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Warner Backs Blu-Ray. End Times For HD-DVD?
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports: In addition to Apple, Warner Brothers is now going to throw its weight behind the Blu-ray format for high-definition disks. Warner has been the only major studio to publish its movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Today, the studio announced that from now on, it would only issue movies in Blu-ray.
Richard Greenfield, the media analyst with Pali Research, wrote that this marks the end of the format wars: "We expect HD DVD to 'die' a quick death.""
You could hear a high-def pindrop in here. I don't think anyone expected things to be over so quick. Does this mean there will be some good sales on HD-DVD players?
Now it just has to take on the DVD. Good luck. I look forward to dragging my feet.
Do you perhaps think that the "Slow HD uptake" referred to in the article might be as a consequence of the overwhelming cost of, and over-restrictive DRM associated with HD video? Have you thought perhaps that for the vast majority of spice-girl-loving, Shrek-3 adoring consumers, DVD is more than "Good enough"?
My UID is prime. Is yours?
I hope the war ends quickly, and I hope blu-ray wins because blu-ray has a higher data rate (something like peak 48Mb/sec vs 32Mb/sec). Not to mention that blu-ray dual layer holds a whopping 50 gigs. But I'm not going to buy any kind of player until the war is clearly over.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
I knew that $199 HD-DVD player with 10 free HD-DVDs from Amazon.com was too good a deal to be true. But I got suckered into it anyway and bought myself one for the holidays. Betamax all over again.
I figured with HD-DVD players so cheap, they couldn't help but beat Bluray, with their absurdly overpriced players. Apparently I was duped by a dumping strategy - clearly they knew their market position was about to slip off a cliff and they decided to flood the market with cheap players.
I am boycotting further purchases of any high def DVD products for the next few years. This experience has left me utterly disgusted. Move piracy, here I come.
After Betamax and the MiniDisc, maybe Sony is finally getting some luck.
I'm wondering how many times the death knell for one or the other sounds. First it's no-boobs Betamax BluRay (revised I know but yea) Then it's Warner and the warning to HD-DVD What next?
Byebye betamax, hello BlueRay...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
This thing of thinking one agreement will stop conflict has been done before.
There is one player left who will likely fight on, that being microsoft. They absolutely don't want blu ray to succeed, because that means they lose another round to Sony.
Should be fun seeing how they react.
Doesn't it also have region coding where HD-DVD does not, not to mention AACS BD+?
Ok, So here in Switzerland I can get the average DVD for around 14.99 CHF to about 24.99 CHF (MediaMarkt). I saw a blue ray movie and it was 44.99 CHF and could not believe it. Why in the heck would somebody pay nearly double the price so that you can see the butt pimple of an actor? Maybe one or two movies you want to see the butt pimple, but in general no way...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
A homogenous standard is long overdue which has been the main handicap in the development of new and better root kits.
;)
:)
Yay! Now root kits can evolve to their full potential!
I was going to add a remark about welcoming our new Sony root kit based overlords, but I'll leave that for someone with limited imagination
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
It's possible yet HD DVD might make some studios play musical chairs. But failing that I think the writing is on the wall for the format. HD DVD owners should probably take heart that there are going to be some excellent firesales and at least Toshiba and probably others are bound to produce hybrid players that play both titles for some time to come.
Microsoft shouldn't care too much if blu-ray succeeds. The VC-1 codec that most blu-ray movies uses needs to be licensed from Microsoft. Money in their pocket either way.
I was wondering when this was going to make it to the front page. I've had an HD DVD player for the past few months, along with about 20 movies for it (half are HD DVD exclusives). I've been perfectly pleased with it, and I'm not particularly bitter about being on the "losing" side of things. Eventually I'll pick up a BD player, once the prices come down a bit more, and hopefully once they sort out their profile issues (c'mon, the ability to do PIP was only recently added, 1-1/2 years after the format came out). And I'm still hopeful that dual-format players will be available for a while to come, especially since there aren't too many hardware differences between the two formats. I think the most sensible thing for the HD DVD consortium to do would be to drop their licensing fees before too long, specifically to allow hardware manufacturers to add HD DVD capabilities to their players for little extra cost. Of course, there are still two studios that are HD DVD exclusive at the moment, and I'm sure Toshiba/MS/et al are going to try to fight it out till the bitter end. Oh well, c'est la vie.
This guy's the limit!
I dont know how much SOny would charge them to license it, but I think it would be hilarious if MS could find a way to release a Blu-Ray drive for the 360.
if the 360 had blu-ray there would be no reason to own a PS3.
Sony actually won a format standard!
*goes ice skating in hell with the singing fat lady*
Screw HD-DVD too.
I'm holding out for Gamma-Ray.
HD DVD isnt dead yet. It's still cheaper than blu ray so it has a chance.
.. will it be flourescent multilayer discs .. or a tech where the laser shines through multiple layers and the bytes of data is determined by the brightness after some error correction algorithms and realtime calibration of course.
Anyway, I can't wait for the next format battle
...Apple will be releasing a BlueRay drive equipped MacPro for the video industry soon.
Yippie!!! I just hate backing up my HUGE music/video library to paltry DVD's.
I am ignoring both of this broken format.
I won't buy any except perhaps some Chinese DRM free HD extended EVD. Or even just huge hard-drives. In five years time we will have 10 terabyte hard-drives as standard. Blueray disks are 25 Gb single layer and 50GB dual layer. A ten terabyte hard-drive can hold 200 to 400 of these films.
My little Linux and tech blog
"Now" as in "May"?
"After a short window following their standard DVD and Blu-ray releases, all new titles will continue to be released in HD DVD until the end of May 2008."
Studios forget their history rather quickly. Back when DVDs where first coming out Circuit City came up with a competing format called DIVX (no, not the video codec, they just stole the name). The idea was that DIVX players could play DVDs, but also DIVX discs which were "enhanced" DVDs which you'd buy for cheap but then have to rent to play. Studios just loved the idea and a number like Fox, Paramount, and Dreamworks decided to release only on DIVX. Well as it turned out, that didn't matter. Consumers didn't like it, so they didn't buy it. DIVX died and it cost Circuit City a couple hundred million for their trouble.
So just because some studios are initially backing Blu Ray doesn't mean anything in the long run. They'll release their movies for whatever format consumers decide to buy, or they'll go out of business.
Also please remember we are a long, long way from any sort of critical point in the HD format move. It is going to be much slower than DVD, which wasn't all that fast. See with DVD, there was a reason for everyone to upgrade. Even if you had a small, crappy, TV, DVD was still better. The picture was generally better even on poor sets, but picture quality aside the other features were more important. No degradation, no rewinding, instant seeking, special features, smaller size, all these things added up to something that was worthwhile for everyone to purchase, regardless of what they watched on.
Not so for HD formats. The only benefit is image quality (and possibly sound quality for the few titles mastered with the new formats). Well, this means that the only people who are going to notice a difference are those who own HD TVs, which aren't all that many people at this point. Even if you do own an HD TV, the gain is marginal. No new features or anything, just a better picture. That's nice, but not a big deal especially since upconverting DVD players give an amazingly nice picture and since not all discs come from a high enough quality transfer to really look nice.
So it is a good while yet before there starts to be a critical mass of HD formats and there's any sort of victory in the HD war.
Finally, it is entirely possible neither format will win. It may be that dual format players become the norm and both formats continue to survive. This is rather feasible since both formats are on the same size disc, both use AACS encryption, both use the same video and audio codecs and so on. Indeed, there's a couple of companies working on dual format players right now. So it very well could work out that both formats continue to be released by different studios.
But to say that this is the end of the format wars is just wishful thinking.
Another chess move in a long, complicated game that is either being played by such idiots that it will last a long time, because none of them knows how to play... or is being played by such subtle, clever, brilliant chessplayers that it will last a long time, because none will be able to get a commanding advantage over the others.
Either way, I can't predict the winner, so why should I care?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Both formats are outdated when it comes to counting capacity compared to current sizes of hard disks. When the CD appeared it was 650MB and the largest hard disk (if you could afford one) at the time were 100MB, which caused the CD to have a 6:1 advantage, but today a hard disk is of 1TB while the Blu-ray (if you are lucky) have 50GB of storage which means that there is a 1:20 disadvantage. And flash disks are now catching up on the optical disks - so the era of optical disk players may soon be begone and the era of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may be an appendix in history.
The upcoming victim are probably the classic hard disk where the flash disks (or similar) may also take over eventually. The reason behind such transition is that solid state disks can have a much better reliability and speed - especially in harsh environments like laptops, but also servers may benefit here.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
... There was a few month ago the first HD DVD and blue ray. For roughly a surface of 15*20 meters, the shop had a 1 single wall of 0,5 meter * 0,3 meter with both hd DVD and blue ray (5 or 6 can't remember, but i do remember thinking they not have taken the msot sucky film at that time). Today when i went to give back a DVD, there were 11 HD DVD on the same palce. For roughly a whole wall of 1 meter* 1 meter full of blu ray. I guess they did not present so MANY blu ray just to be nice and shiny. There are most probably more blu ray laoned than HD DVD. Mind you it is still clear their main loaning disk is the DVD : 7 or 8 walls for the whole length of the shop, + the extern wall of the shop itself are full of DVD.
