean, if you don't need to be able to change the contents ever, that's gotta significantly reduce the number of transistors required. It would probably only work for very large runs, but printed CDs have a similar scale problem and they've worked out pretty well.

Anyway, by having a standardized, serial interface, (and perhaps equally importantly, an existing standard...) the storage capacity would be forever decoupled from the storage medium. One player would work for any sized movie you cared to watch until the sheer quantity of data becomes too much for it.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[TheRaven64]

How many DVDs do you own? Picking a random DVD from your collection, when was the last time you watched it?

I stopped buying DVDs (with a few infrequent exceptions) when I realised I had about 100 of them and most of them were watched less than once a year. Now I just rent (fixed monthly fee) and if I want to watch a film again then I just rent it again.

I really don't care about HD-DVD or BD. The quality is better, but not sufficiently better to justify the effort of upgrading my equipment. What would be interesting to me would be a service that, for a fixed monthly fee, let me download one new film (or 4 TV episodes) a day, DRM-free. In theory, I could archive them all to disks (optical or magnetic), but why bother; I can just re-download the few I want to watch more than once and not bother with the cost of media. Introduce it now with DVD-quality H.264 and move to higher resolutions as they become available. Let me transcode them to watch on whatever portable player I want. Keep me subscribed by keeping on adding new content, not by telling me that my existing downloads will stop working if I don't.

This model seems to work well for NetFlix. If their customers wanted, they could rip every DVD they rent, but how many actually do? It isn't really worth the effort for most people.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[AusIV]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't
Which is more reliable?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Usually things with moving parts are more prone to failure, however my computer has a 40 GB drive in it that I purchased in the late 90s. It has been used regularly ever since, and still works fine. I can't think of any CDs or DVDs I have from the same period that are still functional - they've either been scratched or lost. I've had a lot more optical disk "failures" than I've had hard drive failures. I don't know that I'd want to purchase content on hard drives, but I have backed up a lot of my media onto my hard drives because I feel I'm less likely to lose the data if it's on my hard disk (I do have my disks in a RAID, so if one fails I can recover it, but I've never had that happen).

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[Dare nMc]

Why would content providers ever bring the price of a HD based product anywhere close to that of a comparable bundle of optical discs? My answer: They wouldn't. It'll always be a premium product

$130/400Gb = $.30 if you pay $1000 for a blue-ray player compared to even a write once hard disk, and blue ray disks were free it would take 400 disks before you would break even. with them currently more like $1/MB for the blue ray disk...

makes alot more sense for blockbuster to be replaced with a atm, inside walmart,etc. carry in your sata drive (3GB/second) connect, select 10 movies (80GB) wait 30 seconds, go home. You could easily fit the entire block-buster online library (10,000 movies) on a 8TB drive array, into a ATM footprint.

Hard Drives have moving parts Optical Disks don't Which is more reliable?

I have failed a DVD drive every year, in at least one of my computers for the last 5 years. I lost one 10 Year old HD during the same time.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[smoker2]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't
Which is more reliable?

Optical Drives have moving parts
Hard disks don't
Which is more reliable ?

Fool ! </barracus>

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to take better care of them. I've only had damage to 1 music cd and never to a DVD. They are always in their case and on the shelf if they aren't in the player.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[Dare nMc]

ok just a order of magnitude off :(

10000 movies * 8GB/HD movie = 80TB, still fits in a kiosk, but thats going to cost a bit.
SATA is 3Gb/s not 3GB/s so each HD movie takes 30 seconds to copy, not 10 in 30 seconds.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[HTH NE1]

Hard Drives have moving parts
Optical Disks don't

An optical disk is a moving part! Or do you only listen to them by holding them up to your ear?

It's that it is a single part, readily separable from the hardware required to play it, that you should have emphasized. And still they can develop cracks at the spindle hole that get longer the more they're played, eventually extending past the hub and ruining the table of contents or CSS key making the rest of the disk inaccessible.

Re:HDs vs Optical Disks

[LunaticTippy]

You need to take better care of them. I've only had damage to 1 music cd and never to a DVD. They are always in their case and on the shelf if they aren't in the player.

Well, I guess you live a more structured life than I do. I lend discs out a lot or take them to a friend's house. I take them on a trip or to a party. Plus, a lot of my discs are rentals or from the library. Those are scratched like a rented itch.

I call bullshit

[r_jensen11]

On iTunes an album costs about 10 bucks--as much as $8 less than some CD retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost of getting music to buyers online.

How about it's cheaper because the quality is less than 1/10 of that of a CD, let alone a SACD or DVDA?

Re:I call bullshit

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

How about it's cheaper because the quality is less than 1/10 of that of a CD, let alone a SACD or DVDA?

You're thinking along the same lines as the HD-DVD and Blu-ray people. The fact is, most people don't notice or care about the minor difference in quality of the signal. I can't tell the difference between a FLAC and a 192 MP4 on my car stereo, especially with wind and road noise. Even on my fairly nice stereo setup, the difference between them is not a deal killer. If you're talking about my analog wireless, outdoor speakers by the hot tub, forget about it.

And while download bandwidth costs money, it is mostly the convenience that people want. They'd rather have it fast and now, even with some minimal DRM than wait to buy it in a store in person or even wait hours for a perfect quality download. The same is going to hold true for video.

Re:I call bullshit

[heinousjay]

But I heard that DVDA splits you open like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Re:I call bullshit

[codifus]

The size of the downlaod is 1/10 of the size. You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between AAC (MP3 on steroids) and the original CD music. CD

Re:I call bullshit

[Bassman59]

You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between AAC (MP3 on steroids) and the original CD music.

yeah, if your playback hardware is a cheap MP3 player with cheap earbuds, or worse, played through an FM modulator into your car stereo, you can't tell much of a difference.

but if you have a decent stereo system, the difference is obvious.

Re:I call bullshit

[TheRaven64]

but if you have a decent stereo system, the difference is obvious.

No it's not. If you sit and listen carefully, and there is little or no ambient noise then it's noticeable. But how often do you listen to your music like this? For most people, music is something that's on in the background, not something they focus their entire attention on, and in this situation it's very difficult to tell the difference between professionally encoded 128Kb/s AAC and CDDA.

Oh, and 128Kb/s AAC actually sounds better than CDDA played back on an old CD player. I have a CD player from the late '80s, and the DAC is bad enough that it is often noticeably worse than my iPod plugged into the same amplifier, or a more recent CD player even when I am not really listening to the music.

Re:I call bullshit

[noewun]

but if you have a decent stereo system, the difference is obvious

Not really: see above in that most people don't care enough about the difference in quality to worry about it. Joe and Jane Average consumer are just fine with MP3s and AACs, as can be seen from the success of downloading, both legal and illegal, and from the success so far of the iTMS videos and movies I think that most people won't care enough about the quality to worry about, either.

There seems to be a threshold of quality in audio and video above which the vast majority of people are satisfied. I think the only people who worry after that are the equipment-obsessed.

Re:I call bullshit

[thatguywhoiam]

yeah, if your playback hardware is a cheap MP3 player with cheap earbuds, or worse, played through an FM modulator into your car stereo, you can't tell much of a difference. but if you have a decent stereo system, the difference is obvious.

My experience has been, you play a blind test of an AAC and the 'original' for laypeople, 9 times out of 10 they cannot discern the difference at all. You may be that last 1, but you are definitely in the minority.

2 1/2 hours

[bigpat]

With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection.

A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes, according to this article. So considering my download of the 1 Gigabyte Battlefield 2142 demo took about 30 minutes last night over my basic $34.95/month FiOS connection, that means it would just take about 2 1/2 hours to download a full length movie. Theoretically less than an hour with the faster service offerings. I really don't see the problem with that. Netflix takes a day or so to get your movie and it is very popular. I could see just leaving the computer on over night to get the download and watch the movie the next day. A torrent like download could even distribute the load.

The only thing holding back distribution over broadband Internet is the studios. If the studios allow distribution like this, then there is a big enough market out there to make this work.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Anonymous Coward]

A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes

Think about that will you. A full HD movie on little more space that a cheap single layer DVDR? I don't think so somehow.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Anonymous Coward]

A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes, according to this article.

That can't be correct, because normal, non-HD 2-hour feature DVDs are more than that.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Anubis350]

and at that speed, you could probably start watching the movie a few minutes after starting the download and watch it to the end without interruption. There's no need necessarily to let the *whole* movie download before you start, just enough that you won't end up paused half an hr in because you caught up to the download :-P

Re:2 1/2 hours

[rjstanford]

A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes

A current DVD holds over 7GB, but doesn't hold a sufficiently high quality HD movie to make people happy. Article or not, if we could have simply added a new decoder to existing hardware and been blessed with 1080p HD goodness, we would have done.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[bigpat]

Well, don't believe everything you read... Sounds like it is about 15 Gigs (they left off the 1) for a full length movie in HD, so that would be 7 1/2 hours with basic FiOS service and 2 1/2 hours with the 44.95/month FiOS service. Still less time than I sleep most nights. And still faster than Netflix.

And the Fiber is being rolled out now and is available in many communities, it is not just in some distant future. Where BlueRay and HD-DVD still require millions of households to buy a player which costs hundreds of dollars and buy discs that now cost $30 at bestbuy. I think "DOA" is a bit of a exaggeration, since the studios can control to some extent how much content is going to be made downloadable. But if Apple can pull of downloadable HD content with its iTV and Microsoft with its Xbox, then I don't see either BlueRay or HD DVD becoming a dominant format the way that DVDs have, more of a niche or in between technology.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[toleraen]

You can get 3 movies at a time with netflix, so that's 22.5 hours with basic, 7.5 hours with premium service. Still faster, but keep in mind you have to tie up your Internet connection for that long. Then you need 45 gigs free on a hdd. Then you need to connect the computer to the TV with an hdcp approved connection. If you don't have that, you need to burn it to an HDDVD. Then you need to log into netflix and reenable your account after you realize how much hassle it is to download and play HD content!

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Overzeetop]

Maybe he'a planning on taking the 15GB movie and running it through a 2:1 lossless compressor twice? Heck, with an 8 pass, you could get it down to 60MB, and...oh, right. ;-)

Re:2 1/2 hours

[D4rk Fx]

You're lucky enough to be in an area that offers a Decent internet connection speed. I Pay $44.95 a month for 386k/386k (was 256/256 up until the start of this month.) The ISP is the only one I can get internet from anywhere close enough to home to matter. The fastest speed they offer is 704k/704k with a price tag of $104.95 a month. It's totally rediculous how expensive it is, for the speed of service offered.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[TheRaven64]

You can fit an HD movie on a normal DVD with H.264 or similar CODECs. EVD does this. There isn't much point though; if you're going to break backwards compatibility then you may as well have a more major upgrade.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Malc]

So, 90 minute movie = 5GB, right?

90 mins = 5,400 secs
5GB = 5120 MB = 40,960 Mb

Therefore your bitrate is 7.6Mb/s. That's in the realm of MPEG2 rates for DVD. AVC and VC-1 codecs should use half that. However, that's at standard def, not 1080p. NTSC 480p has 337,920 pixels. 1080p has 2,073,600. That's 6 times the amount. I suspect your 5GB download isn't quite up to the same quality as HD or BD discs. It certainly won't offer anything else secondary video, alternative language audio, etc. BTW, MSFT's Windows Media Player HD examples are about 60MB/min - that's 5GB per 90 mins (about the range you're saying).

