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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.""
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.
"Most people that have a good HDTV can tell a large difference in good HD content."
You mean, some people _think_ they can tell the difference (notably TV salesmen and people who've bought a HDTV).
I read a recent blindtest where three experts and a bunch of non-experts were tested for the difference between HD and non HD material on several LCD's and plasma displays.
On the first test, 42 inch screen, 3.5 meters away (10 ft), they all guessed 720p. It was 480p. After much flipping back and forth, some managed to get it right. More tests and eventually getting down to 50" 2 meters (6 ft) away, and there were still some who couldnt even tell 480p from 1080p. Nobody could tell 720p from 1080p better than random chance.
The fact is, such tests show that under normal viewing conditions most people simply dont have eyes and visual centers good enough to reliably notice the difference between SD and HD, nevermind deciding what looks best. You have to get up to 60-100 inch screens at a normal viewing distance to be able to reliably tell the difference; most people would be much better off getting a TV with better color and contrast ratio and simply slap a HD sticker on it so they think it's buzzword compliant.
It's not totally without precedent. The 3.5" floppy disk was a Sony format.
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.
So did CD, 3.5" discs, DAT and a bunch of computer tape formats.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
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.
Looking at that chart, while HD-DVD has support, it's definitely in the minority now with this announcement. Moreover, New Line is owned by Time-Warner, so they're likely to go Blu-Ray only too at some point. I'd say that the situation looks pretty grim for HD-DVD, although it's not quite over yet.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Completely true.
I ran a little "experiment" of my own, which isn't really scientific but whatever. I set my HD TiVo to only output at 480p (which is the default) and showed a bunch of "HD" content on my 1080p-capable TV.
No one noticed.
And since it IS the default setting, I wonder how many HDTV owners with HD TiVos are staring at 480p content and thinking that it's amazing HD. (Besides, in most people's minds, HD=16:9. Get a widescreen digital SDTV, and people will swear it's HD.)
Which isn't to say the HD TiVo wasn't worth it - it stores something like 180 hours of SD programming, and outputs in digital, which really does help the picture quality. (Plus it comes with a network adapter so I no longer have to hook it up to the phone.)
The move from analog to digital massively improved the picture quality. The move from 480p to 1080i was completely unnoticeable.
Well, almost. The network brand in the lower-right corner is a bit sharper in HD...
(Which, I think, hints at the truth. The difference between SD and HD is only really noticeable in static imagery - once things start moving, the motion completely obscures the difference. And since I rarely watch TV shows of walls, there's really no point in HD.)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
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