I don't care for the HD DVD war out of many reason which were already cited (DRM, standard etc...). But in my mind, the war is decided, and if one of my friend absolutely want to buy one of the format, then I will recommend blu ray, jsut by the nubmer of blu ray one can loan.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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YOU wasted 99 bucks. Sucker. But you can enjoy your free copies of HDDVD "Gigli" and "Flashdance" for at least 4 or 5 years until the thing takes a crap.
I buy all my HD-DVDs from amazon.com instead of amazon.co.jp (where i live) or amazon.co.uk (where i'm from) because... they are INSANELY CHEAP AND REGION-FREE. seriously, this is about the only time i've seen globalisation work for the consumer. it feels like amazon has had nearly non-stop promotions on HD-DVDs for the last 6 months; i've ended up with about 45 of the damn things. ordering them a few at a time from the US (admittedly especially good as i'm paid in GBP and the dollar has gone doooooown) means they are practically half the price of the UK, and even less than half the price of japan. so really it's just like i'm still buying regular UK DVDs, except they look vastly better... (and what is it with these people who say they can hardly see the difference between regular DVDs and HD? is the world full of people who don't realise that they are legally blind?? someone needs to round these people up and administer some eye-tests, on road-safety grounds alone...)
the real question, i suppose, is: do i feel bad HD-DVD might now disappear? no -- because that nice new samsung dual-format player is being released as we speak. i was planning to buy that anyway, as a handful of movies i like are on blu-ray, at which point i can forget about the whole sorry mess and move on...
Given how little effort Warner Brothers put into mastering their HD DVD titles and how universally they are panned for their terrible encoding, is it any surprise that customers avoided getting the HD DVD versions? While I'm disappointed in the news, I don't know that WB will be that large a coup for BluRay. The BR group already scored THE major blow by signing Disney on as an exclusive.
Though I haven't experienced it first hand, is the DRM on the HD formats really any more effective than DRM on DVD? In case you have forgotten, DVD features CSS. While useless as it was defeated, it's still there. From what I hear, the HD formats haven't had more success in protected their keys in general, and though they now revoke them, I wonder what happens when keys from a moderately popular network-disconnected HD format set top box are compromised. So far the keys I hear compromised are desktop software, and they've required users to 'upgrade' to the new key to play back future content. Would they damn a whole set of legitimate customers and kill their reputation for the sake of a losing battle?
As much as DRM *should* bother people, on physical media in particular it doesn't seem to register with moth people.
No, I'd say it's predominantly the pricing, which was exacerbated by the ambiguous market situation. Buying *one* player was probably already too much money for the benefit, but to be safe they would have had to buy two players. Now with one factor, it's less bad, but HD playback devices I don't think have come down enough for the mass market to decide it worth it to replace their DVD players.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is old news.
The last great hope for HD DVD is that they "convince" (financially) one of the Blu-Ray partners (think: Fox) with a LOT of money to dump Blu-Ray for HD DVD. Given the Warner example, the gap between their Blu-Ray and HD DVD sales, though into the ten's of millions, was not on the order of $100M, so monetarily convincing Fox could be in the $200-$250M range.
I don't have any preference over either format as I've purchased both, but I did think HD DVD was going to "win" prior to the Warner announcement. At least with Blu-Ray you get the original Transformers the Movie on Blu-Ray disc in the U.K. that can be bought from amazon.co.uk.
The BR/HD devices may well take over where obese supine consumers mindlessly suck the tit of the Culture Industry in their overstuffed barcaloungers in the family "Enertainment Center". There, picture quality in a darkened and directed room makes sense. But that is only one particular consumption ritual practice. There are many others. My typical practice is watching video in tiny stuttering windows online, because I can watch one thing, check my email, and work on a project at the same time, or in short sequences. A friend of mine is the same, yet he uses a video projector as his screen. Parties at his place are great - watch online video? Sure. DVD? Sure. Dance Dance Revolution? WTF? Oooh, OK - why not... Wii? OK - but only after we watch that online video of the guy's head exploding. And freak out your sister with the goatse guy.
Betamax and VHS were such a pitched battle because there were no other options. Now, I can't get a cup of coffee without some giant flat panel telling me how white my shirts should be, and then I go to work, and some knucklehead sends me a link to a youtube video of the longest fart EVER, or I visit my brother and his 5 jillion channels of TV pumped all over every screen in the house, etc. etc.
In the early 1980s, there were fewer options, so there was more at stake in a format. Now, it's just another fish in the sea. And with bandwidth increases and everybody and his ugly cousin getting in on the online video action thanks to Flash video, I think it may well be that BR or HD will be the LAST disk format...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
In my local HMV, they have 1/3 of a disc rack dedicated to HD-DVD and nearly two racks for Blu-Ray. The only thing which is really stopping it from taking off is that each disc costs between £20-£30 ($60 to most of you), but I think that's probably what DVDs cost when they first came out. Also note that each PS3 sold (granted, they're not selling *that* fast) is another potential Blu-Ray customer.
Summation 2
This is the age of Announcements, invented by MS.
Warner "pretends" to go with BluRay.
Enter installed base, etc.
Then "Management reviews the current marketplace spread and re-evaluates the sales potential of the formats". Any company can do whatever it likes at any time.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Seems to me no one has mentioned something which to me says a lot:
"For a long time, Hollywood was lopsided in favor of Blu-ray: 7 of the 8 major movie studios (Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) supported Blu-ray, and 5 of them (Disney, Fox, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM) release their movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. Only Universal was exclusively HD-DVD. Now that is rapidly changing what with HD DVD exclusive converts Paramout and DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros now for Blu-ray." (this from http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/boost-for-blu-ray-warner-bros-will-release-high-def-titles-exclusively-in-that-format/)
So in summary, we have:
HD-DVD Exclusive:
Paramount/Dreamworks
Bluray Exclusive:
Disney
Fox
Sony
Lionsgate
MGM
Warner Bros
Not mentioned in the article above, I believe Universal Studios is actually HD DVD exclusive, but rumours seem to indicate that they aren't that way by contract, so they COULD jump ship. Further, New Line Cinema is owned by Warner Bros, so it would stand to reason that they will end up Bluray exclusive.
At this point, it LOOKS like a pretty lopsided situation to me. Add in that while supposedly HD-DVD players (and PCs with HD-DVD in them) have outsold bluray players, (again supposedly) bluray titles themselves seem to have outsold HD-DVD, especially in non US markets.
I have been reading about this since the news broke yesterday on places like http://engadgethd.com/ and http://avsforum.com/ and it really sounds like even the HD-DVD diehards (for the most part) are conceding victory to bluray.
-Verxion
I think everyone is missing the point and if you think that this spells the end for HD-DVD then you're seriously mistaken. Just because Warner has thrown in with the wolves doesn't mean anything. You might find that some of these studios could change the tide if Microsoft decides to offer even more incentives like they did with Paramount.
I'm sure that Microsoft is keeping a close eye on the situation.
WD40 helps, but not much.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
I've had an HDTV for a year now. Nothing huge, just a 32" Sharp LCD. I got it mainly for the better aspect ratio; I was tired of watching cropped movies and letterboxed network television. It's also wonderful for watching sports, being able to see more of the field and tons of detail.
Despite the arguments some Slashdotters have made about the human eye being unable to distinguish between HD and SD on a small screen, it's a clear improvement even for me with uncorrected 20/40 vision. Buying 1080p for $1200 rather than 720p for $800 may have been overkill, but I might use the set as a whopping big computer monitor someday.
I really don't care much about the DRM. I don't buy movies, I get them from Netflix or on cable. So the cost to me stays the same and the ability to copy is unimportant. It would be nice to just download movies and shuffle them easily between all of my computer and TV screens, but my Internet bandwidth just isn't ready for that yet.
I have HDTV now and I want to watch HD movies now. As soon as there's a non-sucky player for $100 I'm in.
> They'll release their movies for whatever format consumers decide
> to buy, or they'll go out of business.
The gist of the article is that customer can no longer decide to buy HD-DVD - 'cos there won't be any.
> Finally, it is entirely possible neither format will win.
I kinda doubt that, the ball is definitely rolling now. The biggest factor is the price of the players but that's dropping fast. This year they'll be below $100.
The only thing which could really move it one way or another would be recordable disks, ie. piracy. if one format becomes easy to copy then it could get a big boost.
But then again, you simply don't need 50Gb to pirate HD video. A standard 4.5Gb DVD with H264 compression can store a pretty damn good quality version of a movie. I don't know if there's hardware players which can do this yet but if there aren't, there will be soon.
No sig today...
A Sony format WON!? Did Nostradamus talk about this? Maybe Sony Blu-Ray DRM is the "Seventh Seal?"
i really do hope this battle of the formats is over. ive already bought a blu-ray player (my ps3) and blu-ray movies. this schism is screwing the consumers because we have to own two players to get all the movies we like. i do think blu-ray will eventually prevail so i feel bad for the people investing in HD-DVD, like my co-worker. :/
If a company wins a format war and nobody cares about it, have they really won anything?
