HD VMD Shows Up Late For the Format War

Fishead writes "As the fight heats up between HD DVD and Blu-ray, and as consumers seem to care less and less, a new contender has entered the fray. Next month, New Medium Enterprises will be selling a 1080p player through Amazon and stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150 — half what the cheapest HD DVD player costs, and a quarter the cost of a low-end Blu-ray. The difference this new HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format brings is that the discs are created with the same (cheap) red laser as DVDs. From the article: 'HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second... between HD DVD's 36 Mpbs and Blu-ray's 48 Mbps. The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future.'"

Comments

Re:Yes, but...

[aliquis]

In the world where I live when I have bought a tune I can do whatever I want with it, if I want to make it shorter and crappy quality and play it as ring tone on my phone why should I be allowed to? Are you sure this is because of music labels? Maybe because so many retards buy stupid ring tones for massive cash. That blue frog and shit. During swedish adds "jamba" or whatever it's called tries to sell you ringtones with poo humor, it's so awful.

And as another answer had said what about CDs? Not that I understand why CDs and electronic music would be different.

Also what about if you make your own fucking tune and want to transfer it? Or if the tunes are public domain? Or if Apple doesn't sell them?

This is just bullshit, and Apple are so fucking gay. (Not to compare gays with Apple, you're great! ;D)

(All I want is software which works in whatever OS I prefer =P)

So, for $150...

[Asterra]

So, for $150, I guess we can be assured that the hardware does essentially nothing besides play videos. No PIP, no exotic menus.. heck, probably no TrueHD or DTS-HD, for that matter. And, probably more to the point.. no movies.

If people are not caring for this new format now, they'll really stop caring when the third gen HD-DVD players drive the second gen prices to the same point as this new contender.

Go, Mel Gibson.

Re:Fourth

[Wiseman1024]

Of course, that's the reason why there are new formats in the first place. The mafiaa corporations (Hollywood, Sony, etc.) want to spike every human life with AIDS, installing supposedly-illegal surveillance units at every home, and turning everyone into the perfect consumer: only buy the crap they make, at your local most expensive price, buy it several times if possible, and don't share anything with the next consumer.

Now I have to admit I'm surprised and disappointed about the Chinese format; I had a bit of hope that it'd be DRM-free. I guess the days when China was any good regarding this matter are long gone; they are now another America. Nobody outside the dictatorship will want their "television watches you" format.

And the problem is people is too stupid to actually buy their crap. Snobs, "early adopters", and other sufferers of human stupidity make this attack on your freedom successful. If Hollywood didn't have any AIDS-ridden format to publish their crap in, and Sony didn't sell any of their obnoxious, overpriced and premature technology, they'd be forced to use fair use formats. Or they would fold, which would be even sweeter.

There are many better alternatives to all of this crap; we can use it ourselves for any of our content. A solid state memory with a Matroska video, using Theora or H.264 for video encoding and Vorbis or MP3 for audio encoding.