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Toshiba To Halt HD-DVD Production
Multiple users have written to tell us that Toshiba is planning to halt production of devices related to HD-DVD. According to Japanese broadcasting network NHK, Toshiba will lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" as the format war finally draws to a close. Regardless, investors are pleased that Toshiba has made the decision to cut its losses. This comes after a last-ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-mart from throwing their lot in with Blu-ray, although some sources suggest that Wal-mart was already aware of Toshiba's plans to withdraw from fight.
halt construction on devices related to blu-ray, I can finally stop hearing about this irrelevant crap. The slashdot poll said it best: no one gives a shit.
But HD DVD doesn't sound stupid. It says exactly what it is, and doesn't embarrass itself. Blu-ray, besides being spelled incorrectly, says nothing about what it is. Whatever happened to the glory days of Video Home System, Compact Disc, and Digital Versatile Disc?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
For those that think we're better off without standards, imagine if there were multiple competing HTTP protocols.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I was kind of hoping HD DVD would win this one, now we'll be stuck with region locked movies for another decade till the next thing comes along.
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
yeah. floppies, CDs and Hi8 were such miserable failures, after all.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
I don't want more choice, I just want better stuff.
If Bluray is a Sony format, so is DVD and CD. Sony backed it strongly and presumably did a lot ofthe original development but it's not a Sony format in the same way that minidisc and Betamax were. Sony got other companies on board as part of the standards consortium.
This might explain why it didn't fail. Companies prefer it when the standards body isn't the same organisation as their rival. There's always a risk that the standard might change specifically to favour one manufacturer.
Nobody gives a fuck. Ok ?
90%+ of average consumers don't have any clue whatsoever what "VHS" stands for, and couldn't care less.
For that matter, most consumers couldn't tell you what "HD" stands for either.
They mean the same thing to a complex mind when the formats in question are both proprietary and do about the same thing.
In this case there was competition between the formats not only in which format was "better" in terms of storage quality (not to mention archival, access speed and other properties) but also even if one format was clearly superior which was better in terms of price and availability.
I don't think having both formats around was hurting anything as both are still in early adoption phases, most users don't have Blu-Ray or HD DVD yet and a large portion perhaps even a majority don't have the capabilities to use such formats (at least in the new abilities they provide) yet over the older standard.
I still see this as a bad thing and perhaps the "wars" are not over at all as Hard Drives, Flash drives and other storage options are coming down in price and are able to offer similar amounts of storage. The real contender in these "wars" as I see it could be download bandwidth rather than delivery of a physical piece of media.
In the end these media wars are good for the consumer. Take CDs for example, a format that won with relatively little competition. The way things are sold to consumers is that the new format is more expensive at first but as it takes hold and becomes dominant is prices drop to match the old cost with a margin determined by the cost of production. Music CDs are still fairly expensive and have not come down (as I believe) to a price comparable to that of Cassettes even though the older format has been more-or-less out of the market for several years now.
For Formats it is difficult to raise prices on consumers as there is an expectation that the prices will fall over time and consumers will need a reason to pay more with the information on the format primarily being a luxury good. However that expectation works both ways as consumers expect that two items of the same format will cost about the same on average.
It's more like a product trademark to me: you don't complain that the word Panasonic is 'better' than say Toshiba, just because Panasonic literally means pro-sound and Toshiba is a compound noun where To- means Tokyo, and what -shiba is I forgot. But that doesn't still make Panasonic any 'better'.
They might have beaten HD DVD but they haven't beaten the biggest contender.. DVD.
It's a feature.
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
The only thing I care about is the cost of BD-R (Blue Ray Writable). We've been waiting a very long time for a replacement for DVD-Rs, and DVD-R9 at decent write speeds are only now becoming both affordable and practical (compared to DVD-R5).
I figure my BD-R threshold is about $5 per disk. Presently they seem to be going for $15-$22 per disk. I'll be willing to buy a BD-R reader/burner when 25GB single layer BD-R's are at $5, which interestingly is the price of CD-Rs when I finally decided to make the switch from floppies in 1996. That was a 450 fold increase in media size. CD-R to DVD-R was a 6 fold increase. I'll be content with another 6 fold increase.
Hopefully BD/BD-R support for MythTV will be available by then.
Whenever anyone mentions England driving on the right, I think; "Good, won't be affecting the rest of us in the British Isles then."
Although it would make crossing the borders interesting.
HD-DVD doesn't tell you what it is. From the name, I'd assume it was a normal DVD with HD content on, that could be played by hooking up a normal DVD player to a HDTV. With blu ray you know it's a different format straight off. And five fucking syllables...
The problem is that without one, you can't afford the other. There are technologies developed in the 90's that you can't afford yet because of legitimate patents. With even a single other player in the market, the better stuff becomes affordable. With one vendor, your only choice is between buying from that vendor and not having their product, no matter what the cost is.
I'm simply not naive enough to believe that you can have the good products without healthy competition. If your product is "good enough" for consumers and you're the only supplier, where's your motivation to innovate or improve?
"You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome." -neapolitan
So there should be two formats or even more out in the world to give a choice for consumers? A choice to not buy either until one format wins so they don't get left with obsolete hardware where nothing new is going to be released on?
How about this, every studio comes up with their own format! That way, there's tons of choices for the consumer! Want to watch a Univeral or Paramount movie? You have to buy a special player to play their formats. Think of the possibilities! Think of the competition! Think of the illegal downloads because no one would want to put up with that bullshit!