Re:2 1/2 hours

[bigpat]

7.5 hours isn't that bad if it is done overnight, so it won't tie up your connection. And at current prices 15 Gigabytes of memory runs you about $4 or so, just looking at newegg.com. And you can reuse that space if you don't like the movie or if burning to a BlueRay becomes cheaper.

HDCP would only be needed if HDCP was enabled in whatever format the content was encoded. Last time I checked most content did not have HDCP because it would piss off a lot of people that had HDTVs but not the HDCP enabled HDMI connectors to see it at the full resolution their hardware supports.

The "hassle" as you put it, is what the music companies tried to artificially encumber CDs with so as to prevent the distribution of downloadable mp3s, seems that people got around the hassles pretty well until the content distributors finally figured out that they should probably just give consumers the options that they want.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[rjstanford]

You can fit an HD movie on a normal DVD with H.264 or similar CODECs. EVD does this. There isn't much point though; if you're going to break backwards compatibility then you may as well have a more major upgrade.

Not quite that simple, I'm afraid. Besides, your argument is, to put it bluntly, bunk. You say that there's not much point - I've got a good one: money. You can buy a red-laser DVD player for $30. Add a firmware upgrade and all of a sudden you've got an HD player for $30. Call it $35 with the new licensing costs. Sure beats $999, doesn't it? Don't you think that someone, some studio, some manufacturer, would have figured this out before if it was realistic?

Besides, according to the wikiGods, H.264 at 1080p requires 50-200 mbps, depending on encoding quality. Even at 50mbps, that would be 22.5 gigabytes per hour. At 720p/1080i its only 20mbps, or 9 gigabytes per hour. Unless you're happy with, say, the quality of the average bittorrent files, but personally I'm not - I think they're often worse than standard DVDs run through a decent upconverter.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[toleraen]

But what if you like all your movies, and you don't want to get rid of them? You can't fit a whole lot of HD content onto a hard drive, eventually you're going to have to either burn it to a disk, if they let you without gimping it, or delete it. A 250 GB hard drive can only hold about 10 to 15 HD movies, depending on the format. My DVD collection, if I had it in HD and without special features, would require a 5TB of space! And yes, I have watched all the movies I own more than once, so deleting movies wouldn't be an option.

I rather enjoy being able look at my collection, pick out a random movie, and hit play. Having to schedule my life around when a movie will finish downloading just isn't my thing. If there's a movie I want to watch and it's not in my collection, I can go to the video store two blocks away from my apartment, get it, and be back in 10 minutes.

Certain films I could wait for (via netflix or download), but most of the time I just don't want to wait. If I'm going to choose a movie in advance, it may as well be via netflix. With a download you can run it overnight, but odds are you're not going to watch it as soon as you get up. You'll wait till the evening after you get home from work. Then you have to go through the aforementioned work of either burning it or connecting it to the tv. Where is the convenience in doing this versus netflix? Either way you have to schedule your viewing, and one comes in a convenient, ready to view package.

That said, I still would rather go to a video store.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[DrXym]

A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes, according to this article.

That depends on what is meant by HD. I expect you could produce a downloadable movie in H264 (far better compression than MPEG2) at a higher quality than DVD that clocked in at 2-3Gb. Would it be BD / HD-DVD quality? Nope, but it would be perfectly acceptable and probably quite similar to what you get from digital satellite.

A more important question is how much it would cost to rent or buy movies from a download service and how convenient is it to order and download them. If Sony could make it a no-brainer to rent movies (e.g. for 5 days) at a reasonable price (e.g. $5) or buy them permenantly for $10 they might stand a chance of making some money out of the system.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[dangitman]

I rather enjoy being able look at my collection, pick out a random movie, and hit play. Having to schedule my life around when a movie will finish downloading just isn't my thing. If there's a movie I want to watch and it's not in my collection, I can go to the video store two blocks away from my apartment, get it, and be back in 10 minutes.

That's what people said about CDs versus MP3 collections, back when hard drives were more expensive, had less capacity, and greater physical size. But now everybody has iPods, and hardly ever touch their CDs. iTunes changed the way people organized their collections. Why bother sorting everything in shelves, and look for the movie you want, when you could, say, search for movies featuring a certain actor or director, and be watching it second later?

Physical media is a huge pain in the ass. The stuff that I have on hard drive gets watched a lot more than the stuff on the shelves. With hard drives prices so cheap, just keep expanding your storage. Hard drives are nearly as cheap as optical media, but way more convenient. If you count your time handling optical media, they could be considered more expensive, if your time is worth anything.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[bitbucketeer]

The article is wrong. My HD DirecTiVo, a HR10-250, has a 2 hour HDTV movie weighing in at between 7 and 10 GB. And that's the raw MPEG-2 data stream.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Pinback]

How long could more than a trivial number of people get away with using their full download pipes?

Even if Verizon did allow downloads to proceed at full pace, who could host the upstread requirements, without using multicast?

Re:2 1/2 hours

[Ngwenya]

Besides, according to the wikiGods, H.264 at 1080p requires 50-200 mbps, depending on encoding quality. Even at 50mbps, that would be 22.5 gigabytes per hour.

Hold on a bit - that represents the maximum bitrate of a H.264 MP stream. On a disc, you'd be using VBR to ensure an optimum bit stream. (Unlike, say a TV broadcast where your transport stream needs to recover state more easily, hence CBR). If you take a look on Doom9, there was a recent transcoding competition using the (free) movie Elephant's Dream, to see what the acceptable bitrates for HD were. And H.264 pipped VC-1, but both gave perfectly acceptable quality at 6 Mbps (12 was nicer though, but 24 Mbps was just utter overkill).

The BBC currently broadcasts HD H.264 at around 20Mbps as a transport stream. I've transcoded that down to 8Mbps VBR, and it looks plenty fine - admittedly that's 1080i, but the 8 Mbps stream is deinterlaced.

So you definitely could get a HD movie on an existing DVD (definitely true if encoded to 720p). What you might not be able to do is get a movie with DTS Lossless audio tracks on it. Not sure if that's such a huge problem.

As for why the hardware makers haven't done it - you've answered the question yourself! Why would they want to make more of the $35 players which generate wafer thin margins, when they can enjoy a 2-4 year window of stupidly huge margins? The whole purpose of DVDCSS wasn't to stop people copying DVDs - it was to ensure that only certain authorised manufacturers were allowed to make DVD players. AACS is specifically designed to enhance and extend that exclusionary marketing method.

Time will tell whether the ploy is successful.

--Ng

Re:2 1/2 hours

[toleraen]

True, but audio can be compressed much, much better than video seems to be. I haven't seen too many videos that were compressed to 1/15th the size of the original, and still looked almost as good as the original. Also, I use a nicely layed out spreadsheet fo organize my movies by title, genre, location, etc etc, so searching through my movies only takes a few seconds at best.

50 pack of dvd-r w/ 235 gigs of storage: 12.99
250 gig hard drive (with probably ~240 gigs formated): 69.99

I guess I'm not understanding what you mean by me valuing my time handling optical media. It takes at most, 10 seconds to locate the movie I want in a rack (30 seconds maybe if it's in a spindle), and get it into the dvd player. Popcorn still takes 2.5 minutes to pop. Maybe we should be more concerned with figuring out how to more efficiently pop popcorn? That seems to be a bigger time waster.

Re:2 1/2 hours

[dangitman]

True, but audio can be compressed much, much better than video seems to be

But technology progresses on. Compression technology is getting better, and hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper. So, even without better compression ratios, the storage capacity keeps on increasing.

It takes at most, 10 seconds to locate the movie I want in a rack (30 seconds maybe if it's in a spindle), and get it into the dvd player.

But you need to organize them on the shelf, and have the storage space to do that. I was also referring to using optical media for backups, if you use downloaded videos. A RAID eliminates much of the need to keep optical backups.

consumers are demanding change?

[night_flyer]

which customers? Most people I know are still watching a 30" (or less), 5 year old TV.
We are just now looking into an HDTV because the prices are coming down to a reasonable range...

Re:consumers are demanding change?

[Anonymous Coward]

which customers? Most people I know are still watching a 30" (or less), 5 year old TV.
We are just now looking into an HDTV because the prices are coming down to a reasonable range...

I watch over the air HD on my PC with this ATI tuner card.

So, HD on the computer is an option also, even if it is windowed it looks good. I also am starting to look at HD TVs, but it would be nice to have those movies available for download and be able to transfer then to my laptop or desktop, so that I could watch them wherever I happen to be goofing off.

Re:consumers are demanding change?

[KylePflug]

Heck, my TV is older than my house (almost 20 years), smaller than 30 inches, and does just fine for DVDs. Since I moved off to college I'm watching everything on a 19-inch widescreen monitor which is technically HD-resolution, and the experience is slightly better because it's crisper and has the right aspect ration, but at the same time worse because of tearing. Most people don't want to spend thousands of dollars for a TV so they can spend half a grand for a player so they can spend $40 on each movie they stick in said player. Is HD the future? Probably, but not at these prices.

Re:consumers are demanding change?

[AliasTheRoot]

I have a 10 year old 4:3 Sony Trintron 26" It still works fine, the sound quality is still decent enough and the picture is good. I see no reason to replace it.

I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connections

[CyberLord Seven]

The phone and cable companies have been dragging their feet with regard to internet service which makes sense. They don't want phat pipes before they are allowed to charge both sides of the pipe. See their arguments against net neutrality for more.

Is there any consumer backlash?

No. Think back to when Coca-Cola changed the formula for Coke. People took to the streets and it hit ALL of the major news media in the US.

People don't care. I think they don't care because what they have is fast enough. It's the same with DVD and Hi-Def. I already have movies in DVD format. I have seen one of my favorites, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in Hi-Def this summer and compared it, on the same television, to my DVD copy. Net result, I LOVED the Hi-Def image but I'm not going to buy the movie again in Hi-Def for the simple reason that there is no compelling reason to buy it in a lesser format.

What I mean by lesser format is DRM.

Well I think they may be dead

[Sycraft-fu]

But just because they don't offer enough extra. I have an HDTV and really, it's amazing how good DVDs look on it. I have HD cable so I've seen full HD content. Is it better? Yes. Is it an amazing step up? Not so much. Regular DVD movies look pretty good. Well, that's really all that they have to offer.

When DVD came out, it's easy to see why it took over. Not only is the picture better, and even on low end TVs, but the sound is better and supported surround, you can seek instantly, quality doesn't degrade over time, there are extras, the disc is much smaller and so on. Basically DVDs provide a big upgrade to anyone. Even if you are watching an an old 20" TV, DVDs provide extras and a picture that doesn't get worse, in additon to a better picture quality to start with.

Well the HD formats offer none of that. They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres. So really you are down to better picture, and only for those that own HD sets which is still a small number of people.

I just don't see there being the reason to upgrade. I'm not going to. Sure an HD picture is nice but really, I'm not unhappy with DVD. It looks good on my HD set. So I can easily see the formats failing for the same reason DVD-Audio failed: lack of interest. I mean DVD-A is better than CD in terms of quality. It's higher sample size and rate, as well as supporting surround sound. However do most people give a shit? No, not worth it to them. To the extent they replace CDs it's with MP3s which, while lower quality, are more convenient.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason you can't see a big difference is because you have HD Cable. HDTV over cable arrives seriously compressed. It is significantly lower quality than uncompressed. Most anyone will see the difference. If you have strong over the air signals where you live, get an antenna made for HD stations and tune in to an over the air HD signal (remember that it's at a different spot on the dial so to speak compared to the commensurate SD stations). Then compare that signal with a good HD show versus what you see on the same station on HD Cable and you will most likely be very surprised.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[blackmonday]

I can only speak for myself, but my cable company is compressing HD content. I had an OTA antenna and tuner, but ditched it so I could get a moxi pvr. No contest, free OTA signals are way better looking than the cable company's feed.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[pinkfloydhomer]

Dolby Digital and DTS in theatres is a totally different beast from the ones on DVD. They have nothing in common but the name. Also, true HD programming viewed on capable equipment (which we will all get, sooner or later) is vastly superior to DVD, for everyone to see.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[Fezmid]

"They can, in theory, offer better sound, but only if you have a system capable of the new formats (and I've yet to see a compatible receiver) and only if the disc has it and many don't since Dolby Digital and DTS are the formats that are actually used in theatres."