My HDTV is 42". I can tell a slight difference between DVD and the HD broadcast image. I'm sure that at larger sizes the difference would be far more dramatic. But how many people have the super-duper large screens? I admire the 6' screens in the store even though I realize they cost about half of what I paid for my car and are ridiculous for normal people to own.
At this point, DVD is more than good enough, especially given the DRM crap involved. I think that HD formats will remain kind of like laserdisk in this generation but will pick up more steam by the next generation. The screen format that replaces LCD/plasma, that's going to be where it takes off. I'm looking forward to my wall-sized OLED screen for $50. If I can't have a flying car, at least give me that!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's not totally without precedent. The 3.5" floppy disk was a Sony format.
The NPD sales numbers showed BD sold more disks every week in 2007. Even transformers release week did not sell more HD DVD's. Warner made the correct decision. BD's were outselling HD's by a 61 to 39 advantage YTD07.
Blu-ray titles take 10 spots on the Amazon DVD bestsellers list atm, including the top four. There are _no_ HD DVD titles in the top 25. The bestselling HD DVD title is #35. (Behind 4 more blu-ray titles on the way.)
I know hating on Sony is de rigeur here. Sorry.
The human eye isn't a 100% analog device either - it's a digital device which takes light sampling using rods (black/white luminance) and cones (color information) and sorts them together.
Damage the eye, and you can get a "blind spot" where all the rods and cones are defunct. Drop to low lighting conditions where there's not enough to activate the cones, and you switch to rod-only black and white "night vision" with the brain filling in what it *thinks* the color of something should be based on what you perceive objects to be.
The real problem is simply that human visual acuity isn't actually all that great. Can you tell the difference between a 480p and 720p image on your computer monitor? Probably, but you're sitting a foot and a half away from it.
From 10 feet away, you can *barely* distinguish a 480p image from a 720p image on a 30" set.
Go up to a 60" set and you can barely tell between 720p and 1080i/p from the same distance.
Me? I have a 50" TV. My max viewing distance is 12 feet. My minimum is 8 feet. (I occasionally move the couch). It's a 720p native screen and that's just fine by me.
I've saved a number of people on the order of $1000 by showing them this graph at a local Best Buy and having them simply stand in front of a TV known to be getting an HD feed and step back and forth. The salesmonkeys hate me for it.
It seems the /. crowd was really hoping HD-DVD was going to "win," if they had to pick a winner. Judging from the comments that have bubbled to the top so far, that is. Me, I've always liked Blu-ray's features (like integrated Java) better (and let's be realistic, the DRM on both formats isn't all that materially different; AACS is the foundation for both), so I'm quite pleased that the "format war" is over.
/. crowd makes it out to be). No, DivX was an obvious loser from the get-go, and now HD-DVD is in the same position. Everyone, from the studios to the retail channel to the end user, is now going to "know" that HD-DVD is doomed to be the next Betamax, and nobody wants to end up holding that bag.
/. crowd needs to recognize, once again, that they knew nothing and that their conventional wisdom was wrong. There's actually not that much of a difference between Blu-ray and HD-DVD (although I still think Blu-ray is a better format, at least from the perspective of a computer geek), and these formats are going to be useful, all the muttering about video on demand over the Internet not withstanding. (We heard a lot of the same talk ten years ago, and yet we're still not quite there yet--even with YouTube-quality video, which is about a quarter of DVD resolution.)
And make no mistake, Warner Brothers making a choice is huge. They were trying to play both sides for years, but they've finally said, "Enough is enough, we want an HD disc standard so we can start making money," and picked a horse, and that's going to be it. Whether or not HD-DVD continues to sell, consumers are quickly going to get the signal that a winner has been anointed.
I do see a parallel with DivX, as another commenter observed, but it's not a matter of both sharing overly restrictive DRM (which the average buyer isn't going to consider, no matter whether it effects them or not--it's not the make-or-break issue the
Also don't be fooled that Warner is ending HD-DVD support in May; they've probably got a lot of HD-DVD authored content/manufacturing in the pipeline still, but they're going to be winding that down pretty quickly. DVD and Blu-ray is going to be released first, and HD-DVD will follow after a whole month.
So yeah, the
So let's welcome our new high definition disc overlords, and start thinking about how we can use this technology, rather than whining about DRM or how Sony is evil and hates their customers. (Which is a bit of a red herring, as Sony isn't == Blu-ray nearly as much as Toshiba == HD-DVD. The BDA includes quite a few other heavy hitters, like Apple and Disney, while HD-DVD has... Microsoft. Gee, I wonder why Microsoft is in the HD-DVD camp.)
As was the CD, a joint venture with Philips, the other company that tries to come up with ground breaking / market changing products.
"new" DVD format offers anything that is *remotely* enough of an advantage over the hugely entrenched normal DVD format to replace it. I predict whichver one 'wins' will sort of 'hang on' for a while, for which there will be a small videophile market that will slowly die off. Sort of like Betamax tapes and laserdiscs.
Exactly. Talk is cheap, and there is NO way the current agreements on paper are not finite.
Ice Cream has no bones.
We've just had Xmas and a whole lot of people bought HD-DVD because of the cheap players. maybe this will jack up the numbers and cause another swing.
No sig today...
So did CD, 3.5" discs, DAT and a bunch of computer tape formats.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
"At the end of the day I would much rather deal with Sony, because I can easily use someone else's player but if Microsoft controls the software in the living room then history shows we will be in for decades of crap."
You mean like with the upcoming 360 DVR?
I'd been hoping we'd skip HD and Blu-Ray and go to one of those higher-density mediums one hears about on Slashdot every few weeks. Both formats still require too much compression.
We're not there yet. We're probably there when we get 2K high images at 72FPS without compression artifacts. Somewhere around 72FPS, the annoying strobing on pans disappears. Or, in other words, football games finally look right. Football games are hard because the background is moving, there's action moving in different directions, and viewers care about the detail. The motion compression algorithms can't really handle that situation.
The digital cinema industry has a standard for this. They have two formats, "2K", which is simply 1080p, that is, 1080x2048 pixels, and "4K", which is 2160x4096 pixels. They define two speeds; 24FPS and 48FPS. Color depth is 12 bits. Compression is JPEG 2000. Maximum image data per frame is 1,302,083 bytes (which is actually smaller than you'd expect). Audio is sampled at 96KHz with a depth of 24 bits, and is not compressed. There are 16 audio channels. That's the Hollywood/SMTPE definition of a "movie" in the digital era.
In actual practice, most films now being distributed digitally are going out in "2K" mode, at 24 FPS,with 8 audio channels. The spec has headroom to double each of those numbers.
A 2-hour movie at all the highest ratings is about 500GB. So that's what needs to be delivered to the consumer. Neither HD nor Blu-Ray can do that yet.
Formats come and go so quickly. I was backing up some data to my terabyte drive, and some USB thumb drives. I came across a set of zip discs that had fallen behind the desk a while back. The date stamp of 2001 was not that long ago. I have a nice widescreen, full 1080p. DVD's look good, to the point you can critique the transfer. Still, in an A/B comparison with Star Wars, (ABC ran it, I tossed in the DVD for a quick a/b) the HD signal is better. We also get channel 13 and 13-1 here, and sometimes they show the same show, letterboxed on the SD channel and full screen on the -1 channel. There is a clear difference. Of course, if you don't have a big screen, you would not tell, so there goes 99 % of the market. Wanna buy a zip drive ?
I think WB suffers from some of the same misinterpretation of Bluray sales data that has been rampant.
Bluray player sales are almost entirely PS3 based (73%). HDDVD are almost entirely standalone (people buying them to watch movies). Disc SALES are currently misleading because as a popular holiday gift en liu of the Wii, the PS3 was gifted along with the gift of movies to PS3 owners, which include a large number of kids under 18. The likelihood that these kids are going to go buy discs on their own is not great.
A better indication of adoption is the number of standalone player sales and the rental market. Netflix web site statistics show a 3:1 format preference for HD-DVD. It shows that while more people viewed information on BluRay discs (expected since there are currently more available), they select HD-DVD as their default shipped format by 3:1.
So the interpretation of that data suggests that HD-DVD players have become the home player of choice and people are renting their movies and not buying. The "sales" of bluray would appear to be tied to the sales of PS3's as gifts. This may be bad for WB since they want people to buy movies and not rent, but WB and others are misrepresenting what is really going on to try to direct the format to the one that makes the most money right now. Unfortunately, that is a temporary phenomenon and will subside over time since a large portion of PS3 users aren't old enough to posses a credit card.
I don't think WB will make it to May (the date they chose to change over to bluray exclusive) before they change their mind and continue making both. Q1 Sales data and rental data will speak volumes.
If more than a few people like the format it will die just like my laser disc, OS/2, AS400, Amiga...Long and slow. I can still buy laser disc and the support for repairs is solid. Even if a few people make HD DVDs a hobby it will be here for while. For me DVD is good enough and I find laser disc at garage sales and flea markets.
