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]

yeah, I agree. It has to be really hard for a group of people to agree to a standard, and then stick to it. Especially when MS is involved.

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: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.

Re:What's old is new again

[ncohafmuta]

Perhaps the DVD player was IN the matrix, and so as to protect itself from being discovered by the humans, and giving them too much information, refused to play.
Seems pretty logical to me.

-Tony

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:ah DRM

[PitaBred]

too weak and you can get anything to play them.

Man, it SUCKS when I want to play my media on a device I own, and it actually does it without me having to jump through hoops!

What do you bet it's the copy protection scheme...

[jhfry]

that broke.

I hope it is, as that might finally make these coalitions focus on developing the better technology for delivering the content instead of protecting it.

It's not worth the risk to release a format that is encumbered with complex copy protection schemes. They WILL get broken, and they WILL cause problems for consumers.

Bug or Feature?

[TheMeuge]

Well - the industry has realized that marketing expensive HD-DVD players is a nightmare, when an Xbox can do that and so much more at a much lower price. Making HD-DVD content unplayable on the Xbox is just another logical step (they have they own special logic). So the question is this - is it a bug, or a feature?

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: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:recieved-received

[norminator]

'I' Before 'E' except after 'C' and when sounding like "Eh" and in "Neighbor" and "Weigh"

and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May
And you'll always be wrong, no matter what you say!

--Brian Regan

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?

[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: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

Re:Less issues with HD-DVD then Blu-ray

[flynt]

I have had issues with Crank and Speed.

There are clinics to help you with that.

Re:Eagles HD-DVD has problems too

[Farmer Tim]

I have Eagles concert HD-DVD that doesn't play in xbox360 hd-dvd player either...

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

Re:Not HD-DVD's first embarrassment by far

[illegalcortex]

Personally, I have favored Blu-ray due to the higher capacity. What becomes popular as a movie standard will also drive what becomes popular as a computer peripheral standard. I'd rather do my backups/offline storage to a higher capacity media. Sony has pissed me off in their treatment of the PS3, but I don't hold that against Blu-ray in general.

But you have to admit, these are the same problems that happened with the first generation of DVD. There were certain discs that would blow up certain players. Manufacturers learned and they fixed them in the next generation. The xbox will probably be able to fix it via a firmware upgrade.

Claiming that this is somehow a harbinger of doom for HD-DVD is doing just what you are accusing the other side of doing. You are letting your rabid hatred of HD-DVD shape your interpretation of something that's just history repeating itself.

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: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.