This is not true. I can't speak for Blu-Ray (because I don't have one), but I do have an HD-DVD player and love it. All HD-DVDs have Dolby Digital+ which is better than regular DD. In addition, many HD-DVDs have "TrueHD" audio which is significantly better than DD.

Since the decoding is done in the player (not the receiver), all you need is HDMI 1.1 port to get the audio (it's sent via a PCM stream to the receiver, where extra processing is done for speaker distances, etc). In addition, if you don't have HDMI you can do the same thing with the analog outputs on the player - connect them to the analog inputs on your receiver and the same thing happens. The low end 2nd gen HD-DVD player will not have analog outputs, so if you want the cheap HD-DVD player with analog out, you need to buy it now.

The audio improvements are very good, but probably only if you have a decent setup (ie: "Hoome theater in a box" probably won't notice much of a difference).

I don't think HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will go the way of DVD-A/SACD like a lot of people predict. The sales of this new format completely dwarf what the audio format was selling (well, maybe not Blu-Ray...) http://www.thedvdwars.com/index.cfm

The way I look at it, I can get a player for $350 that makes my current DVDs look better than a normal DVD player and lets me buy new HD-DVDs. I don't need to replace my extensive collection with HD-DVDs unless I want to, and Netflix offers most/all HD-DVDs so I can rent 'em instead of buying if I want. Seems like a no brainer to me, but YMMV.

Re:Well I think they may be dead

[thecodeman]

You don't need a new receiver to take advantage of the new surround formats such as TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS-HD. All of the HD-DVD players contain decoders in them that will decode these surround formats and output them via analog 5.1, optical, digital coax, or HDMI. Many receivers today have at least one of those connections, HDMI being the newest and more expensive. You can then either overlay post processing if you like (Such as THX surround processing) or simply leave the signal as-is. There is no need to have two decoders doing the same thing.
http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/dvd/product.asp?model= hd-a1

Nope.

[toleraen]

The Internet.
The xbox 360 has what, a 20GB HDD? so it will be able to hold...1 HD movie (at Bluray/HDDVD quality), maybe a 3 or 4 if it's compressed more? And as mentioned, it lasts 24 hours, then it's gone. So if something comes up and you can't finish your movie, too bad!

Cable on-demand.
Instead of paying 3 or 4 bucks for a movie rental, which would display at full 1080p resolution, you get a compressed version for ~85 bucks a month (per Comcast pricing). Oh, and you don't really know if the movie will be offered there. If it's not, you get to run to blockbuster and pay 4 bucks anyway!

New formats mean pricey hardware.
So people are willing to drop $3k on a new setup, and then pay an extra $85 for cable ($1000+ a year!), but they aren't willing to drop $350 (at current prices) to play movies? Really? I seem to recall DVD players catching on just fine at those prices.

The rise of the hard drive.
The 360, as noted above, could probably only hold maybe half a dozen movies at ok resolutions (for an HDTV). After that you have to delete movies to make room for new ones. My DVD rack currently holds 100 DVDs. I win. Maybe a HDD makes sense for large collections, but even then, it'd have to be a sizely hard drive to contain all the HD content. You're looking at $150 just for the drive itself!

Personally, this guy sounds like an idiot. Everything he's asking for is years down the road. How much has broadband evolved (as far as speed goes) in the US in the last few years? I had 3Mb connection 6 years ago. Today? 6Mb. Not moving too fast there. HDD prices aren't anywhere close enough to the price of a DVD to make it feasable. On-Demand has the best chance, but only assuming every studio signs on and makes their content available. But at that point, I would bet your cable bill just went up another 30 bucks.

The HDTV crowd will adopt, eventually. Those of us still enjoying our $200 27" tv probably won't, at least for a long time.

Music drove the broadband revolution

[PFI_Optix]

It was Napster that really drove broadband adoption for the masses. The ability to download a song in minutes instead of an hour put DSL and cable in high demand.

Will HD video drive the next step and bring the US back into the lead for home internet access? IPTV and HD-on-demand will help drag broadband into the rural areas and increase connection speeds everywhere. Here's hoping he's right and the new HD discs are doomed to fail in favor of digital distribution.

TV is the limiting factor

[daeg]

Why would you bother downloading a 15GB movie when a 3GB movie looks fine on your computer screen and most TV sets? Even most HDTVs won't benefit from the information stored in a 15GB movie. How many people actually have sound systems that support 5.1, let alone 7.1?

What I expect to see is tailored movie downloads that fit what presentation devices you have present. A simple web form can ask what type of: television, sound system, connection speed, timeframe desired, and storage desired that will select which of a few pre-encoded files you download. This way, I can download a very high quality movie (with a nice TV and sound system) while my mother can download closer to DVD format (older TV, lesser sound).

If you can only use 25% of the information, why download 100%?

Re:TV is the limiting factor

[Chode2235]

Yeah I completely agree. I have a 50" DLP HDTV, but no 5.1 surround set. I would love to download the awesome picture, but let the huge 5.1 audio sit on the server while I download the 2.0 audio instead. I cant even watch a DVD with the 2.0 track as they dont include it.

Re:TV is the limiting factor

[the eric conspiracy]

Even most HDTVs won't benefit from the information stored in a 15GB movie. How many people actually have sound systems that support 5.1, let alone 7.1?

That is ludicrous. Most DVD's are now coming out in dual layer 8 GB format to get the best bit rates possible out of the format for the simple reason it looks better. And the DD 5.1 sound tracks are a small percentage of the total data size.

And in any case I have an excellent 5.1 sound system to go along with my HDTV - if you try to offer some cut down sound track along with a iPod video resolution of the movie there is NO FRIGGIN' WAY I would buy into it - it's a serious downgrade of what I have today, and that just is not acceptable.

I do have serious doubts about BluRay and HD-DVD - format wars very often result in both formats disappearing. But 3 GB movies with 2.0 sound? NO!

Re:TV is the limiting factor

[daeg]

That's why you would download the high quality stuff. Someone with 2.0 sound doesn't need the data for 5.1. Someone with a 30" non-HDTV doesn't need as many bits as someone with a 52" HDTV.

Someone like yourself, who has nice sound and nice video, can go for the longer, bigger downloads. Someone who wants to see the movie sooner can opt for less quality -- this way consumers can get a choice.

Re:TV is the limiting factor

[the eric conspiracy]

The existing formats degrade gracefully. And if you buy the lesser resolution and then upgrade your hardware? You get the lesser resolution. You have to rebuy and redownload everything. I do not see ANY benefit to this. Just buy the freaking disk for crying out loud.

Much depends

[OpenSourced]

HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection

Well, much depends on the codec you are using. I'm not an expert, but a properly coded film can be HD without taking such a lot of space as a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. Think H.264, or even XVid. And surely better methods will appear. I'm waiting to see in bittorrent the first 4Gb xvid files compressed from a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD. I don't think it'll take too long, and I guess the quality will be much better than a normal DVD.

Re:Much depends

[4play]

have a look around usenet a.b.hdtv is full of releases. Firefly.S1.E03.1080i.DD5.1 is roughly 4 gigs in size to give you some point of reference for size of these releases.

Re:Much depends

[Farmer Tim]

I'm not an expert, but a properly coded film can be HD without taking such a lot of space as a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. Think H.264, or even XVid.

H.264 (AVC) playback is mandatory for HD players of both formats (as is VC-1). IMO these codecs will probably be used in preference to MPEG-2 to allow more space for the obligatory extras.

http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Univer sal_24.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Specific ations

As for Xvid...well, you can't get a smaller file of equal quality from a lesser codec.

Blu-Ray is DOA, HD-DVD saved via Combo Discs

[Num6]

The combo discs HD-DVD offers will make this format a winner. It's portable, it here now, it plays in existing equipment and it's semi future proof.

Re:Blu-Ray is DOA, HD-DVD saved via Combo Discs

[toleraen]

What, you mean like the Blu Ray combo disks? They aren't available yet, but then again the demand for HiDef videos aren't terribly great either at the moment.

Not this again

[Rik Sweeney]

So I'm going to be able to download movies with my 2GB max usage per month am I? Let's see, I think it's around 700MB for the lowest quality movie isn't it? So I can get 2 movies each month, which won't even be in High Definition and feature no the deleted scenes / alternative endings. And since I don't even live in the US I'm not even going to be offered this service...

Fuck that, I'll just get a PS3 and be done with it.

I'LL GLADLY BUY THE CD!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll pony up the extra $8 just so I don't have to deal with the DRM. And Apple fanbois, don't bother telling me how great your company's DRM is. Its like a dictator bragging about the freedom he grants to his people.

Prices fall

[VGR]

The "New formats mean pricey hardware" paragraph is ignoring history. New tech always starts out expensive and then comes down in price. I mean, come on, the first VHS VCRs were well over a thousand dollars.

Uh, it is available..

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"With five times the visual information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection."

First off, It is available though not legally(The.Matrix.1999.720p.HDTV.x264-THOR). Second off, thanks to the wonders of good video encoding its no larger than any other DVD - 4gigabytes. How long that takes is obviously a matter of what your connection is, but I see 6mbit as about the current standard for residential cable

According to the wonders of google math, (4 gigabytes) / (6 (megabits per second)) = 1.51703704 hours
More than reasonable. Even if you half the download speed for say a slow server or worse connection, we're still at 3hours. It's still not at "video on demand" speeds, but its quicker than netflix and if you plan ahead there would be no issue at all.

Re:Uh, it is available..

[Anonymous Coward]

4 gigabytes = 32 gigabits

you dont work for nasa do you?

Re:Uh, it is available..

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

32 gigabits / 6 megabits per second = 1.5hours, you don't work for the department of checking math do you?
step 1) www.google.com
step 2) type "4 gigabytes / 6 megabits per second"
step 3) ???
step 4) MATHS!

Waiting for better technology

[kentrel]

I'll wait for the day when you can buy the sum of Human Knowledge and Art on a Special Edition Crystal

And then I'll leech it off bittorrent.

Re:Waiting for better technology

[pla]

I'll wait for the day when you can buy the sum of Human Knowledge and Art on a Special Edition Crystal

Yeah, but you just know they'll release the "Super Deluxe Gold-Plated Crystal" version a week later, with all the extras and deleted scenes...

Re:Waiting for better technology

[retiarius]

this reminds me of the old trick for solving NP-hard problems --
simply wait for better technology!

i.e. this is the class of situations (of say, length-N) which require an
exponential amount of time for satisfactory results. since moore's law
(compute power / memory space doubles every year or so),
you solve a hard problem with just-large-enough-N by being patient.

technology itself, not algorithmic smarts, wins.

