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Disney - Blu-ray's Fair Weather Friend
An anonymous reader writes "One day they're out, the next day they're in. Back in March, Disney CEO Bob Iger seemed to indicate that his company (which has exclusively backed Blu-ray since the start of the high-def format war) was on the verge of supporting *both* high-def formats. What a difference a couple of months of good press for Blu-ray makes: this week, the CEO reversed his earlier position, saying 'the single greatest thing we can do right now is to not waffle, but to be very, very blunt about it, (and) to continue our support of Blu-ray because we sense a real advantage.'"
What's better...
HD DVD
Blu-Ray
With dual players coming out. It doesn't matter what he supports.
Disney's largest shareholder probably gave Iger a bollocking. After all, Apple is on the blue ray Association Board of Directors.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
By requiring the player to phone home before playing the content. This would give customers better products and shareholder more confidence when trading technology and entertainment stocks. One can only hope.
My media server doesn't care what kind of "optical disc" Disney backs.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Blu-Ray has additional copy protection in addition to AACS, so any media mogul who is depending on DRM to protect his profits would naturally be waving the Blu-Ray banner at this point.
Of course, Blu-Ray will have all of its protections defeated too - it's just a matter of time.
What's the advantage of supporting Just one of the formats? What's in it for Disney to diss HDDVD?
...why they would name a format (Blu-Ray) with a name so close to the English word "blurry". The subconscious connection is too easily made, IMHO -- even if they do have a good format.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
According to Template:HighDefMediaComparison , HD-DVD's don't have any regions, whereas Blu-Ray's have three. Presumably, Hollywood executives who get off on exercising control really dislike it that HD-DVD gives them less control, thus they prefer Blu-Ray. For that same reason, you'd think consumers would prefer HD-DVD...
I was thinking the exact same thing as I read the transcript in the article. Bob Iger talks about Consumer Electronics support. I saw that as doublespeak for "Microsoft: you just got burned bad with the XBox360 HDDVD player firmware vulnerabilities." I agree - HDDVD's protection is totally broken.
The PS3 is a little harder to crack. I know it'll happen, but for someone like Iger, being able to push Microsoft around is probably the stuff of his dreams. I'm sure he doesn't care about the other HDDVD partners, and dual-format players will just make it easier for media houses to produce their content. Like you say, Whuffo, The writing is on the wall.
Microsoft has lost another battle.
So cute. Pathetic, but cute.
But the encrypted turd would have to be read with a brown laser - which I'm sure is in shorter supply than the blue laser. One would assume this was R & D's only intelligent decision ;-)
I don't see how this qualifies as "pushing MS around". The success of the XBox360 and MS isn't really based on whether movie studios support the HDDVD's, but the PS3 and Sony's fortunes are heavily dependent on studios supporting Blu-ray since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it.
They did, but there were prunes on the menu that day.. Disaster..
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I've heard this enough times, but I still don't buy it. Aside from what movie studios do, there's perfectly valid reasons for Sony to back the Blu-Ray format (ie 4.7GB just doesn't cut it anymore, and nobody wants to go back to the PSX solution of multiple discs). Granted, that makes the PS3 an overpriced electronic toy, but what electronic toy isn't?
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Of course HDDVD has a lot more capacity than 4.7GB too, so there was a lower-priced option available if higher capacity for the PS3 was the only issue. What's interesting about the PS3 is that it is both overpriced and loses money anyway.
Not to nitpick but commercially produced DVD's are dual layer, and have about double that capacity, roughly 8.5GB. It's not anywhere close to HD-DVD / BluRay, but I doubt that game makers have problems with these constraints for this generation. Gears of War certainly doesn't, and it looks better than anything on the PS3 as yet.
A fair weather friend is one who is with you in the good times and against you in the bad times.
According to the summary, Disney has been exclusively signed up to Blu-Ray from the beginning. They have never not supported Blu-Ray.
They have never rubbished Blu-Ray, nor released any plans to withdraw their support of that format.
So how does this make them a "Fair weather friend" ?
If they had supported one then the other then the first again, according to economic climate then the statement might be true, but they haven't done that at all.
If Bluray ends up being the "winner" of the format war - something which won't be the case until you can get a standard player for
MPEG2 can still look good when the source is hyper-idealized, such as in the case of Crank which was not shot on film, but this is simply not the happy case 99.9% of the time.
