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Toshiba Making Funeral Plans for HD DVD
Blue Light Special writes "With HD DVD on life support, Toshiba is reportedly preparing to bow to the inevitable and allow HD DVD to expire quietly. 'While denying that a decision on the fate of HD DVD has been made, a Toshiba marketing exec left the door wide open. "Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players," Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, said.'" A few folks have also noted that Wal-mart is joining the Blu-ray train, further lowering the stock of HD DVD.
HD-DVD was cheaper for both players and movies, but I'm glad the format war is officially over. Especially with wal-mart throwing their (considerable) weight behind BD. I just can't stand the fact that Sony won. Oh well. I'm still not buying a BD player until they get sub-$200.
If you go to Fry's this weekend, you can get a blu ray reader for ~$180.
Betamax,Laser Disc,Minidisc, DIVX rentals, and now HD DVD. When will tech companies learn that everyone wants one standard and that these wars usually end poorly for someone. You would think that by now they would learn to all cooperate and back one product, thus making it cheaper for the consumer and getting thier product into more households.
Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1
Had I not received a PS3 as a gift, I probably would have went HD DVD. But given the circumstances, I'm glad (and suprised) that the choice will eventually only be one single format.
Hopefully I'll soon be able to get all of my favorite movies in high definition, not just the particular ones owned by production companies who signed specific format deals.
A lot of people won't be happy about it, but I've gotta admit I'm impressed with how Sony marketing pulled this off. I definitely didn't see it ending this way.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
It's done. I guess Sony had to have a successful format eventually.
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So, since the format war is over, does this mean the PS3, with a bundled Blu-Ray drive, has more to recommend it in the market place?
Especially since the "fear and doubt" of buying an obsolete format, are no longer hanging over it?
So does that involve excess stock being quietly disposed of in an Alamagordo, NM landfill?
Wasn't Sony on the wrong side of all these battles? What gives? Sony may actually win a standards war? What's next, other companies will use memory stick?
When all else fails, try.
Their competition is called Blu-Ray. It's shorter to say, it has the word "Ray" in it (which is awesome), sounds new and different from DVDs, and even has a "cool" misspelling of a word. It's the same reason Yahoo! will never succeed - people simply like saying "Google" too much.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Oh well, I'm not all that interested until the players (and the televisions) drop to a reasonable price. Oh, and easy-to-do piracy is another must on my list! ;)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Packing the PS3 with a blu-ray drive did pay off. It was probably the main reason that Blu-Ray won out - none of the other Blu-Ray players have had much chance in market penetration.
The only thing that bugs me about this development is that it's a Sony product and I don't like supporting Sony's attempts to lock their users into their products. Then again, I also believe that Sony will only have a few years of profiting from being the next-gen DVD standard - downloadable content should slowly take over within the next few years. There's the problem of net neutrality that could throw a wrench in that, but I'm still hoping that this will be resolved in favor of net neutrality.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm glad blu ray has won.
My point of view: I don't watch movies. I don't even own a television. What format is better for movies and TV doesn't matter to me.
What does matter for me, however, is being able to use a re-writable form of the media for making backups. HD-DVD only offered 15 gigabytes of storage; Blu-Ray offers 25 gigabytes of storage.
Now that a format is decided on, economies of scale can kick in and, in a few years, blu-ray blank media will be as cheap as DVD media is right now (I just bought 100 DVD blanks for under $23 at a two-for-one loss leader sale at CostCo; I remember, five years ago, when DVD blanks were $3 or more per disk at the same time CDR blanks were 30 cents a disk).
I Sony just as much as the next guy who's actually informed about the industry. Don't get me wrong, Sony makes good products. But Sony's business practices combined with their utter disregard for any other technology out there makes me hate them with an utter passion.
I still own several Sony products. Why? Because when I bought them, they were by far the best product out there at the time.