The original poster has a point, a good one

[zappepcs]

While it may be difficult to figure out where the money will come from, or how the DRM will work, the average joe bloggs and jane bloggs is already using digital on demand products, some via cable, some via the Internet (youtube etc.) and they are getting used to it. This is a critical factor in how visual data will be and is being used. Remember VHS vs. Betamax? The fact that GooTube is soon to be up and running will ensure that _EVERYONE_ knows about video via the Internet. The next logical step to take, even for naive grandparents, is "how do I watch all my favorite episodes of program x on the Internet?" or how do I get television on my computer?

By the time they start asking those questions, all the arguing will be nearly done. When there is a proven market for a product or service, every large corp. worth anything will trip all over themselves to sell it to the public, and will do so no matter what DRM hurdles are in the way.

In the same way that YouTube and MySpace made headlines and garnered public attention, digital on-line on-demand video services will do the same.

PS4? Did we forget about Sony's Situation?

[AppreticeGuru]

PS4 won't use disks? That's very possible, considering that the PS3 release is resulting in massive losses for Sony, combined with the largest notebook battery recall in history (remember the exploding, melty laptop pictures?), loss of market share in their TV division and other electronics, who's to say Sony will even be AROUND for PS4? I'd be surprised if Sony doesn't bite the big one on this ps3 venture, seeing as they've put all their remaining eggs in this console basket.

Not all HD programming is real HD

[DG]

One of the things that surprised me when I upgraded to an HD connection was just how much "HD" content was really just upconverted "regular" video.

There is very little programming that is really honestly truly 720p/1080p - but the stuff that is, is spectacular.

I agree with you that a 480p DVD looks pretty damn good on an HD screen, but real shot-in-HD content is a whole lot better.

What I'm afraid of with Blu-Ray/HDVD is a similar problem - is the content actually generated in higher resolutions, or is it just a really good upconvert of lower-res source material?

DG

Re:Not all HD programming is real HD

[bommai]

While I agree that cable channels are dragging their feet offering HD shows, most network TV shows (primetime, late night) are all in pure HD (720p or 1080i). Take a look at the program guide for any day in any of the major networks (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC). All primetime shows are in HD. Not just upconverted. Even the late night talk shows are in HD. Many sports programs are in HD. Even Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are in HD (these are syndicated shows - not all stations show in HD, my local station does though!!). I watch only network TV, so I get HD goodness now.

Re:Not all HD programming is real HD

[novus ordo]

It shouldn't be upconverted since cinemas have plenty of real estate to offer for even future formats. They work at what is called 4K which is at a resolution of 4096 x 2160. 1080p is 1920 x 1080. So you could double the resolution of 1080p and you would get about what you get in cinemas. There's more on this kind of weird HD stuff in my journal.

Re:Not all HD programming is real HD

[Sycraft-fu]

Eh, it's an improvement, don't get me wrong, but not as big as I thought it would be. I've seen plenty of real HD content (PBS produces lots of it) it just doesn't knock my socks off even when it's an ideal condition, like a brightly lit outdoor nature piece. Is it better? Sure enough that I'll pay $5/month for the HD cable box, but not enough that I'd care to get an HD-DVD player.

Re:Not all HD programming is real HD

[AliasTheRoot]

A lot of *DVD* content is upsampled from old video tapes.

The Matrix HD download

[muftak]

It is available to download, only 2.07GB as XviD, here:- http://www.torrentvalley.com/dw.php?id=443593

Playstation 4?

[matchewg]

Phil Harrison is already saying the PlayStation 4 won't use discs Maybe if Sony still exists..

Buy a good handheld

[way2trivial]

movies run 90-200 mb get ten to 20 a month.

http://thepiratebay.org/browse/206

It's boring is the problem...

[Quiet_Desperation]

...and not worth the effort. 720p this. 1080i that. LCD. Plasma. DLP. Which one looks better. Which one has video lag. Is there still burn in. Who wants to deal with that to buy a fricken' TV set? I'm a technophile, and I can't be bothered with it unless my old, venerable 36" Wega CRT dies tomorrow. I hear people who say things like "standard DVD isn't good enough for MEEEE!" and I ain't gettin' it. It's your own fault if you've trained yourself to see the tiniest video artifacts. You've become the typo Nazis of the video world. Ah, who cares...

Re:It's boring is the problem...

[vapspwi]

Your take is pretty much exactly the same as mine. I have a 36" Wega that I'm perfectly happy with. I wouldn't mind having an HDTV (though I don't currently have any HDTV source to drive it with), but after helping a friend select an HDTV (he ended up with a Sony SXRD), I realized that it's just too much of a hassle. All the resolutions, all the different display technologies (each with a complex set of pluses and minuses), and all the related problems and questions - it's ridiculous that buying a TV has gotten this complicated.

JRjr

Re:It's boring is the problem...

[jandrese]

On the other hand, if I were buying a TV set today there is no way I'd stick with a SD set. Since both of you went with the Wegas, I'm betting you're the same way. That said, the failure rate on decent quality CRTs is very low, chances are you could still be happily using them in 10 or 20 years assuming you still have SD signals to feed them with.

Frankly, I'm in no rush to replace my TV, but it's clear that you'll never get HD if you wait for your TV to break before upgrading. On the other hand, having seen HD movies and SD movies side by side in the store, I can't say I'm rushing out to buy one myself. At the distance I watch TV at I could see the difference between the HD and SD sets, but neither looked particularly "better" until I got closer. Even up close the difference wasn't exactly earth shattering. Sure I can tell that the actors nose is made out of 20 pixels instead of 5, and you can make out the lines a bit better, but that didn't really help me enjoy the movie any more (of course they were playing a Knights Tale I think, so nothing would have helped).

Re:It's boring is the problem...

[vapspwi]

When/if I get a PS3, it'll be my first HD source, and I'd probably start considering getting an HDTV a little more seriously. I don't have digital cable or satellite and don't really want it, and I can't be bothered to hook up an antenna for over-the-air HDTV, so the benefit of an HDTV is fairly limited for me right now.

I've spent some time watching my friend's SXRD. He has Dish Network, and HD stuff looks good. DVD looks good. But standard TV ranges from OK to nearly unwatchably bad, when you combine the compression of the satellite feed with the upconversion to 1080p for display. That also dampened my enthusiasm for HDTV.

JRjr

Re:It's boring is the problem...

[PenGun]

interesting. My Sony 34XS955 CRT does an amazing job of scaling up SD. A clean cartoon looks to be HD. A reasonable show like The Daily Show look very good. Even my ancient low res music vids look pretty good.

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Um, somebody did.

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone came out with a way to perfectly compress a HD quality movie into 10MB the way mp3s squeezed a 70MB wav file into 5MB, the industry will change overnight.

Not 10 MB, not perfect (btw mp3's are 'lossy', not perfect). DVD's HD-DVD'sand Blue-Ray use compression (as do DVD's).

Dolby true-hd/Dobly Digital + /Dts-hd

[Anonymous Coward]

Try giving me Dolby true-hd/Dobly Digital + /Dts-hd in my HD downloads and we might be talking. Additionaly, has this man ever compared WMVHD to HD-DVD? Night and Day... nuff said

OT: Your sig

[rainman_bc]

Tired of waiting for working video editing in linux.....

Wholly crap me too... Right now it's the biggest bug in my ass any why I'm starting to dislike Linux...

Re:OT: Your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

VirtualDub to simple for you or does it not work right for you?

$1 is less than $8...

[787style]

CD and DVD manufacturing costs are considerably less than $8 (it's usually sub $1). The reason why it costs less is because you (the consumer) get less.

Thumb drives and Blockbuster

[gelfling]

What it will evolve to is Blockbuster simply copying a movie to a USB drive and lending you the drive. That way the store doesn't have to actually have any physical inventory at all. You bring the thumb drive home, play the movie - accounting for whatever DRM etc etc etc and then you bring the drive back to Blockbuster for wipe and a new movie. That way the bottleneck is eliminated.

Re:I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connecti

[MBGMorden]

I'm all with ya on the "down with DRM", but you can't take a DRM high-ground whilst proclaiming the superiority of your DVD copy: DVD's have DRM too. Maybe not as strong as the new formats, but it's still present.

Bandwidth

[wardk]

Bandwidth is not here now for this, and if it does come, it's gonna be so expensive as to make us wish we could drive to the store and rent the DVD

right now I am sure most if not all of us home users already get gouged when we exceed our bandwidth limits, some even get the boot.

all this is going to do is xfer the $$ from the entertainment industry to the telecom industry, if we're lucky, us consumers won't pay more than triple what we pay now for better service.

and of course none of this will actually work cross platform. windows users get first, mac users maybe and those linux users? only if you have MSovell version.

I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[MtViewGuy]

I can cite the following reasons:

1) It has far more movie studio support than HD-DVD. Particularly important is Disney's support, since Disney DVD's have always been very strong sellers to start with anyway. Can you imagine a Pixar movie released on Blu-Ray format? (big thumbs up)

2) The storage capacity is larger (50 GB versus 30 GB), which means you can put more extra features on a single Blu-Ray disc than an HD-DVD disc.

3) The arrival of Sony's PlayStation 3 means immediately the arrival of a large user base that can play Blu-Ray discs.

4) We're still a long way from offering HD-quality video downloads over the Internet. It would require huge increases in download speeds, maybe as high as 50 megabits per second at bare minimum (the number of broadband Internet home users with anything over 10 mbps download speeds is still very small even in Europe and Asia).

Yes, prices are high now, but I expect prices to drop rapidly during the course of 2007. Good quality standalone Blu-Ray players will probably cost around US$450 by the end of 2007, in my humble opinion.

Re:I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the Playstation userbase is a major point in Blueray's favor. I remember when standard dvds were only available in select titles and vhs was still the dominant format, and I saw the same quality/benefit problem today's consumer is faced with. It just isn't worth converting an entire collection or investing in expensive hardware in order to jump into a format that isn't even out in full effect, as DVD was to VHS then.

I saw Playstation 2's ability to play dvds as the turnaround point for the DVD format, since a broad userbase will now have that much less keeping them from purchasing DVDS, Studios acknowledge the increase in demand, other DVD players get cheaper, and a new standard is born.

A similar situation could happen with Blueray, but this time the xbox 360 is in the mix as well. Sony has the upper hand in that it has its own studios, has disney on its side, and seems to have an anxious supply of potential customers despite their constant mistakes and fumbles.

Re:I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[Varkias]

The point people are trying to make is that aside from the picture quality that you can only detect with a $2000-3000 new television there is really no compelling reason to invest in Blu-ray. Prime example that has been used time and time again take a regular CRT 17" television, compare DVD to VHS. There is a noticeable difference in content and quality, extras, subtitles, etc.. Now do the same with DVD to Blu-Ray aside from a better picture on a expensive tv there really isn't that drastic of a difference. Also just because it's in the PS3 doesn't mean that it will take off either. Look at the PSP the UMD format was supposed to usher in a new portable movie format. Oops. People weren't willing to buy another copy of the same movie just because it played on the PSP. I think the same will happen with Blu-Ray why should I pay $29.99 for a movie when I can get the DVD for $15.99 that looks almost as good even on a HDTV.

Re:I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[MtViewGuy]

A similar situation could happen with Blueray, but this time the xbox 360 is in the mix as well.

However, Blu-Ray on a game console has one big advantage over HD-DVD: Blu-Ray playback is built into the console, while you need to buy an accessory drive to play back HD-DVD discs on the Xbox 360. As such, once PlayStation 3 production and sales ramp up over the next year, this will dramatically increase the Blu-Ray user base, which will drive more Blu-Ray player sales.

Re:I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[MtViewGuy]

The point people are trying to make is that aside from the picture quality that you can only detect with a $2000-3000 new television there is really no compelling reason to invest in Blu-ray.

