Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.
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'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.
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"
"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).
Despite many agreeing with you, I cannot, because like so many things in consumer electronics, users are too often fooled into thinking they're assessing one thing when they're assessing another.
To begin, "good HD content" is already qualitative rather than quantitative. HDLite seems prevalent on DirecTV - please see http://www.stophdlite.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Lite (probably in that order). I'd consider it "good HD content" and appreciate it a lot compared to SD - but it's not highest quality HD, as might be found with the OTA ABC or CBS broadcasts. What we call HD Lite is more along the lines of what you get from good DV tape - which I'll admit might qualify as "good HD content" but isn't HD.
Next - and I'm going to contradict myself a little bit w.r.t. the above paragraph and I'm ok with that - comes native resolution of the TVs themselves. My DLP has a native res of 1280x720p. The sign at the store calls it a 1080i set - because it accepts and converts 1920x1080i to native (all HDTVs convert whatever to their native formats) - so you have to beware of marketing crap. I haven't looked at the latest models, but most plasmas sold to the date I'd checked last year were native of 1024x768, and LCDs are very often 1366(or so)x768 native res. On those models, you're not going to get 1-to-1 mapping of HD anything without processing inside the TV - so like it or not, further signal degradation occurs in the format changeover.
Next, not all HDTV inputs are created equally. See http://www.dbstalk.com/ if you're a satellite TV user (or want to check my references) and you'll see plenty of newbie posts answered by very qualified TV engineers telling that no, they're not crazy, for their set / brand / production run, the component inputs are noticably better than their HDMI inputs or no, they're not crazy, for the same reasons, the HDMI inputs are noticably better than the component inputs.
Next, tuners. I have 3 ATSC tuners in my house, until recently, two were hooked to the same DLP HDTV - and just switching between the two caused guests - drinking beer and watching the game - to exclaim, "WTF did you just do?!?!?" So, even though the source could be qualified as "good HD content" the differences in h/w quality was easily observable by people with no vested interests in oooohs and aaaaahs of HDTV ownership.
Next, cabling. Yes, yes, yes, anyone paying too much for cables is an idiot. Try it. 'Nuff said. Now add in store cabling (have you ever worked in a consumer electronics store?) and you'll know all bets are off for controlling that part of your experiment.
Next, as you point out, color engines. Two HDTVs with same native resolutions? The one with the better color engine wins everytime - in fact, it's often been shown that given the choice between higher native res and color engine, spend the money on the better engine. My Helio Ocean phone with its 2 megapixel camera looking like crap (knew it before I bought it, didn't care) is an excellent proof point on this.
Next, SD upconverters built in to HDTVs all vary - and there are some very scary good ones. Ditto on set-top boxes.
Finally - the source material itself. Hitchhiker's Guide on HD (Lite) is better than on DVD - it's slight, but not subtle. I switched between the two without telling my wife what the switch was (to see if it was just my bias, as you suggest), and got one of those, "WTF did you just do?" moments again. Take something that really cared about HD during production and it's just no contest.
So - there's a lot more to HD comparisons and good HD content and what to invest in the HDTV world than just what
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
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"
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