What really ticks me about this is that Blu-ray was not a better format. The only advantage to it is the storage capacity. HD DVD typically had a better picture, better contrast, better compression, better sound quality, and a cheaper method of production. HD DVD was a better format. If Blu-ray was better in these areas, I'd stand behind it immediately.
And THAT'S why this whole thing sucks. The superior product lost.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Am I the only one who doesn't give a damn one way or the other?
At least Blu-Ray rolls off the tounge easier. And yes, I'm convinced that's at least part of the reason it won.
Technoli
Michael Bay, is that you?
Living With a Nerd
wins.
Why is this so common in technology?
I suspect the built in DRM in Blu-Ray is why large companies (who also have large media concerns) is the winner.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You know, it's not really that bad of a deal right now anyway. HD-DVD players are cheap. And you get free movies with them through the end of the month. If you time it right, you could get enough in free movies/money to honestly make it where what you really buy is an upscaling DVD player, that doesn't have to upscale every movie, for basically free (counting the value of the movies). My dad bought an HD-DVD player at christmas time (I bought one in November), and the way he looks at it (since he got 10 movies free), is basically free DVD player that does upconversion. I think this is how Toshiba could get rid of the rest of them. Stop doing combo discs and just tout features that won't go away anytime soon.
Don't say you weren't warned long about about HD-DVD. You have no one but yourself to blame if you are stuck with hundreds to thousands of dollars on a dead format.
It's not our fault the wrong format appears to be winning...
How fast until BD+ is cracked?
There must be a time limit, ok it has been 30 years, I no longer have to hate them. :)
Just my thoughts, I am sure there will be many that will disagree.
Quid Pro Quo, nothing more, nothing less.
http://wwwfail.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FHD_DVD
"You heard it here first"
I highly suspect that when all the players finally surrender to Blu-ray that Sony is going to pull a serious hidden rabbit out of its ass.
Prediction the PS3 is currently and always has been HD-DVD compatible, making it so was one of the delay reasons during PS3 launch. Sony wanted to be sure they had everything right to make it so. Right now the HD-DVD compatibility is turned off in the firmware. Once the battle dust settles we will see an announcement that in the next firmware the compatibility will be turned on, see Sony helping ya out! Wasn't that nice of us. How when your early adopter HD Unit dies that's alright you can use your PS3. You do have a PS3 right? No thats OK, we'll be happy to sell you one.
Lets examine this, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are practically the same thing, they only vary slightly in some small technical details. I suspect that those variations hardware wise are accounted for in the PS3 hardware. And well, the software side, thats what PS3 does best.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If only the media companies would let those of us stuck with HD-DVD discs because of this crap exchange them for the cost of the media... and not pay the damn royalties, etc again.
MD was and is used often in Broadcasting.
Others:
3.5" Floppies
SPDIF
DAT
8mm video (Video8)
SACD
Various DV formats (often used in Broadcast, again)
I'd say all of the above saw reasonable success.
They've had their fair share of miserable failures as well.
In this war I didn't WANT there to be a winner. I was hoping both camps would be forced to accomodate to an ongoing market share tug-of-war, while consumers owned hybrid players and weren't locked into EITHER format, and could choose whichever suited them. Movie studios would release movies on whichever they wanted, or could do double-sided discs (HDDVD on one side, Blu-Ray on the other) and release them in both formats, like music albums were released on cassette as well as CD for many years.
Now that Sony owns the HD movie format, it's a strong disincentive for me to start buying movies in HD, until the DVD format is phased out completely, or until it becomes possible and easy to rip movies from Blu-Ray and reauthor them minus the DRM.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
And let every device maker in China do the rest.
For movies, you just download from TPB or iTunes like you are probably currently doing, burn them into HD-DVDs and presto.
They should have pushed the combo discs harder via advertising. I think people would have taken to the idea that they could buy a combo disc (for the same price as a standard HD DVD, eat a little profit there guys) and use it in their DVD player right now and in their HD DVD player when they were cheap enough (like now). But few people knew about them or what they were and they were rarely on the shelves. They made several marketing errors with the format (no v2 xbox360 with HD DVD built in being another) and chose to try to sell it on the definition alone, which wasn't a strength over the BD setup. No region encoding? Awesome.