I have to disagree on that! The price of non-CRT rear-projection TV's have dropped tremendously over the last year (you can get a DLP 720p set for under US$1,500!), and even the price of the big 40" (diagonal) LCD panel displays have dropped to the point you can get them for US$1,700 for 720p models! By the end of 2007, expect even 1080p non-CRT rear-projection TV's and 1080p larger LCD panels to drop well below US$2,000 in price. With these lower prices, the incentive to buy high-definition disc players jumps dramatically, to say the least. I've seen Disney's Blu-Ray version of Dinosaur and even on a 40" 720p LCD panel, the picture sharpness is amazing.

Re:I personally think Blu-Ray will win, though.

[WuphonsReach]

We're still a long way from offering HD-quality video downloads over the Internet. It would require huge increases in download speeds, maybe as high as 50 megabits per second at bare minimum (the number of broadband Internet home users with anything over 10 mbps download speeds is still very small even in Europe and Asia).

Bullpucky...

You only need 50mbit/s if you're using old fat MPEG2 compression (even then, broadcast HD is only 25mbit/s or less).

But if you use a more modern MPEG4 codec, you can easily get good quality in a 2mbit/s stream (maybe as low as 1.5mbit/s?) or a high quality stream at 3-4 mbit/s.

DVD streams look good at 0.40 to 0.75 mbit/s in MPEG4 and HD is roughly 5x larger in area.

The future is here!!!

[SeePage87]

I already own all the seasons of the West Wing on a hard drive the size of a deck of cards (read ipod).

Physicla Media?

[CodemasterMM]

I do agree that HD-DVD and BluRay are definately DOA. I do not think anyone wants to readily re-purchase their entire DVD collection just to have higher quality (most people don't have HD TVs yet, even).

And to the point of downloading music/movies/etc. instead of physically owning them, I actually prefer to have the physical medium - sort of a collector's thing. I enjoy holding the disk and being able to look at the art on the box/case instead of looking at images online. I am not sure if I am alone on this, but basically when I buy something I like having it physically, so I can't be ripped off later after I reformat or such.

Re:Physicla Media?

[Eccles]

I no longer consider DVDs as items to own.

I borrow them from the library. I rent them from Blockbuster et al. I trade them on Peerflix and Barterbee. I buy 'em off Amazon and then resell them when I'm done with them. OK, the kids have had me keep a few, and I have a few classics just in case, but I've seen far, far more DVDs than I own.

So HD-DVD? Seems like a better format for my next rented/borrowed/traded/soon-to-be-resold discs. I just need a cheap enough player.

This philosophy applies to lots of other things, BTW; I've sold remotes, tuners, KVMs, and more for nearly the same price I paid for them.

As for the artwork, I'd rather have framed movie posters or a coffee table book.

Use netflix and it doesn't matter

[chipace]

If you don't buy the media, then you reduce your loss if one format "wins" over another. Also, by the time one format "wins", the players should be much cheaper.

Netflix charges the same price for DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray... so if you want HD content, just buy a player and get going.

The worst case is you have to buy a new player when the content runs-out (a 50% chance).

Personally, I want a PS3... and if Blu-ray dies, I still get to use it for games.

3-5 years before either format catches on

[Nutsquasher]

Both Blue Ray and HD-DVD have a lot going against them. Both formats are brand new to the consumer market. In quick summary, most people are going to wait 3-5 years before adopting either of these formats, if they take off. Buying one today means either you've got a lot of money to burn (paypal@dave-gallagher.net please), or you're easily influenced by marketing.

Let's look at the history of DVD's:

• DVD's were first starting to be sold in early 1997.
• By 1999, DVD players were around $300 each. DVD sales were tiny compared to VHS.
• DVD's and players increased on popularity by 2001, aided by the PlayStation 2 having a DVD-player built into it (at the time, a PS2 wasn't much more money than a sole DVD player). The format was being adopted rapidly by this point.
• By 2002-2003, DVD's finally had surpassed VHS sales, 5-6 years after they first came out.
• Now, in late 2006, it's tough to find a home that doesn't own a DVD player. Also:
  • You can buy DVD movies everywhere.
  • You can rent DVD movies everywhere (Netflix, BlockBuster, etc)
  • There are tens of thousands of titles available for DVD, including a vast array of Movies (previously available on VHS), and TV shows (many never available before on VHS).
  • DVD players can be bought for $50 or less. Almost all computers have one built in.
  • DVD movies can be had for $2 - $20. Some series and combo's cost more, obviously.

Other notable mentions during this time period:

• VHS degraded over time. DVD's don't (when stored right).
• VHS has a much worse picture quality than DVD did.
• Nearly everyone already owned a TV which would benefit from upgrading from VHS to DVD.
• DVD's sounded much better. Some people bought high-end stereo systems, but most still use the speakers in their TV.

This took from 1997 to 2006 to accomplish. It's almost a ten-year old format. To say either Blue Ray or HD-DVD will take off in a short period of time (1-2 years) is blasphemy. It'll take at least 3, but probably around 5 years, before either format becomes mainstream. IF either format survives, that is.

Things going against Blue Ray & HD-DVD:

• Extremely limited selection of titles. Think hundreds of them (if not only a hundred), vs. tens of thousands for DVD.
• No rental outlets carry them yet.
• Movie Players cost much more money than DVD players. $500+ if you buy a PS3, or Xbox 360 Core w/HD-DVD add-on.
• These movies are priced more. The cheapest I've seen are around $25 each.
• Most people don't own a TV that will benefit from the higher resolution of these types of media.
  • ...unlike upgrading from VHS to DVD, where everyone experienced an increase in picture quality.
• High-end audio equipment is needed for many to take advantage of the new features to these discs. Again, most people don't have this.
• Everyone just through out their VHS tapes and replaced them with DVD's. They may buy new movies on HD-DVD/Blue Ray, but good luck convincing them to re-buy Terminator 2 for the 3rd time.

By the time it takes for Blue Ray/HD-DVD to catch on (3-5 years), if they catch on, there will be:

• Xbox 1080
• PlayStation 4
• On-Demand HD Movies, over the net, delivered to your TiVo, Xbox 360, Apple iTV, whatever.
• On-Demand HD Movies, through your TV provider.

Neither format is proven (asides from looking and sounding good, with the right equipment), and the VAST majority of consumers won't see a benefit from either of them today. What has to happen for consumers to benefit is:

• 1920x1080 P HDTV's have to come down in price, to the $200 Wal-Mart special range.
• The players have to be had for $100 or less.
• There needs to

Re:3-5 years before either format catches on

[Trogre]

and what a lot of people here forget is that DVD took off desipite massive DRM encumberment:

• Hardware manufacturers bullied to obey no-skip and no-fast-forward flags.
  
• CSS encoding
  
• Region codes (that mercifully are illegal in NZ so we don't have that problem as much).
  

Slashdotters seem to think that consumers aren't going to stand for the DRM in these new generation DVDs, but history has shown us that they just don't care.

I for one won't be buying one of these players, or any media until I can play them DRM-free on my linux box, but it won't be without regret - despite claims of only minor improvements, the quality difference of HD content is staggering. The improvement over 576i/480i is close, but not quite equal, to the transition from B&W->Colour.

only technophiles are demanding change

[poot_rootbeer]

"But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast."

I disagree on both counts.

Customers (on the whole) are content with the quality and convenience of the DVD distribution model, and will be for another couple technological generations at least.

The real reason for HD-DVD and BluRay

[pctech3]

What you must remember, the only reason that we are even talking about these new formats is because the MPAA wanted "enforceable" DRM built into the video media. The DVD format, while it can support HD video of 720p, the MPAA will not allow it, because of the lack of enforceable DRM.
The only reason they developed the new formats to support the HD video was to convince the users they needed to have the new DRM enabled systems.
A few notes:
The early computer BluRay drives will not play the BluRay movies.
Both formats may "disable" your player if it "thinks" the disk may not be "original".
The player firmware can be automatically upgraded whenever you insert a disk.(this could cause some severe issues with compatibility).
With the increased data density on the media, it will be more prone to physical damage.
The apparent increase in picture quality is not worth the increase in costs of player or media.
If HD was really that much of an improvement, release the restrictions on the original DVD format, and spread the movie across multiple disks!

***Sig Block***

It's only gamers who would justify $600 for a video game system...

******

I didn't steal your sig, I just borrowed it. You can have it back now.

Thank You.

He's Right, but his reasons are all wrong.

[MrCopilot]

HD-DVD, BluRay Media & Players
New Consumers, the ones who don't remember The Format Wars of Yore(TM) and who happen to be affluent, will pickup these devices and media but not in enough numbers to save the format. Kind of like the people who bought the UMD concept not remembering MiniDisc travesty.

PS enthusiasts will buy the PS3 but not many movies. PSP rerun

DVD is "good enough" for most consumers. Plus the selection will be 2 million DVD titles to 50 hdDVD and 100 BluRay.

The only thing that may save them is the universal players that the 2 big players don't want.

I have a 15yr old 32" TV and a 15 yr old 27" (oddly enough both Sony) in another room. One has a DVD, One has GameCube (soon to be replaced with a Wii) Both have cable boxes.

On Demand Cable, On demand Gaming, On Demand DVD. Hmmm do I really need to overspend on a new HDTV and expensive as hell player plus overpriced new media, No thanks, If I want high definition I turn on the PC. where the HD media lives anyway.

Here's hoping for a slow and painful death to both new Formats and perhaps one of the producers.

Re:He's Right, but his reasons are all wrong.

[PenGun]

Hmmm I sure like my new Sony 34" HDTV. Sure plays a mean Quake4 game online, very hard to go back to an itty bitty 19" monitor. Oh and actual HDTV files ... um wow eh'.

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Re:He's Right, but his reasons are all wrong.

[MrCopilot]

Sorry, did I forget to mention the monolithic NEC Multisync XP21 in front of me.

Re:He's Right, but his reasons are all wrong.

[PenGun]

Yeah my kid has a HP branded Sony 21, nice monitor but still pretty small compared to this 1920x1080 30" wide beasty. My 60th birthday present to myself ;).

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

maybe not

[scharkalvin]

If dual format players and burners come out, and prices fall to current DVD price levels both formats will survive. Look what happened to dvd players and later on dvd computer burner drives.
Even if HD video content is available on line there will be a market for discs. Some people want to collect their video, not just watch it a few times. The former group currently BUYS their dvd's, the latter rents them. Blockbuster will be the one on life support when HD video download on demand becomes available. Also HD-dvd and Bluray will become the next computer back up medium when the -R and -RW versions become cheaply available.

What could have been...

[Kadin2048]

Not only can Xvid/ffmpeg allow you to take that whole box set of The West Wing on a 2.5" laptop hard drive, if you want, it could just as easily give you high definition movies-on-disc, using the DVD technology that we have around right now.

The studios want everyone to believe that to get HD, we have to mess around with an entirely new disc format, but that's bogus. Using the much better compression technologies available today, we could squeeze a highdef movie onto a dual-layer DVD.* Heck, with some DVD players, it would probably just require a firmware reflash to be able to play them. The entirely new disc and drive mechanism is there to purposely break forwards-compatibility.

But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter.

* Apple's page says H.264 can compress 1920x1080 down to around 8Mb/s, so given a DVD-9 capacity of around 6.8E10 bits, that's about 140 min of video. This is comparable to MPEG-2 SD video, which is allowed at up to 9.8Mb/s by the DVD Video specification.