Now somebody point me to the cheapest possible 24Hz-capable Bluray player, complete with price.
(Speaking of media servers, is there one which can actually achieve 100% consistently flat framerates over HDMI? Hint: Windows cannot.)
Get with the picture. The only real difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the frequency of the laser, and thus, the density of the bits on the disk. AFAIK the encryption for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just different enough to be incompatible. They were both "broken" pretty much simultaneously. However, all AACSLA has to do to "close" the hole is to change their keys, leading to a new cycle of cat-and mouse. AACS is no more broken than RSA; they just lost their key.
Blu-Ray has some extra stuff like BD+, which allows the player execute arbitrary code to search for debuggers, patch the player, install rootkits, and so on. Blu-Ray also has something called ROM Watermarking. However, I gather that these thing are just another annoyance, and not a serious problem.
No, as someone else said, this is probably political. Disney is associated with Jobs Who is associated with Apple, and Apple backs Blu-Ray. Their just digging their trenches deeper.
Ok, CDs and DVDs were not specifically designed for use in computers or anything besides standalone players. But what is the excuse for products introduced in 21 century? Where is support for building a library on a hard drive of a computer or DVR? Where are the computer drives that can play and record movies for a reasonable price? Where are the on-demand/online services to deliver an equivalent-quality movie over the wire? Both formats should go the way of Sony's minidisc and memory stick ATRAC players as consumers revolt and find other forms of entertainment.
since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it
If they make a loss on an $600 unit which is crippled compared to a PC, it's one of the worst corporate inefficiencies in today's world. For the same price, you can buy a used car, pay a rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in many parts of the country, get a decent desktop from Dell or feed 100 children in India for a month. Don't tell me 100 parents can not assemble one playstation 3 in a month.
With Blu-Ray, Disney can easily put an entire hour of un-skippable high-def commercials, trailers, disclaimers, warnings, notices, and animated logos in front of every movie, even if the next Pirates of the Caribbean is 3 hours long.
So in their shoes I'd be thinking Blu-Ray too.
More likely, it's due to a couple of bad weeks for HD-DVD (security keeps getting cracked). That'd be more motivation for keeping to the other one if I was an idiot executive. Who cares if one gives a better quality video? One of them is still capable of manipulating our customers^W^W^W protecting our content.
I agree - HDDVD's protection is totally broken.
So it's now significantly better for the consumer?
== Jez ==
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Just to nitpick: The laser frequency is the same, a blue 405 nm wavelength.
Insomniac's Brian Hastings had this to say about the space issue: If you ever hear someone say "Blu-Ray isn't needed for this generation," rest assured they don't make games for a living. At Insomniac, we were filling up DVDs on the PS2, as were most of the developers in the industry. We compressed the level data, we compressed the mpeg movies, we compressed the audio, and it was still a struggle to get it to fit in 6 gigs. Now we've got 16 times as much system RAM, so the level data is 16 times bigger. And the average disc space of games only gets bigger over a console's lifespan. As games get bigger, more advanced and more complex, they necessarily take up more space. If developers were filling up DVDs last generation, there are clearly going to be some sacrifices made to fit current generation games in the same amount of space.
Granted, some really great Xbox 360 games have squeezed onto a DVD9. Gears of War is a beautiful game and shows off the highest resolution textures of anything yet released, partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures. This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM. It also means that you're going to chew up more disc space for each level. With streamed textures, streamed geometry and streamed audio, even with compression, you can quickly approach 1 GB of data per level. That inherently limits you to a maximum of about 7 levels, and that's without multiplayer levels or mpeg cutscenes.
Sometimes people ask us, "If Resistance takes 14 gigabytes, why doesn't it look better than Gears?" Well, for one, Resistance didn't support texture streaming, so we had to make choices about where we spent our high-res textures. Resistance also had 30 single-player chapters, six multiplayer maps, uncompressed audio streaming, and high-definition mpegs. That all added up to a lot of space on the disc. Starting with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction we are supporting texture streaming, which will make the worlds look even better, and will also consume even more space on disc.
There's no question that you can always cut more levels, compress the audio more, compress the textures more, down-res the mpeg movies, and eventually get any game to fit on a DVD. But you paid for a high-def experience, right? You want the highest resolution, best audio, most cinematic experience a developer can offer, right? That's why Blu-Ray is important for games, and why it will become more important each year of this hardware cycle.