I really only want documentaries in HD (planet earth) so I don't much care about HD yet and I'm saddened that I'll have to buy some crippled format if I ever want the content. But for me, Blu Ray = Vista, I'll skip it if I can.
When both formats were introduced, I heard and read many times that HD-DVD had the better name because consummers could instantly grasp which format was in HD.
If Toshiba (and other HD-DVD losers) let people invoke their warranty to get free transcripts of their HD-DVD to Blu-Ray, then they'd keep a lot of their customer. Offer a discount on tradein for a Blu-Ray player if they ship ther HD-DVD player back with their discs to be transcribed, and Toshiba could turn a disastrous loss into a way to keep a lot more customers despite picking the losing side.
--
make install -not war
Otherwise all those HD-DVD movies people have bought would be useless and a waste of money. As it is, they can just rip those high def movies to their hard drives.
I'm still considering picking up a second HD DVD drive for the XBOX 360 for use on my computers so I don't have to move the one I have around and risk damaging it. I've already invested in many HD DVD releases, most of them exclusively released to HD DVD, and am now reaping the benefits of 50% sales on more titles. A discounted drive that I can use on a computer, AACS keys disclosed, another five HD DVDs free... I'm even reconsidering purchasing HD titles I already have on DVD.
Meanwhile there are still studios with exclusive HD DVD contracts with titles I want sooner than later.
(You can't find a VHS player with S-Video out anymore at a reasonable price. Those dual VHS-DVD decks don't support S-Video for the VHS side. S-VHS decks sell for more than twice what HD DVD decks are. A JVC deck I've been watching is now $414.99.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I guess I had better send in for my 5 free HD DVDs, then.
That's one down. Now we just need to decommission the VC-1 codec that snuck in the back door of Blu-ray. Don't need it.
Most of the stuff on
I supported the HD DVD format while it was viable (until WB pulled out). The silver lining is that the competition between the formats made hardware very, very cheap. Less than 18 months into the launch of both formats, we had HD DVD players go for ridiculously low sums. Blu-Ray backers didn't counter with matching prices, but they did drop the prices of their players (to sub-$500 levels). Software, too, became a bit cheaper. In-store, non-web pricing of high-def media was usually $29-$39, a good two- or three-fold increase over the regular DVD price. In 2007, especially in the summer and fall, there were numerous great deals on Blu-Ray discs. For every sale on HD DVD media, there were 4 or 5 on Blu-Ray: buy one, get one frees, etc. This was a smart move, as it lowered the cost of entry for people who had PS3s and honestly weren't too excited about the new formats. Now instead of paying $10 or $15 more at the store, the price difference would be $5 or less.
Of course, the counter-part to this was the whole confusion between the rival formats and a lot of people who cashed into a new format weeks before its demise. But, even if HD DVD is dead, the discs and players still work.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Is porno available on Blu Ray?
That was supposed to be the deciding factor: which format the "Adult Entertainment" industry adopted.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
While adding Blu-Ray to the PS3 may have hurt Sony in sales, it probably helped them a lot in this format war. Which is why they did it. There were just a lot of Blu-Ray players out there.
Now, if you are going to get a Blu Ray player, you might as well throw in gaming capabilities as well.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I was looking forward to a long format war. I just wanted to see certain big corporations beat themselves to death and turn off most consumers that see only marginal benefits of HD over SD in a disc format, compared to the huge improvement of the DVD over VHS. So now it looks like both the manufacturing cartel and the motion picture cartel will start to make some money out of this. This is so disappointing.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
HD DVD had pretty ineffective advertising for the format.
