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End of the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD Format War?
Next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas should shake up the format war. The NYTimes reports that Warner Brothers will announce the Total HD disc that can store both Blu-ray and HD-DVD content. The article also mentions that LG (along with "possibly other gadget makers") is expected to announce a player that can play both formats. According to Yahoo, LG has not announced pricing, but the Times notes that such dual-format devices are bound to cost more than existing players. And the Times outlines the many considerations that would come into play before studios decide to release their content in both formats on a single disc.
This will end the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD war much in the same way that DVD±R drives ended the DVD+R / DVD-R war.
And to a lesser extent the Betamax / VHS war.
Summation 2
So, will I be able to buy a Total HD Player that plays both Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs?
No, its the other way round. They are claiming that these Total-HD disks will play in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players flawlessly. If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
Um, HD-DVD uses the blue-violet 405nm laser too.
I'm keeping out of this arguement though, I really don't care which is better until one of them fails. Too much DRM, too many faults and cost is just too much.
Monkeyboi
Last I saw was that Sony (and possibly Toshiba with HDDVD) was refusing to license any player that could play both formats?
or has some one (LG?) gotten around this some how?
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
superior just based on the fact that it can hold more data
Brilliant. A single criterion for superiority.
"Blu-Ray is an always has been superior just based on the fact that it can hold more data"
Yeah. I have some backup tapes that can hold more than my hard drive but I still use my hard drive as my primary source of data storage. Why? Because storage capacity isn't everything. I'm not saying BluRay is or isn't superior but I'd wager data throughput will be a much bigger factor. The cost of the reader and writer will also be significant, especially if the only difference is indeed storage capacity.
Blu-Ray is an always has been superior just based on the fact that it can hold more data (and it uses that cool blue laser).
Both HD-DVD and blu-ray use blue-lasers, so that is a non-issue. Blue-Ray has more capacity per layer (25GB/layer) as opposed to HD-DVD (15GB/layer), but a dual-layer HD-DVD has more than enough space to hold a movie and all the crappy extra feature, especially when using h264 or VC1 codec. So extra space for blu-ray is also irrelevant. Extra space may be needed for games, and IMHO thats where Blu-ray will shine. But for movies HD-DVD is a better deal because in the end you get same audio/video quality as blu-ray at half the price. Blu-ray might just end up being a gaming-format for ps3 and nothing more.
Price should be a consideration in 'superior format' as well ...
HD-DVD is currently much less expensive for consumers, and manufacturers of both discs and hardware. This may not be the case forever, but (hypothetically) if it is cheaper to produce 2 or 3 HD-DVD discs then to produce 1 Blu-Ray disc the storage capacity advantage is not really important.
As has been noted in an earlier post, Blu-Ray disks hold more data. Those behind Blu-Ray would not be happy to see their disks reduced to computer archives rather than media as Warner Bros. sells content to happy consumers. This could be a considerable loss for Blu-Ray as empty disks sell for much less than disks with media.
Something that is not mentioned in the article is why consumers would want either format anyway.
I have a 1080i television and a seXbox-360, but I don't want either format because of the DRM and the lack of features. Maybe in the future when they can offer something substantive, as DVD did when it displaced video tape, I'll consider Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, or Total DVD. Right now, DVD looks just fine to me.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
The ability to make a player that plays both formats has been around for a while now (nearly as long as the formats infact), however Sony (and the rest that hold the patents on Blu-Ray) were refusing to sell a license for any device that would play both formats. Now LG is announcing that they will be sellign one.
so either they are ignoring the Patents (and will get sued horribly for it) or have gotten a License (or found a work around).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Or look at it this way:
People don't know which way the market will swing. Some manufacturers are trying to win either way with a disc that can be played in both players. However, once the market is decided, nobody will buy them, what'd be the point? If the market never gets decided, consumers will just get bored, buy an HD/Blueray drive and still ignore Total HD.
Whatever happens, I reckon a year from now Total HD will be all but forgotten.
If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
I doubt it. Both formats' relative failure up until this point has nothing to do with the "format war". I use quotes because there really isn't any war to speak of; nobody cares. Look throughout recent history, and you'll see that nobody cares about incremental quality improvements in media format. If the media's physical shape or size changes, that's something else, but there aren't any physical changes here. Even broadcast quality upgrades have been ill-received, and have only come about because the FCC has mandated it. In this case, I don't believe a regulatory agency even exists to mandate media format upgrades.