Re:What could have been...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct. I submit www.bit-hdtv.com as proof. Of course, most of that stuff is 720p but still.

Re:What could have been...

[Lumpy]

Exactly!! At Work demo HDTV, 1080p HDTV from standard DVD discs to our clients using a HTPC laptop we created for that exact task. We have IMAX conversions of clips to 1080p that absolutely wow the clients.

When we demo HDDVD or Blu Ray the clients are not ever blown away (99% of all HDTV's and home theaters are NOT what most would call HD but simply 720p and therefore get a tiny advantage over standard DVD plus most HDDVD transfers are not very good, BluRay discs right now are also not at full spec as they cant make 2 layer discs so they are releasing at lower res.

Those willing to break the law, can enjoy tommorow's technology right now. Hell, I just bought my daughter for xmas a usb hard drive box that has HD out and will play H.264, divx,xvid vob,iso, most anything (it's based on mplayer from what I can tell) and with a 750Gig drive in it can hold every single anime dvd she owns as a ISO file and plays as if the dvd was inserted into a player (sans all the DRM and restriction crap) in a portable device that fits in her backpack.. 2 bookshelves full of DVD's only slightly recompressed fit in the thing. If we recompress to H264 or other format I can fit 2 book cases full in the thing. (she wants the dvd menus and extras, go figure.) It cost me $500.00 new from newegg.com with the hard drive.)

Re:What could have been...

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

"But, because such a format wouldn't offer the studios total control over your living room, it's never going to happen as long as the movie studios have any say in the matter."

There's no law against some minor player in the hardware market adding dual layer + XviD decoding + component output @ 720p or 1080i to their DVD players, is there? If so, there's always imports, and I'd bet someone could come up with a firmware hack that accomplished something like this with an existing unit anyway.

At any rate, if I had a small manufacturing setup & was a relatively unknown brand, I would be working *feverishly* to develop something like this. I'd also be working just as hard or harder to get at least 720p if not 1080i recording capability into it via component inputs. That wouldn't be a cheap unit, but I'll bet it'd sell like wildfire with very little advertising cost at any price under about $1500.00. ;-)

How'd this guy get to -1?

[mmell]

I happen to think he's right. I also happen to forsee a future where the average personal computer will merely be a stateless hardware platform which requires inserting some variation of the USB stick for all its functionality. I.e., your computer is on the flash drive - just plug it in at any station with a CPU, RAM, video, keyboard, printer and away you go - your OS, your programs and files, yours. We'll be using such devices to carry our credit around, our ID's, our personal data, our personal media collections . . . there'll be palmtop/laptop/desktop stations to ensure that we can have our access everywhere we go.

No, I'm not psychic - this is just a logical extension of trends and technologies which are present now. The tech is already available, (more or less) works, and Moore's law hasn't been repealed by the laws of physics yet. No moving parts on solid-state devices means physically tough, durable devices; small, tough, (becoming) cheap . . . sounds like a trifecta to me.

Then again, I really thought we'd have flying cars by now. They promised me flying cars. Where are the flying cars?

Re:How'd this guy get to -1?

[Anonymous Coward]

25Mb/s down at our company in canada. for about $100/month canadian.. so like $4/month US.

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet /HighSpeedNitro/default.htm

Not as early as you think.

[Captain Splendid]

Early yes, but nowhere near 5 years. Let's be honest, if I spend the 5-10 minutes required for the various task involved, I could have a new, DVD-quality movie to watch every night of the week. Hell, with my broadband connection, I could do a double header every night, preceded by some catoons and a half-hour news segment (say, a Daily Show ep), and still have bandwith left over. I know this isn't Hi-def, but the installed base for that is ridiculously low, and most people will never notice anyway.

Now, I'll grant you, even with the ridiculous availability of content on the many P2P sites and apps, learning how to torrent/unrar/get codecs/find reliable trackers is not for the faint of heart, but how long until somebody releases an app that incorporates automatic search/RSS functions along with a media player and an archive extractor? Getting the process down to just a few clicks should be fairly easy.

And that's the hard way! The easy way is firing up iTunes (or whatever) and browse/buy effortlessly.

The funny thing is, even though the next-gen DVD debate has been going for what seems like years now, it had not occurred to me that VOD and the like would even make an impact until I read the article. Blu-ray and HD-DVD already have a ton of problems ahead of them without considering video over the Web.

Re:I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connecti

[Durrok]

Is it still DRM if anyone can copy it by putting it into their dvd drive and running it on a recent version of Nero?

If the DRM no longer does it's job and even non-techies can get around it I don't think it's really DRM anymore. I think it's just obsolete software.

Here's a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not technically inclined. Also, laziness isn't a virtue.

You have a life? I doubt it. Go out and get one instead of piping up here at /. with your worthless opinion.

Media is here to stay

[UttBuggly]

I think the article is ludicrious. The number of people who would download HD content versus the vast, unwashed, technophobic masses is a big delta. At least in the U.S., we're all about the convenient, easy thing to do. Basically, I think there will always be people who are spoiled to putting a disc in a machine and having it work with a huge degree of success, every time. (Scratched rental and NetFlix DVDs notwithstanding)

Plus, there's the issue of cost. To build out a 100Mb - 1Gb content delivery infrastructure is very doable technically, but not economically. It will price out most users until the costs are recovered and there's some competitive pressure to reduce the price of admission.

Optical media, HD or Standard, is amazingly cheap and easy to make these days. I use the analog loophole on my SciAtl DVR to burn DVDs via the S-Video outputs for about 12 cents a pop. If I bought blank media in higher volume, the cost would drop more. I have an excellent network and lots of disk space at home but for stuff "I gotta keep", I burn to stable, won't crash or get eaten by some DRM scheme blank DVDs.

And in checking my Amazon Wish List, the majority of items are DVDs, Standard and HD-DVD (giving Blu-Ray a pass for now), that I want to own and plan on keeping for decades. I absolutely expect to have some device and/or method to view them for a long, long time. I do NOT expect to be using spinning ceramics with iron bits for storage in 10-20 years. I personally think we'll be using high density synthetic crystal data lattices, but that's another topic!

I don't think I'm atypical in preferring to have a 'hard copy' of some movies instead a Media Center PC or iTV box.

Why you won't see many complete TV show box sets

[zoeblade]

In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven.

The technology will certainly exist to do it, but no one will make such a product. It's a psychological thing - while someone might be willing to spend $40 - $60 for a season in a box, that person will be far less likely to spend seven times as much money on all seven seasons in one smaller box. For a start, it's a lot of money to spend in one go, even if you were going to get all the seasons eventually anyway. It also seems like too much money to spend on a single entertainment product, even if you are paying the exact same amount per episode.

We already have the technology for most people in developed countries to play MP3 CDs. I have seen a few audiobooks available in this format, because the single book will fit on a single disc. I haven't seen any MP3 CDs containing the complete works of a musician, however, because putting five or six albums on a single disc doesn't feel as if it is worth the same amount of money as buying those albums separately.

Errr...

[cliveholloway]

In a few years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven."

I might be able too, but I can assure you right here and right now that I won't.

Re:Errr...

[Farmer Tim]

You've missed the point. The idea of replacing a collection of The West Wing the size of a microwave oven with one that will fit inside a microwave oven has a lot of appeal to those of us with significant others who are fans of the show.

Re:I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connecti

[Afrosheen]

Well, DRM is like any other anti-piracy technology. It's simply a deterrent for the masses.

  Witness VCR tapes and macrovision. Months after its introduction, we had electronic devices that plugged in via RF or composite ports and stripped macrovision. Boom, instant copy, no video flutter. Soon, the DVD format with new protection was released.

  Witness DVDs. It took a little longer, but eventually thanks to DVDJon and others, the protection was cracked. Anyone with MythTV, DVDShrink, DVDecrypter, etc. can now copy their movies. Soon, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD become prevalent.

  Notice a pattern here? Once the masses get ahold of something, the companies start breaking a sweat and pushing for new standards. It's just like Napster..nobody cared until every single damn AOL user on the planet was on it. By then it had jumped the shark and was doomed anyway. Napster 2.0 never made it, but iTunes hit it big along with Allofmp3.

  Don't worry, soon enough whatever wacky protection on the latest formats will be broken and they'll push for something new.

No more paper... no more discs

[yaphadam097]

I still have plenty of both, and expect to for the rest of my lifetime. Sure, downloaded content will become more important as time goes on, but I don't think it will ever replace discs anymore than the computer replaced paper. In fact, plenty of people download content just to burn it to disc just like plenty of people print Word and PDF documents, and even webpages.

The value of HD-DVD is that now you can have content that is of the same quality as or better than what you can get over-the-air or on cable/satellite. I don't see that as trivial, and I don't see it as going away. My HD-DVD drive is in the mail, and I already own a couple discs. Plus, Netflix will send me HD-DVD content without any increase in my subscription cost. I'm sold.

So, the SW saga would take a week?

[Duggeek]

...an HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection.

Talk about "bullet time"... more like "bulls#!t time". It would take long enough to watch the complete trilogy on DVD before you even get the first episode in HD.

I propose, to the industry, a simplified formula:
No matter how "good" or "hi-def" the content is, the electronic delivery of that content should not take any longer than when you play-out the content itself.

This may defy our fond memories of dial-up, but <sarcasm>those were the halcyon days of yore.</sarcasm> Once we found that a streaming video could be viewed with a click, we were hooked. Now, I believe it is the very guideline stated here that defines our impression of "quality content delivery".

Litmus test: When clicking a link for YouTube or Google Video, don't you get annoyed when it starts to "stutter"? Buffering time aside, it is the interruption of the video stream that annoys us most of all; ergo, when the delivery takes longer than the content, it's no good.

There are already established bandwidth standards for HDTV anyway; if it ain't broke...

On the flip side, maybe it's a good thing that hi-def content is so "bulky". This could make the MPAA and RIAA quite satisfied with the status-quo; where it is time-inefficient to electronically distribute hi-def (read: more expensive) content when compared to physical media. An ad-hoc limitation on "unlicensed" distribution.

Bullshot.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

No goddamn way is HDDVD or BluRay dead.

Reliability. I *could* download the entire White Album from iTunes, or some other provider, but when my hdd dies and it doesn't happen to be on my ipod in it's entirety, guess what? I'm out 1 overhyped Beatles Album. Now apply that to digital video, and you're in the same situation.

In fact, the fact that bluray discs are virtually indestructable add to that... Besides, while optical media does rot, if I drop it on the floor in it's packaging, it's probably not going to crash right then and there. Unlike the hard disk inside my PC.

Re:Bullshot.

[havenskate]

I could just imagine the rentals of movies on hard drives for people that don't download the movie...

It's bad enough to get a scratched DVD or a DVD with someone's dinner on it. I think some bachelors must rent DVDs as a dual use frisbee and plate for their picnics...

I would, however, like to see some solid state distribution of media eventually. And I believe in Internet distribution -- but with all the concern over copyrights it's not going to get anywhere fast.

Re:Bullshot.

[schnikies79]

just thought i would chime in on the itunes issue even though it's a tad off topic. they will let you re-download what you have bought from them if you send them a nice email explaining what happened. they will only do this once and will kindly ask you to backup your collection next time. i was skeptical that they would but i had read that people were able. my roommate lost his a few weeks ago and emailed them with the problem. they had no problem giving back everything he had bought.

i wonder if any of the other pay-per-download companies will do this.

Re:Bullshot.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If this were a case where I could re-download and unlimited number of times, and authorize as many times as I want, I'd be less skeptical of downloadable services.