While Blu-ray has ads that put the format up front and show you multiple movies you can get for the format, HD DVD ads are mostly ads for a single movie, available on DVD and HD DVD. The only ad you could say was an ad for the HD DVD format itself focused far too much on characters of Shrek, and the characters were actually complaining about the superior quality of the picture, either for Donkey's dragon girlfriend looking too big and scaly or Gingie finding himself looking too delicious and taking bites out of himself, ([crunch] "Ow. Yummy!"). Rather than promoting the format, it felt like it was promoting the Shrek franchise.
I find it interesting too that though Apple backs Blu-ray, DVD Studio Pro supports HD DVD instead. Apple's DVD Player software included with Leopard only plays HD DVDs mastered by DVD Studio Pro, but still is the first OS to ship with native support for an HD media format, and it was HD DVD. Still, the mastering time is ridiculous: 1 week to encode 22 minutes of 1920x1080i video to H.264 on a 4-core Mac Pro with Compressor running 24/7.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Yup. Pr0n started coming out last March on Blu-Ray.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
It turns out that every non-techie I would talk to would ask about blu-ray but I never heard anything about hd-dvd. It turns out the techies were wrong, people bought onto blu-ray since it was something they hadn't heard and immediately understood it was a new format.
HD-DVD, on the other hand, didn't come across as a new format, but simply watching DVDs on your (new) HD television. I've had so many non-techies tell me how they are excited to get some HD-DVDs to watch on their new HDTV, not having a clue it was a different format requiring a different player.
Anyone want to apologize for getting it totally wrong? Maybe not "ipod ... lame" wrong, but still pretty wrong.
Microsoft announces their new system with 15 1-TB HDD's for Downloadable Content causing Sony Toshiba and everyone else to say !!!!
Where's that cap to the Decanter of Endless water???
HD-DVDs commonly came dual-layer, at 30 gigs each. There was a quad-layer format in the works.
Blu-Ray had a dual-layer format at 50 gigs, but most movies were single-layer.
More relevantly: I'll bet those 100 DVDs are single-layer. This is because last I checked, dual-layer DVDs were still significantly more money, enough to not be worth it at all, even if you consider that they're more convenient. Single-layer DVDs are at least cheaper for the storage than blank CDs.
So, are you really glad the more expensive format won out? Is it that important to you to have to swap discs less often, so you can burn 50 gigs at a time instead of 30? Because I'll bet blank HD-DVDs would have been much cheaper... Of course, we'll never know.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My $350 HTPC can upscale a DVD marvelously at 720p (my TV resolution) and I can't imagine the need for BD to get approximately the same picture (due to downscaling). At 1080p it might make a difference since software would be scaling to ~5x the resolution so your dynamic image processing might take over there. But you're still limited by the display. Besides, you only notice the picture sucks if you set less than ~5ft away ;)
winning against a format in the same situation but with less support is easy.
,well this is a much difficult if not impossible battle.
Winning against a format that basically everyone uses on the entire world,have sub 100 dollars players and that for most people offer EXACTLY the same thing as bluray if not more
at least for other spinning plastic disk.
I'm so sick of people assuming Blu-Ray = Sony. Look it up people, Sony is one of 9 founding companies, one of 18 companies on the Board of Directors and one of over 250 companies total in the Blu-Ray Association. Sony was just the most visible member of Blu-Ray since they have the most to gain or lose, so they have been pushing it the hardest. If you don't like Sony, then get a Samsung, or LG or Pioneer or some other Blu-Ray player. I'm not a big fan of Sony either, but I'm tired of people saying "I hate Blu-Ray cuz I hate Sony" or "I'm pissed that Sony won" Yes, Sony won, but so did 250 other companies and us consumers in general now that we'll have one format. sheesh, you anti-Sony guys are almost as bad as Apple fanboys!
I'd love Toshiba & the HDDVD LA to open up the HD-DVD standard. Allow manufacturers to produce HD-DVD stuff royalty-free and without restrictions. I know it'll never happen because all the individual parts (AACS & codecs etc) are all individually licensed but it would still be great.