So, dual mode discs or dual mode players or even a total end to any disagreement between content producers will change nothing; HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will each go the way of DVD-Audio (do most of you even know what that is?).
The new Warner Bros. "Total HD" hybrid disc and LG Electronics (re-announced) combo HD DVD/Blu-Ray drive are solutions for a problem we didn't ask for: studios being idiotic and only releasing movies in one format.
WB and Paramount get free passes for being the only studios to support both formats. Everyone else gets Fs.
The HD market is a tiny swab of moist air in the filled water bucket of DVD revenue. I think sales are still under 1%. I can guarantee you that they would be at 5% or more if this stupid format war never came around. That's the main issue.
I don't understand why Universal (and to some extent WB) continue to make these HD DVD/DVD combo discs. For the uninitiated, these are dual-sided discs, with the DVD on one side and the HD DVD on the other. Dual-sided discs are always more complicated and expensive to manufacture and they're really not a value-add to consumers. Most big releases on DVD go with multiple discs rather than multiple sides. So, it makes it a crappier product and on top of that, they charge a premium, anywhere from $10 to $20 (MSRP) for our "benefit"! Note: expect this to play out in this new/twin/hybrid Blu-Ray and HD DVD format. Why pay $25 for one movie when you can pay $40 for both, one of which is unnecessary?
And here LG joins the fray, offering a dual-format player for $800-$1300. Nevermind that at that price range a savvy shopper would be already able to buy both players. HDTV owners aren't buying the new formats because they don't want to pick the losing side. Why don't they want to pick the losing side? Because they don't want to buy a new player for the winning format years down the road. Mind you, in 2009 or 2010 HD players are going to be $199. So these people are holding off because they don't want to spend $199 in another year. And a new $1000 player is supposed to calm these fears?
I can't put it any clearer than this: they fucked up. Everyone did. And now to make up for their mistakes, we should pay extra. And we won't.
The best part? The statements we'll hear in 2008 that the HD market isn't catching on. And who's to blame? Why, not the studios, but pirates! Pirates took our profits.
This whole ordeal is being played out by giant billion-dollar corporations that are basically repeatedly hitting themselves and each other in the groin with a hammer. When we ask them to stop and re-think what they're doing, they just ask us for money to cover the medical expenses. And then they use that money to buy more fucking hammers.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Disc-based media needs to be retired.
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works.
An interesting side note on formats...
Most of my friends who have the new wide screen HD TVs don't have HD service. Furthermore, they stretch standard TV to fill their wide screen which makes everyone look fat. They end up with a low quality distorted picture but they are really impressed with their new "media experience". This is the real HD experience. I doubt there is any real demand for true HD.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The current "big thing" with TV programs is to package them in seasons for sale on DVDs (sometimes along with Extras).
If this idea makes the jump to HD media (which is a reasonable assumption), then the extra space means less discs in the set, or the same number of discs with more space for extras.
Just because the extra space doesn't seem relevant for one application (storing a movie with some extras) doesn't mean it couldn't be used for some other parallel application that might need it.
Thats like saying "people will never need more than X amount of HardDrive space in their machines, since all you need is X to install WindowsXP and a word processor". Some people do things like Video or Audio editing which might need more space. Others need to run large Databases for businesses.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
This makes my head hurt.
On the one hand we've got discs that have both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and on the other players that play both formats.
Somebody slap somebody!
Where "the cheaper format to produce" == standard-definition DVD, right?
Most of my friends who have the new wide screen HD TVs don't have HD service. Furthermore, they stretch standard TV to fill their wide screen which makes everyone look fat. They end up with a low quality distorted picture but they are really impressed with their new "media experience". This is the real HD experience. I doubt there is any real demand for true HD.
I would submit that your friends are ninnies, and that you draw your conclusions from too little data.My brother has an HD TV and an HD service, which he is always keen to show off. It's a source of endless amusement to keep asking him if we're watching an HD broadcast, and making him check on the guide. The best part is when he blames his 1 year old top end Sony HD TV for not being able to display the HD content properly. He's just convinced that there must be a better experience to be had, somehow, some way, if he can just get the cabling right.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm curious where you got that impression from, since HD and BD can use the same codecs (MPEG 4, MPEG 2 and VC-1). The only real core difference is space and so far that hasn't been an advantage for either side yet.