PlayStation 4

[havenskate]

Like a good Slashdot user, I did not RTFA. However, I'm a little confused by the summary.

At the end, there's a line stating, "Phil Harrison is already saying the PlayStation 4 won't use discs." Since the summary implies that the changeover will be to hard discs and not blu-ray or HD-DVD discs, I assumed this comment was refering to the PS4 being a hard drive based system which sounded pretty interesting to me and it's something I've never heard of before.

But, upon clicking the link I saw another slashdot summary with the following quote: 'I'd be amazed if the PlayStation 4 has a physical disc drive,' [Sony's Phil] Harrison says."

Ermmm.. Anyone willing to enlighten me? :) Thanks,

Jeff

Another

[UnknowingFool]

The guy has some points, but I think the real reason Bluray and HD-DVD will fail will have to do with form factor. People get confused today as it is between CDs and DVDs. Now two more formats are coming that are the same form factor that are incompatible. I would have opted to make the next generation discs noticeable smaller so that there was an immediate visual difference.

Re:Another

[Farmer Tim]

People get confused today as it is between CDs and DVDs.

Not in my experience. Most people usually can tell the difference between the larger DVD cases and the smaller CD jewel cases, and the disks themselves usually have labels on them which help identification somewhat. People do have difficulty telling the difference between CD and DVD drives and don't always know what they have in their computer, but that's a different matter; mostly, the CDs go into the box connected to the stereo, and DVDs go into the box connected to the TV (and those who have worked out that DVD players also play CDs have one box for everything; it doesn't get simpler than that).

Now two more formats are coming that are the same form factor that are incompatible.

Well, that is a problem, at least until one format wins out or manufacturers start making hybrid drives. But the advantage is that competition between the formats should push the price of hardware down faster than if there was only one; VHS succeeded because it was cheaper than the alternative, and I think some manufacturers will remember that lesson when it comes to making their preferred format successful. To be honest, I think the benefit here outweighs the inconvenience to the few who buy disks without regard to what they're playing them on (if you don't want to buy the wrong thing, know what the right thing is. Willful ignorance will be rewarded with wasted time).

I would have opted to make the next generation discs noticeable smaller so that there was an immediate visual difference.

You'd rather have a completely different physical format that isn't backwards compatible with your current collection of CDs and DVDs? Not even Sony, inventors of Betamax and MiniDisc, are prepared to go down that road. But I'd add that there are already 8cm CDs and DVDs, so a subtle size difference isn't going to be any more an effective means of identification than the blindingly obvious packaging and label.

IMO the standardisation of the 12cm disk format is a huge leap forward: it means any digital media bought in the last 20 years (and into the foreseeable future) can be played on one device, instead of needing a multitude of playback mechanisms. Is that not simple enough?

old news

[EricBoyd]

I've been saying as much for years - in fact here is a blog post from June 2005 where I say that both would be DOA, expect for the fact that the PS3 gives Blue-ray a little bit of hope.

The reason I've been saying this? The same reason why DVD-A and SACD never took off: there simply isn't enough difference if all you're doing is stepping up the quality, to make consumers see the point of upgrading. So they won't bother - an upgrade like this is a big deal (rebuying your entire collection, new TV, new players, etc.) so there has to be compelling reasons like there were for the switch from VHS to DVD (new slimmer form factor, ability to play again and again without degradation, looks much nicer, and only lastly higher quality). I'm just not seeing these reasons for HD-DVD or Blue-ray, and I think the vast majority of people are with me.

The real successor, like the article says, is digital downloads: no physical object at all. That's an upgrade that consumers will love, once the bandwidth is available.

Re:old news

[cmotd]

It's so enlightening to read what nerds have to say about things they know absolutely nothing about, namely marketing and how big corporations work. The new formats are not DOA. How can a movie company market a piece of digital information? They can market a disk package easily, but how do you market something that only exists entirely as nothing tangible. Has this idiot ever walked into a Mall and seen DVD sections in department stores? You see that's how MOST people buy things.Most people aren't techno wizards, and most importantly never will be. There's this stupid notion among computer people that one day everyone will be like them. Not happening. Most people want to do things the way they've always done them, and large companies wnat them to do that because they sell more that way. Saying the new formats are DOA simply because there is better technology around is naive and ignorant. We've had the technology to send a manned flight to Mars since the early 70s, so what?

Regarding Phil Harrison's quote

[testudorex]

I recall this same comment coming from a popular science magazine I read years ago talking about the ps3.
They had wanted to make it where your ps3 is "always on" downloading games/updates, and whatnot. This was long before Sony took sides on the HD format war, where Sony, invariably decided to fly head on into today's BD PS3.

Current BD vs. HD-DVD Numbers

[larryj]

Current numbers for Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD sales are available here.

I have no idea which of the two will survive (or if either will). It will probably be Blu-ray since I bought the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 this past weekend. I have a Panasonic 50" plasma (not 1080p, it's scaling to 720p/768p) but HD-DVD movies still look MUCH better than standard DVD. If it does die out, at least it was only $200. I'll enjoy Netflix HD-DVD rentals and a few purchases in the meantime.

I've been doing some research the last few days. My understanding of the history is that HD-DVD was released first. Blu-ray (commonly referred to as 'BD' which is short for Blu-ray disc I suppose) has more storage capacity and everyone expected the picture quality to be better. But that didn't happen. The initial BD releases were very disappointing and many people felt that HD-DVD looked better. New releases are apparently equal in picture quality. I think a lot of this has to do with the available drives as well as the mastering process. HD-DVD jumped out to a pretty big lead (not that either has sold a lot) but with the PS3 coming out tomorrow, there will be a lot more Blu-ray owners.

I'm curious to know how many 360 HD-DVD drives have already been sold and how it will continue to sell.

Re:Stated this for quite some time

[suckmysav]

The problem is it is AFAIK impossible to encumber the file you put on your customers USB stick with the requisite DRM restrictions necessary to keep the movie studios happy. I dont think you will see Blockbuster being allowed to do this at all.

What you WILL see is Steve Jobs positioning the ipod as the portable movie device of choice and I wouldn't be surprised at all if you found "ipod rental kiosks" in Blockbuster stores where you place your ipod into the dock and it downloads DRM controlled movies onto it.

Jobs is already on the verge of joining the Disney board which will mark the first step towards this goal.

hi-def formats scare me

[teh_chrizzle]

between the DRM, the possibility of a format/patent war, and all of the proposed flags, i'm going to put off buying HD/Blu Ray anything until there is a clear winner or a viable solution. the DRM part is SO scary that the dark lord himself says blu-ray is anti-consumer:

Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that'd be fine.

For us it's not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts.

nuff said

A positive review of satellite internet.

[PaganRitual]

Because you asked :

The dish on my roof looks cool. I feel like a spy or a military outpost. Sure, the connection sucks, but have you ever seen the inside of a Ferrari? I bet that looks crap as well. Quid pro quo.

Who here actually owns a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD?

[MrJynxx]

I actually just picked up an HD-DVD for the 360 on Tuesday. So far on my 47" old HDTV(purchased in 2003) it is displaying the movies beautifully!

King Kong that came with it was pretty good. I REALLY noticed a difference when the scenes were in the forest or something with a lot of color. The colors and the brightness in the picture is much better. But I picked up Fast and the Furious Tokyo drift (ok ok, I know, terrible movie but the scenes in Tokyo was great) . And I could see a noticeable difference with the picture quality especially the reflection in the cars, etc.. It was like I was watching the movie through a window in Tokyo.

And to think, I think my HDTV is kinda shitty now compared to what's offered now (projection, doesn't look as good as my other friends tv's)

Downloading ain't about your downstream bandwidth

[rickb928]

It's about routing all that traffic off the content providers' networks and onto *your* service provider's network and on to you.

If some 5% of us start using movie download services, what does that do to provisioning? Available bandwidth? Other users' performance in peak demand?

This is not only a problem of back-end systems, but net neutrality. If I start using some download service and schedule those 10-20GB downloads all hours of the day and night, sooner or later Cox is gonna say 'no', to preserve bandwidth and their peer routing.

And Cox will probably sell me the PVR (well, subscribe me to it) that will dump HD content night and day for me to watch when I will. And charge me for it as well. And ship it to me on their own network, no routing from Akamai, thank you very much.

Overall, the idea of downloading relatively huge content is ahead of most ISPs capabilities, or at least what they are willing to pay for, I think.

And buying a drive with your stuff on it sounds attractive until you consider dumping or playing those Sopranos episodes over USB2.0... Gack. Adding Firewire or SATA interfaces might jump the cost more than it's worth. Might.

One big advantage of DVDs must be the incredibly low cost of producing the media. I bet a DVD in quantity costs less than $2, probably a lot less, to produce. Add the shipping costs of heavier drives, and the inevitable damage from acceleration (handling to you in Rio Linda), and can drives work at all in the near future?

I'm looking forward to having to subscribe to everything. NFL, World Cup, Firefly, Sopranos, Discovery Channel, Food Network... Arrgghhh!

rick

I want 2160p60+ format

[Skapare]

But that's going to require a disk with 100 to 300 GB of data. Well, for movies I'll settle for the frame rate being exactly what the original film was shot at and let my display up-scan it to some integral multiple over 60 Hz. of course this means I'm going to have to find a display that good at a decent price.

Sure, 720p and 1080i are a good notch above 480i. But it's not that good that I would be willing to buy into an HD media format for higher than what DVD costs today. When the HD media format gets down to this price, then why not. But until then, it's just not really worth it.

But a 25 GB optical disk would be nice to hold a kick ass Linux distribution and a whole lot of music.

Bandwidth & Ownership

[Diagoras of Melos]

Just compare to what happened in the music space. The rent-your-music scene is a negligible, money-losing business. Only iTunes allows some semblance of perpetual possession. What's their market share? 90%?

The movie download market will face similar consumer resistance. There are an awful lot of good movies out there that aren't on cable. And a few dozen HD movies will fill up most hard drives, even terabyte hard drives, so the need for archival offline media like DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray will persist for a long time. That's completely aside from their utility in moving around large data files.

Which brings us to the ongoing American bandwidth joke. Sorry, but most consumers are unwilling to wait 3 hours or more for a movie to download, especially if they can't own it. This is America. Want-It-Now Consumer-Nation. And we're stuck with the lamest Internet bandwidth in the industrialized world. For this application, it's hurting commerce. Didn't we invent the Internet? Until the Democrats and the FCC break some legs over at the telecom boardrooms, that situation won't improve. A major upgrade of America's Internet access is probably more than ten years off. Our loss is Sony's gain. Go long.

Already outdated anyway due to HVD

[thejake420]

Holographic Versatile Disc already exists, and is already in live use by the likes of media mogul Ted Turner in at least one of his television stations. Expect a high end consumer model in 2007 (couple of thousand dollars) and a realistically priced version in 2008-2009.

More to read on the topic of HVD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile _Disc

It's not guesswork or opinion - they already exist, they're just still a little too pricey for the consumer market. However, in a couple of years it will be in any respectable home entertainment system.

blurry

[ElephanTS]

Slightly silly observation: When you look at the BluRay logo and defocus your eyes a little it looks like 'blurry'. It gets worse the smaller the logo is reproduced. Well, makes me laugh anyway.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/14/Blu- ray_Disc.svg

Here's why...

[one_red_eye]

HD-DVD and Blu-ray are DOA for the same reason the Dreamcast failed. Not enough titles for the hardware and the cost is too high for sane people to make the transition.

What about own versus rent?