It's not dead until Netcraft confirms it. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Guess I am in the buy them now while they are going camp. Its worth it if you already have the players. The quality is practically the same either way. I've been buying both formats for awhile but I liked some the ways HD DVD was doing things particularily the lil extra fluff like the menus and what not. Oh well if this is the towel it was a good fight. Although I expect neither winner truly won. This format war will prove pointless as more media is going virtual as people are streaming higher content.
I'm sad to see HD-DVD go for one reason.
It means I'll have to buy a new TV for high resolution (1080p).
Currently, I'm watching movies in all their glory on a VGA connection from an XBOX360 w/ HD-DVD player. With no HCP connection, I'm out of luck without not only a Blu-ray player, but also a Blu-ray compatible TV.
When Sony wins, we all lose.
The format war is over, unfortunately, Blu-Ray is far from ready for general consumer adoption. Profile 2.0 players, the players that actually do everything they are supposed to (and everything that even low-end HD DVD players did), are few and far between... not to mention very expensive when they are found. The standalone Blu-Ray players pretty much universally suck. They're woefully underpowered to do things like load the Java VM which is required for viewing many newer Blu-Ray discs (Disney's newer discs like Pirates of the Caribbean and Ratatouille take a full 2 minutes just to load on most standalone players). And the machines by some companies are so buggy that there's already been a class action lawsuit.
The only Blu-Ray player even worth considering for consumers is the PS3. But then you're stuck with a big game console instead of just a standalone movie player, which is what many people really want.
I had bought a Toshiba HD-A3 HD DVD player for $159. Feature complete. Booted to drawer open in under 30 seconds. Loaded all movies in under 30 seconds. Did everything I needed (my TV has fine 3:2 pulldown so 1080i out is all I needed). And it came with 10 movies. Even now, there's really no equivalent on the Blu-Ray side. No standalone 2.0 player that isn't dog-slow.
When Warner switched, I simply stopped buying HD content. Most of my friends that were buying HD DVDs did the same thing. Sure, I may buy into Blu-Ray eventually. But it looks like it's gonna be a while before it's capable of doing what it should.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
is slammed into the coffin, I'm sticking with my DVD upconverter (http://dvdupconvert.wordpress.com/ ).
Afterwards, perhaps Blu-Ray. . .
If it's a commercial failure, then why bury it. Just make the spec, tools, etc. free without license. There's a huge market for a low-cost high-capacity storage and video medium. Toshiba could make HD-DVD free to everyone. Blu-Ray can't beat that. Sure, the MPAA members will only ship Blu-Ray, but if it costs nothings to add to your drive, why wouldn't a vendor throw it on top just because. Home video and amateur cinematographers will have a reasonable format for producing, sharing, and storing footage, there'll be an HD replacement for VHS, and the cost for the blank media will plummet.
Then let's see who wins in the long run. Toshiba can still ship HD-DVD recorders, media, etc. Being fully open, the platform will reach every corner that Blu-Ray doesn't, by design. Blu-Ray is a very consumer-hostile format as-is; it's designed to limit the medium. Toshiba should give up not by burying it, but by becoming the antithesis of its competitor.
Now that there's no competition in this format,... Sony can extort more for Blu-Ray players and demand higher royalties.
I don't suppose I'm the first one to think of this (or maybe I am) but it seems like they could re-brand HD-DVD from "High Definition" to "High Density" and sell the discs as blank storage media for PCs and other devices. It'd be perfect. Am I really the only one who has thought of this?
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
This is one of the most insightful posts I have ever read. Too bad I don't have mod points.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
gb2/b/
My question is this: if HD-DVD dies, what are we to do if we want a movie or series that was released in HD-DVD only? Will the companies rerelease it on BD? Or will we have to find a hybrid player? Or will we have to buy and keep around that old HD-DVD player just to watch two or three movies or series every now and then?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Your theory would work well with uncompressed material. I have seen a documentary about restoration of old film material that did just what you describe (intelligent analysis over multiple frames). It gave stunning results, the picture was arguably better than it originally was.
