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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.""
Yes and VHS was "good enough" for most people as well. Remember that a 25" TV was HUGE back then...
:-)
Most people that have a good HDTV can tell a large difference in good HD content. Please note that I am not saying many of the movies that have come out on either format, but "some" of the movies there is a HUGE difference in quality.
The fact is that Microsoft isn't a content provider and because of that they can't leverage any monopoly this time to win this format dispute. The real issue is all about Java on these players. I bet you can guess which player has Java and which one doesn't
The HD-DVD camp just pulled their talk tonight at CES and that comes as no surprise, also it now has come out that Universal has an "escape clause", so this could be over sooner than most thought. The only real question is "if" Microsoft wants to dump a LOT more money at Universal to try and continue this dispute. I would imagine that now it would take a lot more than 150 million.
Again, don't get confused about any company caring about the consumer, Sony used the PS3 to cement Blu-Ray and Microsoft HATES Java and will do a lot to make sure it doesn't gain a significant foothold in the living room. 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.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The DRM in blu-ray is less consumer friendly then HD-DVD
the drm in BOTH is totally unacceptable to me.
runnable code?? in a VIDEO disc?
oh please!
come back (vendors) when you have learned your lesson. we don't want no stinkin' "revoke lists" and all that java crap going on.
a/v players should JUST relay a/v bits to the display/speakers. and that's ALL.
in that respect, they both got it horribly wrong. so I boycott and will never buy bd/hd discs. buying only tells them that you approve and I will never approve of this. vote with your dollars.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
For the price of a DECENT upscaling DVD player, I got a DECENT upscaling DVD player which also plays a HD format that may be going out. Do I care? Not really...I have no plans to buy Blu-Ray for a while, and the reason I bought an HD set and DVD player was largely because about a month ago my TV and DVD player got fried by lightning.
Warner Brothers hit it on the head, at least for me, but they forgot another issue: With all the FUD surrounding the current BD players, coupled with the price, many of us have no plans whatsoever to buy one, at least for now. Waiting until after people snatched up the 1st- and 2nd-gen players, then (like me) lower-priced 3rd-gen players, and not just that but wait until CES was about to start was just mean-spirited. Their stance toward the whole thing, up until yesterday, left a bad taste in some consumers' mouths. Is it enough to hurt them? Probably not, but I think they may have just extended the format war rather than killing it as intended. I certainly hope I'm wrong about that.
I don't get some people's attitude about HD-DVD being the underdog, though. In one corner you have Sony and Pioneer, along with Sun and a number of companies that're pushing a proprietary format built on a mix of open and closed standards. In the other corner, you have Microsoft and Toshiba, along with a number of other companies, pusing a proprietary format based on a mix of open and closed standards. Both camps have technologies that are similar to each other. Both had their advantages and disadvantages, and they were never as hugely different as many fanboys of both formats made them out to be.
So yeah, I guess you can say that we "wasted" our money, but thus far, most people buying HD stuff have the money to burn, so unless you're living in your parents' basement and blowing your McDonalds wages on HD equipment, this isn't as huge as people seem to be making it out to be. At least we've decided who's going to win the SACD vs DVD-A...excuse me, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war.
Yeah, seriously, I don't think Blu-Ray will have a long shelf-life, either. DVD had 10 years. Whoopty doo. My prediction is that in 5 years you'll be tivo-ing all the movies you want to watch, and by "tivo" I mean your PVR will be pulling down your HD content either straight through dish or cable or through your cable/phone/internet combo deal. Blu-Ray will be the format that you'll get when you absolutely, positively don't want to commit your movies to your PVR's hard drive, and for videophiles who'll recognize that the streaming options are inferior to the more popular streaming options.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
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"