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:What's old is new again

[Half a dent]

My first DVD player refused to play The Matrix properly when it was released (quite common at the time). IIRC this was due to an interactive feature (follow the White Rabbit?) not being compatible with the firmware version of the player, looks like a similar story here.

Less issues with HD-DVD then Blu-ray

[mrycar]

As an owner of both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, I have found less issues with the HD-DVD format then Blu-ray. On my Blu-ray devices (samsung and LG) I have had issues with Crank and Speed. On the Xbox 360, no issues experienced. I have played Children of men in both my living room and bedroom xboxen with no issues. Checking blu-ray forums shows many disgruntled blu-ray owners. Personally, I dislike either format and would, and would do direct download of HD, if there was a thing as high-speed network connectivity where I live. disgruntled blu-ray owner.

Re:Another nail in the coffin for HD-DVD...

[SatanicPuppy]

They're both going to lose to digital distribution once the telecoms get off their asses, so it's kind of a moot point. I think half the push toward HD is fueled by the content providers desire to make the files bigger and harder to download.

Re:Too bad the movie sucks

[garcia]

Can't believe the trailer compared it to Blade Runner. The King Crimson / Pink Floyd references were cute tho.

I agree! The current events overtones with the Homeland Security and illegal immigrant killings/deportations were only for the benefit of attracting those in the reviewer community that hate the US' current administration. Their plan worked and it got rave reviews.

I saw it opening weekend because I needed to get out of the house but other than that it wasn't worth the $8.75/ticket I paid. The MPAA wonders why piracy is popular? If they think that people want to continue to pay nearly $20 (for a couple) to see politically motivated bullshit with horrendous and unnecessary violence then they have their heads further up their asses than I knew.

If there's absolutely nothing else to see at the rental place, I suggest watching it. Otherwise you're better off going to the back room and getting some cheesy 70s porn on VHS.

Why can't the industry make things compatible?

[dpbsmith]

These "title-A-won't-play-on-brand-B" stories are common. But why? This is essentially a phenomenon of the DVD era. Or, rather, there are three phases to the history:

Phase A: Pre-recordable-CD. Everything worked. An individual cassette jamming in a player? Sure. A bad pressing or a warped LP? It happened. A bad CD? Prior to copy protection, I encountered _maybe_ one in fifteen years of buying them. But an across the board disaster, like the latest hit title failing to play at all in a popular brand of player? Never.

Phase B: Media incompatibility with recordable media. I've never seen a CD (one bearing the Compact Disc logo, not a copy-protected not-quite-CD) fail to play. But I've frequently encountered the burned CD-R that plays on some players but not all. The CD-RW that says it will play on "most modern" players, etc. And DVD's, hey, the instructions for burning System Restore disks on the computer my wife just bought say--WITHOUT EXPLANATION--only to use DVD+R's, "even if your DVD writer is capable of burning other formats."

Phase C: Popular, commercial entertainment titles on mass-produced non-recordable media that fail to play in large numbers of popular, commercial players.

Why is this happening? Are the vendors now just giving lip service to standards, and are unable to produce a title that will play on everything unless they procure everything and test on everything?

Heaven help me if we ever have digital motor oil.

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

[illegalcortex]

And DVD's, hey, the instructions for burning System Restore disks on the computer my wife just bought say--WITHOUT EXPLANATION--only to use DVD+R's, "even if your DVD writer is capable of burning other formats."

You may already know this, but the reason why is error correction. The DVD+R format is far superior to the DVD-R format when it comes to error correction. So if you get a scratch on a backup disc, you are much more likely to not lose anything if it's a DVD+R. It's probably they didn't want to explain error correction in an instruction manual written for people who would have just skimmed over it anyway. Any explanation for the masses would have just boiled down to "it's better, trust us."

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

[greed]

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

The important difference is buffer underrun recovery. The +R blanks have a time-code in the groove that's pre-cast into the polycarbonate. -R blanks don't. So, in the event of a buffer underrun, DVD+R can accurately locate the last-time-written position and resume burning without a gap. DVD-R will have to have a gap, just like CD-R with buffer-underrun protection.

For .ISO-type pre-burned image streaming, this isn't a big deal; pick a speed where "Disc At Once" won't be too fast for your hard disk, and there won't be a gap on -R and +R won't win you anything.