Comparisons at this time are mostly inconclusive as well.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Your brother, evidently, is either an idiot with poor eyesight _or_ correct about his TV sucking wastewater -- here's why:
Standard Television signal is approximately 480 lines of resolution, meaning there are 480 different pixels in every vertical line on the television, and the signal is interlaced, meaning that the TV displays 1/2 of the lines in the first scan (1st, 3rd, 5th, so on) and then the second half of the lines in the second scan (2nd, 4th, 6th, so on). This means that at any given time, only 240 of the lines of video on your TV are being updated, meaning that you're not getting all 480 lines of solid resolution. They are _there_ but they are not being displayed at the exact same time.
HD Television is either 720 lines of resolution in non-interlaced format or 1080 lines of resolution in interlaced or non-interlaced format. Even with 1080i, you're still getting 540 lines of resolution per scan -- more than double that of standard television. The actual resolution is almost 3 times as high as standard definition television. With 720p, you're getting more than 3 times the detail per frame than on 480i! You'll note if you research that there is a strong following of videophiles who claim that 720p is actually a more detailed picture than 1080i/p, but personally, I like my 1080i just fine.
The moral of the story is that if your brother can't tell the difference between an HD source and a 480i source, he needs a new set of eyeballs or to clean the 3 feet of dust off the television.
I have a Hitachi 51s715 51" HDTV and the difference between standard definition content and HD content is more than apparent, it is _obvious_. Anyone that isn't truly blind can see the amazing difference in clarity, color depth, black reproduction, etc.
I'm not sure if you're making your story up, your brother is a blind moron, or his TV sucks wastewater, but one of the three is true -- an HD signal cannot be mistaken for an SD signal by anyone with eyesight!
Lastly, regarding programming, Comcast offers free HD with any PVR system, DirecTV has a solid lineup of HD channels, Charter offers a good selection for no additional cost (you just have to call for the receiver), Dish Network has a poor selection but also has HD... Anyone saying it's hard or difficult to get HD service in their area must not be in an area serviced by any of those four major providers.
(ps, I'm not a video scholar, and my description of TV resolution is probably far from 100% accurate, but does cover the basics. Correct me on it if you want to, but I'm not claiming to have pioneered the NTSC standard or anything.)
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
It's the wrong format.
Make a standard that takes solid state memory, capable of arbitrary resolution and supports the best quality and the most most common formats. Make it cheap (no lasers or moving parts should help a fair bit). Initial market will be home videos and people with media on their PCs that they want to view on their television screen.
It will take a few years for media to become cheap enough for it to be worth releasing pre-recorded movies but if there's enough of a market without them then they will become too large a market for the movie industry to ignore.
There's also ease of manufacture, but that's a major, major win for HD-DVD, instead. It's essentially free for a DVD pressing plant, and the yields are almost as good as normal DVD. Meanwhile, everything I hear suggests that BD-50s are pretty much still test pressings at the Sony lab, with roughly 10% yields.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
In this case, I don't believe a regulatory agency even exists to mandate media format upgrades.
Please, PLEASE don't give the MPAA ideas like that!!!
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works. I have to call bullshit on this one. I don't believe there are people who don't have cable OR internet OR a phone who buy significant amounts of DVDs. I also disagree with the idea that disk media should be retired, but I just can't go along with your claim without some evidence to back it up.
And it isn't about whether someone "deserves" to watch a movie. It is about whether it makes economic sense to offer a particular product. I think there is a lot of life left in standard def DVDs. I think that some kind of next generation DVD format will succeed - and I think it will be HD-DVD. I think it will take longer than most people think for HD-DVD (assuming it wins) to surpass standard def DVDs. My guess is that it won't happen until 2012.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
This would sound like a really good point unless you've ever actually purchased or rented one of these DVD sets, and wondered why there's only two episodes on a disc. The reason for this is that you can charge more for a 5-disc set than you can for a 2-disc set. Even though the content is the same, the customer feels like they're getting more if they have a big box full of DVDs. Just take a look at the back of any TV series disc, and observe how much of the burned area is used. Usually it's only about 30% of the total disc area.
If they can already fit more content on these discs, there's no reason to believe they'll add additional content in the space Blu-Ray provides. If anything, they'll just throw more crap extras on there that nobody wants (like trivia games, previews, and links to their website, since the interesting stuff like interviews and behind the scenes footage costs money to create).