However, MPEG 2 material is compressed, using just the same (intelligent analysis over multiple frames) in the opposite direction to remove redundant information.
In other words, when you have two uncompressed frames, you may find details in frame 1 that will fit well into frame 2', and details in frame 2 that will fit well into frame 1'. Frame 1' and 2' WILL look better than frame 1 and 2 rep.
For MPEG material, the compression algoritm did the opposite: "oh, no need to encode this region in frame 2, frame 1 already has enough information". So while trying to enhance, there IS no more info to pick from frame 2 to put into frame 1': the data was deliberately thrown out.
Why Linuxxx doesn't win the war even at no price :-)
If Toshiba decides to go with Blu-Ray there are good strategic reasons for them to make sure that HD-DVD will NOT stick around.
They will start gearing up to product and profit from consumer Blu-ray players (and presumably burners) and allowing others to make and sell HD-DVD players and recorders could cut into or slow that market.
-think apple and the clones, or think why MS is getting ready to dump on one of the few halfway decent OS products (XP) it has ever made
Competing existing products cannibalize sales future and next-gen products. So it would not be in their interest to license HD-DVD to 3rd parties unless there were pretty high royalties or license fees attached.
-I'm just sayin'
So Sony's financial involvement is 1/250th?
Might as well put that one to rest too; Toshiba - sucks; sounds like shit and tofu collided.
Sony is rumored to be the one bankrolling most of the big money expenditures (including the recent advertising campaign and some of the studio payoffs...
Sure, and Microsoft is rumored to have backed the only studio switch we know was paid for (Dreamworks/Paramount).
Who cares? If you hate Sony is it not in fact more delicious to have Sony put forth tons of money to build up Blu-Ray, and then go buy non-Sony Blu-Ray players and AV gear?
I am a consumer, and just want a single standard so we can have healthy competition and a focus for hackers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In this war I didn't WANT there to be a winner. I was hoping both camps would be forced to accomodate to an ongoing market share tug-of-war, while consumers owned hybrid players and weren't locked into EITHER format, and could choose whichever suited them.
What is healthy is a market with a standard, that products are built around. What is not healthy is deadlocked standards, which makes it hard for consumers to use anything.
Would you prefer to have to have two computers with two different internet standards? And be using the equivalent of Gopher on both, because the market adoption never took off to make it worthwhile to spend crazy amounts of time on browser research?
Now that HD-DVD is dead, consumer adoption of Blu-Ray can take off and we can have the same competition that drove DVD prices down so dramatically.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you just want to watch movie (most people do) any Blu-Ray player will do (yes, Samsung fixed the problem that lawsuit as around where a few discs would not play).
If you want to be able to shop FROM YOUR disc a specialized web store based on the movie you just watched - well then, may God have mercy on your soul.
HD-DVD had all kinds of cool internet features - that hardly anyone used more than to show it could be done.
Oh yeah, I forgot the other hot thing you can do with internet access from your movie player - watch up to date trailers, just like you can on your PC. Wohoo!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My question is this: if HD-DVD dies, what are we to do if we want a movie or series that was released in HD-DVD only? Will the companies rerelease it on BD?
It's pretty obvious that if there is only one format, all studios will release on it. It's already rumored Paramount and Universal are preparing to switch (they have already cancled a few HD-DVD releases and announced nothing new in a while), and in fact Paramount is already sitting on a stock of Blu-Ray titles from when they supported both formats...
The upside is that future Blu-Ray releases of current HD-DVD titles will take advantage of the 50GB storage space of Blu-Ray for higher bitrates and lossless audio.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who can claim windows media is superior to quicktime/real/vlc/flash mpeg 4 or h264? Sad fact is, it is there somehow, for some reason.