DRM? I think you mean Digital Consumer Enablement!
First of all, modding pedants up always rubs me the wrong way. I'm a pedant myself, and sometimes even a grammar nazi, but I don't expect (or even hope) that such posts of mine are modded up. I completely fail to see how someone giving their definition of a "fair-weather friend" is insightful. If I point out that fair-weather friend is supposed to be hyphenated, does that make me insightful? What about if I point out that technically, only the B in Blu-ray is supposed to be capitalized?
Second of all, it seems to be your definition of fair-weather friend that needs adjusting. As pointed out above, a fair weather friend is not the same thing as a foul weather enemy. It's a friend that is "loyal only during a time of success." There's no implication that such a friend actually turns against you when the weather isn't so fair, just that they don't support you.
Just because Disney has been contractually beholden to the Blu-ray format does not necessarily make them a supporter. If their contracts lock them into using Blu-Ray but they were out there touting how great HD-DVD is and how much Blu-ray sucks, would that make them a supporter? No, and there have been some instances where something like that has happened. (The row between Howard Stern and Clear Channel comes to mind, when Stern was actively ridiculing Clear Channel on the very stations they owned.) In this case, Disney trying to straddle the fence with their public comments can certainly be taken as non-loyalty towards Blu-ray.
1.) Given the parts, I doubt they could assemble it.
2.) I doubt much of the cost comes from assembly.
I would suggest there is one potentially very significant difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD which is "BD-J" -- to quote Wikipedia...
"BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is the interactive platform supporting advanced content for Blu-ray Disc. BD-J allows bonus content on Blu-ray Disc titles to be far more sophisticated than bonus content provided by standard DVD, including network access... and access to local storage." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J
AFAIK HD-DVD doesn't have anything like this (please correct me if I'm wrong). Now I agree that no movie studios are producing content which uses this functionality in a useful way, but that may change. See for example this piece which Ian McKellen (Gandalf/Magneto) did, talking in a question-and-answer format about Shakespeare for the National Theatre in the UK:
http://www.stageworkmckellen.org/
IMHO, this shows the way that using BD-J you could produce some "DVD extra" type content which was vastly more interactive and thought-provoking than what's currently done. Having said that, AFAIK no-one is doing anything with it (except -- groan -- Dragon's Lair is being re-released again, on Blu-Ray. Deep Sigh.)
Perhaps therefore the one creatively interesting advantage of Blu-Ray will be wasted while the studios put all their energy into fighting the customers with DRM...
If they make a loss on an $600 unit which is crippled compared to a PC (...) Don't tell me 100 parents can not assemble one playstation 3 in a month.
Assembly of a custom built (mostly, component pick nor random parts) computer is around $50-70 here in one of the most expensive first-world countries around. Assembly line production in a cheap country should come out to almost nothing. But if you want to put in a Quad Extreme, a GF8800 and other expensive components it'll still cost in the thousands. Can your 100 parents assemble a Blu-Ray drive? Create a blue laser? Create a lens for a 400nm laser? Produce a <100nm CPU or graphics chip?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As far as I know no discs have used this for copy protection yet, but it was part of Sony's marketing strategy to claim that BD+ was an extra layer of security. I saw people on doom9 claiming that it doesn't really add anything they can't get around, but since it hasn't been implemented yet, it hasn't been broken yet. Which means that sony can argue with the other studios that they have stronger copy protection than HD-DVD.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
There's something this guy failed to mention, maybe because it completely blows his argument out of the water. But for people like me that have been gaming for a long time, we know the answer.
Mutli-Disc games. Yes that's right, Final Fantasy did it, so did many other games.
Sure you've got to put a lot of redundant data in there but acting like you're limited to 1 disc per game is a straw man argument. Need more space? Add more discs. Simple.
HD-DVD has something similar.
It's very hard for me to describe the HD-DVD version of this feature but here goes nothing. HD-DVD's allow you to use the menu while watching the main movie, browse through the chapters with clips playing while the movie is still playing. Some discs have a "pop-up video" style feature you can activate. This can allow a button to pop up at any time and when you click on it will continue to play the movie, but also start a second video (picture in picture style) and then overlay the audio over top the existing audio.
Like I said, it's hard to describe but appears to be the up the same ally as providing more interactive content.