I got a rather good home cinema setup (100" canvas, projector, large surround speakers etc), and I couldn't care less for who wins this war, except for one tiny thing:
The fucktards from Sony who:
* Killed SACD
* Bacs Blu-Ray which, like DVDs, got this inane region/zone scheme
Why zones all over again? It is such a joy to just order HD-DVDs from anywhere and they just work on my HD-DVD player. Gahhhhh, I guess people really want this crap.
I can suck it long OR I can suck it hard, but I can't do BOTH!
Can anyone the relative advantages to each format, especially as a data storage solution?
IMHO the battle is not over until the 'loser' concedes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Badass Resumes
Personally, I just went out yesterday and bought myself an A30. 7-10 free DVD's for $200-$250 and the player supports everything possible except for bitstream audio output? Count me in. If the format dies tomorrow, and my player lasts the 6+ years that my cheapy Apex has, and I can't buy a single extra HD DVD disk, I'll still be happy and consider the price a great deal.
Blu-Ray format does not seem to be managed well. I want both formats because I don't believe that either format will die in the next 18 months. However, HD's specs are well established, and work well. Blu-Ray's specs are ever changing. Profile 1.1 was ratified a while back, but as far as I know there is nothing available in the consumer markets that meets this spec today. Profile 2 is out there as well, and while I haven't dona a lot of research, I didn't find any release dates specified from any manufacturer on when they were going to meet the new profile specs. Things like on board memory and expansion ports for adding things later are in the new specs. Seems to me that the Blu-Ray commission seems to think there's big things coming down the pipe for the platform if they are adding expansion to it. I am not willing to plunk down $400 to get a decent Blu-Ray player that only comes with 5 free movies today. That comes out to $150 more for the player, plus $130 for the extra 5 disks to match what my HD player comes with. That is a huge price difference just to get shafted with a player that doesn't meet the latest Blu-Ray specs and probably will never be able to be upgraded to meet them, either.
Thanks, but no thanks. I plan to support both formats since there are movies on each that I want. But I'll wait a few months for Blu-Ray to figure out if they're actually going to put out a product that meets their customers needs, and drop the price on it in the meantime.
Indeed. And the original SuperDrive in the old Macs (I'm talking about the "bird feeder" compact models from the 1980s) were made by Sony. That company has had many, many wins and hugely successful technologies, such as Trinitron, Betacam SP, the Walkman and Discman of course, and, like you have already mentioned, the CD (in cooperation with Philips), 3.5" floppies, DAT and MiniDisc to name but a few. Betamax was a sad intermssion...
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Well, I just rocked over a cd installer for my daughter's "Barbie digital camera" and guess what, it broke.
Don't keep those backups on the floor!
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I have spent a couple of months optimizing code for HD decoding, and mostly the format doesn't really matter:
Both use the same codecs, they support the same resolutions, and the maximum bitrate is more or less the same (30 vs 40 Mbit/s for HD vs BR).
The one important difference is that a "full HD" 1080x1920 BR frame will always be encoded as four quadrants, each at 540x960.
This does lead to marginally lower compression rates, since you get more borders, but the great benefit is that you can have multiple CPU cores (up to 4) work in parallel on each of the parts!
You can of course do the same with a multi-core decoder for HD-DVD, but only by starting each cpu/thread at a different key frame, and since each 1080p picture requires 2 Mpixels, it is far too easy to trash both the TLB tables and the L2 caches when doing the motion compensation step which normally requires multiple source frames to be available to generate each target frame.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Not sure what you mean by compulsory DRM. I was aware that Blu-ray has region codes and HD-DVD does not, but otherwise I thought their DRM schemes were basically the same. Are you saying it's not possible to create a non-DRM Blu-ray disc even if you wanted to? And that it's possible to do with HD-DVD?
Frankly, I don't understand what the fuss is about. I download hi-def movied that have either "HD" or "blu-ray" as a part of the filename. Both formats play just fine. I don't see any difference. Who ever needs to buy a drive and optical disks when we have fast internet, large hard drives and thepiratebay.org?
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
DAT and MiniDisc were successful?!
Circumcision is child abuse.
And I honestly prefer HD-DVD; I have had less problems with playback. Blu-Ray playback is choppy (varies from disc to disc) unless I use something like AnyDVD to remove the encryption.
Honestly, I have long resented Toshiba for refusing to cooperate with SONY / Phillips on merging the two standards. If you spend any time thinking about the two disc formats, it's clear which one has the most potential. On the one hand we have an intermediate, quick fix solution with just enough capacity to store High Definition mpeg4 video; on the other, a revolutionary disc format that does for optical storage what DVDs were to CDs. When the industry finally decides to adopt Blu-Ray as the standard, we'll begin to see prices for players, burners, media and (hopefully) movies drop. Eventually we'll see PC / console games (non-PS3) that take 3+ DVDs shipping on single discs, or game developers offering higher resolution content because the storage medium has surplus capacity.
Did they purposely degrade the dvd so you payed more for the HD-DVD version? They do this all the time on cable. Sports shows are seriously poor compared to very detailed news shows
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Absolutely spot on chap. This absolutely sucks donkey balls.
Guess I'll be downloading HD movies or up-converting DVD's because I'm not going to be buying a BD player. The Sony DVD players I've owned I've hated. I won't be making the same mistake. If BD ends up being the only game in town, then I'll be sitting this one out ...until something else comes around.
You're not talking 44K vs 96K like you were with CD vs. DVD-Audio.
With DVD vs. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray you're talking lossy Dolby Digital (roughtly equivalent to a 96kbps mp3 per channel) vs. lossless 5 channel (either via LPCM, MLP, or the DTS and Dolby Digital lossless formats).
There's a huge difference there.
The software update for that came out a while ago.
The hardware specs were set, the small questions being software. The differences between 1.0 and 1.1 were pretty big, but could all be done in software except the 256 MB local storage.
The differences between 1.1 and 1.2 are related to online interactivity, the only hardware differences being 1 GB local storage and Ethernet. The PS3 has both of those, so 1.2 profile compatibility is only a system update away.
I still say the hard drive wins out in the long run... or at least until Flash drives come down in price.
Notable facts:
- DRM: AACS-128 on Both; BD+, ROM-Mark optional on Blu-ray
- Larger aperture on Blu-ray, allowing for the higher capacity
- 3 layer HD-DVD is v2.0 spec, 3 x 17GB = 51GB, currently unknown compatibility
- Max bitrates (total, audio, video) are higher on Blu-ray
- DD+ and Dolby TrueHD are mandatory on HD-DVD, optional on Blu-ray
- HD-DVD is region free; Blu-ray has 3 regions; SD-DVD has 7 regions
- Microsoft's HDi in HD-DVD vs. Sun's BD-J in Blu-ray
- Stand-alone component manufacturers: HD-DVD: 5; Blu-ray: 5
- LG has a player that supports both discs but is expensive
- Blu-ray discs are hard-coated
Most people I know that have an HDTV are quite satisfied with an upconverting DVD player and SD-DVDs. They're cheaper to buy at $BIGBOXRETAIL, look good enough scaled, and sound great. For most, DD 5.1 or DTS 5.1 are good enough for their setups. Even with the DD+/DTS-HD/TrueHD/DTS-HD Master, unless you have better speakers (think bought seperately, not a home-theater-in-a-box), you probably won't notice the difference in codecs.Also interesting to note how many geeks here are praising HD-DVD even though its an MS product. Isn't MS = Bad? Did I miss the MS = Good decision? Is it the lesser of two evils? Subjective, so you decide for yourself.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
You people act like Warner is some kind of independent expert and accurate fortune teller. Of course they are going to say "We expect HD DVD to 'die' a quick death." That's what they want to happen because they are a Blu-ray only studio and they're obviously going to say it is going to happen because the more people say that then the more likely it is for it to actually happen.
I think these format wars will be moot in a few years due to the rise in Streaming Hi-Def. Has anybody else used NetFlix Watch Instantly with a good connection? To me the video and sound look better than DVD. They also coming out with set-top boxes this year. Sure its DRM laden with a crummy selection, but it cost nothing on top of the normal service.
Once a player is revoked for future titles, doesn't that mean they must intentionally break existing players? So far, since they've compromised keys of programs running on general purpose PCs, they've felt justified because, *relatively* speaking, customers getting a patch from the vendor isn't too difficult (but still, why should those customers suffer for the sake of the studios they gave money to already?). What happens when someone compromises a player's security, and that player is a widely used set top box without any network capabilities?
I know that (perhaps the real reason for companies to leave HD-DVD behind) blu ray has this BD+ scheme which isn't yet demonstrated to be compromised in a general sense. Of course, nothing quite assures me like a Sony-backed standard talking about executable code being installed by a player from the disc, just so you couldn't possibly skip executing it. Sony has never abused such capability before, after all. I know, they *say* BD+ scheme shouldn't change anything persistently and a player *should* roll-back on disk eject to pre-disk state, but who knows.
