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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.'"
Would you care to explain again how HD-DVD is more accessible to the average consumer? I'm not into anime or that sick tentacle porn so I could care less about movies from other regions.
Since the US the region code for the US and Japan is the same those who have American players can watch and collect BD discs for "anime or that sick tentacle porn" to your heart's content.
Anyone holding such a ridiculous opinion has no business discussing any aspect of cinema, you are just too ignorant to have any insight whatsoever. Which is probably why your claim about the ICT was total bunk too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
Just to nitpick: The laser frequency is the same, a blue 405 nm wavelength.
All this stuff is about money, not principles. You shouldn't expect the suits to understand how stuff works (encryption, laser frequency etc) - just about whether or not this will make more money than that. If Disney turns something down, and later a better offer is made, there's no concept of loss of face, just the possibility of reduced profits.
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.
This poll is flawed anyway, because it's not absolutely clear that clicking on one automatically casts a vote. I clicked both to see what they were about, and discovered that I'd already "voted" for HD-DVD. FWIW, I don't know either way, so I wouldn't have voted at all.
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