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.

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.

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."

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...