I wish that studios would recognize that for the illegal scene, they will certainly lose the DRM struggle. All it takes in that arena is for a handful of people to be willing to invest time and effort to break the protection and make a single drm-free copy in order for it to mean absolutely nothing to illegal distribution. They may not even elect to break the disk protection, instead having setups where they break any other part of the digital chain and laboriously copy it over. Meanwhile, for customers that wish to abide by the law, DRM provides no end of extreme headache. Want to make a private copy for backup purposes (i.e. you have young children and you want them to not manipulate the original), whoops, sorry. Want to copy it to hard drive for performance above and beyond any possible disc changer, that won't be valid either. Want to merely play it back on your system and don't run Vista, well, the studios don't like that, so no. Some arbitrary cracker a thousand miles away just *happened* to crack the protection in a way such that the studios will blacklist your playback methods, congratulations, they may make your player useless just to spite the cracker. Want to move it to a portable player that requires some transcoding, no, not allowed. And the studios answer to limitations is essentially they *might* allow common-sense private moving/modification, but only if devices doing this call home and beg for permission first. It's an insane world.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Up the refresh rate on your monitor to >=85hz, and make sure the room isn't completely dark.
-Just something I've learned from 20 years of using a computer.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I am a big fan of their screwdrivers work. My understanding is that they had a lot of influence over the design of the popular cammed cross tool.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
What's stunning me is that we're seriously discussing whether we want Sony or Microsoft to "win". It's like the choice between a giant douche, or a turd sandwich. Have we so quickly forgotten Microsoft is responsible for the horrendous DRM in Vista, and Sony was responsible for the rootkit fiasco?
Vote Cthulu when you're tired of choosing from the lesser of two evils.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
I know I will get modded down because I say I generally don't agree with the parent, but here are some my observations:
1) There's too many ways to actually receive HD when you're actually getting SD: stations have broadcast stations in both HD and SD on the same cable box, wrong source to TV connections, HDCP downsampling, HD-Lite, badly adjusted HDTV (especially LCD!), etc etc etc. Unless your an HD ultra-geek that knows EXACTLY what's up, chances are you think you're seeing HD, but actually are seeing SD.
2) Have an older Sony 34XBR910 CRT HDTV and the thing that hits me the most about HD over SD is NOT the resolution, but the greatly increased color gamut! Although some shows / stations (ex: Discovery HD) oversaturate the color, in general it's the combination of increased color gamut with the 16:9 wide-screen and somewhat increased resolution that makes a better picture for me over SD.
3) Whatever you do, do _NOT_ I repeat do _NOT_ compare HDTV based on what you see at Best Buy, Costco et. al.!!!! When I bought my TV a long time ago, went a a "real" high end TV store and compared pictures and our TV looked great. Went to Best Buy and the same TV looked like crap because of the input feed.
4) I'll agree with this. I cannot tell the difference between 720p and 1080i at a casual glance. Fox HD transmits 720p and it looks as good as CBS HD.
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are very good at doing repetitive fp and fixed-point operations, and much less good a bit-twiddling. I.e. the motion compensation stage of video decoding, where you copy (possibly sub-pixel-located) source blocks into the target frame has been handled by graphics hw since the very first sw DVD players, like Zoran's SoftDVD which was the first.
(In fact, SoftDVD was capable of handling 30 fps even without hw assists, running on a PentiumMMX 300 Mhz cpu, and without dropping any frames, but having the motion comp hw made it much easier to avoid drops. BTW, I did a very small bit of asm optimization work on that sw player.)
High bitrate HD/BR video is encoded using the CABAC (Content-Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) algorithm, which provides slightly better compression rates, but which is also particularly unsuited to a GPU: Each decoding step requires multiple if/then/else stages, just to decode a single bit of information. It is also completely serial, in that you normally cannot determine the context to use for the next decoded bit until you've finished the current bit and possibly even branched on the result!
When you need to do this more than 50 million times/second, CABAC becomes the real bottleneck.
OK?
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Check your facts and stop being a fucking idiot. From wikipedia:
Although widely considered to be Microsoft's product, there are actually 15 companies in the VC-1 patent pool (as of August 17, 2006). As an SMPTE standard, VC-1 is open to implementation by anyone, although implementers are hypothetically required to pay licensing fees to the MPEG LA, LLC licensing body or directly to its members, who claim to hold essential patents on the format (since it is a non-exclusive licensing body).[1]
It was actually 90mm.
Even beyond the announcements being PR fluffery, this whole conflict is much ado about nothing.
My HD DVD player makes regular DVD's look absolutely amazing in my HD system (40" 1080p LCD). Enough so that I still buy almost everything on DVD. Take Ratatouille for instance. The fact that it's a "Blu Ray Only" title is completely and utterly irrelevant when I can still watch it on my HD DVD player, it looks great, and I saved a few bucks besides (currently a $5 difference on Amazon between the BluRay and DVD versions).
Actually, since I rip all of my movies to storage, I feel a little stupid when I spend money on an HD DVD since I don't have the software to rip HD DVD's, and if I did, I'd have to trade the space for 3-4 DVD's to save that one HD DVD. So, by several metrics, HD DVD's offer me less utility than DVD's in exchange for an incremental improvement in playback quality.
Until direct network distribution of HD movie content becomes the norm, DVD's are plenty good enough for me.
As far as I know the Porn industry is still supporting HD DVD, and I suspect a lot of early adopters are also avid porn fans :)
Had MS added the HD player with the Xbox 360, we would not be having this conversation. I realize the price would have been higher for the 360. Simply having a HD-DVD add-on as an option is not a good strategy. The reason is obvious why WB went with Blue-Ray, all the PS3's out there. I will wait till prices drop even more, it is not worth paying the higher price for players at this time.
I can live without either format. I don't have a HDTV so it wouldn't do me any good and all of the DRM stuff makes me not want to get either one. I'll just stick with the regular DVD until I can't buy it anymore.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
How did it turn around so fast?
The amazon scores change hourly - just after christmas the HD DVD titles were in the top 25, and no blu ray titles were there. It goes back and forth.
Amazon isn't exactly the most useful metric for who's selling what.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Those lap-dancing places don't count as restaurants.
For now, I'm waiting out the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD war and loving my DVD Upconverting Player. The resolution is not as great as Blu-Ray or HD DVD, but it's an acceptable compromise. Besides, I can't afford to upgrade my existing DVD collection to either Blu-Ray or HD DVD discs. :(
>Sure they look fine, but they don't support the 96 kHz audio sampling rate. By sticking with DVDs, you're missing out on a vast spectrum of inaudible sound.
His dog, at least, thanks him for sticking with DVDs!
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
There is one player left who will likely fight on, that being microsoft.
Microsoft doesn't make movies - with Blu-Ray now having 70% of all movies exclusive to that format, what exactly is it even possible for Microsoft to do? Subsidize player sales for Toshiba so they are super cheap? Done. Buy out a studio? None are left to be purchased, and Paramount had almost no impact because Spielburg wouldn't let them release the most popular titles they have.
Microsoft could have put an HD-DVD drive in the 360, last year when there was still a question of who was going to win. But they didn't even do that.
There was a rumor that Microsoft laid down an ultimatum this week - the HD-DVD partner studios had to agree to give Microsoft exclusive access to download movies, or Microsoft would move on. So I think the only fight left in Microsoft is to move to Blu-Ray to spite the remaining HD-DVD studios!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1) Format war is over. Warner did it.
2) Player prices have fallen below $300, low enough to where in December Blu-Ray players were outselling HD-DVD players.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I must add trinitron to the list aswell.
I have no idea if Sony have had anything to do with DV, Firewire, HDMI, some LCD technique, and so on. But I guess hey have done some more stuff right which I don't know about.
In a number of the press releases you'll see New Line is Blu-Ray only as well. LOTR will only be on Blu-Ray now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Blu-Ray isn't nearly as bad as DVD was:
1) Most Blu-Ray discs today have no region codes enabled.
2) All Bly-Ray discs are required to drop the region code a year after first sale.
So the majority of content you buy except for the very latest releases will be region free.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How does it matter if a HD-DVD player released 10 years after the first one uses 12x if all movies have to be playable at 1x anyway? You can never use the bitrate of 12x playback in movies anyway if you want them to play on all players.
It's independent journalists, media analysts, and people who understand what it means to have 70% exclusive market share on your side.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I found an article in Variety that has an interesting quote in it:
"Warner sister company New Line confirmed it will shift allegiance to Blu-ray only as well."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978461.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1&query=blu+ray
That seems to confirm that New Line is -*ALSO*- blu-ray exclusive.
We've had cheap players selling for months now, and Blu-Ray still was outselling HD-DVD 2:1. Last month, Blu-Ray standalone players (not counting the PS3) outsold even the cheap HD-DVD players. So there's no way whatever influx happened last month would improve sales ratios, and move any Blu-Ray studio - but now, with 70% of movies being Blu-Ray exclusive lots of those very latest HD-DVD player owners have a great incentive to return the players and go Blu-Ray instead. You see messages to that effect in forums everywhere now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AVS has been the stronghold of the most fanatical HD-DVD supporters. Of course they are spinning conspiracy theories.
