Blue Blu-ray

TopSpin writes "Early this year the meme circulated that Blu-ray might be going the way of Betamax, and for the exact same reason: Sony's unfriendliness to the porn industry. But at Japan's recent euphemistically named Adult Treasure Expo 2007, adult filmmakers said Sony has begun offering technical support, and this was later confirmed by Sony PR. The company stated that Sony would offer support to any filmmaker working on the format, no matter their industry. Apparently, Blu-ray is now the preferred medium for Japanese adult films."

Comments

Any consensus?

[MontyApollo]

Is there any consensus in the geek community about which format is liked best?

Re:Any consensus?

[westlake]

most people still don't have HD.

That is changing very rapidly.

30% of American households have HDTV.
44% of these households receive HD programming.
The "home theater" movie and gaming experience can be more important to buyers than HD programming

>it's easy to forget that this will often be a buyer's first experience with large screen, wide screen, projection, flat panel displays,etc.
>which is good news in the long run for Sony and Blu-Ray.

2/3 get their HD programming by cable TV. 1/4-1/3 by satellite.

30% of U.S. Households Have an HDTV: CEA

Re:Any consensus?

[That's Unpossible!]

Let me know when you've got a 50-70" widescreen TV.

It has nothing to do with extreme detail, it has to do with making giant TVs look just as sharp as your 20" TV... stretching a picture made for a small TV (SD) onto a large TV (HD) looks like shit.

Difference?

[lymond01]

Without looking at the tubes, I've been curious (not too) about the end user functional difference between blu-ray and HD-DVD (aside from one having fewer syllables). Is it like buying a red porsche cayenne or a blue porsche cayenne? I'm not sure how two devices can compete with each other if they are essentially the same. Will their market lifetime boil down to non-technical reasons, as stated in the article? Is there some nifty upgrade path that one allows over the other?

Re:Difference?

[Night Goat]

Personally, I bought an HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360 so I would have some HD material for my HD TV and HD projector.

You should definitely look into getting an antenna hooked up to pull down some over-the-air HD programming. I thought I'd need some mega-huge antenna to get a signal because I live in a rural area, but I was able to use a powered rabbit ear antenna and I can get the five or six stations that broadcast near me. It looks really good, too. Saturday baseball on Fox is a highlight of the week for me now, because of the increased clarity and the wide screen view. You can see a lot more of the action. You might already know about OTA reception, but I'm surprised how many of my friends bought really nice HDTVs and are just using analog cable or analog broadcast TV.

Am I the only one who just doesn't care about HD?

[bigtangringo]

I really don't care for the HD craze, I still buy plain old DVDs. Am I really in the minority?

No preferred media for me.

[Chonine]

I am not looking to continue buying movies on plastic discs. Having movies sent through the mail or having to drive to a store should be unnecessary now. There are already a few internet on demand services for movies, and plenty of cable/satellite on demand services. Ownership services ala iTunes is probably around the corner. DRM-free would be ideal, so really whichever gets around to that first wins in my opinion. Not happening any time soon, but really not an issue in the debate. HD, Blueray, and iTunes all have it. With regards to pornography, I expect the industry will continue moving into the online direction. I suspect they will continue to be pioneers in the area actually.

8 years ago I purged floppies from my life, ripping them out of every device I had, and saving all of that data to newer disc. Around 2 years ago I pretty much purged CD/DVD from everything, sans a single portable USB DVD-RW drive I can use for anything. Magnetic and optical medium had its time. Flash drives/cards, solid state disk drives, and networks should be everything. Of course, the transition is slow, but that's why I took a stand. I don't buy software, I install new OS' from the network or an existing partition. The DVDRW drive is a read once and rip solution for music CDs, and periodic DVD backup aside from rsync. Movies I use cable on demand services, DVR, and theaters.

About the only reason why I would care for any next-generation disc medium would be for a viable backup solution. Not many available, nor cost effective at the moment. This is a pretty geeky view of everything, but I think that the general consumer trend will follow it. Most likely, both BlueRay and HD-DVD will slowly replace DVDs, but only when the cost is comparable for both the movies and for combination devices. The *real* next-generation media is when there is no media at all.

Re:No preferred media for me.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Last I heard, the Internet is not there yet. Seriously. I heard an analysis on the Digital Production Buzz that distribution of a top selling movies like Cars or Shrek is not possible with the current backbones that's available, where the amount of data on plastic & aluminum discs of the sales of just ONE movie in the first week of sales exceeded the aggregate backbone capacity several fold for the same period on the Internet. And lots of new movies are released every week.

A better codec will shrink that down, but you aren't going to cut it down by more than half without losing picture quality. I really love how HD movies look, 1080p movies on a 1080p large projected screen is exceedingly nice. I'm not going to like anything that's bitrate starved to save on bandwidth. Disney's Pirates of the Carribean regularly exceeded 20Mbps, and that was with H.264 AVC.

The *real* next-generation media is when there is no media at all.

I think "next" generation kind of falls apart here, it really applies to both HD discs and internet downloads, though I Internet movies to be the final victor in the long run. I expect that there will be DVD, HD disc and internet streaming & downloads (with several formats within that) to coexist for some time.

WHich is why Blu-Ray is winning

[SuperKendall]

Toshiba is the ONLY hardware maker for HD-DVD drives.

On the Blu-Ray side, you have players from Sony and Panasonic and Samsung and others (soon to be Funai players as well, the producer of the dirt-cheap DVD players for WalMart).

Sony learned well the lessons of betamax (also including have the format with more storage, and more studio backing). It's a shame the HD-DVD backers didn't bother to examine history to see where they were headed.

Porn never mattered in this war

[SuperKendall]

For DVD and VHS, porn was a huge deal because it was difficult to obtain discreetly otherwise.

But nowadays any kind of porn you can imagine, and many kinds you would rather not, are all online. Porn media sales are nothing now compared with total video sales. So even though Blu-Ray is getting more and more backing from adult studios, it will not really have any effect.

On a side note though Japan and the US are in the same region with Blu-Ray, so Anime or other titles (such as this adult studio stuff) can all be imported directly. I'm just hoping most anime comes with English subtitles even just for Japanese release...

Re:Am I the only one who just doesn't care about H

[G-funk]

I didn't either, until I spent some time with HD content. My TV is small by US penis-measuring standards, it's only 32" and it's only 720p, but there's a HUGE difference between SD and HD content in some programming. CSI:Miami looks fantastic, as does Saturday night AFL, I think sport is definitely a place you can expect to see a lot of growth in HD in the near future, and where it really pays off.