/* There's no question that you can always cut more levels, compress the audio more, compress the textures more, down-res the mpeg movies, and eventually get any game to fit on a DVD. But you paid for a high-def experience, right? You want the highest resolution, best audio, most cinematic experience a developer can offer, right? That's why Blu-Ray is important for games, and why it will become more important each year of this hardware cycle. */
Just a nitpick but...
He forgot to include "good game" in things on the disc. All the high-def graphics, stereo sound, and mpeg movies in the world don't mean a damn thing if the game sucks. Please devs, keep the GOOD GAMES coming. Don't get distracted by "OOO SHINY!" at the expense of a good game.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Lucas. If he would release the original trilogy, nicely restored...
- get rid of the grabage mattes around spaceships, the slugs on the emperor's face, and all the other OBVIOUS stuff they missed in the last X "restoration" attempts
- in the highest currently possible definition (1080)
- not the most recent "well, we had this old LaserDic master" bullshit
- and NO (1997+) special features
on EITHER format, I'd go buy one... maybe not tomorrow, but as soon as the players were halfway reasonable (like $200-300 or so.) Or maybe I'd get a PS-3 or some other cool device that included [HD|BR] playability.
If I were in charge of either format, I'd drive a dumptruck full of money to Lucas' ranch. The original trilogy is one of a very small handful of things that I really do want to own in the best possible quality.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Not to feed your flamefest, but $600/mo is a pretty reasonable price for a 2br apartment here in Pittsburgh. You won't be soaking in a hot tub or anything, but you'll have some space to call your own in the "most livable city" in the US.
As for the $600 Dell system, I think the poster was talking about its ability to play games. You can certainly buy a $600 Dell that will play the latest games (perhaps not with every option maxed) at reasonable framerates. But I agree-- Getting a $500-600 Blu-Ray player is the real selling point of a PS3, IMHO.
E pluribus unum
Mutli-Disc games. Yes that's right, Final Fantasy did it, so did many other games.
Sure you've got to put a lot of redundant data in there but acting like you're limited to 1 disc per game is a straw man argument. Need more space? Add more discs. Simple. Something you've forgotten is that when trying to "make money" you want to keep costs down. One of the most expensive costs is manufacturing and packaging. If you are stuck to multi-disc distribution for your game you will be eating profits because you couldn't squeeze it into one disc. I'd imagine the company FUNDING the game would rather make the mpegs a little more gritty and the sound quality more compressed rather than expand to a second or third disc.
A 2-disc game fits into the same size box as a 1-disc game, packaging costs don't increase at all. As for pressing a second disc, pressed DVDs in bulk cost a couple of cents each. Shipping a multi-disc game has next-to-no extra costs for a developer, except for having to make enough stuff to fill them and possible problems with free-roaming level structures (e.g. swapping discs each time you entered a different area in GTA would suck).
As long as prices fall quickly I don't give a rat's ass which format "wins". My motives are selfish. I have a bunch of old videotapes I want to archive. I thought DV was the answer, and it is to a point. But even though DV is a decent compression method, once I archived a few dozen tapes I found I was STILL reluctant to trash the old VHS/Hi-8 analog tapes.
I want enough space on a burnable disc so I can capture all my video (all SD and all lo-fi) with a lossless scheme. Only THEN will I toss my old tapes and not give it a second thought. Then I can experiment with different codecs until the cows come home and know I didn't sacrifice anything from the originals. I'll probably only actually do that on a handfull of the recordings I have, but hey, you never know. Someday one of my grandkids-to-be might develop an intense interest in a vacation I took years ago to Wally World. More likely is that all my precious footage will end up in a landfill somewhere. Such is the life of a pack rat.
Sure, that approach works with a fairly linear game like an old-school RPG. How in the hell are you going to integrate disc switching with something like a sports game or an MMO? At best, it's an annoyance.
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The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
The summary says "What a difference a couple of months of good press for Blu-ray makes". I'm really curious what is the good press the author is talking about? (I'm not flamebating, just haven't been following the press regarding HD formats).
It barely matters. As soon as someone makes a file/streaming delivery mechanism that is just a little bit better than what we can do now, no one will be interested in having to go to a store, deal with hard to open plastic cases, and building walls of shelves to store the stuff individually on fragile and oversized chunks of plastic.
