Popular HD DVD Disc Hits a Snag

An anonymous reader writes "Following weeks of headlines touting strong sales for Blu-ray discs, rival next-gen format HD DVD looked like it had its own success story in the making with this week's HD DVD release of the cult hit 'Children of Men.' The disc recieved a stellar review at High-Def Digest, and went on to out-sell the most popular Blu-ray discs on Amazon. But now comes word of apparent incompatibility issues with the Xbox 360 HD DVD player, with some (but not all) consumers reporting that even multiple returns of the disc are unplayable on the format's leading playback device."

Comments

Re:ah DRM

[EveryNickIsTaken]

"(I remeber a similar story about Tivo DVD players not playing new Blue-ray discs)"

You're aware that BluRay discs require a BluRay player, right?

Re:Cult hit?

[Conception]

Because it was a British movie released in 2006 to film festivals and not a Hollywood style blockbuster?

Not just XBox 360 Player that has problems...

[TheNetAvenger]

Not just XBox 360 Player that has problems...

I know it is wild to assume that SlashDot would not mention this part, but it appears that some Toshiba based drives also have problems with this Disc.

PS. I hate the HD-DVD DRM as much as everyone else, but if the DRM was to blame it would NOT be failing at the DRIVE level and would be failing at the player level where the DRM is processed.

Re:What's old is new again

[walt-sjc]

So the question now is, can the people buying the movie get their money back? I know that most stores will not let you return opened music / videos / software - only exchanges for the same exact thing in case of bad media.

Re:What's old is new again

[SirMeliot]

Yep I had that too.

In the UK Woolworths sold a Samsung DVD player which was I think the first sub £200 DVD player you could buy in the high street. They sold a ton of these and were very good about taking them back again when they wouldn't play the Matrix.

IIRC early PS2s didn't care too much for the Matrix either.

Chronos Blu-ray PS3 again

[whiteSanjuro]

The first pressing of Chronos on Blu-ray had a similar problem with the PS3, but no one found that newsworthy at the time...

Re:recieved-received

[illegalcortex]

Or oneiromancies. Or deficiencies and zeitgeist.

Or fancied, policies, conscience, prescient, ancient, efficiency, financier, glacier, society, caffeine, protein, Keith, Leith, Sheila, deindustrialize, reignite, being, seeing, keister, neither, obeisance, seize, sheikh, species, feisty, kaleidoscope, height, seismic, counterfeit, foreign, reveille, sovereign, heifer, leisure, atheist, onomatopoeia.

That rule is actually fairly misleading. The British one is a little better, but still has problems.

In all fairness...

[fyngyrz]

The PS3's Blue-Ray player will not play in HD unless you have a 1080p or 1080i capable display. Since many displays sold until very recently were 720p max, especially projector systems, this puts quite a "ding" in the experience of the PS3's Blue-Ray playback.

What the PS3 does for a system like that is drops back to 480p, which is for all intents and purposes the same as a standard DVD player running in progressive scan. Except that the disk cost $30 instead of $15, that is. These circumstances make the presence of a Blue-Ray player in the PS3 somewhat moot for those with 720p maximum systems.

Sony is of course well aware of this, and despite the recent revelation that the PS3 has a built-in scaler, none of the many updates since the machine was released addresses the problem.

There is a DRM-related agreement (or perhaps I should say conspiracy) with the entertainment industry that says that no component system will be allowed to output more than 720p, but 720p itself is allowed. Standing witness to this is Sony's own stand-alone player which has component out and the ability to do 720p without any problems.

So it isn't only Microsoft that has produced an incomplete or broken solution in the high definition disk arena; Sony's implementation isn't without its serious problems.

Re:In all fairness...

[xero314]

I HAVE a 5000, and it does NOT take 1080i and produce anything useful. You should contact Infocus Immediately since their spec claims 1080i compatibility and they have provided multiple updates for 1080i related issues such as 1080i image positioning is corrected and 720p and 1080i @ 50Hz sources sync and display correctly.

if there is some other infocus 5000 other than the SP5000 then I apologize. Just hate to see you having a faulty unit or Infocus making claims and updates for functionality that does not exist.

Re:Why can't the industry make things compatible?

[illegalcortex]

Is there really a difference in the error correcting codes written to +R and -R?

Yes.
From http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-t o-choose-cddvd-archival-media/

As I said earlier, DVD-R sucks for data preservation for three reasons: inferior error correction, inferior 'wobble' tracking, and the fact its data writing methods look like an un-needed halfway point between CD-R and DVD+R. The wobble tracking I shall explain first, then the error corrections method, then the specifics of ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP optimum power settings.