MS will do every kind of dirty trick to make sure VC-1 stays. They want every studio have at least 1 windows machine just to encode their junk. VC-1 encoding can be done on OS X too but it is pricey compared to Windows.
For people feeling sad because "Evil" Sony has won, read that press release, just the beginning to figure what would have happened if Toshiba/MS HD-DVD won.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/apr07/04-15VC1NABPR.mspx
If Toshiba has lost, they should go down fighting:
1) Slash the prices. keep the cost BluRay players > HDDVD+$50 players.
2) Slash the prices on the HD-DVDs. Why are they more expensive then BluRay movies anyways?
3) Open the format up to everyone for free. No licensing.
4) Start selling porn on HD-DVD. Lots of it.
5) Quickly reduce the cost of the HDDVD burners and media. You'll start getting people backing up BluRay discs on HDDVD because too many of their kids are wrecking the Disney and Sony Bluray cartoons.
Keep going!
Could someone wiser than i in the way of the moderators please explain what's wrong with pointing out that Sony, like pretty much every company in existence, has a history of not always getting things quite perfect on the first iteration of a hardware release? Did i just piss off some PS3 fanboys or is there some flaw in what i said that i'm not aware of? "I have a 60GB PS3 and there's not a BD or a special feature out there that it won't play. Nor will there ever be" is a pretty tall claim to be making, at least as far as the second part of the statement goes. The PS3 is a great piece of machinery, but i doubt that it will be the last Blu-Ray player i ever need to get.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Why does one format have to win the war per se?? Why can't they both put out players with both formats supported? I mean we have about 10 billion video, graphics and audio formats on a pc why not two or more HD formats for players. To me unending competition and variety is what had made the tech and computer industries so great. Constant innovation. We really purportedly have the potential for 1.5 terabyte bidirectional internet connections to our homes(yes that is terabyte with a "t") with existing wiring in place. That would make any media format issue pointless to worry about and make our virtual interconnectedness take on new possibilities and levels of magnificence. I mean I suppose we'd still need media for storing things...
Yeah. And the current glut of Profile 1.0 players can't even play picture in picture content. So Blu-Ray discs don't even have it on them. Unlike HD DVD which did from the very beginning, so my Matrix and 300 discs have tons of fun extras like that.
Actually some Blu-Ray discs did offer PIP by simply including a second video track that had the PIP (more heavily compressed). Somewhat wasteful, but when you have twice the storage capacity...
I would also hardly term the current number of 1.0 profile players as a "glut".
And lastly, my Matrix DVD set had similar extras - but I only watched them once in conjunction with the movie, it works just as well to play them all after. Not quite as cool but very serviceable.
Blu-Ray was rushed to market to compete with HD DVD and it shows
Sure it does. But the parts that were rushed do not matter as much as studios like to think they do.
And part of wanting to watch a movie is being able to play it, not wait 2 minutes for it to load a silly Disney disc.
An HD-DVD owner complaining about startup time of Blu-Ray? For shame. Some of those internet features on HD-DVD discs also sucked away a lot of time to just get to use the disc.
I'm sorry you are bitter about your loss, but realize we are all better off the way things turned out. If you must blame, blame Toshiba for forcing this cursed war upon us all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
VC-1 is also on the way out. At the bitrates that BD can handle AVC gives noticeably quality. Even at low bitrates it is questionable, VC-1 was essentially a success of MS astroturfing on AVS and other forums.
Someone's been reading XKCD. Really, saying that the Blu ray's success is based on the amount of Porn is a cynical if not dismal statement. Although, I wouldn't put it past people today. A lot of other people commenting on this story have said that price drops would be the best thing about thing to promote the format. Frankly I think that multi media content delivery over to a device connected to a television would work just fine. It's a shame that no one ever thought of that before. Oh wait, DIVX! Sure the world wasn't ready for it back then, but it sure is now. People are getting tired of fussing over formats. As long as the interface was simple enough for anyone to use and the prices were reasonable. Seriously, you expect Apple to do it right? No way in hell man.