Tell me, what market forces would have led to Warner (let alone Fox) going HD-DVD exclusive. For every title that came out in both formats, the Blu-Ray version outsold the HD-DVD version. The entire past year, Blu-Ray was outselling HD-DVD buy 2:1 or 3:1. So why on earth would either of them have switched? Since it made no business sense for them to do so, the only lure would have been money from HD-DVD (see: Paramount). So then even if there was money from the Blu-Ray side that was just balancing out what HD-DVD was offering - and Warner chose not to take. Sine Warner was making a money neutral choice with or without payments involved, the motives are what they say they are - Warner wants one format so consumers can finally start adopting instead of staying away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Movie buffs care a great deal about HD formats. Look at the drama from both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray sides. Obviously a lot of people care a great deal - so your feigned indifference is shown up my the masses of people that do care.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Last month, Blu-Ray standalone players (not counting the PS3) outsold HD-DVD players.
Players are already cheap enough people are willing to buy them now. Player price is not really an issue anymore (not that it ever was, something that never stuck in the heads of HD-DVD supporters).
Now that we can have stronger consumer update of HD formats, the many Blu-Ray hardware makers can reduce prices even further in competition, and media prices can get lower with more plants pressing Blu-Ray discs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are two studios left, Paramount and Universal. Universal will shortly swing to Blu-Ray so they are not on the short end of the stick. The Paramount will invoke the escape clause and leave as well.
Look for one of them to make the break at CES.
As an aside, I find the fact the studios are trying to decide on the format war somewhat depressing.
It sure does suck to finally only have one format instead of a stupid war that benefitted nobody. Oh wait, it doesn't - Warner is a hero here. They put the finishing touches on a game that was already over.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where can I get an affordable multi-region Blu-ray player?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It's disappointing that studios are willing to choose the quick payola for format exclusivity over long term customer satisfaction. As broadband and storage tech gets cheaper and more pervasive, you can bet more and more customers alienated by choosing the "losing format" will turn to solutions that require less financial commitment and even provide a little spiteful satisfaction. Namely illegal downloading. Sure, Comcast can try to throttle downloads and Microsoft can try to DRM-lock their OS, but there will always be a way around these draconian restrictions and they seem to be getting more consumer friendly, rather than less. The record labels are slowly learning, but at least their follies aren't costing the general music consumer money (I'm talking about obsoleting an entire format, not DRM-crippled/rootkit costs). November 2007 numbers indicated 750,000 HD-DVD players, that's a whole lot of pissed off customers.
Not in practice. Both formats have similar capacities in their most common forms (dual layer HD-DVD vs single layer Blu-ray)
100% of Blu-Rays released in the last two months have been dual layer (50GB discs). Of all Blu-Ray discs on the market now, something around 20% of them are single layer (basically some of the ones release in the first few months of the year).
More space, means more room for higher bitrates and lossless audio. 100% of Disney and Fox Blu-Ray discs have lossless audio. What percentage of Universal or Paramount titles offer that on Blu-Ray?
You're treating this as if 100,000 Blu-ray discs take half as much storage as 50,000 Blu-ray discs and 50,000 HD-DVD discs. That's clearly not the case.
They take up the same space but are half as complex to track and distribute, all being just one unit instead of two different kinds.
And what marketing costs are you looking at that are saved by ditching HD DVD?
If you'd been paying attention you'd have seen multiple full-page ads from Warner - some for HD-DVD only, some for Blu-Ray only. They can reduce the full page ads by half now.
Up to a point. I don't think this would have been an issue if studios had all supported both formats
The issue would have been both formats dying because people continued to stay away until there was one. No-one wants two players. No-one wants an overly expensive combo player.
Here's something worth bearing in mind: I'm not doing Blu-ray. I looked at the three formats a month or two ago, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray, and decided that I felt HD-DVD was a clear step up from DVD, whereas Blu-ray was a step down. (For my logic, see here.)
Your "logic" there is equally as flawed as your post was.
Some points:
1) AACS is not mandatory on Blu-Ray, and in any case all HD-DVD discs to date have made use of it.
2) As noted, Blu-Ray has more space for higher bitrates and also a higher maximum bitrate.
3) Blu-Ray the format also supports managed copy.
4) If Blu-Ray discs are cheaper to manufacture how come movies on both formats costs the same, except for the horrible HD-DVD combo discs that are $5 more?
Every single point you have would have gone to Blu-Ray had you got the facts straight. You boght into the FUD and misinformation campaign that so many HD-DVD backers were pushing the whole year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is, frankly, hyperbole. Even WB is going to be releasing new content on HD-DVD for the next six months, so saying it's dead in a month or weeks is completely ridiculous
Unsiversal and paramount do not want the short end of the marketshare stick, so they will move to at least support Blu-Ray as quickly as possible , possibly this week but certainly within weeks.
Consumers will not buy a new HD-DVD player past this point. Who would buy into a format now that, best case, has 30% of movie titles you could get?
Consumers not buying players means large chains like Best Buy and Walmart drastically reducing shelf space for the HD-DVD format.
Warner is just the tip of the iceburg, and you're saying the band sounds pretty good so why not sit and listen for a while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you perhaps think that the "Slow HD uptake" referred to in the article might be as a consequence of the overwhelming cost of, and over-restrictive DRM associated with HD video?
This is a great example of the severe myopia that so many Slashdot posters seem to have early on when major shifts occur. For most people, DRM does not register - and do not forget that even the Blu-Ray DRM is less restrictive than DVD DRM was/is!! (fewer regions (which most discs don't even bother with), and we are in the same region as Japan).
Have you thought perhaps that for the vast majority of spice-girl-loving, Shrek-3 adoring consumers, DVD is more than "Good enough"?
Now that's a totally different and perhaps valid point. But even the most non-technical people notice HD differences. For a while my HD cable feed was out (Iuse only Clear QAM HD feeds and the cable company likes to screw with them, the bastards) and so we had to watch one of her favorite TV shows in HD for a few days. As soon as she sat down she said "Why is this so blurry"?
People notice. The thing that kept people away, and rightfully so, was the war itself. Who would be stupid enough to buy into a format early, when either (or both) of them might die? Both might yet die but lots more people are able to think that a single format will simply not go away and buy into it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think we all should acknowledge the naked truth about this format war.
Blu-ray is winning against HD-DVD because it has a cooler name and a cooler logo.
The format war is *not* over because a couple of 'experts' say so
No, it's over because one format now has 70% of studio support which included all the Pixar films, LOTR, Batman, Spiderman, Matrix, Pirates, etc. etc.
You don't need an expert to tell you which way this gale is blowing. As usual they only report the obvious.
* Until the war is over, don't build a large library (rent)
It would be a good idea to rent HD-DVD's, but Blu-Rays are now a go to buy (though I would actually not buy Warner Blu-Ray discs until the remaster them to make better use of the space). I generally rent most titles anyway and only buy the few I really love. Buying HD-DVDs' at this point makes no sense since the rest of the studios will be switching soon, and you can then look forward as I said to better remasters of the same content.
The cost of the player for a few years use is modest
You have to look at current and remaining future releases to decide if the cost per title is low enough for what you want to see in HD-DVD at this point. It's not for me.
Amazon started selling discounted Bluray players with the same 10 disc offer a couple of weeks after the HD-DVD offer, so it is not part of a dumping scheme by either format.
I agree, both of these were attempts to build marketshare and improve sales.
I agree there's no reason to really be concerned or annoyed if you already have an HD-DVD player. But if it's possible to return the one you have, or not to buy one in the first place - that seems like the better choice now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't know if the peak bandwidth is changing with it, but there are now triple-layer HD-DVDs, which are actually slightly larger than Blu-Ray discs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
just like spdif (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format)
This smells very much like a top-down decision. As in, Sony gave Warner a large chunk of cash (though how large that would have to be is just scary), or sweet-talked some execs, etc. The actual engineers at Warner hate working with Blu-Ray, and the actual movies they've put out have more features (and more robust features) on HD-DVD.
Example: There have been Warner Blu-Ray discs which actually include several versions of the video stream -- that is, they store the entire movie at least twice -- one with the picture-in-picture burned in to the video. I mean, ok, that's one way to waste those 50 gigs...
Also note that the announcement has absolutely no mention of anything other than that Warner wants some format to win. There's no explanation of why they want Blu-Ray to win, rather than HD-DVD. When Paramount went HD-DVD exclusive, they actually included an explanation of why they thought it was the technically superior format.
Read your analysis in your journal. It sort of makes sense, if, as someone says below, you haven't bought fud about DRM being optional in one and not in the other, etc.
But we are geeks.
We know how to access the hardware.
We don't have to care that much about most of the movies coming out in high-def. We don't have to watch any one movie so many times that it's going to make the studios any money to prevent us from copying them, at least, not in high-def. We can make our own movies, and we can make drivers that access the raw stream from a drive with no intent to break DRM. We don't have to choose between one or the other.
That illusion of two choices is the kool-aid.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Minidisc was never a huge success. The small form factor made it reasonably popular for portable players for a time, but Sony wanted it to replace CD. DAT was seen as a digital successor to the compact cassette but was never as successful. They found their niches but neither did as well as might be hoped.
Most of Sony's biggest successes are in equipment that's compatible with existing technology.