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
Motorola HD cable boxes default to 480i. If he has one, power off the cable box, hit menu, then switch the to HD 1080i and override SD to 480p. Hit menu again and power it back on. You might have to be switched to an SD channel for the menu to come up.
Many cable guys don't set the box up properly when they come to your house.
You've completely ruined my off-the-cuff flippant remark with logic.
Shame on you.
You are right, there really is no war - you only got the conclusion wrong.
Blu-Ray will obviously win because they have these things going for them:
1) The studio that makes content that looks most impressive in HD (Disney with Pixar, which can re-render at true HD resolutions with no grain or noise in the image).
2) Star Wars
3) The number of PS3's in homes now and in the future mean there are already an order of magnitude more Blu-Ray players in consumers hands than HD-DVD, and that gap will only grow wider.
4) The support for Apple and Dell in burning home HD movies to Blu-Ray (Dell ship s aBlu-Ray burner already and HD camcorders are already in the prosumer range).
By the end of this year, all will be clear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Brilliant. A single criterion for superiority. (holds more data)
So since the two formats are otherwise the same physical size, support the same codecs, and support the same protection system - do you need any other form of superiority to declare it better, especially as someone who may potentially look to be storing or moving large amounts of data on these discs? What is it you are looking for?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Big, big difference. You're talking blank recordable media. If the Blu-ray/HD-DVD conflict only affected blank media, it wouldn't be a big deal. But we are talking about factory pressed discs with movie content. It is a big problem that you can only get some moves on one format.
Well, you were right on one point, you don't know anything about ntsc.
:-)
1: sdtv is 480 lines. But those lines are measured as fine vertical lines. Or dots per horizontal scan line.
But, the fact that ntsc is also interlaced is also in this context, irrevelant. That only becomes revelant when talking about how many scan lines there are horizontally. Thats in the next kettle of fish.
2: There are 525 of those scan lines in ntsc, but only the odd lines are refreshed, then the even ones, in any two vertical scans. In ntsc we lose about 22 lines for vertical synch and hidden data, like closed captioning yadda yadda.
3: By the time the video is filtered well enough to keep it in its assigned ntsc channel, we have only about 330 dots per scan line left, nothing higher gets through else the Friendly Candy Company comes calling with a citation in hand for adjacent channel interference. Done well, this is still subjectively sharper than your old vhs vcr could ever do, which was in the 240 line range.
4: So sdtv winds up being about 480x400, interlaced. This ain't hdtv by any means, but because theres no analog noise, and no analog ringing artifacts or color 'dot crawl' it does look better to the unwashed. ntsc, the best we can put on your scren, is about 330 vertical lines by about 500 horizontal scan lines, which, with the 3 line comb filters we use to enhance the sharpness of horizontal lines in the image, loks subjectively sharper but is in fact the equ of about 200 real horizontal lines. Those filters are why you occasionally see some very slight slanted line in the pix literally snap from one line to the next on your screen. This of course requires matching filters in the viewers set, which only the top of the line stuffs have.
5: 1080i, which I've seen quite a bit of, is much sharper. But I can recall, long before we had an ATSC stds body to codify this stuff, seeing a Zenith demo at the N.A.B. show, a demo tape playing from a specially modified type C 1" machine with the tape moveing at about 30 ips and the drum whining similar to the old 2" quadruplex machines, of about 10 minutes of Stars on Ice, with Red Buttons, all that 1 hour tape could hold.
The stars all had their names embroidered on their tee shirts, and with the camera at max wide angle to show the whole floor, Red stopped and took a bow from center ice. You could read his t-shirt when he straightened back up. On a projection screen 4 foot high and 8 feet wide he was maybe 6" tall in that image. That was a 2x1 aspect ratio pix and I'd estimate the real, working resolution of that setup was at least 10,000x5000.
The image compression wasn't quite as good as mpeg2 (it was still under development itself) then and was done in hardware both ways. The data rate from that modified type C was in the 500 megbytes/second area. In other words, that single picture would have occupied more than all the bandwidth available in a 120 channel cable system. Not terribly practical in the real world.