[pico303]

The thing that bugs me about downloads is ownership. I could care less about download speed. If I have to leave my XBox 360 on all night to download a movie, that's fine. It's still faster than Netflix. My problem is how do I get it off the hard drive? How do I save it for later? How do I watch it on the TV that's not attached to the XBox? How do I watch it on my computer?

I own a ton of DVDs, most of which I won't replace with HD-DVD. I like to feel like I own the movie if I pay for it. I don't get that feeling when it's locked in an XBox or even on a PC. I don't want to get screwed by Microsoft or Apple charging me again if my hard drive crashes, or deciding that I can't migrate my movies to another PC for backup. What happens in a couple of years when I upgrade to an XBox 720? Or something by another manufacturer? What's to prevent Microsoft or Apple from deleteing my movies when they think I'm done with them?

At least with iTunes I can burn songs to a CD and transfer them away from my computer. I just don't get that feeling from the film studios that they're going to want me to do that, so I doubt my XBox--or any other download service--is going to support it either.

Change does not imply progress

[Anonymous Coward]

> But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast.
I'm sure "change" will happen. It always does. The question is, will there be progress.

Who needs discs?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you can store your games on the crushed souls of a thousand fanboys!

Copying HD-DVD and Bluray is easy (for geeks)

[daverabbitz]

Obviously the pixel data is decrypted at some point, as the bitstream in HDCP is different to the bitstream in AACS, so the software/firmware/hardware is decrypting it and re-encrypting it to the target device, so it seems trivial to me to just read-back the pixel data as it is decrypted, either using a debugger/virtualization in software, or a simple FPGA data logger in hardware.

You can already rip SACD and DVD-audio with an FPGA, soldering iron and a 24/192 sound card.

If I had a Bluray/HDDVD (not available here yet), I'm sure I would be making dumps of the unencrypted bitstream within a week.

The only way I can see that they would have of completely stopping access to the pixel data would be to have the decrypting and re-encrypting on a single chip, and having the Decoder in the TV in the LCD driver. And I don't think it will be very likely that they will have done this in every device which can play AACS/HDCP.

Also you can play HD DVD on Windows PC's so obviously you can extract the decryption keys from the software players (once you de-obfuscate them). And I know they can disable keys, but I can't see them disabling every software player, as this will piss of a huge amount of legitimate customers.

Not to mention, that if you are a warez d00d you can get pretty much every movie that's any good as an HD scan of higher quality than either format offers. 2k field anamorphic scans in H.264 and XviD are available if you know where to look, and they sure take a beating on your CPU to play them.

But yes, I can see that AACS will be more of a deterrent(sic?) and annoyance for Joe Six-pack than CSS.

Re:Copying HD-DVD and Bluray is easy (for geeks)

[daverabbitz]

And yes I am a dirty rotten pirate, but guess what, I don't care. At all.

And I do buy DVD's. Why?

Because it's usually cheaper (my time is worth something, and bandwidth ain't free) and easier than downloading them (sometimes even cheaper than renting them if you buy them at The Warehouse ($5 for Top-Gun, w00t)). And I only download scans for movies that are actually worth watching, because you can't buy HD-DVD/Bluray in NZ and you can't get most good movies on HD-DVD or Bluray.

But mostly I don't even bother as between working, more working, and doing useful things like music practise, who has time to sit on IRC camping out for a slot for the latest scan on XDCC.

And I don't think I'll buy any HDBluDVDRay products, as I simply can't be bothered, just as I can't be bothered getting HD scans anymore, and the quality isn't as good as scans anyway.

Also HDMI is stupid, why did they have to have to come up with a new standard with a new cable type and new plugs, when HDSDI has been in use in the Film industry since before consumer HDTV was available and runs over standard RG-59/RG-6 with standard BNC connectors.

It seems to be the trend these days that you take an established standard, bastardise it into an (in all ways) inferior standard, and start promoting it as the best thing since sliced bread.

Like LCD's, the industry seems to be pretending real hard that CRT's (you know those things with better refresh rates, resolutions, and dynamic range) never existed.

Also shame on all those who bought plasma TV's, they only have a 3 year half-life at best, realistically closer to 2.

I know someone who bought a $70,000 Plasma TV only a couple of years after they came out, it was fantastic for the first year or so, but 5 years later it is rubbish, really dim and greyed out. That's worse depreciation than a new car, or a large computer.

geez..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of this bullshit. I predict huge success of blueray.
You will want 50Gb on a inexpensive disc.

Re:I don't see anybody "demanding" faster connecti

[Jesus_666]

I think they don't care because what they have is fast enough.

True. I'm on 2 Mbps ADSL and the only thing I'm utterly dissatisfied with is the upstream (~150 kbps). I'd love 2M/2M SDSL or even 2M/1M ADSL, but the only way to get faster upstream would be to buy a bigger ADSL line (6M/? being the fastest in my area), which I don't really need.

don't think so.....

[SuperDre]

I really don't think both formats are DOA, maybe some people like only streaming or downloads (those are propably also the people who don't buy movies but illegally download them).. But as an owner of many original dvd's and vhs-tapes I for one want my movies that I paid for on a physical carrier (disk), because what happens when your disk is full or when you HD crashes, then you can pay for the movies again.. A lot of people like to have a physical thing to put on a shelve, just like books...

DVDA

[Dion]

Hey, didn't you hear about DVD Audio (DVDA, *snicker*)

akaik?!?

[bitbucketeer]

Well, let me clue you buddy... my new panasonic blu-ray player upconverts DVDs to 1080p and they look simply fantastic! Oh, and it play's Blu-Ray discs, too. But I'm not buying any more Blu-Ray discs until the studios stop putting the 1080i broadcast-compressed transfers on them!! 1080p can look much, much better than what they're giving us.

Re:akaik?!?

[Splab]

So you are saying that they will overtake the DVD market since DVD looks better at 1080p and you aren't buying Blu-Ray discs... WHAT?

As you so smartly put it, a good player can convert an existing DVD to higher quality - that is to show it on a higher resolution (my computer already does that, so woupty doo if your Blu-Ray comes with something I take for granted). So why on earth would anyone swap their collection of DVD's for Blu-Ray? As I pointed out above, people will take less quality for ease of use anytime - so if they get good quality with DVD, why the hell should they pay more for a crippled product? (You won't even do that yourself as you pointed out).

Re:Well I think they may be dead, but HD isn't

[swissfondue]

Eventually almost all new TVs sold will be able to show HD in full resolution, because the viewing quality is a great selling point for TV buyers. The same will be for HD digital video cameras, which will get substantially cheaper in 2007 and 2008.

All new Apple computers include HD video processing apps (iMovie, Quicktime) and the necessary processing power for editing and display. So the computer hardware and software for high definition is readily available.

The next step is sharing the HD content. One way is to play a home movie directly off the cam on the TV. Another way will be wireless (maybe Apple's "iTV"). A third could be a high definition DVD player and disks.

Storing content on hardrives, even as cheap as they are, is still relatively expensive. As soon as cheap HD DVDs and players appear, sharing content with other people or storing it on an optical disk for long term storage could become a serious challenge for DVDs.

The ecosystem for high definition video hardware and content still needs to grow, but I can see a future for HD players based on the growth of high definition home video.

Why internet streaming isn't the answer to anythin

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all when a new distribution medium appears it tends to complement the existing ones, not replace them...when "automatic" pianos appeared, piano players didn't vanish...and radio broadcast didn't kill live performance...etc

So how can disc be a better media than streaming in certain circumstances ?

- First, even if internet pipes tend to grow larger, physical medium also tend to grow in capacity and speed...so, at least for now, you can get higher bitrates when playing offline content.
    For example HD discs play movies at 10-20 Mbits/s...not everyone can steadily download at this bitrate for 2 hours non stop, and content providers better upgrade their servers and pipes if they want to feed more than a hundred customers at a given time.
That's why HD downloads are more in the 5 Mbits/s range "thanks" to aggressive compression.

Microsoft's Xbox movie rentals, which expire 24 hours after they are downloaded, are a good example of what those deals will look like

And just as record labels' fears over music downloads were placated by copy-protection

- Second, even if content providers would like otherwise, I think people like to "own" content, like "I *have* this dvd" not just rent it for 24 hours. They also want to be able to *use* the content they own, like playing a dvd in any kind of dvd player and not being blocked by "copy-protection" when lending your pruchases to relatives...

When you buy a DVD, you pay for the cost of embedding a piece of plastic with data, packaging it, shipping it to retailers, and stocking it on shelves. Movie downloads require only the space necessary to store the data on a hard drive

- Third, even if we know streaming if really cheaper for provider than physical media, the price is the *same* !! At least when buying a plastic disc (even if its cost is like 5% of the retail price) you think you actually bought something.

I'd have the impression of getting screwed if I bought a virtual, lossy, drm-infested, 0$ version of a physical media for the same price.
That's why big media corporations like this idea...

Noooo.... DVDs dont' have "DRM"

[Joce640k]

DVDs dont' have "DRM", they have copy protection.

It's not the same thing at all. I can take my DVD anywhere and watch it.

"DRM" could mean I'm only allowed watch it in my own house on one specific piece of hardware.

You're all stating good points but....

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're smart you're already ripping your DVDs into disc images. My collection is already stored on my hard drive. Download/rip the highest def you can get your hands on. You will be happy with yourself later when storing that 'huge' collection costs pennies and transmitting takes seconds.

No discs already. Partially.

[ThePhilips]

Phil Harrison is already saying the PlayStation 4 won't use discs.

In a way, when modern game consoles would support full fledged game downloads (iow games 100% downloaded from net a-la D2D used for PC games Halflife and NWN2) that would mean death of discs. Of course, Wii would have problems with that: it supports only SD cards which are max 2GB. Xbox360/PS3 with many gigabyte hard drives should have less problems.

Also, I think many publishers prefer disks, since that way they have more assurances against warez copies. (I personally prefer to have disk - as proof of purchase. Though applying "No CD" cracks now is part of normal game play (-: ) And, in the end, for retail presence games also need disks.

Re: USB hard drive box that has HD out

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Is that the AVX-100TX? I hunted for the specs you describe, and that looked like the closest, but I didn't see anything about .isos. (IFO is listed though.)

Any chance of a link?

[Kadin2048]

Those willing to break the law, can enjoy tommorow's technology right now. Hell, I just bought my daughter for xmas a usb hard drive box that has HD out and will play H.264, divx,xvid vob,iso, most anything (it's based on mplayer from what I can tell) and with a 750Gig drive in it can hold every single anime dvd she owns as a ISO file and plays as if the dvd was inserted into a player (sans all the DRM and restriction crap) in a portable device that fits in her backpack.. 2 bookshelves full of DVD's only slightly recompressed fit in the thing. If we recompress to H264 or other format I can fit 2 book cases full in the thing. (she wants the dvd menus and extras, go figure.) It cost me $500.00 new from newegg.com with the hard drive.)

Any chance you can give a link to this product? Seems pretty neat. I'm looking for a STB that would play movies compressed to MP4 or some other high-quality format and also disc images and the usual media; I had figured that I would be rolling my own microATX box and basically building a HTPC. For $500 depending on what it contained, hardware-wise, that might be a good deal. For a DIY job, you'd probably pay almost that in parts I think, plus whatever you value your time at.

No, you missed the point.

[cliveholloway]

Perhaps I need to wrap posts like that in a "pedantic" tag.

"You'll buy every episode", is NOT the same as, "You'll be able to buy every episode". The former implies that you will buy and have no option not to. Get the point now?