I think your analogy needs work.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Its an interesting definition of disastrous to say that the biggest selling HD console has been a disaster, and as for the idea that bundling Blu-Ray into the box wasn't a smart move this has been cited from the beginning as a major issue with XBox 360 in that while MS backed the HD-DVD standard they didn't integrate it into the box because of the desire to get the console to market quicker. This led to a market in which one "HD" console has HD level movie content (and similarly large available storage on its gaming disks) and the other has an after point of sale device with no gaming advantage.
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Back in the day, beta was the superior format - at least from a quality perspective. VHS won out because... we'll I don't really know - I was too young.
I own an HD-DVD player - but the Blue-Ray *disk* format is superior and more extensible than the HD-DVD disk. Blue-ray will increase in capacity with time, as it was designed to do. HD-DVD didn't really have this in mind it was for the most part, easier to implement and designed specifically for carrying HD video content. Blue-ray carries with it an entire execution environment within the player - one of the reasons for the difficulty that vendors have had complying with the specification.
Note that the disk format has nothing at all to do with the content format. Almost all HD-DVD's contain SMPTE VC-1 content, but there is a mix of VC-1 and H.264 within Blue-ray disks. Blue-ray and hd-dvd are capable of playing other stream types.
The "Blue-ray" logo really represents just a particular disk format and a player that has a certain set of capabilities.
Glad to see the non-noob tech prevail.
When you say 'obsolete' drive, are you talking about the built in DVD, which they chose for the data speeds (allowing, for example Devil May Cry 4 to be as fast to load as it is on the PS3, which has a *20+ minute install routine* or are you talking about the external and optional HD-DVD drive?
If HD-DVD truly is no longer being produced, we'll see an external Blu-Ray drive for the 360 before year's end. Knowing Microsoft, it's been ready for mass-production for at least a year.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I refused to get in the middle of HD DVD vs. BluRay and refuse to catch BluRay now that this supposed war is over. The BluRay format has bounced around like a damn super ball and No I am not buying a Playstation 3 for the purposes of watching movies. I want a machine that will remove my need for my upconverting DVD player and above all else the format and player are solid, finished, and done. Versioned software 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 is good. Versioned hardware is bad. Somebody wake me when Sony is tired of tinkering and actually settles on the final standard. No, having new features become available for new hardware isn't an option all it does is screw the original purchasers (take a look at 1.0 spec players).
> I know Sony's not much better than Microsoft
;-)
Microsoft shows us daily that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sony, by contrast, is just plain evil.
How could you forget Elcaset?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You're making the very large assumption that the TV is the center of attention for the room. If the room is dedicated to media and home theater, then sure. Go massive. But if the room has other purposes, sizing the screen to SMPTE or THX projection recommendations (which is what you linked) is absurd. You've got to live with the thing. If you also use the space for chatting with people and entertaining, a screen like that really dominates the space in an uncomfortable way. I thought this issue would go away as we transitioned from CRT RPTVs to nice flat panel jobs, but it really hasn't had as much an effect as I was hoping.
Also, a massive screen sitting plainly in your living room makes you look like a tool the way owning a European sports car does.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Frequently? never heard that before - sounds like product bashing from the HD-DVD fanboys.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Remember how compact discs which broke the spec weren't allowed to be labeled with the philips CD logo? You're going to see Blu-Ray on anything burned to a Blu-Ray disc, whether it will play in anything in particular or not.
And if you'll recall, every time someone has tried anything like this, it's always either been hideously easy to crack or it's been a compatibility nightmare that backfires. Retrofitting a completely different DRM scheme onto an existing format is almost impossible for these two reasons.
So, to use your example, once BD+ is cracked (and it will be, and the crack will become widespread just like DeCSS), Sony can either do minor revisions of BD+ (which will again get cracked) and retain compatibility with the millions of existing player, or Sony could completely revamp BD+ (BD++?) and break all existing players. Obviously the latter is an untenable position.
Now, Blu-ray players do have the "advantage" of allowing firmware upgrades to "support" newer encryption schemes. However, Sony cannot overuse this idea. Consumers are used to their stuff just working. Having to frequently update your player every time somebody cracks Sony's encryption just isn't practical in the long run. Consumers will rebel, or there will be a massive negative PR backlash. If Sony wants to drive customers to downloaded content, this is the surest way to do it, and they know that.
DRM will continue to be an annoyance in the short-term, but nothing more. Real pirates (China-based mass duplicators) will continue to bypass it. P2P will get around it. In the end, it will be no more effective or annoying than DeCSS.
One thing to note: there is a very beneficial side-effect to the end of the format war. The more players that are sold, the more difficult it will be for Sony to make the alterations you're so afraid of. Now that HD-DVD is dead, Blu-ray sales should pick up all that slack, effectively doubling its adoption rate. Regardless of what you think of Sony and its policies, mass adoption of its hardware locks Sony into a format. This is a Good Thing(tm), as we have all the time in the world to crack it.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Not at all. Surgeon General says that smoking is harmful...
Betacam, Betacam SP, DigiBeta and the newer HD versions are THE standard in the video industry. Even the Betacam SP, now 20 years old at least, is very widly used and still hasn't been fully replaced by the newer digital versions, even in the "Western" video world.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
That's because they're right. VHS has been Video Home System for decades, probably since its consumer launch (and certainly at least soon afterward).
The engineers might have called it "vertical helical scan", but it wasn't ever widely marketed that way.
Erm, that means the acronym actually stands for "vertical helical scan" my friend. Making up a new meaning for an acronym doesn't change its original meaning. Hence the term used by the OP "backronym" - an explanation that won't scare the neophytes who purchase the technology.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
It also doesn't make the original meaning "more correct", except for people who want to sound smart at parties.
Hence the term used by the OP "backronym"That's not really appropriate here. Since VHS was never known as anything other than Video Home System to the world at large, you can't really claim that it's wrong. At the very least, you could say that both are correct.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?