As an exersize in what could be done, I've seen it, so even 1080i today is just a wannabe to me. OTOH, it (1080i) is far far better than anything I've seen in my 40+ years as a broadcast engineer watching our own on the air ntsc signals through a $5,600 fcc standard receiver. We haven't nick-named it Never Twice Same Color without reason.
--
Cheers, Gene
Speaking of anecdotal evidence...
I think that is true only of people who really haven't seen HD. Even my mom, who watches approximately no TV on average, is stunned by HD quality and will sit in my brother's room watching something like Discovery HD for 60-90 minutes. That's pretty much unheard of for her in most cases.
She wants an HD TV. She just can't justify the cost right now because, in her words, "there's nothing wrong with our TV." When either the costs come down a bit more or something goes flaky with the TV, she's going to be in the HD world. And she's probably going to beat me there!
I WILL NOT defend the DTV initiative that created 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p and all of them at 24 frames, 30 frames, and 60 frames. However, there are some technical reasons, we watch different content. And, for extra fun, to manage legacy stuff, the 480i/p formats support BOTH a 4:3 and 16:9 version...
Film content/transfers, which has more information than the HD video (which is why you could release the film, transfer to VHS, transfer to DVD, transfer to HD for D-VHS and broastcast (in both 1080i and 720p), and transfer again for the HD formats with a 1080p version), and all look good. However, film is shot in 24 frames/second. To make DVD players cheaper, the content is converted to 480i/60 (one film frame for 2 DVD frames, one film frame for 3 DVD frames). Then, we started to get HD Ready sets that supported either 720p or 1080i, and if you are analog (and therefore 1080i), you can also do 540p, so once you support that, might as well support a 480p signal, analog is cool that way, just update the electronics and show a different image, digital sets like Plasma/LCD/DLP need to scale to their digital output), so we got progressive scan DVD players. Reading notes on the DVD (normally, or comparing and guessing), we convert those 2:3 frames with a reverse pull down, to get back to 24 frames that we show progressively... this matters because if you just show the lines you get:
Frame 1: film frame 1
Frame 2: film frame 1
Frame 3: film frame 2, but half the lines are still from film frame 1
Frame 4: film frame 2
Frame 5: film frame 2
Frame 6: film frame 3, but half the lines are still from frame 2
So you can't just add in half the lines and show it progressively, you have to figure out when the frame changes.
So, for film, IDEALLY you want to sent 24 frames/second, and let the set adapt accordingly (whether showing one frame twice, and the next three times, or even better, be able to process the image at 24 frames/second and show them each once for longer).
However, given the allocation of bandwidth for HDTV, and the realities of MPEG-2 encoding, we essentially got 4 "useful' formats, and a bunch of stupid ones, 480i/60 4:3 (for simply digitizing existing legacy content is useful), 480p/60 (kind of useful for game systems) in both 4:3 and 16x9, this was pointless, a 480p 16x9 format was sufficient to handle digitally sending DVD quality images, and 720p/60 and 1080i/60. 720p/60 is the most resolution you could get in the stream at 60 frames per second, progressively, and 1080i/60 was the most resolution you could get at 60 frames/second interlaced.
Now, should we have both progressive and interlaces, I would say maybe...
If you are shooting something fast moving like sports, you want the 60 frames/second, so 720p/60 was the ideal format for broadcasting sports events. If you are shooting something slow moving, like a nature show (which was a lot of early HD programming, and it looks great, but not sure the purpose), you don't care about as many frames, and interlaced vs. progressive matters less, but getting 1080 lines was useful, making 1080i/60 a useful format for these. However, for film transfers, which will be a large portion of HD footage for a while, 1080p/24 made a lot of sense, you are only sending 24 frames/second, so why not get the extra resolution.
Remember, the TV stations had a dream, promise HDTV, and deliver it maybe to the cable/satellite operators over a line, but not OTA. Only 10% of people got their programming OTA, so TV stations largely existed because of government decisions to keep them (as opposed to the network simply selling content to cable/satellite directly), so their idea: either broadcast 6 480i signals, requiring no new equipment other than digitizing, and all of a sudden, you have 6 channels to sell ads on. A local market with 7 stations would conceivably have 42 channels available without paying a monthly fee, that's kinda cool, and all the networks have a bunch of digital stations that the created fo
when was the last time you purchased a monitor that couldn't display games or video at HD resolutions? when was the last time you saw a laptop advertised with a 4:3 screen?