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

What's old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of 1st and 2nd generation DVD players had occasional trouble with some DVD titles. Given the complexity of something like DVD, HD-DVD or BluRay it's really to be expected. Both the hardware and software is complex enough, and many Slashdoters know the difficulty of getting both new hardware and software to work together properly.

Re:What's old is new again

[dAzED1]

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.

Re:What's old is new again

[EtherMonkey]

Given the complexity of something like DVD, HD-DVD or BluRay it's really to be expected.

So, in other words, it's ok for me to pay $400 for a new, standards-certified, HD-DVD player and then $30.00 each for HD-DVD-labeled movies, but I shouldn't expect them to work together? And because I've probably owned the HD-DVD player for several weeks/months before coming to this sad realization, and because I obviously need to open the shrink wrap on the HD-DVD movie before attempting to play it, I cannot recover any of the money I've paid for this premium, standards-organization-certified, combination of player and media?

Well, at least now that I own the physical media and therefore have legal license to play the movie, I can legally download a working, albeit lower-quality copy off the Internet. Oh wait, that's still illegal.

Eventually, all the crap that the entertainment companies go through to implement copy protection, (a.k.a. DRM), is going to wind up frustrating even the most steadfast consumers of legally-aquired recordings, and they will be driven to pirate downloads as a matter of survival.

It only hurts the honest.

[bigtangringo]

Meanwhile, pirates have probably ripped the disc and made it available online.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Re:Cult hit?

[Penguinisto]

Okay, that makes it go down just a bit easier, but still... I thought that in order to achieve a "cult" status, a movie/book/TV show/whatever had to have some or most of the following:

* A loyal fan base willing to spread it to firends and strangers alike, and willing to spend more than the usual amount of time on promoting it (e.g. "Star Trek" during the 1970's).

* Obscurity, or at least relative obscurity (see also "Rocky Horror Picture Show", before some jackass company released it on tape/DVD and ruined the whole thing forever).

* Independence in birth, thought, and/or most aspects of the film/book/etc that makes it stand away from the 'Mainstream' (e.g. "Night of the Living Dead").

* Longevity - it has to age a bit like fine wine before it can actually have a cult to follow it (e.g. "Equilibrium", which still kicks more ass than Chuck Norris IMHO, but has been out for years now).

IMHO, calling this flick a "cult" film kinda smacks of exploitation by marketing... but then again, maybe my semantics are just off? (I'm sincerely hoping not, but...)

/P