For a CD/DVD burner to track where it is on the disc, it uses three things: the 'wobble' of the data track (where it actually wobbles back and forth instead of in a straight line) to tell where it is in the track, the position of the track to tell where it is on the disc, and some additional information on the disc to tell where the track (singular, as CDs and DVDs only have one track, and it is written in a concentric spiral) begins and ends.

This additional information on a CD-R is called the ATIP (Absolute Time In Pregroove), which contains how long the track is, where it begins, what the maximum and minimum writing speeds are, what formula dye it uses, who actually made it, optimum power control settings, and error correction data. The ATIP is stored as a frequency modulation in the wobble itself.

However, since the wobble changes subtly to encode data, it is impossible to use with the small size of tracks DVD requires, as electric noise in the laser pickup and wobbles introduced by the electric motor spinning the disc, these could easily be read as frequency changes in the real track itself.

On DVD-R, they tried to solve the problem with something called 'pre-pits' where spikes in the amplitude of the wobble appear due to pits fully out of phase with the rest of the track (ie, between two spirals of the track, where there is no data). This can be viewed as a simple improvement over CD-R as it makes it easier to track the wobble (since the wobble is constant except for the easy to detect and remove spikes).

Unfortunately, this method as one flaw: due to electric noise in the laser pickup, it would be very easy to miss the pre-pit (or read one that wasn't actually there) if the disc were damaged or spun at fast speeds. The time to read a pre-pit is 1T (roughly .0000000038th of a second), which even for a computer can be easy to miss. DVD-R traded hard to track frequency changes for hard to read wobble-encoded data.

On a DVD+R, however, they came up with a much better method. Instead of changing the frequency of the wobble, or causing amplitude spikes in the wobble, they use complete phase changes. Where CD-R's and DVD-R's methods make you choose between either easy wobble tracking or easy ATIP reading, DVD+R's method makes it very easy to track the wobble, and also very easy to encode data into the wobble. DVD+R's method is called ADIP (ADdress In Pre-groove), which uses a phase change method.

With ADIPs' phase changes, the direction of the wobble changes and continues on going in the exact opposite direction (ie, counter-clockwise to clockwise, or the reverse). For example, if the wobble was 'going up', the phase change causes it to instantly reverse direction start 'going down' no matter where it in the wobble cycle. The phase change is very easy to detect, and also continues for a set period (in this case, one 32T section of the track, or 32 times longer than the pre-pit method of DVD-R).

The state of the phase change (clockwise or counter-clockwise) encodes the individual bits in each block In essence, with the phase change method, not only do you have an easy way of tracking the wobble, but you now have an easy way of reading wobble-encoded data.

As I mentioned earlier, this wobble-encoded data includes error correction of wobble-en

Re:What's old is new again

[cyphercell]

No kidding, what I find interesting is that it's the same movie on the same platform showing truly sporadic results. This is a bit different than the "White Rabbit" scenario where it was one movie, having problems with specific players because of an identified feature.

Re:The Matrix

[elrous0]

Actually, IIRC, the worst offender back in the early days of DVD was Polygram. Not only did their packaging suck, but quite a few of their titles (most notably "Kalifornia") simply wouldn't play on Toshiba DVD players or clones (because the Toshibas were strict about not playing improperly mastered discs).

Incidentally, for those who are interested, you can find a pretty good list of problematic early DVD's here.

Re:What's old is new again

[jon_joy_1999]

apparently, the mods today don't like sarcasm that has a point. Lets try again.

MS is part of the group that created the HD-DVD standard. They were not part of the group that made the DVD standard. Titles that had problems with the DVD standard initially either were not from groups associated with the DVD standard, or they were stupid.

Point is, I don't care if some DVD titles had problems with early DVD players. That is completely unrelated to whether or not it is ridiculous that MS can't follow the standard they helped create. Is MS-bashing cliche'? Sure. Does that mean that it isn't dumb that this is happening? No.

first off. this isn't sarcasm that has a point. this is MS bashing without any facts, which makes you look stupid in my eyes.
I don't care if this gets modded down, that's the truth.
I am sick and tired of people jumping to conclusions without all of the facts.
FTA "We've contacted both Microsoft and Universal, but have not yet received any official word on whether it is a hardware problem, a software problem, or both." which I interpret as "Microsoft and Universal have nfc what's going on" note: Microsoft AND Universal.
so it's not just Microsoft in this game. please hold your bashing until after there is a declared winner.

Works fine for me

[ender-]

I picked up the Children of Men HD-DVD on the day it came out, and it played fine in my Xbox360.

Thankfully! I'm usually the sap who gets stuck with the crap that doesn't work. Maybe I had some good Karma built up that I wasn't aware of. :)