No offense, but your display is really too small to see a big difference. I assure you that a high-def movie looks far better than an upscaled DVD on my 92" 1080p screen. On a bigger screen the difference is even more obvious.
You may only have a 40" display now, but do you want to rebuy all your films when you get a 60" or larger display in the future? It's your money of course, but I won't be buying another DVD again, just as I didn't buy VHS when a laserdisc player was available, or laserdiscs once DVD had arrived.
I feel sorry for you that you were tricked into buying hardware yesterday and that you cannot see how 7 to 10 free movies for a device that costs the same as the retail price of the movies is a big scam to product dump and lock you into Toshiba hardware and their HD DVD format.
If you really want to know more about the formats rather than FUD, check out wikipedia.org.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So you got burned on betamax, did you?
What kind of TV do you have that is 60"?
Blurry to me. I can tell the differences between HD and DVD's video quality.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Nice FUD. Take your anti HD-DVD propoganda elsewhere please and re-read my post. Yeah, Yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls. Don't worry, I won't bother replying again unless it's to an intelligent comment.
I, along with many other people do not care who wins the HD war. I am buying both, but the two combo units currently on the market are more expensive then two separate units and do not come with free DVD's of either format. I don't care if the price on HD is currently artifically low, and neither does anyone who's buying it. A non educated consumer going into a store will look at both options and wonder why Blu-Ray thinks their stuff is worth almost 2x as much as HD, and will likely buy the HD option unless they have compelling information from a trusted family member or friend to get Blu-Ray despite the price.
I do not consider published hardware specs with players that support them (or the lack thereof) that I mentioned in my post to be FUD and neither should any educated consumer.
MiniDisc is often used in theater because you can edit tracks on the disc without a computer. I use it to make back-up recordings and play sound effects simply because it's easier to use than CDs.
Yes, we here at slashdot have forgiven Microsoft all their evils. That borg look we gave Bill is just because robots are cool, almost as cool as Microsoft. 2008 will be the year of the Microsoft desktop as we wipe linux off for the awesomely secure power of Vista. Sony taught us that it is right and good that powerful multinationals treat their customers as criminals, as it should be. All is well in slashland, all we need now is to bring the ponies back.
Oh, and Cthulu needs not the puny votes of mortal flesh.
"are more expensive then two separate units and do not come with free DVD's of either format"
In my experience anything that comes bundled with "free" stuff from a third party is an offer too good to be true. What's the catch?? Go into a music store and compare D/A converters for example. The one that doesn't have free software sellotaped to it will usually be the better piece of kit.
Show me a HD-DVD player that comes with a coupon for ten DVD's and all I see is a turd.
The PS3 does 24p, the 1.9 update fixed the last of the problems with it.
As of firmware 1.8 it upsampled DVDs and PS2 games through software.
As of 2.1 it's Blu-Ray 1.1 profile, and supports DiVX and WMV.
Remember, the Cell processor is powerful enough to do any of this, so the PS3 doesn't require a dedicated chip for anything.
It's one of the best and most flexible Blu-Ray players on the market.
How many Blue Ray disc sales are replacements?
If a Blue Ray disc is scratched there is no recovery, you cannot put it in a disc doctor like an HD-DVD, DVD or CD-ROM.
There is no scratch resistance in BlueRay discs.
This was such a problem that special coatings for the surface were developed just for use in BlueRay, however, everything gets scratched eventually; with BlueRay you need to buy another disc.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Did I just read one poster claim improved "stubble" resolution? HD wins by a facial hair?
Want something you can distinguish on that 12" TV you can see through the window of your neighbour's house? Refresh rate on a horizontal pan shot. Every movie director alive has learned to pan the camera sideways *very* slowly, or with carefully chosen composition to minimize the stroboscopic effect. In action movies, the action is always coming straight at you. Any other direction will make you sick.
When are we going to finally get a true 72Hz frame rate? Beta (particle) ray? Higgs Boson ray? I'm sure the actor's guild wishes to maintain the 24Hz standard. Probably hard to get enough light to film at 72 fps. But rather trivial to animate at 72 fps. Real life celebrity babes are temperamental, soon become old fat ugly and imprisoned. Animated digital babes stay young forever, like Mickey Mouse, have a new dress every day, and need never wear the same hairstyle twice, unless they feel like it. When a digital babes goes looking for the bourbon, she never forgets her lines.
These quality quibbles make my head spin.
Best. Comeback. Ever. There are a few semi-correct points in that guy's post, but they are hidden very well in a nice fluffy insanity-suit. I'm sure there is a way that what he said could be rephrased as something insightful (and get modded appropriately), but not in this discussion, and not with that attitude.
I swear we should be allowed to give mod points to sigs... "-1, Offtopic"
see the updated chart to get an idea of the now current situation
Now that there's only one serious contender for next-gen (or should I say current-gen) home movie formats, let's start working on that awful DRM.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Players are already cheap enough people are willing to buy them now. Player price is not really an issue anymore (not that it ever was, something that never stuck in the heads of HD-DVD supporters).
When VHS was becoming popular, players were $1000. With 25 years of inflation that's like $3500. The BR Players launched at what, $1000 and HD DVD at $500? For early adopters and Home Theatre buffs, that's nothing... $400-$500 is routine to pay for the remote control at the high end. They launched CHEAP for the early adopter market, and inside of a year were pretty cheap.
Players are a one time cost. The Gamecube was routinely half the price of the PS2 and Xbox, and didn't outsell them. Cheaper doesn't always win. Once the object is "cheap enough" then it's not about price, it's about whether people want it.
For early adopters in 2005-2006, $500-$1000 for a new digital toy is reasonable... My DirecTV HD Tivo cost $1000, and they sold them as fast as they could make them for a while, then dropped the price to $400 and sold them to the next tier of buyers, and kept dropping from there.
The player price matters, but to the early adopter, $1000 was reasonable in year one, $500 in year two. Once you get to the advanced side of the market that isn't willing to pay anything to play (people with $10k - $30k home theatres, the early adopter market, could buy a $1000 BR player AND a $500 HD Player), but has $5000 sets, $200-$300 for a good player gets reasonable.
Under $200, you compete for mass market, and under $100 for the late adopters. By $50, you are going after the technology avoiders.
If BR launched at $5000 and HD DVD at $1000, I'd buy the player price, but at $1000 and $500, that dropped to $500/$300 or so after about two years... player price didn't matter. People buying a $500 TV won't spend more than $100 for the player, but the market for the $3000 sets isn't gone, and $500 for a player isn't unreasonable there. All the big box stores are pushing BR, technophiles pushing BR, etc. The only people pushing HD that I can see are Slashdot anti-DRM people that for some reason think that HD-DVD is better DRM-wise which doesn't appear to be the case in reality.
Yes, but I've yet to see the only one whos decision that really matters:
Lucasfilm.
Or is that covered by 20th Century Fox?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I strongly disagree about saying that upconverting is "similar" to real hi def.
Not true at all. *Maybe* in small TVs, but in general, the difference can be easily seen.
I upconvert my dvd collection and they look very good, but, as soon as I see a Blu-ray movie, 1080p, difference get obvious.
He actually said 92", but 60" displays are very common and there are some larger flat panel TVs and RPTVs, but at 92" most likely he's referring to a projector onto a screen, where 92" is if anything, small. My 1080p projector is projecting onto 120" screen. To be honest not all HD material is created equally.
Not only was mini-disc very successful, mini-disc players and discs were made by just about any japanese consumer electronics maker you ever heard of. Sony definitely got everyone on board with this one. They were great little devices, until flash storage made them irrelevant.
You don't have to take my word for it. Go to wikipedia.org here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc to read up on Blu-ray, history of the format and attempts made to avoid the format war here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Attempts_to_avoid_a_format_war . You can also read the comparison of the formats here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats . I'm not expecting you to believe me but I ask you to educate yourself and to stop spreading FUD.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I wonder if we are truly seeing the end of the ridiculous format wars and all the nonsense that come with physical media distribution. Physical formats have already become mostly irrelevant in the music arena with more and more people purchasing their music on line. Video and movies cannot be that far behind.
Many 1080p monitors can already go much faster than 24/30FPS. When being driven by game consoles, they use that speed. The PS3 can in theory output 1080p 60FPS, although it doesn't really have enough crunch power to deliver 60 different frames per second on most games. The point, though, is that monitors now have much higher frame rate capabilities than movie storage media.
It's going to be embarrassing when EA Football looks better than NFL football.
Since Blu Ray has already been cracked, what will happen is that the pirate industry starts transferring Blu Ray movies to HD-DVD, and without studio competition, there will be a MAJOR loss in revenue to those studios that support only Blu Ray.
Aw comon...did you think the piracy markets wouldn't notice this opportunity? There is a market, cheap production costs, cheap distribution costs (i.e. internet iso's) and one more major factor.
The Chinese HATE the Japanese for their atrocities in World War 2, one of which, the Rape of Nanjing, stirs incredibly strong emotions in Chinese worldwide even today. Because of Sony, Blu ray is perceived as Japanese. Screwing over a Japanese corporation would be widely popular in those provinces. A pirating operation in Nanjing would be effectively immune to government intervention, it is doubtful the government could even find enough officials willing to speak against it, let alone take action which would spark a major riot. In addition, most overseas Chinese would support a distribution channel.