Wasn't Disney also behind the original Divx? (Not the codec, the failed DVD wannabe)
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Screw the executive asshat at Disney that made that dipshit decision.
How? You already give him your money.
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Just to nitpick: The laser frequency is the same, a blue 405 nm wavelength.
So when Sony is complaining about their capability to ship due to blue laser shortages while HD-DVD players are leaving on boats en-masse, they're just full of it, or they negotiated poor contracts?
My God, it's Full of Source!
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Or it could fit on one 50GB Blu-Ray disk. I think we see one of the reasons HD-DVD is going to have issues.
:)
Yeah, it's all about capacity. OK, and name too. 'HD-DVD' is too tied to HD programming. 'Blu-ray' is just a name - if they will sell me a season of 24 on a single Blu-Ray disc, in SD, I'm buying. I care far more for the amount of shelf space it will take up than being able to see the pores on Kiefer Sutherland's face. (OK, if they want to do it in 720p and call it 'HD' - whatever, I don't care).
And if they're smart enough to sell it for $24, that'll just be a marketing coup.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You know, I'm sure I pointed this out before, oh oh I did *rolls eyes*9 88810/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222058&cid=17
Seriously, enough with the "which is better","format war",etc it's futile.
Biomech
In Kalamazoo, MI you can get a two bedroom for $600. I paid $620 and that included cat rent for a two bedroom with diswasher. I think it was 700-800 sq ft. That is in a college town just a few miles from Western Michigan University. In comparison, I'm a few miles from U of M stadium in Ann Arbor and its $1000 for a two bedroom with washer and dryer plus fireplace.
Cars that run are going for at least $1000 around here. I wouldn't call that a "good" car either. As for the cost of the PS3, its more than half my rent money in a month! I could have two car payments for that!
The main problem has been with the PS3, which, despite lacklustre sales, still blows any stand-alone HD-DVD player away, at least in numbers shipped.
Did you really just compare the cost of a single Blu-Ray disc to multiple DVDs and try to imply that DVD costs more? Perhaps, in 10 years. Until then, the cost vs. size argument is weak at best. Add to it the fact that most consoles are moving towards hard-drive-based and I predict in the future console games will be more and more like PC games. They will install just the game engine or the entire game directly to the hard drive. Then they would be free to stream the cut scenes directly from the disc. As for today though, a 2nd disc is a simple and effective solution, it simply hasn't been needed yet. In other words, it's just Sony FUD.
You're overlooking a big problem with multi-disc games, and that's diminishing returns. For multi-disc games, the shared assets need to be on every disc - that means the main character models, weapon models, explosion textures, common level textures, and so forth. So by adding a second DVD-9, you don't actually gain 9GB of space. As your game grows larger, the amount of common material will approach the size of a single disc, and adding more discs will not get you anything.
Not to mention that gamers these days complain about a few seconds of level loading time - they won't stand for having to switch DVDs every level.
And another problem is that disc-switching doesn't work with a more free-form, open-world style game, as is common these days.
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The only reason it hasn't been yet cracked is because they have yet to even USE it. No blu-ray disc to date (AFAIK) has actually used the extra "layer" of protection. I suspect that if they started using it and if blu-ray ever came down in price enough for hackers to bother, it would no doubt be cracked just as easily as AACS.
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You're overlooking a big problem with multi-disc games
I did no such thing. I said "you've got to put a lot of redundant data in there". I don't see how that's overlooking it when I specifically mention it.
As your game grows larger, the amount of common material will approach the size of a single disc
Wrong. The limit of shared data is whatever you can fit on a single layer (4.7GB). It has nothing to do with the number of discs and no way would a game need that much shared data anyways. The shared data is the engine code for rendering, physics, AI, etc. Also common elements such has GUI graphics, sounds and things that need to exist in the entire game not just certain areas. But all the level data can easily be crammed on separate discs. So can cut scenes, scripted game events and lots of other stuff.
You will have load points in any game using multi-discs but that doesn't mean it's not possible. Once the consoles move to the install model it will be a moot point anyways. Just like on PCs.
And another problem is that disc-switching doesn't work with a more free-form, open-world style game, as is common these days.
Did you even play GTA 3 on the PS2? Whenever you went from one island to another it would have a loading screen that said "Welcome to...".
What's the difference between changing levels or changing discs? A minute?