But for backup programs, which make things up as they go along, they often underrun. DVD-R takes forever to re-synchronize, and the backup takes much, much longer as a result--and may not read in a DVD-ROM drive if you need it as an emergency boot disk (where facilities exist yadda yada). DVD+R will re-synchronize very quickly.

The gaps also result in a loss of usable disc; with Retrospect for Macintosh, I get about 2.7-3.2 GB on a DVD-R, and 4.3 GB on DVD+R. (There's checksums and catalog data eating up the remaining .4 GB of DVD+R.) That, and 10-15 minutes to write a +R vs. nearly an hour for -R (in an 8X nominal burner), means: Video goes to -R, and Data goes to +R.

Re:Not just XBox 360 Player that has problems...

[TheNetAvenger]

Isn't the XBOX drive a re-branded Toshiba drive? If so, that would indeed make a whole lot of sense.


At the initial launch of the players they were all Toshiba, but I have no idea if MS has acquired any other suppliers since the launch. Also the model used by MS could be different even if they are all Toshiba; hence, why some users are not having problems and others are.

This could also be as simple as a defective Disc that borders on the readbility requirements for a HD-DVD. Like others have mentioned, when DVD was new, there were a lot of issues because of problems in the Disc manufacturing that were marginal for some players.

Doesn't suck, but nowhere near Blade Runner

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the movie is closer to Silent Running than Blade Runner. The movie wears its 60's lefty sensibilities on its sleeve. I felt Blade Runner was more universal than Children of Men. CoM's references seem squarely pegged in the late-60's early 70's: Pink Floyd, John Lennon, King Crimson. I kept thinking Michael Caine's character should have been a cynical punk, not a cynical hippie.

Cuarón's visuals are astounding. The tension he develops in the chase is excellent. He brings the Saving Private Ryan visual style out of Spielberg's slate grey epic and delivers it in natural color with a smaller scale, and throws in some blood splatters for good measure.

The chase doesn't stand up for me. By the end it seemed to move out of hard reality and into allegory. They seem to just breeze through that immigrant concentration camp. The cop who helps Caine smuggle the pot seems more out of Monty Python or Brazil. Takes me out the of reality. And the protagonist's unwillingness to use a gun to save humanity seems strange considering running people over with a car or splattering their brains with a brick was not beneath him. This again is a lefty worldview against the gun object that make little sense.

Also a scene of the polluted English countryside (though prettily composed) doesn't ring true for me. The developed world's land and waterways are cleaner than ever. Top predators and fish migrations that haven't been seen since our pre-industrial past are returning, even in the midst of our sprawl. The xenophobia and the authoritarianism we see in today's government seem properly projected forward, but the pollution of the land seems to require a 180-degree turn around. (Maybe if the movie was set in China?)

So, for me, CoM is not Blade Runner.

Re:ah DRM

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

This has nothing to do with it, it plays fine on my HD-A2 and my cubicle mates 360 add-on, most likely there were a bad batch of disk. You may now remove your tin foil hat.

The Matrix

[metamatic]

Actually, there was a fairly lengthy technical investigation, and it turned out that the Warner release of "The Matrix" was improperly mastered--it didn't actually meet the DVD standards.

Annoyingly, Warner didn't bother to remaster it, which is the main reason why I never bought the DVD. Warner have generally done a bad job of DVD mastering over the years--consider also the initial Kubrick DVDs, the continuing lack of widescreen releases of many Warner movies, the crappy cardboard packaging...

Re:Another nail in the coffin for HD-DVD...

[elrous0]

As opposed to Sony, the guys who put rootkits on their CD's and are complete control freaks about ANY attempt at putting homebrew on the PSP?

I am far from a huge MS fan, but I will admit to Western bias when it comes to the 360 vs. PS3. I don't want to see yet another generation completely dominated by annoying JRPG's and witless anime shit. It's not healthy for one country or region to have a 70%-80% videogame console market share. I'm perfectly happy to have the 360 and PS3 remain neck-and-neck. That way, whether you're a fan of Western or Japanese-style games, everyone wins.

As for HD-DVd vs. Blu-ray, I root for HD-DVD (against all odds these days). Allowing Sony dominance is ASKING for trouble (again, remember those rootkits?). Not only are they control freaks, but there is also a serious conflict of interest in a content-producing studio owning the rights to the means of distribution for EVERY OTHER studio as well.