Uhuh. It is pretty much a given that this will be a disaster for the studios. Piracy right now is just about convenience, once it become a political statement for a billion Chinese, however...
Of course, a major studio that supported HD-DVD, were to release a movie about the Rape of Nanjing, well, they would gain an enormous amount of good will with the billion plus moviegoers in the Chinese movie market, which would establish the dominance of HD-DVD regardles of what the west does. More importantly the Chinese might actually BUY rather than pirate the movie, just to make a point to the Japanese. Since it also would probably be the single most funded production in cinematic history, it is pretty much a given that it will happen sooner or later. The Chinese government has been trying to downplay this festering abcess in sino japanese relations, it has not been noticeably successful.
P.S. The Chinese suffering of World War 2 atrocities is not very well known in the west, which concentrated on the Nazi's. Among the Chinese, the memories are still fresh, the Japanese still treat the matter with denial (visiting the Yasukuni Shrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine)
and, if you are a westerner, you should read something about it, because it is going to be a major force in China's dealings with the world.
Can't say I am happy about such a destabilizing force in world politics, but ignoring it is like ignoring cancer, it is just going to make it a lot worse later.
Sure, Joe Sixpack doesn't care about the DRM, in the sense of technology meant to prevent copying. After all, none of the DRM schemes ever invented *ever* prevented copying, and in fact, the stronger DRM methods only encouraged new ways of copying (since it is hard copying a movie to a friend, methods were invented to copy it to 1000 strangers on the Internet).
But Joe Sixpack *does* care about *restrictions* that DRM allow. He cares about his collection of 200 legally-bought DVDs not working any more when he moves to another country. He cares about a DVD he legally bought over the Internet doesn't work. He cares about a DVD he bought for his kids (for full money) having ads that cannot be skipped. He cares about buying a large, expensive collection of music and videos for one device (e.g., think of an iPod), and a year later when he buys another device, he can no longer play the content he bought.
All these problems are caused by just one thing: DRM. Without DRM, the player market would have killed all these restrictions - if Sony's player doesn't skip ads, Toshiba's will and nobody would buy Sony's players. DRM is what allows these restrictions, and why the consumers hate it (even if they don't know on who to put the blame). It's not just us "penguin-huggers" that hate DRM - us penguin-huggers are just more accutely aware of what causes the restrictions we hate.
Actually, the main reason for that is the BOGO (Buy one get one). Previously it was for HD-DVD and now it is for BD. However, it will be interesting to see the stats when no specials for either format is going on.
On the contrary. DAT and MiniDisc were big and were used by most studios. Just because a technology is phased out after, say, ten years doesn't mean it was a success at one time.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Both were expected to be major consumer formats as well. Studio use is a relatively tiny market. Neither managed to replace the consumer format the studios wanted them to. Billions of CDs have been sold. Minidisc sales peaked at something like 2% of CD sales. Finding a niche doesn't really make them a huge success.
Since almost no titles include region codes today, and any titles that do have region codes will not after a year, AND there are only three region codes (unlike DVD's seven) AND Japan is in the same region as the US - any Blu-Ray player will do.
But you didn't really want an answer, you just wanted to look smart. Sorry I foiled your little plan.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where George comes in is that he has the permission to say Go in producing the actual disc(s). So while the existence of a Blu-Ray disc is under his control, the choice of format is not.
This is very similar to the situation at Paramount where Spielburg has denied Paramount the right to produce any of his movies in HD-DVD. That's a big reason why the Paramount exclusivity ended up being a non-starter, if you look at the actual impact it had - it really ended up meaning the loss of one title, Transformers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I realize you HD-DVD chaps are particularly dense (as evidenced by not understanding just what 70% movie share working against that format means) but if you read the very bit you quoted, I was asking how many HD-DVD discs shipped with lossless audio. You could easily understand what I meant by the question even though I misspoke and labeled HD-DVD as Blu-Ray, but you simply chose to ignore that along with the obvious impact of the Warner switch which is so much larger than Paramount was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wrong. New discs will soon use the 1.1 profile.
.0000001% of the market cares about can't handle it, but updates will obviously appear.
What are you talking about? 1.1 has nothing to do with BD+. Sorry your chosen lameoid software player that
Bitrate doesn't automatically translate into superior quality
Yes there are diminishing returns. That's why HD-DVD titles generally run the bitrate up to that point and then drop lossless audio... as I said, more space means better quality in the end, instead of having to chose between great audio or great video.
Blu-Ray has more DRM
Effectively less DRM than current DVD's for consumers. Not a consumer issue anyway.
The Blu-Ray players are more expensive,
Mass adoption will lower prices quickly, and people are already buying more of them at $300 than $100 Toshiba players.
Blu-Ray uses BD-J, which might be a real nightmare (I won't be surprised if some VMs have issues with new titles, the performance isn't good at all seemingly, etc) versus simple, elegant web-like markup for HD DVD
Pure FUD, BD-J has been working OK and is a lot more flexible in what you can do vs. simple markup.
The war is far from being over.
War was over Friday. This will be so much more clear even to people such as yourself, by the end of the week...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My mother-in-law dragged my wife and I into a Walmart for some random reason over the holidays. It was interesting to note that all of the Blu-ray players were out of stock and there was a whole stack of cheaper HD-DVD players ($299 vs $385). Who knows what it really means they could have only had 10 BR player compared to 30 HD-DVD but I thought it was interesting.
/., I wonder if the public just doesn't care as much as we do.
A sidenote: my inlaws just got a HD tv and when my mother inlaw saw the two choices of the players between a Toshiba and a Sony she went with the Sony without a thought. With all the crap we give Sony on
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Have to call you out on that open ended comment. The reality is that only two of the six major studios support HD DVD. Dude, it's over.
People don't buy consoles to watch movies for the most part. At least, that's not why they buy a 360.
Parent +1 Funny. I said, wha...huh...aaahhhh
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
I have a 1080i capable 32' CRT. It weighs a ton, is square, and is about 6 years old - but HD looks great on it - much better than any LCD I've seen.
minidisc wasn't too successfull int the american or british consumer because they were quite expensive and there was little prerecorded music on the format. SCMS probablly didn't help much either
In the proffesional and semi proffesional market market though they were very popular because of easy editing and small size. SCMS was annoying but those at the lower end of the market probablly just used analog copying (which was still WAY better than tape to tape copying) and those at the higher end of the market had proffesional decks that did not enforce SCMS.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
As we know the PS3 has a Blu-ray drive, according to WikiPedia, 5.59 million units have been sold as of Sept. 30. I guess all of the consumers aren't currently using the console mainly for movies, but they are potential costumers. So this could be another major reason for Warner and other studios to release their movies only in Blu-ray.
BMW has something like 5% of the auto market, but who wouldn't say that BMW - or indeed Apple - are hugely successful?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
I think honestly they were selected primarily to keep NA and the EU separated, both in terms of timed american releases of movies, and also to let the BBC have the control it desires to keep most titles in the EU and control when they get out. Not sure why a third one came into play, probably just to punish the chinese. (and/or Russia for AllOfMP3).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would say they were hugely unsuccessful if they launched a car that they wanted to have 50% of the market and they ended up with 5%.
Good riddance to HD-DVD. About fucking time. I can't believe it took this long to put HD-DVD out of its misery. I thought for sure we would've reached this point two years ago. Blu-Ray is clearly better in every way that matters 1) it has considerably more storage space 2) it just sounds a hundred times cooler
Sorry, but you fail. I don't give a crap about Japan; I want to continue buying and watching UK movies and TV shows.
And what makes you think that region codes disappear after a year? [citation needed]
I read this in a few places last year - but I can't find references now. So I'll withdraw that assertion until I can prove it. I too like to watch UK content, and so far BBC discs I've seen (though not wanted to watch) seem to be region free.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
HD-DVD has a big opportunity to win.
1. Continuously leak information that whill help fully crack AACS and BD+
2. Release cheap HD-DVD Burners
3. Finance secretely a HD-DVDShrink program
HD-DVD will take off. It will be families best tool to "back-up" their Blu-Ray discs.
I was reading intently up until this point. Consumers may be ignorant about DRM but it is nevertheless a very important issue.
It's not an issue that affects consumer buying habits much today. It's an issue that effects what is possible for consumers to do. Very different things. I contribute to the EFF every year to fight DRM, it's not like I don't want to be rid of it either. It's just that I can separate that from realizing the impact it has on the average consumer, and for the new formats it is less impactful from the standpoint of region coding and controls that effect what most people can do with content.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... crying sour grapes and how the war didn't matter anyways.
At least they can focus all their energy on promoting the XBox 360 rather than promoting HD-DVD and the XBox 360.
So c'mon fanboys, let's hear how Sony is evil and blah blah blah while ignoring everything Microsoft has ever done.
When you get enough money, burning it, sometimes without a specific reason, becomes almost a habit.
Or what? Do you count all the 1 cent (or pence, or whatever) coins you have in your purse? For some people a $100 bill comes to be equivalent in importance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.